love life; live to love

sometimes we need the reminder:

love according to Stephen Colbert

i love this so much.


Ask a Grown Man: Stephen Colbert from Rookie on Vimeo.

i especially love the part (~7:38) when Stephen starts trying to define love in terms of what it looks like:

"they want to hear your stories. they care how you feel. they want to make your day better. they want to listen to your problems. they reach out to you.

everybody wants to be loved, to have people pay attention to them. but if someone goes to the effort to call you, reach out to you, write you, to come up to you at a party, come over to talk to you, smile when they see you, ask you your problems, those are good signs they like you... if your happiness is more important than their happiness... one nice definition of love, i think, is that another person's happiness is more important than your own. and an early sign of that is that they want to make your day better."

quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice."

-from "The Sensible Thing" (short story)

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.” 

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, Short Stories

quotes on love from Bob Marley

"IF SHE’S AMAZING, SHE WON’T BE EASY. IF SHE’S EASY, SHE WON’T BE AMAZING.

IF SHE’S WORTH IT, YOU WONT GIVE UP. IF YOU GIVE UP, YOU’RE NOT WORTHY.

… TRUTH IS, EVERYBODY IS GOING TO HURT YOU; YOU JUST GOTTA FIND THE ONES WORTH SUFFERING FOR."

Bob Marley

The Uncertainty Principle (and, of course, Breaking Bad)

 

a tale of two Heisenbergs...

when i was home a few days ago i started reading Copenhagen.

for some reason, it was just calling to me. i've had it on the shelf for years, one of the select books from college i kept around in arm's reach. i remember being assigned it as reading in one of my core classes (Natural Systems), but never read far before i abandoned it for something else (the only notes i made in the margin ended on page 5, with a blue box around the words "Uncertainty Principle" and "complementarity.")

well, i'd pretty  much forgotten anything and everything about the play until i picked it up and started reading it, and, perhaps due to my brimming obsession with Breaking Bad, have found it more interesting and relevant than before. reading it has made me wonder if perhaps Vince Gilligan was inspired, to some extent, by the work of Michael Frayn and the history of nuclear physics.

the play is nothing but an ongoing theoretical conversation between mentor Niels Bohr, his former student (and now rival physicist) Werner Heisenberg, and Bohr's wife cum secretary Margrethe. it takes place in some future time after all three have passed into the next life and involves a discussion of Heisenberg's (in)famous visit to Copenhagen, the true motives and results of which are unclear to historians and the scientific community. the three actors circle each other throughout the piece (as can be seen in the photo off the cover), as electrons inside an atom, mirroring the atomic physics at the center of their discussion, but also drawing attention to the relationships of individuals/elements to one another.

for people who watch Breaking Bad, this is what comes to mind when we hear "Heisenberg":

volatile, explosive, unpredictable. dangerous. seems to me that Vince Gilligan is very careful and methodical with how he created the world of Walt and Breaking Bad, and it seems unlikely that Walt choosing Heisenberg as his nom de guerre is not mere coincidence but part of Gilligan's elaborate plan.

some interesting overlaps and parallels:
1.  Heisenberg the physicist was recruited by Germany, becoming the youngest professor to work on quantum physics at the university where he began his career, later developing and contributing research to the Nazi regime's atomic bomb program (does this explain the Nazis in Breaking Bad? always thought they were an unexpected curveball at the end of the series)

2.  his mentor, Niels Bohr, was himself a prominent physicist and renowned for his work in nuclear physics, but due to German occupation in his home country of Denmark, was forced to escape extermination

3.  from Copenhagen, page 24:
Bohr talks about Heisenberg's recklessness (while skiing, but also how it reflects his approach to his scientific work): "At the speed you were going you were up against the uncertainty relationship... You never cared what got destroyed on the way, as long as the mathematics worked out you were satisfied."
H: "If something works it works."

4.  page 51, (talking about the arrival of the Allies and the end of the war) Heisenberg: "Under my control -- yes! That's the point! Under my control!"
Bohr: "Nothing was under anyone's control by that time!"

5.  page 74, H: "However we got there, by whatever combination of high principles and low calculation, of most painfully hard thought and most painfully childish tears, it works. It goes on working."

6.  page 75, Margrethe: "Your talent is for skiing too fast for anyone to see where you are. For always being in more than one position at a time, like one of your particles."

7.  page 94, Heisenberg: "Our children and our children's children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment... By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things."

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and finally, these chilling words, written by Frayn, said by Heisenberg, shared by me with you on the eve of the series finale of Breaking Bad:

"I'm your enemy; I'm also your friend. I'm a danger to mankind; I'm also your guest. I'm a particle; I'm also a wave. We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family, to our children... All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened."

-Heisenberg (page 77-78)

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happy Breaking Bad finale day, folks! i don't know if it's because it's the last day one of the best things to ever happen to television will be on the air, or the quickly disappearing summer and impending winter, or that it's the last day of my unemployment, but i am filled with a lingering sadness. i am going to miss this Sunday feeling so much.

Occupy Wall Street newcomers

"...and then, there were Ben Kuebrich and Stephanie Lee."

ben and i made the local NBC NYC news*, for showing up last friday to check out the amazing happenings at the Occupy Wall Street movement. more on that soon!

View more videos at: http://nbcnewyork.com.


*the only reason we found out was because we met a guy on the way home who stopped us to chat and said "hey! you're the ones from the 6 o'clock news!" 

fine italian and french cooking

i've been boning up on my cooking terminology and technique during my lunch break today. one thing i'm proud of, is that ben and i have a really terrific track record in terms of our home cooking. we've been making delicious, healthy (low on oil, high in veggies, low on waste), collaborative food since we first started living together, and it's one of the things i miss the most about our life together. it occurs to me i'm really lucky that i have a partner who is as eager as i am to have a fully collaborative relationship, right down to the preparation of fine food. our lives are a lot happier and healthier (and fuller!) as a result, in addition to being less gender normative, which will be good for the kids!

since i'm going back to see ben in a little over a week (yippee!) i've been reading about food and thinking about what i want to make and it made me think about the art of food preparation, the skill required in artful cuisine (knife skills, knowledge about how to choose and prepare produce, proper timing, just to name a few), and the language that is so specific to food preparation. of course, good cooks may not necessarily even know the formal terminology for what they're doing, which is the case with us. i learned today that what we've been doing with our acclaimed pasta sauce is known in the worlds of french and italian cooking as Mirepoix and soffritto (respectively), and "the holy trinity" in Creole cooking. our sauce is more or less a traditional Bolognese Ragu, minus the milk and cream due to ben's lactose intolerance, plus a super secret ingredient i learned from my mom that will go with me to my deathbed (it seriously makes the difference between mediocre sauce and awesome, no-leftovers, lick-yr-plate sauce)!

another interesting thing i learned today was the origin of the cooking term Mirepoix, which is a mixture of onions, carrots and celery, in the ratio 2:1:1, lightly browned and used as the basis of flavoring for sauces, such as our own pasta sauce, and cooking stocks. have you noticed how fragrant and yummy celery is when its flavors are opened up with some heat? delicious! anyway, i was wondering what the etymology for the term was, and learned this:

According to Pierre Larousse (quoted in the Oxford Companion to Food), the unfortunate Duke of Mirepoix was "an incompetent and mediocre individual. . . who owed his vast fortune to the affection Louis XV felt toward his wife and who had but one claim to fame: he gave his name to a sauce made of all kinds of meat and a variety of seasonings" [from Wikipedia]

glad to know a cuckolded, impotent little French aristocrat gave us such a lovely term for something so tasty! thanks, dude!

also, if you've ever wondered what the difference between Ziti and Penne is, here it is:
Ziti and Penne are both cylindrical hollow pastas, but the difference is that ziti is cut with a square edge, while penne pastas are cut at an angle. this is an important distinction! the angled ends of penne allow for even more sauce retention than ziti, since the ends act as scoops. ridged penne, or penne rigate, allow even more sauce retention because of their ridges. an easy way to remember this is that the name penne comes from the latin/italian word for "feather" or "quill" - hence the angled edge and the name. also: mostaccioli are a larger, wider version of penne and their name means "little moustache."

isn't cooking fun??!

worship this

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.*

-- from this extremely genius article, "Federer as Religious Experience" (emphasis mine)

there are so many wonderful things to love about this article: brilliant writing, brilliant sports writing, David Foster Wallace, tennis, a better understanding of life, love, the writing process, and the capabilities of the human body, and Roger Federer. in short, best thing i'll read today.


*i should note, too, that my brief excerpt doesn't even include his terrific footnote(+). DFW, he really knew his way around a footnote. a man after my own heart.

(+) speaking of which, here's one now:

By the way, it's right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this [religious] experience. Because there is one. It's hard to describe — it's like a thought that's also a feeling. One wouldn't want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it's any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.

fatalism friday

sometimes other ppl have a way of reading my mind and putting it into better words than i possess. some snippets:

"Two years ago when [boyfriend] first moved in, there was something exciting about getting up in the morning. You would rise, dress, and, knowing your lover was asleep in your bed, drive out into the early morning office and factory traffic, feeling that you possessed all things, Your Man, like a Patsy Cline song, at home beneath your covers, pumping blood through your day like a heart."

"Someday, like everybody, this man you truly love like no other is going to die. No matter how much you love him, you cannot save him. No matter how much you love: nothing, no one, lasts."

"You want to help him, rescue him, build houses and magnificent lawns around him."

-from the short story "Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love" by Lorrie Moore, from her book Self-Help (1985)

life imitates art

“But maybe all art is about just trying to live on for a bit. I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”

– Banksy

i feel lost. like in the last few months my spirit has cleaved in two, the rotten depressed and dark parts remaining here while the other bits floated away, too light and airy and dreamy to be bound to these desolate remains. "O... these fragments I have shored against my ruins." sometimes i feel like i can see the other half of me off in a distance, or i feel like i am that distant self looking back at the miserable remains and pitying her. it becomes hard to recognize myself in a mirror. how do i get those lost parts of me back?

as a kid i would lie awake in bed at night, imagining death and the unrelenting continuance of time without being able to participate in it, of lives without my presence. of being forgotten. i didn't want fame, but i didn't want to get lost in time and forgotten. i think this is the fear that underlies the pursuit of fame – a desire to never die.

the other night i lay in bed, sobbing because i could feel that sense of dying, could feel my loosening grip on my dreams, ambitions and aspirations from when i was a kid. i used to want to be something unusual, to be earth-shattering. i wanted to be destined for extraordinary things. and i felt, as i examined my life, considered the turn of recent events, and the availability of options before me, that my life had become rather extra ordinary. and as i thought of an image of myself as a child and the image of myself now, i began to cry. i never thought it would come to this, to being another unhappy adult stuck in a monotonous lifestyle with dreary rituals and nothing beautiful to celebrate. is this what happens? we grow old and comfortable and stuck in daily procedures and stop imagining different possibilities? i'm 25 and yet i feel old, weary, life-deprived, sick of the limited options (watch a movie, take a walk, read a book, work / be a mother, teacher, accountant, secretary). i don't want to be just another anything.

when i was young i wanted to be a writer, a dancer, a storybook illustrator. i wanted to be a wild animal. i wanted to make everlasting art.

and now all i make is dollar bills.

heed heed, ladies!

“Women themselves have come to believe that their ideas and emotions aren’t enough in themselves, aren’t worth giving time to. [...] It is as if we have to justify our existence by always thinking of and providing for others. [...] It is incredibly hard for women to be psychically singular, to be ‘selfish’.”

-Charlotte Keatley, “Art Form or Platform? On Women and Playwrighting”

intergalactic dust

huzzah, readers! a friend of mine pointed out to me just an hour after my last post that today is Carl Sagan day. so, in honor of our galactic dreamer, i'm posting his famous "Pale Blue Dot" quote about the in/significance of Earth in the broader context of our universe.

to the stars, friends.

-stephan!e

a photograph of Earth from the Voyager spacecraft, taken on its way out of the solar system. Earth is the tiny dot located halfway down inside the brown beam on the right.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

retro-plagiarism

"The Jungians say that we hate people because they resemble bad parts of us that we aren’t willing to own up to, yet; we love people because they resemble good parts of us that we’re not confident enough to recognize in ourselves. I’m a pretty firm believer in that theory, myself."

––from this difficult article on Tina Fey, and how she is "not really" a feminist. now, i don't care so much for the critique of Ms. Fey, but this snippet was worth bookmarking. i've always believed in this theory but struggled to articulate it, and now it turns out it's based in Jungian psychoanalytic theory! i tell you, this universe is just one big Over Soul and we are all connected. you, me, Carl Jung, Ralph Emerson, and yes, even Ms. Tina Fey.

---
UPDATE: the quote, as it turns out, goes like this: "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." - Carl Jung

for the backburner

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ or ‘how very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.”

—	Neil Gaiman

happy international women's day!

a few golden nuggets from this day in history:

[this morning while listening to Amy Goodman]
ben: "happy international women's day!"
me: "thanks, happy international women's day to you too! how should we celebrate?"
ben: "hm... get our nails done together?"
me: "THAT'S NOT WHAT REAL WOMEN DO!"
ben: "then what do real women do?"
me: "i'm going to booty camp*"
ben: "yea? cuz real women need rockin' booties"

*"booty camp" is actually "BOOT camp," an intense 50-minute aerobic workout. we run sprints, lift weights, do push-ups, kick box, and drag bodies across the floor. i've been going twice a week for 6(?) weeks now and i feel FIT. my body and heart have never been stronger or more resilient. i pride myself on being able to run faster, do more sit ups, box harder, and do it all longer than anyone else in those classes, women and men. so boo-yea, what i meant to say is that real women are strong women.

and finally, a quote from another strong woman:
"And I have a lot of self-esteem, which is amazing, because I’m probably somebody who wouldn’t necessarily have a lot of self esteem, as I am considered a minority. And if you are a woman; if you are a person of color; if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender; if you are a person of size; if you are person of intelligence; if you are a person of integrity, then YOU are considered a minority in this world. And it’s going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere, especially women’s and gay men’s culture. It’s all about how you have to look a certain way, or else you’re worthless. You know, when you look in the mirror and think, “Ugh, I’m so ugly, I’m so fat, I’m so old.” Don’t you know that’s not your authentic self? That is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising: magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself, so that you will take your hard-earned money, and spend it at the mall on some turn-around creme that doesn’t turn around shit. If you don’t have self-esteem, you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you want to go for. You will hesitate to ask for a raise. You will hesitate to call yourself an American. You will hesitate to report a rape. You will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote. You will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution, and our revolution is long overdue. I urge you all today, especially today in these times of terrorism and chaos, to love yourselves without reservation and to love each other without restraint. Unless you’re into leather, then by all means, use restraints. Thank you.”

—	Margaret Cho happy international women's day! show yr love by paying yr respects and giving love to a strong woman!

a marxist's idea of love

"Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength."

-Theodor Adorno

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hm... i need to think about this. i'm sure there's something clever i could say to connect this quote, and the idea of love, to the Frankfurt School's theories on culture and capitalism, but today i feel sick and don't think i'm in any kind of place to wax philosophical on love or the implications of this quote.

suffice it to say, the balance between weakness and strength has been a challenge to maintain lately. the act of negotiating desires and wills is risky business.

hope

"you cannot live on hope alone,

but without it, life is not worth living."
- Harvey Milk

i have got to give it up for this video:

great graphic design and editing, highlighting excerpts from Harvey Milk's speech "You Cannot Live On Hope Alone" (1978). i got chills just watching it, and an itch to take to the streets and fight for something, fight for everyone's right to love whoever we want.

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another speech that will absolutely move you to tears: Dustin Lance Black's Oscar acceptance speech for his original screenplay for the film MILK (2008).

Dustin Lance Black's moving Oscar Acceptance Speech
by ohlalaparis

what a senseless world we live in if beautiful people like these must be told they are anything less by our government and corporatized media.

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finally: if you haven't seen it yet, you should definitely watch The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (the original documentary on which, i'm assuming, Milk was based, and Hulu has it for free!) i watched this as a sophomore in college, in a gender and sexuality in literature class, and remember crying for hours after, wondering how i'd gone my whole life without knowing about Harvey Milk, and feeling so sad that people like this, brave and beautiful ppl, are taken from us before they can do all the good they can.

bold [sic] hate - ha ha

shield yr eyes!

(or keep em peeled! this shit changes real-time, bitches. so you can witness my minute-by-minute struggles with this jackass mother fucker. and warn me of broken links cuz this shit is wired to hit the fan...)

i have been up since 7 am working on this stupid piece of shit for my grad class, the last two hours spent trying to figure out how to format the fucking tables in the rubric section so it's not all bold.

fucking google docs.

nothing like a webquest to make you hate google, the internet, and life.

also: no food, no company, no time. low sleep, dirty hair, and my muscles wanna go for a ruuuuuuunn nn n n na nun.

there was so much else i could have done but instead this. and more.

still one unit plan, one lesson plan, and a fieldwork journal to write.

and i'm wondering about the state of nature and (hu)man. if the birds, cows, monkeys, and fleas all want to kill us, and the pigs now too, i think it's proof my hero was right:

"Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you."

fly high, fly straight. into the sun?
-stef

English majors

i am beginning to wonder if my interest in significant others has found basis largely in the fact that, on some level, i know what i want and i know what i lack.

it's my way of interpreting the knight-in-shining-armour myth: i'm not looking for someone to rescue me, but to provide those things i'm missing in my life.

it occurred to me this evening, as i was reading a book review written by a fresh-out-of-college English major, a little older than myself. i found myself envying her, spending her working life reading books and writing snappy articles about them, this is the life i want. her writing seemed easy, relaxed, honest. i read my blog posts from the last three years and sense distress. my writing has taken on the clunkiness of function: burdened with academese and pent-up sentiments. never really beautiful. i wish i had the literary rhythms of someone who spends her days and nights reading and writing about literature and poetry. i spend (most) days and nights studying or teaching from textbooks, examining education law, feeling miserable.

then i found out this person whose article i was reading was recently "laid-off." and i recalled my mother's voice telling me when i was a teen: "you can't be an English major. you need a specialized skill no one else has. anyone can read and write." fast-forward: i find myself getting certified to teach special education. it's tedious, aggravating, soul-sucking work, but at least it is specialized.

when i think about all my relationships – only 3 so not enough to be conclusive, but enough to suggest a pattern – the allure, in all three cases, was that they were literary. the first boyfriend was a poet, the second a journalist and creative writer, my third and current boyfriend a rhetorician, creative writer, English teacher, aspiring journalist.

this somehow makes perfect sense. i always wanted to be a writer, my oldest and most consistent memories are of writing short stories, carrying hand-made books and pamphlets around in my pockets, trying to start novels. but now i will never be a writer, not in the literary sense, and so my fascination seems to have found other outlets. my early lust for literature, redirected.

i'm sure there's a Freudian interpretation for such a phenomenon, but i'll settle for Lacan instead, who used to say: That missing love—that lack—is a wound that drives you to fill its emptiness. None of this drive has anything to do with true love, except for the fact that, in all the arousal, true love is missing. (source)