Raddical Views
You can’t go back,
you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.
No matter how fast you drive, or how hard the slide show
of memory flicks and releases,
It’s always some other place,
some other car in the driveway,
Someone unrecognizable about to open the door.
Mark Twain: Rescue Etiquette
In assisting at a fire in a boarding house, the true gentleman will always save the young ladies first—making no distinction in favor of personal attractions, or social eminence, or pecuniary predominance—but taking them as they come, and firing them out with as much celerity as shall be consistent with decorum. There are exceptions, of course, to all rules; the exceptions to this one are:
Partiality, in the matter of rescue, to be shown to:
1. Fiancées.
2. Persons toward whom the operator feels a tender sentiment, but has not yet declared himself.
3. Sisters.
4. Stepsisters.
5. Nieces.
6. First cousins.
7. Cripples.
8. Second cousins.
9. Invalids.
10. Young-lady relations by marriage.
11. Third cousins, and young-lady friends of the family.
12. The Unclassified.
Other material in boarding house is to be rescued in the following order:
13. Babies.
14. Children under 10 years of age.
15. Young widows.
16. Young married females.
17. Elderly married ditto.
18. Elderly widows.
19. Clergymen.
20. Boarders in general.
21. Female domestics.
22. Male ditto.
23. Landlady.
24. Landlord.
25. Firemen.
26. Furniture.
27. Mothers-in-law
Awesome.
(Source: kateoplis)
“ May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
Neil Gaiman
Katherine Hepburn is the best.
From Katharine Hepburn’s 1981 interview with Barbara Walters:
Hepburn: “I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man…I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to and I made enough money to support myself. And I ain’t afraid of being alone.”
Walters: “Is that why also you wear pants?”
Hepburn: “No, I just wore pants because they’re comfortable.”
Walters: “Do you ever wear a skirt, by the way?”
Hepburn: “I have one.”
Walters: “You have one.”
Hepburn: “I’ll wear it to your funeral.”
This is awesome. & Barbara is amazing.
Maybe.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Where do I record my feelings? This is what counts, now? Are feelings not worth anything unless they are publically displayed and explained? I am more than likely guilty of this way of thinking. It has made me yearn for my privacy and things that only I can call mine, things with no ambitious intention except that they are true for me. We are the biographers of our own lives, we are the word-smiths, we are meticulously picking and choosing what we share and display publically. Not only online, but to the world entirely. We definitely won’t share the same things with everyone, different for lovers, family and friends, co-workers. It’s weird though, feeling connected when we really don’t know that digitized person on our screen as well as we think we do. Being my friend on Facebook is entirely different than hanging out with me at a concert, or working side by side in business.
But words are so fucking intimate. It physically pains me to type even the most basic of thoughts, I feel as if I am banishing something from within me that I’m not ready to let go of. I can feel the weight of everything inside me leaving my being as words begin to string together, in their own special order, never before assembled in such a way until I came along to give them their order and meanings. This is how it has always been for me. As I describe and bid farewell to things I am aware of, I find writing to be a source of divination but also very painful. I was reminded today of Amy Winehouse, and I recalled the first time I really listened, I recognized her pain almost instantaneously. I knew innately the hopeless place where these words had taken their form and I was deeply moved by this raw talent, with it’s beaming power of courage to portray such emotion, and with such heartbreaking elegance. Amy weaves me between the insufferable pain of the world and the exquisite pleasure that comes from the consciousness of knowing you are fucking alive. I was accused of seeing something with “too much heart” today. Some would say Amy put too much heart into her songs. Amy seemed to always choose her heart over head until it literally burst at its seams. (She literally died of an enlarged heart) Is there such a thing as having too much heart, of putting too much of your heart into something? There has been a moment where I lost heart, I stopped writing and nothing happened. Life went along as it did before me and as it will after me. It takes courage to express your heart, to passionately and vivaciously not give a fuck. What if Amy had made my same cowardly decision? She never compromised herself the way I did, the ways she did compromise herself though are entirely different. Her music and lyrics get to exist the same way she did, fighting, screaming, grasping, and exuding such honesty that you feel renewed and astounded all at the same time. The deepest parts of me yearn for the same to ring true in my words. I want to write and exist as Amy lived, fully or not at all.
So I have decided to pick and choose what I share and who I share it with. There are some things I will never choose to speak about, others that I may just forget about or won’t come up at all. I have divulged intimate details of my life before, although typically when I feel enough time has lapsed, and yet I have never shared the most basic of things. I have the intent of sharing details about the life I’m currently living in real time but I unconsciously or consciously will decide to guard specific aspects, to keep them private and safe from well, anyone who stumbles upon this? All this time I have been wondering if perhaps I was concealing parts of who I am from this specific forum for some crazy unrealized reason but it’s no different than the rest of my life. We live. We filter. And we share. When the time is right. It doesn’t mean you don’t know someone or that the bond you might feel with them is fabricated. We remove and reveal certain layers over time. We might never know a person completely but it doesn’t mean we don’t know them; we just take what we need.
Thank you, Amy.
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Not one of my faves but it turned out to be one of the best songs of the night.
“ Cassie Radd is the most amazing person alive
Britney Spears
I set the bar high at work and was rewarded accordingly.
