beautifully done

sometimes I love post secret.

Notes on eminent women

Taken from a biographical study of 30 “eminent women,” as described in chapter 4 of Smart Girls. While I don't particularly agree with her selections—not a huge fan of Gertrude Stein and Margret Mead—the results are interesting.

Eminent women had not necessarily had
-Consistent/good parenting—often at least one parent was absent or irresponsible
-Recognition of their talents in childhood
-A good education—many had spotty educations and many preformed well only in their specialties

Eminent women had had
-Time alone
-Voracious reading
-A sense of being different or special
-Individualized instruction
-Same sex education
-Difficult Adolescence
-Separateness and the ability to avoid confluence—strong sense of individual identity and goals, rather than identifying as relationship
-Taking existential responsibility for self—identify self as someone working on something, rather than as relationship
-Love through work--”first you must find your work; then you will find your love.”
-Refusal to acknowledge the limitations of gender
-Mentors
-Thorns and shells
-Integration of roles
-Ability to fall in love with an idea

a couple of favorite political images

from back in the day. . .

Two things

1) I do not often talk or write about quantum physics. This is because every scientist I've ever talked to in anything near that field says you really need to have all the math to understand it, and that descriptions for the lay public are uniformly crap. Therefore, I try not to reference any but the most commonly known facts, and to avoid having these as key to my arguments.

2) It turned out that I got ten minutes to ask Minch my questions, which was ok, because it was a pretty cool ten minutes, and basically the answer was, "read Pettit."

However, I did also find this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which doesn't entirely agree with the way Minch put it (philosophy can be that way) but is still pretty cool.

Three original jokes

composed by Taran Weathercolor:


What do you call a female supervillian?

a girlfiend!


What's poisonous to a clock?

tocktick.


What did the teenage zombie say after he wrecked his parent's car?

I'm dead.


Also, it's been an excellent day. :)

Emo can't sleep post. Hmn.

I used to love the sound of rain, but this morning it sounds like failure and I absolutely can not sleep.

Here is my confession; I miss living in a trailer in my sister's driveway. The trailer was safe because it was mine, and it was mine because no one else wanted it. No one expected it to be nice, and no one was counting on me. I could--and did--jerry rig all kinds of sub-standard solutions when things went wrong, and it was all ok. It was satisfying; I could listen to the rain. I could dance in it. No one was counting on me, and through my own labor I had privacy, a place to sleep, my guitars were safe, my books were dry.

I've been thinking lately of getting a tattoo, solely for my own benefit. It would a have to be somewhere I could see it, and I've been thinking about some words, simple script, across my left wrist--work harder. I find it deeply appealing, and yet somehow it betrays, even to me, that there's something broken about me, something unbalanced. In my mind I see another word, "peace," across my right wrist so they will weigh the same, but it's harder to believe.

A house can't be really mine. It's worth something. There's too much of it, and by justice it must be shared. This house has weathered 80 years, and if the foundation becomes unsettled I can't solve it by moving around some bricks. I can't use an old dog leash to tie down a tarp and stop the leaking of the roof; I can't cover the windows with duct tape and cardboard and stuff them with grocery bags when I am cold. If I fail, I will have broken something whole, and betrayed the resources trusted to me.

I used to love the rain.