It is time for a tea party of the left. To rise up.

VIRGO The next two weeks will be a favorable time to kiss the feet of helpful allies, but not to kiss the butts of clever manipulators. I also advise you to perform acts of generosity for those who will use your gifts intelligently, but not for those who will waste your blessings or treat you like a doormat. Here's my third point: Consider returning to an old fork in the road where you made a wrong turn, and then making the correct turn this time. But if you do, be motivated by bright hope for a different future rather than by sludgy remorse for your error.

Word

I can't even listen to NPR anymore let alone turn on the TV news. Literally nauseating. The fucking fence, detention centers, all of it. And it feels like hopelessly my industry's fault. There is no way up and out of hand to mouth living anymore that people can see, not like going to college used to mean. So no wonder really. It is like Lewis Black said in a show I went to recently: this election result was a straight up vote for Fuck You. Now we live in the United States of Fuck You.








"Help!"

VIRGO Second chances abound, and yet nothing can ever really happen twice in this ever-evolving reality. So seize this chance if it seems like a good one. Something like it will come again. But nothing exactly like it ever will. (Django shrug.)

Life is good. Better than the alternative, first of all, which the sudden death of a longtime colleague reminds me. His mass is this afternoon. Normally he would be a massive pain in the ass on a Wednesday (meetings all happen on Wednesday), but today he gets to cancel them all like a fist slamming down on all our little intentions. RIP. And life is also good because I like it that way. So I build it to be. In every particular from comfy blankets where you want them to always butter in the fridge to work projects more numerous and interesting to ever run out of them either, all of it, everything I can control is well cared for. For YEARS now, there is only one thing missing. I am so fucking sick of that one thing. Being wrong with me.






Cleopatra - Lumineers

VIRGO The difference between your past and your future is often just a decision about moving forward. Take one step and you're in a different place. Take a few rapid steps and before you know it you're miles away.

Anyone can be president of the United States

VIRGO You can't help whom you prefer, though of course it's only natural to want to spend more time with the one who inspires a warm and reflective feeling in you and less time with the one who makes you work in some way or another.

VIRGO

It seems they want a piece of you, but not a piece of your mind. You don't have to give anything you don't want to give. There are people around you who will ask for more than is healthy for either of you.

Civil Twilight - Dancing With Myself (Billy Idol) 
Bonus track - Jefferson Airplane - Somebody to Love 

Got granted a full semester of time to develop a medical humanities program next spring. A likely sabbatical the following fall. So the year TJ will go off to college, I will be also unmoored from my job as I know it. I used to fear flying off the earth to be this free. But I'm thinking I might sell the house too, and had a real estate agent come price it last week. This is a few blocks from campus, I could rent it then not be there much.

"A friend of mine, depressed in the wake of his divorce, had recently admitted that he often felt moved to tears by the concern for his health and well-being expressed in the phraseology of adverts and food packaging, and by the automated voices on trains and buses, apparently anxious that he might miss his stop; he actually felt something akin to love, he said, for the female voice that guided him while he was driving his car, so much more devotedly than his wife ever had. There has been a great harvest, he said, of language and information from life, and it may have become the case that the faux-human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original, that there was more tenderness to be had from a machine than from one’s fellow man. After all, the mechanised interface was the distillation not of one human but of many....What was soothing, he believed, was the very fact that this oceanic chorus was affixed in no one person, that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere: he recognised that a lot of people found this idea maddening, but for him the erosion of individuality was also the erosion of the power to hurt."~Rachel Cusk, Transit

Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker: Dark Turn Of Mind

On my island, dogs and kids and a clean house and soup in the crockpot filling the air with simmeringsmell overnight. I open my eyes, smell the soup and listen to the tick of the boiler, Django rolls over and stretches next to me. I read the news (Joe, that doesn't work) and look at whatever Adirondack real estate posted overnight. I start to decide what fresh juicebar concoction to have for breakfast after my walk. My favorite combo is carrot beet kale and apple. But too much beet juice, FYI, you will pee pink, which is very weird. I go to the juicebar every morning, the owner floats around like on foot wings of self certainty, takes trips with her husband and actually says 'good help is hard to find' out loud with no irony. I'm sure it is. I smile at the help. They add shots of ginger to my smoothies. 

VIRGO Alas, childhood's limitless possibility must come to an end at some point. And yet today, a youthful opportunity you thought was closed to you forever will open up once more.

I had a taste for Total. The cereal, ya know? But could not find it so I got Wheaties.

Bon Iver - I can't make you love me (in the nick of time)

Temp dropping and wind picking up. I am listening to it and painting my toenails. Django thinks I could use a toering. I am dubious. We are debating it, listening to the wind hit the house like tidal waves, which makes him nervous. I can honestly say nothing but the prospect of a slow painful lonely death makes me nervous whatsoever anymore. Other than that, bring it.

Lissie - Go Your Own Way

"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…" Ayn Rand

“By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing.
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying.
Lady make note of this --
One of you is lying.”
― Dorothy Parker


“If a man, who says he loves you, won’t tell you the details of a private conversation between him and another woman you can be sure he is not protecting your heart. He is protecting himself."
― Shannon L. Alder

“Lying is easy. But it’s lonely...Trust is like faith: it can turn people into believers, but every time it's lost, trust becomes harder and harder to win back."― Victoria Schwab

"Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of view of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.”
― Sam Harris, Lying

"But the sound of despair is never pleasant; it sounds suspiciously like lying.”
― Joseph Roth

I am grateful for many things. I never acquired a taste for lying, for instance. 

Mates of State - Secondhand News