Yum & Yuk

Just finished Mindy Kaling's "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?" and was less than impressed. I liked the stories about her childhood and it was sort of interesting to hear the inside details of how she "made it" as writer in Hollywood, but she throws in too many random lists (about...fashion tips for guys?) just to round out the book, and her "I'm so wacky traditional" lust for "men should be men / marriage and monogamy are great" etc felt more boring and retro than adorable. Some funny bits, but I could've done with about half as much book.

Listening to: Jeff Buckley, "Mama, You've Been On My Mind" and "Last Goodbye (Live)." Good god, he was beautiful.

Image: source.

"The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief, / but does not feel them. / As Monday cannot feel Tuesday, / nor Thursday / reach back to Wednesday / as a mother reaches out for her found child. / As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it. / Not a bell, / but the sound of the bell in the bell-shape, / lashing full strength with the first blow from inside the iron." ~ Jane Hirshfield from Come, Thief

“When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become something inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.” - Judith Butler