Luke > Recent Status Updates

Recent news from America bring the intelligence that the Government of the United States has at length suceeded in finding a reasonable excuse for exercising a protectorate over, or in other words annexing, the Isthmus of Panama. To any one at all acquainted with American policy in Central America, this intelligence can give no surprise; our only wonder being that some excuse was not made years ago.

A baby dies of cholera in Mrs. Seacole's arms and she dissects them in order to better combat the disease. Impressively practical, to say the least.

Some people, indeed, have called me quite a female Ulysses. I believe that they intended it as a compliment; but from my experience of the Greeks, I do not consider it a very flattering one.

I didn't even know of the existence of Nakba Day when I began to read this book. Calling this a necessary learning experience is putting it lightly.

16. The Beheaded Feminist: Qiu Jin

The good news: I probably won't need anymore outside resources for my seminar paper.

The bad news: research is exhausting.

"You seemed to have forgotten," said she, calmly, "that the creatures were all created for our convenience."

She thinks that they threw them there so it would not be said that they killed children in the hospital.

It was either this or Wuthering Heights for my seminar. I do love the latter so, but I don't think I could do my review matured justice by updating it 3+ times in the last five years. Plus, Anne Brontë deserves all the love.

What logic is there in my running after the memory that has escaped, trying to flee from itself? Do I want to kill it so that I can live, or am I trying to revive it even if I die because...because why? I suddenly scream: Damn memory, damn its mother and father, damn the sky over it and the day it was and the day it will be. Damn the flies!

Debating whether to read a book in order to be able to read fanfic incorporating the book is always a gnawing decision.

What disturbed me now was simply understanding how much courage there was in me.

'7.490 Footnote: Milton ignores the structure of the bee colony around a queen.'

That feeling of being so offended at a gendered female structure of authority that one must compromise one's art in order to deny it must've been a real creative limit.

Ground through three of the five outside resources I (currently) have for my 14-16 page paper. I deserve a break filled with instant pasta and Penny Dreadful.

What's the point of learning, he joked, when my path is mapped out.

Your classmate suddenly turns against you and you don't know what's angered him, only to discover a day or two later that he's found out you're Palestinian and that your existence, the very fact that you exist and that you are you and no other, is a provocation that arouses anger or indignation or, at the very least, disgust.

Pretending gender dichotomies are/were/will ever be a thing isn't the fastest way of turning me off a book, but it comes pretty close.

The prof gave us twelve essay prompts and had only one of them directly concern Satan. Three guesses as to which I'm writing about, and the first two don't count.

This illusion had sustained her all these years, the inability to love being less hurtful than the desire not to love.

16 "defective" plot elements: 1) men dressing up as women; 2) secret vows of marriage; 3) premarital sex; 4) elopements of adulterous women; 5) widows losing their chastity; 6) robbery and murder; 7) imprisonment; 8) murder for political motives; 9) secret conspiracy with foreign countries; 10) obsequious flattery of the powerful; 11) instruction in the methods of the immortals...

BATTLE SCENES. Makes a woman want to read LOTR again.

If a consciousness of the uncertainty of life can dispose you to serious and useful thoughts, I would not deprive you of the benefit of such reflections, whether you do eventually recover or not.

Death has become just like everything else, something to which they assign a price that varies with their mood.

You probably believe this is a war for justice, but there's no such thing as a war fought purely over ideals.

Thus far on the rough and ready essay title docket, I have : Coming of Age of the Abject Woman in Victorian Literature; Gaslighting as Test of Faith in the Hagiographies of Early/Medieval Holy Women; The Pedagogy of Satan in Paradise Lost. People who don't like writing papers are seriously missing out.

Online group discussions are hard when everyone's busy following the leader who happened to post first right off an academic cliff.

Well, I thought, America's not stingy with its bombs.

Part of me thinks I'm reading this cause school, on the cusp of graduation, just isn't that school enough anymore. That part of me is becoming increasingly right. Now if only I could pull myself way long enough to do harder things like talk to people about grad school.

Nowadays, though, she might write to her brother "Take care of youself," but not "Please fight for the country with all your might." She had learned how hard her young heart must have been to have written that message over and over without a twinge of pain.

People who mewl and puke about not being able to oh so subtly and multifariously dehumanize others anymore need to grow up.