it’s your life, it’s your call
stand up or enjoy your fall
pull yourself together and
draw the line
[your life your call — junip]
it’s your life, it’s your call
stand up or enjoy your fall
pull yourself together and
draw the line
[your life your call — junip]
Depression is a good lover. So attentive. Has this innate way of making everything about you.
(via nogreatillusion)
Malcolm Gladwell and other cultural mavens on the psychology of consumerism and why brands appeal to us so.
By mapping income versus self-described happiness in several countries worldwide, the study’s authors found that the more money people had, the happier they tended to be. The trend was clear across the board, leading the economists to conclude that there’s “no evidence of a satiation point,” a theoretical level of contentment past which more cash doesn’t translate into more happiness.Contrary to previous research suggesting happiness levels out after a certain point of income growth, new study suggests money can buy you happiness. Still, philosophy might still have a better answer than science.
reblogged because i like the semi-transparent data points on this graph. #priorities
no other plans - sunny levine ft. young dad
Oregon Trail, Great Northern, Pacific Coast…bucket list.
(via espressoandvodkashots)
thesis approval (on version #4, approved by first reader and under review by second and third readers of my committee)
15-20 page term paper on pharmaceutical outcomes topic (related to my thesis so it won’t be as much work, i am going to put together plan to evaluate health and economic outcomes in children receiving antipsychotic as a naive treatment for primary ADHD diagnosis versus traditional psychotropic*)
presentation on ^ paper
econometrics final exam
finish draft of two manuscripts summarizing research on health technology assessment grants for my RAship
regalia purchase
… let’s do this!
*dear doctors, knock it off.
So if you find nothing in the corridors, open the doors, if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.
Franz Kafka, “Advocates” … (motivations for a thesis near completion)
There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming.
(Source: free-wilderness, via my-quarterlifecrisis)
First day of class, I ask the students, by way
of introduction, what they believe:
Language is our best tool, or language fails
to express what we know and feel.
We go around the room.
Almost everyone sides with failure.
Is it because they’re young,
still find it hard to say what they mean?
Or are they romantics, holding music and art, the body,
anything wordless as the best way in?
I think about the poet helping his wife to die,
calling his heart helpless as crushed birds
and the soles of her feet the voices of children
calling in the lemon grove, because the tool
must sometimes be bent to work.Sitting next to my friend in her hospital bed,
she tells me she’s not going to make it,
doesn’t think she wants to,
all year running from the deep she’s now drowning in.
I change the flowers in the vase,
rub cream into her hands and feet.
When I lean down to kiss her goodbye,
I whisper I love you, words that maybe
have lost their meaning, being asked to stand
for so many unspoken particulars.The sky when I walk to the parking lot
this last weekend of summer
is an opal, the heat pinkening above the trees
which dusk turns the color of ash.Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?My students believe it’s important
to get the words right.
Once said, they can never be retrieved.
It takes years to learn to be awkward.
At their age, each word must be carefully chosen
to communicate the yes, but also leave room
for the not really, just kidding, a gateway car
with the engine running.Inside us, constellations,
bit thread knotted into night’s black drape.
There are no right words,
if by right we mean perfect,
if by perfect we mean able to save us.Four of us pack up our friend’s apartment.
Suddenly she can’t live unassisted.
I remember this glass, part of a set
I bought her years ago
when she became for a time a scotch drinker.
I bought it for its weight, something
solid to hold, and for the way an inch or two
of amber would look against its etched walls.
I wrap it in newspaper and add it to the box marked Kitchen.It’s my friend herself who is fragile.
When I take her out to eat, each step is work.
The restaurant is loud and bright.
She wants to know if she looks normal.
I make my words soft. Fine,
which might be the most useless word in English,
everything is going to be fine.
parked at starbucks for the night shift (thesis draft due to committee in 10 days), iced coffee in hand. ditching the playlists in favor of neil young greatest (and not-so-greatest) hits.
get it done.
(Source: Spotify)
As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.
Remember where you came from, where you’re going, and why you created this mess you got yourself into in the first place.
(Source: middlenameconfused, via nogreatillusion)