summertime

oh your daddy's rich
and your ma is good lookin'

so hush little trust fund baby,
don't you cry.

boys don't cry

scientists say that tears have an evolutionary purpose.

only humans shed tears, after all. animals howl - cry out in pain - but tears are the opposable thumb of emotion.

there are theories on this: like anything in evolution, what has stayed with us must have helped in advancing the species.

when in danger, tears signal to your "intimates" (only a few feet away) that you are suffering without betraying your vulnerable state to the predator.

tears built communities, salvaged broken relationships. this is called "theory of mind" or empathy.

tears got someone's attention. the good criers were survivors because they would not be left alone, unattended, go hungry, etc.

when someone is crying, it's difficult to argue with them (or so they say). BACK OFF. I'M ASHAMED. I'M GUILTY. i'm small. don't go.

tears are an evolved mechanism of camouflage (i.e. crocodile tears).

there exists an entire language of tears that we've evolved to perform and interpret simultaneously.

(ah, fascinating what you learn from the radio in the morning before going to work. in the mirror, you smile at the mole under your right eye that superstitious relatives back home had warned you to remove permanently - a sure sign of "a lifetime of tears," they said.

little did they know, you were fortunate enough to be armed with such a predictable fate.)

sunday reading (T magazine)

she's little more than imported wallpaper; the perfect obscure object of desire (what i wish i saw when i look out the back window of my house in manhattan).

this is not unusual for sufferers of dorian gray syndrome, a little-known psychological disorder first identified in 2000 by a cabal of staff shrinks at germany's justus-liebig-university, giessen.

an ethnographic view of fat shows it to be a more fluid construct. the stigmatizing term "obese," from the latin obesus, originally meant "having eaten well" until it was reclassified by 19th-century doctors and health workers, just as "fat" was once a flattering term used by the greeks.

flesh suggests messiness. art, control.

do you love?

i.
word of the day: "le coeur."
not to be confused or mispronounced as "le cul."
though sometimes "le coeur" is not far off from "le cul."
it's a matter of perspective.

ii.
the difference between what you thought love was at 19 and what you have come to think of it as at 23:

"it would degrade me to marry heathcliff now; so he shall never know how i love him: and that, not because he's handsome, nelly, but because he's more myself than i am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire."
- emily bronte; wuthering heights

"when you fall in love, my sister said / it's like being struck by lightening. / she was speaking hopefully, / to draw the attention of the lightening. / i reminded her that she was repeating exactly / our mother's formula, which she and i / had discussed in childhood, because we both felt / that what we were looking at in the adults, / were not the effects of lightening / but of the electric chair." - louise glück; "prism"

iii.
since you can remember, you've always asked yourself: "do you love?" never, "do you love him?" (m, r, b, etc...fill in said blank), but: "do you love?"
when referencing a feeling, it's best not to use names. names require specificity, hence thinking. generalizing is your safest bet and almost 99% of the time yields an affirmative response: "yes."

no need to REinvent the wheel

"i'm perpetually lonely. i'm lonely when i'm in relationships. it's my condition as an artist....i also think i'm afraid of depleting my energy. i have this weird thing that if i sleep with someone they're going to take my creativity from me through my vagina."

- excerpt from an interview w/ lady gaga ("lady gaga's cultural REvolution," lisa robinson; vanity fair - sept. 2010)

REcast genius in another form. what beauty is, is.

this is called "exercising your muscle"

poor poor blistered feet. one on each second toe.
smoking your cowboy cigarettes in your underwear.
nobody cares. only the pigeons frequent your stash
of ash in a metal tin can on the fire escape.
sober up kitten. you got work tomorrow.