Things I want to collect because I reference them often

And yet by hammering away at McGonagall's extreme failure here, I find myself implying a poem that could do something like the following: create a rhythm at once recognizably collective (because using the framework of inherited prosody) and irreducibly individual (because McGonagall's management of that framework would be expressive of his specific poetic voice), a rhythm that therefore enacts what the poem attempts to describe the integration of individual (lost) lives into a human community that persists across time. imply that there is some way to measure—in both the poetic and non-poetic sense of "measure"—lives and duration that resists the cold exchangeability of the numerical and make the past and present rhyme both literally and conceptually. My criticisms of McGonagall imply a poem that could transcend representation and defeat time. The demand I'm making of McGonagall is impossible.

I think every male writer needs a pervert lesbian with a gun overseeing every choice he makes for a female character and if she doesn't like it she gets to shoot. this will improve the across-the-board quality of all fiction by an order of magnitude specifying pervert lesbian because there are times when something is sexy enough to outweigh being kind of unwoke and you have to know when to make those tough calls

Anxiety can be caused by lots of different stuff. Genetics, traumatic experiences, hormonal responses in the brain, generational trauma, but often it's developed at a young age as a defense mechanism. You can't survive on your own as a kid. You're dependent on the people around you to keep you safe. So, if those people are neglectful, or abusive (either emotionally or physically), then your poor baby brain is going to try to compensate. It wants you to survive. It wants you to feel safe. So, it needs to figure out why you're not safe and how to fix it. "Why did dad leave?" "Why did mom yell at me?" "Maybe I did something bad." "Maybe I'm bad." As sad as it is, that's the only way that a kid's brain can make sense of a hard situation. A kid can't say to themselves, "Maybe dad's anger has nothing to do with me. Or maybe mom's neglect is because she's overwhelmed." Nope. All your brain can think is, "My parents aren't taking care of me. It must be my fault, and I better fix it or I won't survive." But your brain doesn't know how to fix it. It's the brain of a baby. So, it hijacks your stress response system and acts like an asshole to keep you in your place. "Stop making a mess, you idiot. What if mom sees? She'll probably go get puppet cigarettes and never come back". In a twisted way, it thinks it's protecting you. The more your stress response activates, the stronger it becomes. Which means you can be a full ass adult, but your baby brain has gotten so entrenched that it's applying your stress response to all sorts of things that aren't actually dangerous. So, your brain hijacked your stress response system when you were young to keep you safe, and it got stuck there. So, even though you're grown, you're still trying to function with a system you developed when you were a baby. It's kind of like your computer running a very, very old operating system, which means lots of critical errors, lots of glitches, and lots of pain. But there is good news. Your amygdala is what sciency people call plastic. Basically, it can change. And if it can change, that means your stress response can change, which means your anxiety can fly away. You just have to apply the right techniques. First of all, you have to try to be kind and patient to yourself. I know, I know, I know. We hate hearing that, but it's true. When you get mad at your brain, you're basically getting mad at a scared kid. a kid that didn't have the support they needed when they were young. And so we have to be the loving parent that they didn't have.

Your Consciousness is the "you" part of you. You know? You? The part that you tend to think of as you. But there is much more to you than this part that you are aware of. Your Consciousness is like a lighthouse beaming awareness out of your face wherever you look or wherever you turn your mind's eye. But that Lighthouse is surrounded by the vast ocean of your subconscious. Your subconsciousness constitutes and is continually generating you—even when you are unaware that it is, and many cases this isn't a very controversial thing to realize. When you speak a sentence or ride a bike you aren't consciously walking through each individual step of speaking your native language or pedaling. Those processes run invisibly and automatically in your subconsciousness, while your consciousness is concerned with what you're saying or where you're going or whether it looks like the people in the grocery store want to bang you— So this makes sense, it's not very surprising to learn that your fluency in your native tongue is part of you, even though you aren't always conscious and aware of it. But sometimes things emerge from your subconscious ocean that are surprising. When I told my mom that I'm dropping out of college because I'm popping on the internet, she was surprised to find that she was disappointed and uncomfortable with this idea. She always told me that she didn't have any expectations of me, she wanted me to follow my passions, forge my own path, and live the way that I thought was best according to my values, instead of trying to live according to her values (cuz she's an incredible mother). She never told me that she had an expectation that I would graduate college or university with a degree because she didn't know she had that expectation—until I broke that expectation and the discomfort caused that expectation to rise from her subconscious mind into her conscious awareness. This wasn't really a big deal, because she wasn't very attached to this expectation. Once it revealed itself, she wasn't afraid to communicate it to me and I wasn't, like, disturbed by it. We experienced it with a sense of play and we just expressed it and proceeded with our lives. This is what happens every day when you have a healthy relationship with your subconsciousness and the things that lie therein. But sometimes we are afraid and ashamed of the things that lurk within our subconsciousness. Sometimes our subconscious desires and urges are too scary for our conscious ego mind to accept. This forms The Shadow.

If one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on Earth. Playing that out, how many more times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory. Also, I would like to stare at my kids a few million more times. I could stare at them a few million more times easy.

Once I heard someone say in a recovery meeting than an alcoholic would rather die than be embarrassed. I don't think it is only alcoholics, though we do have more to be embarrassed about. Aversion to embarrassment makes it incredibly hard to be vulnerable, and avoidance of vulnerability robs us of true connection with other people, the deep comforts of being known and receiving love.

Autistic people tend to have poor autobiographical memory. We often can't remember situations we were in. And time seems to flow in a different way. Its passing doesn't seem to matter that much.

No 12 year old gives a shit if anyone listens to his opinion about mid lane match ups. No 12 year old cares about that. 12 year old emotions are fleeting at best. But you know that 32 year old who got out of college, didn't get the million dollar a year job he fantasized about in high school, and is in the corporate grind? You know what he has? He has DotA. He comes home after his long day with his boss, who is balding, and gets real excited about his ties, and commands him to to shitty work he doesn't want to do. He comes home and the one thing he has is /r/dota2, where he can try to drop knowledge bombs because—by God—he hit 4k and it was hard. And if someone disagrees with him? Well guess what motherfucker, all this repressed anger I have from work—where Charles is telling me what to do—you are gonna get it. I don't care if I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion. I'm not gonna let this go. You think I'm gonna let this go? I'm 32 man, I got 20 more years of corporate grinding to go. Minimum.

Yet I seem to recall being practically obsessed with my own past all through my twenties. All through me teens. It seems, when I look back on it, that the younger I was, the greater fascination I felt toward the various people I had previously been. Nostalgia. I valued my memories much more, then. Too much. Maybe the value of memories, as with any other commodity, is a function of scarcity. When you first notice that you have some, you have relatively few, so they seem to matter more. You are fascinated with the fact that you have them at all. Self-awareness. Growing up. But as you begin to accumulate memories with they years, their relative utility diminishes. You grow into a more realistic appreciation of their worth, then eventually even that dwindles. Finally, there are so many memories, and you are so used to having them around, so accustomed to their plentitude, that your demand curve approaches zero, and your past, your entire personal history, seems hardly worth the effort of remembering at all. Did I just discover an economic explanation for why young people are self-absorbed? And why old people can't be bothered?

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words.

Mental illness is highly stigmatized in our culture, but it is also sometimes romanticized. We see TV shows where in order to catch a terrorist, a mentally ill person must go off their meds, or we see obsessive detectives whose obsessiveness allows them to crack cases that others couldn't. That kind of thing might be true to some peoples' experiences, but it hasn't been true to mine, like, I don't feel like my mental illness has any superpower side effects. In fact, when I'm stuck inside a thought spiral, I find it very difficult to observe, like, anything outside of myself. I become a terrible detective.

There were car gods, there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs.

Whitman has tremendous admiration for American workers of all sorts (see, for instance, "I Hear America Singing"), but he doesn't want to be one; he appears to think leisure is a condition of poetic receptivity. "I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loage at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." I think part of this has to do with the question of emptying himself out: If Whitman were a shoemaker of hatter, he would sing only the song of shoemakers or hatters respectively ("The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands"), instead of being able to sing about work in the abstract ("each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else"). Whitman can sing difference but cannot differentiate himself without compromising his labor—which is a part of why his labor has to be a kind of leisure, a profession that transcends professions; Whitman can't take sides.

I think a big contributor of toxic academic workplace culture is continuing generation students trying to go to graduate school and recreate the hyperbolic romanticization of their parents experience in grad school. You grow up, you spend 20 years hearing: "Graduate school is the worst time ever. It's gonna be the best time of your life, but the worst at the same time. I studied 18 hours a day. I gained 50 pounds. We would be at the bar learning quantum mechanics until 3 a.m every day. I didn't see my mom at christmas for six years"

For the first time in history, large numbers of people regularly travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of time. It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. … A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, be converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. … Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.