Author

I just found out that my (pretty much) favorite author became Christian in the past year. 

And she describes coming to prayer as sitting-space becoming prayer-space, where the silence becomes being in God's presence. And that even sitting silently is like gathering wisps of prayer-space. 

Omo, that's beautiful. 

this

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day
trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is
no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice
we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing
some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be
it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or
some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything
else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if
they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have
enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body
and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time
and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally
grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified
as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great
story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will
need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid,
a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing
about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that
they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day,
getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure
value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. 
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on
your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money
and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration
and craving and worship of self."

-David Foster Wallace

unhappy

ughhh i just want to shake him and say "do you not see what i see?!" 

i knowww everyone has different writing styles, but gracious, it doesn't even make sense.

in the end, people just get too attached to their writing (myself included). but it makes it hard to cut anything to edit anything.

i could never be an editor.

ughhh but i am too critical.  

Books

Fell in love with a book today. 

And then read an interview of the author on the books and discovered four different authors that I've never seen before that I desperately want to read. I love that feeling of realizing there's so much more out there.

 Before this, I've been pretty hmmm arrogant perhaps is the word, that I've known most of the important books out there that I want to read and should be on my to read list. It's been a while since I've discovered entire caches of authors. 

It just goes to show that limiting oneself to only the current news and current books is like wearing blinders to beautiful things in the past. 

People

There are people who are meant to be leaders.

And there are people who are not.

In this time where every single freaking program wants you to prove you're a leader, it sucks.

holy crap

holy crap holy crap.

my favorite band is going to be performing at a Dallas suburb on my birthday.

omgah omgah omgah.

Language

I've recently been falling in love with authors from different countries. Antonia Michaelis (German) who wrote The Storyteller, one my favorite books ever becuase of beautiful language. Andrzej Sapkowski (Polish) who wrote The Last Wish and doesn't have the rest of his series translated bah. Italo Calvino (Italian) who is just freaking amazing and I wish I could write like that. Luigi Pirandello (also Italian) who wrote the play Six Characters in Search of an Author. 

I've been meaning to read some Murakami, but ugh it seems very stream of consiciousness in the one or two pages I've read. Probably over summer. 

I wish I knew a thousand languages so I could read their works in their own language. To see if the words are just as striking, or even more. 

It also makes me wonder how many fantastic books and authors I am missing out on just because I cannot find an English translation or because I don't even know about the author. 

Surely if you're Italian, you would know current Italian authors. Or if you were Brazilian, you'd know current Brazilian authors that are worth reading.