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."

July 31, 2006

And more Cary Tennis debate on foreigners marrying.

Now it's a single chick in Pakistan who can't wait for a husband any longer. (Salon)

"How serendipitous that your letter should arrive this morning, on the heels of the letter from the woman in India in an arranged marriage, whom I advised to accept the perhaps painful and unjust constraints of her culture and her choices. That did not seem very progressive, did it? I imagine it might have sounded rather conservative or backward.

Perhaps I should say this: I do not think that my general ideas about law and culture are conservative or backward; but I believe there is much peril in conducting one's private life as though it were a political demonstration project. People's well-being depends on fragile networks of family and culture; family and culture are not outside us but inside us; when we attempt to fight them -- because we judge their practices to be backward -- we are in some degree also fighting ourselves. We might not be prepared for the damage this can do to us, or for the long, wrenching process of inner change it requires. I feel protective toward people who write to me. I try to put their interests ahead of my own. I try not to place them in greater danger. I sometimes feel that caution is best.

So I welcome your letter. It offers an opportunity to continue the discussion, though I wonder if I will actually clarify anything."

It doesn't, really, but where he wanders to afterwards about discussing adversity is interesting, even if it has NOTHING TO DO with the question, pretty much. (Cary doesn't seem to be having things go well for him now, it seems.)

"I know that we are tested. I'm not saying we are tested by God. That doesn't make sense to me that God would test us -- if God wanted to know what was up, he wouldn't need to test, would he? I only know that we are tested and the testing gives shape to our lives. I am drawn to those who respond with strength when tested.

I learn from those who meet difficulties well. What I learn I try to pass on.

What I observe about those who meet difficulties with admirable grace and courage is that they somehow manage to keep their shape; they do not become someone else and they do not give up or turn away; they remember what they are trying to do; they remain; they persist. They do not lose their ideas. I suppose this could be expressed as "they have faith" except that to "have faith" seems to be to expect a positive outcome. It is more that the people who deal with adversity well seem to recognize the possibility that things might not work out but they keep going and try to be cheerful.

One might ask, Why? Why go on in the face of uncertainty? And that is the mystery: Why indeed? I do not know. That is where we meet the ineffable quality that I admire. Not all might admire this quality; to some it might seem stupid to go on without reason. It is an unreasoning thing; perhaps it is simply an unreasoning love of life.

And so again we scratch the surface of our behavior and reach this unreasoning love of life, this unreasoning belief in the rightness of the human project, a belief that after much travail is threadbare and worn, crude and animal, like the instinct for survival.

You are not alone in thinking things should be different. Ideally, we act with courage and conviction to change things, but at the same time we live in the world as it is, and we live with ourselves as we are, with our limits and our fears, and we live with fate as it is -- capricious and unpredictable, cunning and malicious."

I dunno about "why do we go on?" More like, what other options are there? You can collapse into a ball and cry and whine and wait for someone to come along to take care of you...or not...a la my grandma's MO. Which doesn't improve jack shit. You can off yourself. Or... go on. Yeah, if there was a fourth option it might get a lot of takers, but there isn't one. So... you go on.

Posted on July 31, 2006 at 08:39 AM in Quarterlife Crisis | Permalink | Comments (0)

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