paterbabe's Journal

I just noticed that the microlending site Kiva.org accepts Paypal for payments.... a great chance for me to sell some once beloved, but now excessive/outgrown items on eBay and loan the profits to struggling small businesspeople all over the world.  When the loan is (hopefully) repaid, I can then reinvest again.

Seems like a small way for me to fight against the global credit freeze, rather than trying to 'spend our way out' of the downturn.

Delayed sleep-phase syndrome (DSPS), also known as delayed sleep-phase disorder (DSPD) or delayed sleep-phase type (DSPT), is a circadian rhythm sleep disorder, a chronic disorder of the timing of sleep, peak period of alertness, core body temperature, hormonal and other daily rhythms relative to the usual norms. People with DSPS tend to fall asleep some hours after midnight and have difficulty waking up in the morning.

Often, people with the disorder report that they cannot sleep until early morning, but they fall asleep at about the same time every "night", no matter what time they go to bed. Unless they have another sleep disorder such as sleep apnea in addition to DSPS, patients can sleep well and have a normal need for sleep. Therefore, they find it very difficult to wake up in time for a typical school or work day. If, however, they are allowed to follow their own schedule, e.g. sleeping from 4 a.m. to noon, they sleep soundly, awaken spontaneously, and do not feel sleepy again until their next "night".

-www.wikipedia.org

"The Dutch city of Drachten has undertaken an unusual experiment in traffic managment.  The roads serving forty-five thousand people are 'verkeersbordvrij': free of nearly all road signs.  Drahten is one of several European test sites for a traffic planning approach called 'unsafe is safe.'  The city has removed its traffic signs, parking meters, and even parking spaces.  The only rules are that drivers should yield to those on their right at an intersection, and that parked cars blocking others will be towed.

The result so far is counterintuitive: a dramatic improvement in vehicular safety.  Without signs to obey mechanically (or, as studies have shown, disobey seventy percent of the time), people are forced to drive more mindfully--operating their cars with more care and attention to surrounding circumstances."

From "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It", Jonathan L. Zittrain, "Chapter 6: The Lessons of Wikipedia"

"My advice to young writers is to stop reading like readers and start reading like writers.  Reread stories, books, and passages from books that work for you.  Dissect the prose.  Write it out yourself longhand.  Get inside the mind of the writer.  Figure out why it works.  Then go forth and do the same." (p. 225, In Fact: the Best of Creative Non-Fiction, Mark Bowden, "Finders Keepers: The Story of Joey Coyle")

This advice reminds me of Tobais Woolf in "Old School" typing out passages by his favorite writers.... of course, in that case, his identification with the stories he was copying went a bit too far.... but, it is still an intriguing technique.

Schwächen

Du hattest keine.

Ich hatte eine:

Ich liebte.

 

 

-Bertolt Brecht

"You don't weep unless you've been happy first: tears always mean something enviable."

- Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps, p. 35

Be kind and tender to the Frog,

   And do not call him names,

As ‘Slimy skin,’ or ‘Polly-wog,’

   Or likewise ‘Ugly James,’

Or ‘Gape-a-grin,’ or ‘Toad-gone-wrong,’   

   Or ‘Billy Bandy-knees’:

The Frog is justly sensitive

   To epithets like these.

No animal will more repay

   A treatment kind and fair;

At least so lonely people say

Who keep a frog (and, by the way,

They are extremely rare).

"A great number of people are running around thinking that they’re depressed when it may be that they’re simply disappointed." (Julia)

"The reason half the world feels lonely is because the other half is pretending to be perfect." (from 'reader Susan')

-Julia Allison

http://julia.nonsociety.com/>

"For myself, I genuinely think that one of the real responsibilities of an artist and writer (or, more properly, what I look for in writing and art myself) is a clear, honest communication of what it feels like to be alive to people who haven't been born yet.  There's a unique emotional rudder that literature and art can provide to a consciousness drifting through life -- not something as banal as a roadmap or a rule book - but a sort of sympathetic rut in the road.  And whether that rut is real or imaginary, life ia a lot harder to get through without it."  (p. xviii)

“…[I]f any art is to endure, the effort expended on its creation is usurped (and one hopes eventually dwarfed) by the work’s lasting power.  For example, it takes a few days to read War and Peace, which took Tolstoy a few years to write, but it has survived and grown exponentially in strength through many generations of readers.  Being so faced with eternity, at some point the artist, writer, or cartoonist has to somehow allow his or her work, for lack of any better metaphor, to take on a life of its own – a necessary step tat admits instinct, uncertainty, or faith into the act of creation – what is frequently referred to as ‘taking a risk’ in art.  Sometimes this yielding can lead to complete failure, other times it can lead to something much larger.”(p. xix)

This resonated with me.   I love that shiver of pleasure and sense of peace when I discover a moment of human experience – even when it is not my own experience – perfectly captured in art.  Perhaps it is the sense of being in a conversation with another mind, outside the prison-house of my own soul.  Or perhaps it is the comfort of knowing that some slice of time, some sliver of the beauty in the world, has been pinned to a page, and  – however imperfectly and still impermanently – transcended death.