Chaos Theory:

Quotes

Natasha Lyonne:
“First of all, everyone is entitled to at least one nervous breakdown in a lifetime."
krisjohn:
"I hope we have to go through all of this crap because out of an infinite number of timelines, this is the only one where we survive. Otherwise it's hard to justify."
mightshould:
"I'm coping. That's a major accomplishment. Anything else is bonus."
Mary Rodgers:
"So I asked the shrink: When you're depressed because of actual things that are depressing, are there any drugs that can make you feel better? And he said no, which was even more depressing."
David Sedaris, Happy-Go-Lucky:
"I figured my post-college life would be pretty much like the one I'd been leading for the past decade: work some little job I didn't have to put much into, then come home and do my own stuff. It was the life that most of my friends had, and half my family." "It's a consequence of putting stuff out there--you're going to get reactions."
Kristina Marusic:
"There likely aren’t a ton of people on this planet—let alone within your geography or social circles—whose moral compass, sense of humor, Netflix addictions, dietary restrictions, and idiosyncrasies sync up with yours closely enough to make you want to hitch your wagon to them for the long-haul (and the internet is making us all even picker)."
John Oliver:
"Let this be a lesson that you absolutely don’t want to fuck with someone who has the patience, attention to detail, and sustained anger to crochet their resentment into a handmade garment."
Gail Donovan, quoted in "Knitting Yarns" in the essay "Knitted Goods"
"I love taking what is basically a long string and constructing a three-dimensional object. I love thinking about how somebody figured out how to do that!"
Amber A’Lee Frost:
"It’s not just bad for a person to rely on their weakest skills for survival; it’s unsustainable and immiserating."
Michael Che:
“You know what else makes you do crazy things? Crazy,”
August and Annie/Isaiah, "One Last Stop."
"Does it ever, like...I don't know. Make you lonely? To love somebody who can't meet you there?" "Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling?" When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It's good. Even when it's bad, it's good."
Katie Brennan:
"The Office taught me that love isn’t always an immediate burst of rainbows and butterflies; sometimes the best kind of love is a quiet, enduring, and steadfast process. When you really love someone, you know they are worth putting in time and effort. Even if you entertain the thought of someone else during the process, i.e. you get yourself a Karen, you know they can’t compare to your person. No amount of time can make that connection fade, so whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, you wait for your stars to align. It might take your company casually hosting a Casino Night, or a heartfelt post it note attached to an Office Olympics “medal,” but eventually your time comes—and when it does, it’s pretty much the best thing ever."
Jane Tyson Clement:
"We don't notice the strange way things come about while they are coming about. It is only afterwards that we see the pattern..."
"Candace Kahn," Almost Romance:
"You can't blow off a good story just because it's challenging."
Nick Cave:
"I prefer to say that I have made, for reasons of survival, a commitment to the uncertain nature of the world. This is where my heart lies. I suspect it always has."
Ted Lasso:
"I love meeting people's moms. It's like reading an instruction manual as to why they're nuts."
Ask Amy:
"My point is that you can lay out your plans, but the world might have other ideas."
supercrayon:
"But I kept thinking there’s a future me a week or a month or a year away that is through this. That future me is not plagued by uncertainty, they know what happened and they’re looking back at how things played out. I liked to think that future me was sending strength and love to present me. Sometimes now, present me in fact does send strength and love back towards past me. Your future selves know what happened. The you of a week or a month from now knows, and has already started to plan your next moves. I hope strength and love are rippling up and down the timeline between yourselves."
Christina Long (Washington Post)
“WHY ARE NONE OF MY INTERESTS WORTH ANYTHING IN DOLLARS,”
Michael Diamond:
“People get frustrated when they can’t see the future,” says Diamond. “The future looks scary if you’re telling them it’s just staying at home for the next 12 to 18 months. You shouldn’t really be that surprised when at least a fraction of them get angry."
Seanan McGuire:
"Please stop trying to solve me. I'm not a problem."
Morrie Morgan, in "Work Song" by Ivan Doig:
"I don't know any cure for being myself. The lotion for that hasn't been concocted yet."
Jason Mendoza:
“Sometimes you just gotta huck a Molotov cocktail at a drone and see what happens.”
Augusten Burroughs:
"But impossible is a concept that makes one's heart laugh and throw peanuts at the television."
Augusten Burroughs:
"Even if things aren't catastrophic now, catastrophe has always followed me. Life unfolds, right? All the time, it's unfolding, and I'm going to follow it."
Augusten Burroughs:
"My life has never really been “happily ever after.” I’ve always had conflict and disaster follow me around like a shadow, and I can’t really believe that will suddenly stop now that I’m happily living in Connecticut with three dogs. We’re just going to have to see."
Jacqui:
“If you have a job where you’re not coming home with stories, it’s time to leave. That simply is our qualification. Healthcare helps. Benefits are nice, but oh my god, how do you not come home with stories? It is the easiest qualification, but it’s true. My feeling is if you don’t have a story, it wasn’t a good day."
armeowda:
"Many people can cast their affections broad and bright as floodlights, but others of us are laser beams, and when something actually trips our attraction/affection sensors it can feel like a certain kind of instant precision strike, and it can leave a mark forever."
Stan Tatkin
"There's actually nothing more difficult on the planet than another person."
Lani Diane Rich:
"What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."
Heather Havrilesky:
"Do they let me write these words because I’m good at it, or do they let me do it because I’m an entertainingly crazy person who is slowly but surely unraveling before 50,000-to-100,000 sets of eyeballs each week?"
Justin Peters:
"The simple lesson that Millionaire taught me is that if you want to change your life—either by winning a lot of money on television or by some more prosaic means—at some point you are going to have to take a risk. Unless you are John Carpenter, you will eventually have to step into the unknown, bet on yourself, and hope that you are making the right decision."
Leslie Jones
"Women are the same as humans."
Anne Lamott:
“If you’re paying attention and making your own life as beautiful and rich and fun as it can be, you might just attract someone who’s doing the same thing,” she said. “You can give up on tracking someone down with your butterfly net.” “Never give up, no matter how things look or how long they take. Don’t quit before the miracle.”
Seanan McGuire:
"If what I say doesn’t help you, ask someone else, until you find the person whose reply tells you how to kick the damn door down."
Grangousier:
"It's 2018. There's a realistic chance of pretty much anything happening if it's ridiculous enough."
Joy:
"I feel a constant low level of stress every day, just by virtue of existing in my environment,"
Fancy Feast:
"When she was on a bad date, she would go to the bathroom, hit her nose until she got a nosebleed, and excuse herself, because it was easier to punch herself in the face than suffer the consequences of rejecting a man."
Ber:
"Get your freak on, screw the powers that would deny you."
Lee Bradford:
"Lee? Why does all this weird shit only seem to happen to you? Well, disembodied voice from nowhere-statistically, it has to happen somewhere."

June 30, 2005

June 29, 2005

"It looks like an embryonic green bird!"

Why Lani won't eat Brussels sprouts. I understand- I won't eat shrimp (unless they're so breaded I can't tell what I'm eating) because they look like mosquito larva.

Posted on June 29, 2005 at 04:04 PM in Weird, Wild Stuff | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bitchy bitchy.

So I'm reading through this letter on Salon and to be honest, I'm sympathizing with the writer. (Cary's answer seems to be well, lots of hot air today. I hate when he has those helium days, or whatever.) Her mother-in-law is massively in debt and apparently too flaky to do much about it or care, and she (rightly, I think) suspects she and her husband are going to be stuck with mommying/bailing out/financially support his mother.

"She is not financially stable and never has been. She is massively in debt, not just with maxed-out credit cards but with piles of student loans, and has always lived paycheck to paycheck. Without warning, last year she decided she didn't like her job and quit. Just quit, without having another one lined up! She planned to work for her sister just for the summer while she looked for another job.

I don't have to tell you that we were appalled. We're 20 years younger and would never, ever take a chance like that. People our age (late 20s) are struggling to find jobs; we don't know why she assumed she could just find another one instantly. Especially since, quite frankly, she's a strange woman. (She calls herself "eccentric.") She does not interview well. She refuses to dress for an interview, wearing shabby dresses and sandals. In the past year she has had a total of five interviews. No one, of course, has hired her. We don't think she'll ever find another job.

My husband and I are sick with worry because she simply does not make enough to cover her incredible expenses. One of my husband's sisters has told us that creditors are constantly calling her apartment, and that her kitchen is empty ... she doesn't have the money to buy food. We're worried for her, but we're ashamed that we're mostly worried about us. We're terrified that she will ask to live with us, or for financial support that we can't give. She will not listen to our tactful advice on wearing the right interview clothes. She will not check out any of the job Web sites we tell her about. She will not consider taking a job that isn't in her "dream field," even temporarily. I personally am so angry that she's put herself into this situation. And I'm even angrier because despite the fact that there are two other children, the burden seems to be on us, and not on my husband's sisters.

We feel that our hard-earned future is going to be, if not ruined, then seriously compromised by her complete lack of responsibility. My husband is beside himself over what to do if she does ask us for help. Neither one of us would be happy with her living with us -- it would be horrible -- but could we really say no? I can only say so much -- it's not my mother."

So I started reading the Table Talk discussion (starting here) and I'm getting annoyed with it. People are bitching that if her husband's job is so good they should be able to shell out for Mom, no problem (hello,wouldn't you think the letter writer would know if they can afford to float Mom forever or not?), that she's being mean, that it's his mother and they should be shelling out because it's his mother, wishing something bad would happen to her so she would know what it's like to be needy, etc. Harsh.

My thoughts:

(a) Just quitting a job with no SO to pay for your ass and not getting another job first and not being eligible for unemployment = REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD IDEA. (Hell, that's the fight that led to my last ex and I breaking up.) Sorry, but it's STUPID. Unless your job's about to drive you to suicide, this is NOT A GOOD IDEA.

(b) Likewise, she's shooting herself in the foot a bunch of different ways when it comes to jobhunting. Which is ridiculous, and to me kind of smacks of "I just don't want to FIND a job." (Yeah, dealt with this before too, with several people. If a job has to jump through fifty hoops before you'll be arsed to apply for it, methinks you just don't want to work.)

(c) There's always one sibling that somehow gets stuck with taking care of the relatives. God knows my mom's always been that one (and somehow has ended up even doing that on my dad's side of the family). The other siblings can always just flake out, not do anything, what have you- you can't force them to help if they don't want to, and there's usually one person who feels the guilt enough that they have to help, even if it makes them keel over. I've seen that just a wee bit too much at home.

(d) Since it's not her mother, yeah, she's not going to have that much control over what happens. If hubby is adamant that they support his mother, then that'll probably happen. Doesn't sound like he wants to be stuck with that job, but he'll end up with it out of guilt.

(e) You can't make his mother freaking shape up and get a job and take care of her own ass if she doesn't want to do it. Especially if she decides she wants to be taken care of. So at some point, you either give in or you give the tough love and refuse to help. It's ugly, but that's what happens. She hasn't asked yet, but I think at some point she's gonna dig herself deep enough and she'll have to.

(f) And finally, my point is pretty well summarized here. "I think there's a big difference between the obligation to take care of your parents because they are sick or old and an obligation to take care of a parent because they are irresponsible. If she becomes completely broke and indebted, then guess what Mom, time to lower your dream-job standards and get something to pay the rent."

It's one thing to be completely stuck with the burden of someone who can't take care of themselves. It's quite another to be completely stuck with the burden of someone who COULD but WON'T. And encouraging them not to take care of themselves by giving them free room and board, paying their debts for them, what have you, isn't going to make them get on their feet and stop sponging off you any time soon. Maybe his mom does need to hit rock bottom to get the clue that she will have to lower her standards and improve her behavior to get a job.

In short, if they help this woman out, I hope they don't help her out too much. That way leads to financial hosing and much resentment.

Posted on June 29, 2005 at 02:30 PM in God Only Knows | Permalink | Comments (0)

More mathematical craft.

Knitting.

Crocheting.

Fractal quilting.

Lots of mathematical quilting stuff here.

And non-mathematical craft...crocheted nude sculptures. (Washington Post.)

Sculptural knitting and crochet. With more math here. And omg, I LOVE Faberge Egg. Lovelove! She also made an Audrey II (same link).

"Every time someone tells me, "How nice, my grandmother used to do that," it makes me so cranky that I want to knit a mean green mother from outer space. And who says knitting has to be flat? There's a real challenge in figuring out how best to deal with the fact that yarn is soft, and knitted items want to flop. "

Btw, knitting camp? Wow.

Looking at this stuff totally makes me want to do some kind of knitted artwork/collection of...something. Though I don't really know how to do 3-D stuff too well yet. I'm still trying to figure out short rows.

Oh, that's pretty! I like the freeform bracelet here too.

The 'bracelets that tell time" here are awesome. I should remember that site to show it to my seed beading teacher this summer.

Posted on June 29, 2005 at 01:58 PM in Craft Crap | Permalink | Comments (0)