..."but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs."

- Jonathan Safran Foer
via the NYT

"What makes something hard is your emotional relationship to it, not what the thing actually is. Hard becomes easy, if you do it willingly while it’s still hard.

The biggest factor in getting something to go from hard to easy is normally exposure. The more you encounter something, the less intimidating it gets. Your emotional relationship changes. There’s less uncertainty, your skill in dealing with it improves, your resentment for it fades, your craving for ease or salvation disappears. It has become easy.

So if you have a bit of foresight, the easiest thing to do is to make the hard things easy. You make the hard things harder when you let yourself fall into a habit of avoiding them."

- via thoughtcatalog

stolen from sacha part II

But I guess I could neatly sum up the Beatles break-up by quoting one of my comedy heroes, Mr. Jerry Lewis.  Following Lewis’ break-up with his partner Dean Martin after ten hugely successful years together, someone told Jerry he loved him and Dean together and asked how the two could possibly have split up.  Jerry answered with parable: “A man said ‘those are beautiful shoes you’re wearing’ to another man and the second man answered back, ‘yes, but I’m the only one who knows how much they hurt’.”

- via todayifoundout

gentle sadness

"I love the gentle kind
of sadness like a reminder
that I can feel."

- Marianna Paige

stolen from sacha.

One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil—lighthouse of your universe—as if I would ever forget that phrase.) He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.”

One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing “so you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?”

“Of course not.” the professor replied.

“Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more.”

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us (Live on KEXP)

This makes me smile. Nursing school power song. Take THAT, second semester!

idea of happiness.

I am totally making this this week.

My roommate has za'atar from Israel, and apparently it is delicious.

IN OTHER NEWS.

Spring break is next week and I could not be more excited. Sure, it will still involve care plans, flash cards, and other assorted painstaking assignments, but it will also involve sunshine, my best friends, my family, my dog, and mi amor.

And Emmy's spaghetti. So much of my happiness revolves around food.

lyin, cheatin, stealin.

wait.

raise my hands, paint my spirit gold.

always.

...so much their bones ache.

On most days I come home to an empty house and try to remember my life as a single girl. "This was your day everyday," I think. Cooking for one, eating in front of my computer, not bothering to put any clothes away because who cares, it's all my space anyway and I don't have to share it with anyone.  I do hate cooking for one, but I am starting to appreciate taking up as much space as I want and not worry about thinking about anyone but myself.

But unlike a breakup, at least this bone aching feeling doesn't have to last forever.

don't postpone joy.

I.am.exhausted.  This week was overwhelming. I wish I could enjoy the weekend but I have so much work to do and I just want to crawl under my desk and forget all about everything except dust bunnies. I'm sleepy, the weather here is weird, I miss Mat, and the internet is acting up, thus robbing me of my Friday tradition of watching all Thursday night shows on Hulu uninterrupted. And for these reasons, I am choosing the following reasons to be happy:
- just finished 5th week of school! that means I'm starting the 6th, which means I'm halfway through my first semester!
- the baby pigeons outside my window are getting older and will soon fly the coop and I won't have to hear their incessant squawking anymore!
- I went to Trader Joe's today and bought canned pumpkin and am gonna make all kinds of pumpkin smoothies!
- I found a super awesome mermaid mug in my cabinet and it's really pretty and it's my new coffee/tea mug, so I'm no longer stealing Carey's Georgetown and St. John's "I have two degrees in fancy" mugs!

Also, I really appreciate the man that stands outside my subway stop in the morning handing out the daily free paper.  He's always wearing a nice suit and hat, and always smiling. No matter what you're doing, look good and smile.

summer in the city.

sitting in the 6th floor library reading room in my favorite spot next to the window, I can see the Chrysler building off in the distance, and have a very favorable view of Washington Square Park.  As the breeze blows, you can see the occasional brown leaf swaying ceremoniously down to the ground below, and we are reminded that fall is here.

as winter approaches, and school becomes more challenging, I am reminded of one of my favorite Camus quotes: "and even in the depth of winter, I found lay within me an invincible summer."  This winter will be particularly cold for many more ways than one, so it'll do good to remember that.

'tis a fearful thing

'tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch

a fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be-

to be,
and oh, to lose

a thing for fools, this,

and a holy thing,

a holy thing
to love.

for your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.

to remember this brings painful joy.

'tis a human thing, love.
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.

- judah halevi

zombies.

When I was in high school my friend Nick got a new computer for his graduation gift. It was an Apple laptop, and this was before everyone had them. One summer day Nick, Laura, and myself were lounging around at his house, and he was demonstrating the fancy features of his new fancy laptop. It had this function in which you could say "tell me a joke" and this digital woman would pop up and tell you a joke. The jokes were usually bad, but the feature was novel and thus fascinating to us. On this particular day we hovered around the laptop and instructed it to tell us a joke, and the conversation went a little something like this:

Digital woman: "Knock, knock"

Us: "who's there?!"

DW: "Zombies."

Us: "zombies who??"

....

....

silence.

Us: "ZOMBIES WHO???"

....

....

more silence. Apparently the fancy new laptop had frozen.

At this point Nick began screaming every expletive in his arsenal, which was a lot.

Nick: "ZOMBIES WHO YOU *&^&*&^&87#$$%@#$&*^(%^ YOU @#*&$#(*@(*&%#)"

And we never heard the end of the joke.

Several years later my friend Alex said that he had heard the joke elsewhere, and wondered if I would like to know how it ended. "It's pretty bad" he said. I decided I would just rather leave the joke unanswered, and imagine all the ways it could have ended, rather than be disappointed after all that time. So I still don't know how it ended.

As an adult, I have come to compare the 'zombies who' joke to relationships I have encountered that have ended before they had run the course that I would have thought. Had they not ended abruptly, what would have happened? Do I really want to know how it ends? More often than not, I think I would rather just be left guessing.

...because who answers the door for zombies? you're bound to get your heart ripped out. 

off the back of a truck

"If you have to ask, you can't afford it. This is the second most useful piece of romantic advice I have ever received...

If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can't afford to be with them. It's not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog, no one tells you what the price is. You set it yourself, and if you're lucky it's reasonable. You have a sense of when you're about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, Enough of this shit. Stop making excuses. No one's that busy at work. No one's allergic to whipped cream. There are too cell phones in Sweden. But most people don't get luck. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you'll figure out if it's worth it later.

So, assuming you've gone ahead and purposefully ignored the first adage because it doesn't apply to you and you are in love the way no one in the history of spooning has ever been in love: now what? You've gotten what you want, but the state of mutual ownership has shifted. Like that piece of jewelry that you're never quite comfortable wearing, you become concerned with its whereabouts, who borrows it and for how long. You wonder if you'll lose it, if it might look better wrapped around someone else's neck. Admit it: wouldn't it be less stressful not having it touching your body at all?"

don't gotta work it out.

I recently rediscovered a horoscope that I had cut out of a newspaper towards the end of my stay in Sydney. It was winter, all my friends had moved away, and I was working as a waitress (which I hated). I had booked a 3 month trip and to follow that I was moving back home, and I just couldn't wait to leave. I don't usually invest a lot of faith in horoscopes, but this one was just perfect for that time in my life. Now that I think about it, it's pretty appropriate for my life right now, too. And has been for quite some time.

What happens if you walk daily through the same field? First, you tread a path. Then the path becomes a rut. Eventually your feet sink into the tramlines of habit. You do what you have always done, go where you've always gone. That's stability if you're enjoying it. It's prison, though, if you're not. Something soon has to lift you out of an ingrained pattern that is doing you no good. Be glad of your imminent release from a situation you've outgrown.

london calling

It's funny how traveling makes you do things you normally wouldn't consider doing. Maybe it's the "hey, I'll never see these people again" idea, or maybe just that you're so jet lagged that these things just make sense.

For example. Today I went shopping, and noticed myself doing the following:

- Upon remembering which side of the road people walk/drive on here, I felt an overwhelming urge to correct people that were walking on the wrong side of the path. "Oh, excuse me sir, I don't know if you're aware, but people walk on the LEFT side of the path here. Just wanted to make sure you knew that."

- Purchasing a sandwich, and despite having enough coins to pay for it, instead handed the woman a 10 pound note for fear that I would be struggling too much in my wallet, and God forbid the woman think I'm a tourist or something.

- Considering buying a jumpsuit. Apparently they're all the rage here, and I saw one in a store that had a lace back and actually went back to the store to look at it again. "This would be a great idea."

where is my mind?

Tragedy has struck...I have started attempting...online dating.

Yes, it's true. But mostly out of boredom. And I'm contemplating quitting any day now. Of the 2 dates I have been on, both have been sufficiently awkward, and even more so than anticipated.

Contestant #1: Knew too much about pigeons, wanted to discuss most recent relationship failures within the first hour of date, shared a one bedroom apartment with 2 (yes, TWO) other people, had a roommate that was a self-proclaimed Fascist, and started a sentence with "I probably shouldn't tell you this but...". After the "but" came "I was committed when I was 16." FAIL.

Contestant #2: Friendly enough, but would look at me like a deer in headlights every time he finished answering whatever question I had just asked. So I would ask another. And another. And eventually I just ran out of ammunition, and had to resort to random statements like how much I dislike shellfish. Not a complete fail, but enough to make me wonder what the hell we would talk about if we ever hung out again.

So...I'll give it one more try. Then I'm throwing in the towel.

such great heights

i wish that i could take the same approach to life that i take to running up a hill: keep your eyes right in front of you, and don't look at how much farther you have to go.