Madi > Recent Status Updates

" Couldn't concentrate in class. I was occasionally motivated to succeed by a fleeting interest in the ego boost of a good report card, but always ended up spacing out in the stream of meandering thoughts or playing class clown. I loved to read, but the books they gave me were wack. "

The more I read, the more I'm convinced Flea & I are kindred spirits. Love this crazy dude.

When I see professional athletes talk about how much they love their moms after a big win, I often tear up. Partly because a raw and vulnerable display of love is just a poignant thing, but also, part of me realizes I missed out on something.

It was as if I fragmented. An unconscious survival mechanism kicked in, a kind of separation of self. One part at home, one at school, another running around in the street, each different piece of me showing itself according to what and where was safe.

The wastes of ocean were a final barrier distancing gentlemen from the rabblement. “You can do business with anyone,” said J. P. Morgan, “but you can go sailing only with gentlemen.”

And after all that time, he says, he's still impressed by the campers' neighborliness.
[…] Bill told me. "That ability to coexist is based simply on their desire to enjoy the public land, and the fact that it belongs equally to the guy riding the bicycle as to the guy in the motorhome."

[cont..] Sometimes I'm so grateful it feels like a miracle. For the dumbest things-a cup of hot coffee, a funny text from Liam, that I can read George Eliot again and again, every Saturday afternoon, that I hate my body less, that I love my mother more, that I still have time to choose. The colors are less sharp, but I'm glad l'm here.

Being an adult - it is not the same. It is not, actually, anything like what we wanted, what we imagined for ourselves. But, Marlena, mostly it's better.

“ I remember being happy, completely present. I have never felt that thoughtlessly alive again. “

left off on Mexico chapter

Oh no, now he’s talking about God. Could this BE any worse?

I'm not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud.

"My existence was just fun and games to these people. I wasn't a human being to them. I wasn't a 14 year old boy hanging on by his fingernails."

Wow this did not age well:

“If I had to pick someone else I really admire who’s actually around today? Okay, I admit it: I’d choose Mel Gibson.” (Excerpt)


In context, she wrote that in a chapter talking about god and in reference to the movie Passion of the christ - and was 14 at the time of writing.

Nonetheless, what a choice.

Knowledge, I’ve found, will not betray you the way that people will.

Context: Elizabeth Kendall just told Ted Bundy that she had contacted police about him.

—
He said he was going to call Ann Rule, a middle-aged woman he had worked with at the Crisis Clinic. She was motherly and have had liked her very much.

One thing’s for sure, the stuff in this book about Harvey Weinstein did NOT age well.

Taking Smith’s own advice when reading this autobiography; “So right off the bat, you might consider everything I write with a grain of salt […]”

Almost made it through this one, DNF at 142 pages in.

I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too. And as much as I think I know Miranda deeply and intimately, I don’t like that I know her through the context of iCarly, because iCarly is ending, and I don’t want our friendship to end with it.

I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with. Because once the context ends, so does the friendship.

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Time for a re-read!

Some days will be good, some will be bad. But you, and only you, get to decide who that makes you.

In the section titled "Sounds", he writes "I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans." This chapter immediately followed the section about Reading - so again I ask, did you read or not? Quite frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

I don't know how much more of this I can read. The uber religious narrative interwoven in almost every page, the contradiction in the author's own writing. In the section on Reading, he writes "I kept Homer's Iliad on my table throughout the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Meanwhile, he mentions the Iliad heavily throughout every previous chapter. Did you read it or not?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life […].

Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unal-terable.

From the introduction by Bill McKibben:

Our other biggest problems--overpopulation, habitat destruction, and so on-present the same challenge: they're inevitable if we keep living the way we do, thinking our same thoughts.

His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.

She gets up and walks around the room with the baby on her shoulder patting to get the air up and the baby poor thing so floppy and limp keeps sliding and trying to dig its little boneless legs into her to hold tight and the nightie blown by the breeze keeps touching her calves the backs of her legs her ass as he called it. Makes you feel filthy they don't even have decent names for parts of you.

[2/2]

"It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don't know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and television going and meals late and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy."