i'll let you know when i get there

let's live suddenly without thinking e e cummings

"I think people misunderstand, sometimes, the difference between “empathy” and “sympathy”, and this is getting us in trouble. Sympathy is closer to pity. Empathy, which is essential for being human, means that you can imagine yourself in some else’s situation, good or bad. And feeling *real* empathy, even empathy with “the enemy”, with the bottom of the barrel of humanity, with the suicide bombers, with the child molesters, with the Hitlers and the Osamas, is necessary. If you, as a human being, can’t stop and try to imagine what sort of pain and agony and darkness must have descended upon these people to twist them up so badly, you have no roadmap to untwist the circumstances under which they were created. There can be no limit to empathy. If you can’t go the final mile, you’re not there yet." -Amanda Palmer

this week was a strange mesh of old and new discomforts a familiar fall heaviness old and new growth hurts in unexpected places from unexpected sources but at the end of it on a sunday night, i have a fancy cat by my feet & m&ms in the freezer so it can't be all that bad, right? (right.)

listen, colors up the back of sheep- we all know who's the belle of the ball i was thinking of you in england i was barely there at all staring out the window at hours of green a pastoral haze of physical ache for an absent limb. phantom. willed forgetting. back in america and i find myself elsewhere, still in some past.  some depth.  some nowhere. the way we speak to each other and are spoken to i started listening and all my words changed an excess of darkness before some fall back and i meant to write to you months ago. sometimes it's hard to contain these screams in little boxes the windows are open and everyone hears they used to sit together and coo like birds- there is no natural state this is all just the firing of synapses subconscious lunges at those magic hormones that tell us we are happy chase that connection call it out by any other name (the slight sagging around the earlobes. before you can detect it in the voice, there'...

after years of remaining completely off my radar, the song "Head Over Feet" by alanis morrisette made its way into my consciousness today.  i found myself humming, at first, and then singing it loudly (and with uncanny resemblance AM herself) on my drive home.  even when i had finished, one line stayed with me. "you asked how my day was." and then, to emphasize the profundity, a repeated, "you asked how my day was." it's as though the idea that a person who asked with genuine interest about her day was such an anomaly in her life that she had no choice but to fall head over feet in love with this virtuoso in human connection. at first i found the whole thing pathetic.  who are you, desperate 90's woman, who is so lonely in your angsty broken world that basic gestures of kind human interaction constitute reason to become utterly smitten?  do you think you deserve so little?  are you that dumbfounded that someone cares about your day that y...

miserable people are miserable. they eat little meals of misery and they talk misery blah blah blah and in between meals they have little snacks of misery and if you sit too near them, the crunch will drive you nuts.