Most days it is so easy to fake happiness. You get used to the act when that’s all you’ve known. People tend to react better towards those that are happy and just a little melancholy. I think it reassures them that I am brave for not turning into a crying mess whenever my depression and PTSD go on overdrive. Almost all of my therapists say that while I have serious problems, I am remarkably normal compared to others. And I guess that is a compliment. I work very hard to create this image of a brave, sarcastic girl who does not have the time to care about most things.
But the mask does come off. And in those times, the stark difference in my personality surprises even me. It is hardest for me to appear normal during those anniversaries of trauma. Sometimes I can pull it off, at least during the day. Today is one such day, and instead of using my usual piece of glass to carve out some notches on my skin, I am trying to write about it. Continue reading →
“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
We are all storytellers, as we all narrate our worlds to ourselves to make sense of our experience.
J.D. DeHart plays with fantasy and reality in a set of fun, readable pieces inspired by Greek myths, fairy tales, leaping dolphins and swordfish. He wonders whether imagined characters could handle real life, and simultaneously whether reality enters the realm of legend when it becomes a memory only shared by some. As the last piece points out, one does not need to go farther than a simple trip outdoors to grasp that the human experience is not the only vantage point from which to experience reality.
A Modest Proposal to Cure what Ails the Body Politic in Facebook
A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Abraham Lincoln
The almost-deadly attack by a gunman at a Republican baseball practice on June 14th briefly focused national attention on the dangerous level political polarization has reached in the US. But it’s been trending upward for decades.
Since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public in the United States… There are now large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of activists — they involve a large segment of the public and the deepest divisions are found among the most interested, informed, and active citizens.
Alan I Abramowitz and Kyle L. Saunders, The Journal of Politics, “Is Polarization a Myth?” 2008
Many of us thought Obama was an inspiring figure, as the first African-American President, and he would unite the nation and reverse the trend of polarization. It didn’t turn out that way.
And now, an even more polarizing figure holds the office of President of the United Sates. The extremity of our angry national division is summarized in “Polarization in 2016” by Matthew Gentzkow, Stanford University.
Check out these words that fall like subtle incantations..
Christopher Bernard is the master of entry and departure, hello and goodbye. Lured, summoned as we are into this magnificent collection, we are unable to tiptoe into these poems. Black Fire is the entry poem and so begins the dance.
We are cautioned to meander, sly rhymes beg us to slow down, but we can’t resist jumping straight in. Check out these words that fall like subtle incantations: absurd/contempt/attempt and later love, dove (but ah its a verb). This attention to sound and wit makes us want to examine each line. Is this word a sea shell or a stone, a cape may diamond or a pearl? We are enchanted by the discovery of words and emotions that are familiar made fresh. We hold it to our ear.
The Intern: Chasing Murderers, Hookers, and Senators Across DC Wasn’t In The Job Descriptionby Dale Wiley, published by Vesuvian Books, 2016.
The Intern is an entertaining novel, a novel that employs all the elements and devices we associate with its genre, the conspiracy-thriller. Trent Norris, the first-person narrator, main character is, just as the title suggests, an intern, an intern at the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, which he irreverently describes as “the artsy, standard-bearer of the Apocalypse, the dirty-minded, potty-mouthed, slightly fruity one. A lightning rod to the closed-minded and a place for lovers of the perverse.” But, of course, as an intern he is a minor player in the apocalypse, a gofer who files paperwork, sits in on meetings, ghost writes reports, and answers phones. In fact, it’s while covering the phone for the secretary to the chief financial officer that he gets indirectly involved with a conspiracy that involves the guy whose phone he’s answering and a couple of other chief financial types at foundations. He picks up the phone, a private-line he was not supposed to answer, and is told about something that was going to occur that afternoon. Later he realizes that the mysterious thing being discussed was the killing of a senator. His involvement comes about through the message he left, as a conscientious intern would, about the call; at the time, he thought that the vague thing being discussed was connected to an arts program. After that, a long and involved series of events take place. Trent ends up being chased by the conspirators and the police, who think that he was the assassin. In a matter of a few hours he goes from lowly unpaid intern to public-enemy number one.
