natasiakawi:

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl


By CHARLES WARNKE info

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/dont-date-a-girl-who-reads/

But that ain’t me. Granted, the following photo is in the children’s section at my favorite bookstore (Mr. B’s in Bath, England), but I love dear old James, Vlad, and Virginia. Yes, it’s a first name basis kinda love. Can’t forget about our friend Ernie ;)

As I was reminded by my friend:

“that’s one of my first tests of a boy - i ask him what he’s reading and if he doesn’t have an answer he’s not dateable” Well said, and well done, Charles.

I will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied.

(Source: hervisualdiary)

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Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.” Erich Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940’s and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Tightness in the throat.

Choking, need for sighing.

— Joan Didion

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The Chinese View of the Midterms

The New Yorker’s China writer, Evan Osnos, wrote this commentary regarding the US November midterm elections and their unlikely tie to China — insightful and concise, he addresses the absurdity of pointing fingers across the Pacific in order to distract from the election candidates’ faulty résumés and lack of political facility. As Osnos points out, China is an “enemy of convenience.” It really is people like Christine O’Donnell who I fear will spark another Chinese Exclusion Act or something of this ilk.

Oh no, she’s wearing Communist Red! Maybe it’s actually O’Donnell who’s conspiring against the United States! (or something equally ridiculous…)

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John and Yoko, part deux

Sean Lennon and partner Charlotte Kemp Muhl in Vanity Fair.

Excerpts:

He’s now ready to test the spotlight again. Autumn brings his 35th birthday—on October 9, a birth date he shares with his father, who would have been 70 this year—and the release of Acoustic Sessions, the first album by the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, Sean’s two-person band with Charlotte Kemp Muhl, a 23-year-old model with luminous porcelain skin and such pillowy lips she could be the offspring of Mick Jagger and Angelina Jolie. In a collaboration so enmeshed it recalls the epic mind meld of John and Yoko, Charlotte is Sean’s girlfriend, writing partner, and fellow musician, singing intricate harmonies and playing everything from accordion and glockenspiel to acoustic bass, banjo, piano, cello, vibraphone, recorder, melodica, and shakers on the album. Even the band’s name was Charlotte’s creation—the title of a play she wrote when she was seven. The couple met five years ago at California’s Coachella music festival. “I had a premonition,” Sean recalls. “I saw her and whispered to my friend, ‘I really think that girl is going to be my girlfriend.’ ”

But he didn’t anticipate that Charlotte would also become his McCartney. “I never realized how great it was for Dad to have Paul as a writing partner,” Sean says. “I used to write very simply and autobiographically; it was like slitting my wrists and letting it all pour out. With Charlotte, it feels more like an intellectual game in which we’re both having fun. It’s like intellectual tennis.”

and:

And yet the true nature of their partnership makes that image as misleading as any stereotype that casts Charlotte as a bimbo riding the coattails of the super-rich rock spawn. “People assume she’s with me for the wrong reasons,” Sean says. “They don’t realize she makes more money than I do.”

“I’m his sugar mama,” Charlotte says with a Cheshire-cat grin.

Read it, VF’s writing is impeccable as usual.

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Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything
  1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
  2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
  3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
  4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
  5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
  6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

- Harvard Business Review

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I figure that every girl has two types of exes in her life. There is the ex whom you’re still in love with and hope that you will one day be reunited with by romantically running into him on a busy street in New York after years of not seeing one another. In this scenario, you are just breaking up with another dude only to discover that you and your ex are perfect for one another.

And you’re Gwyneth Paltrow.

He’s a dreamboat: yacht-owning and Armani-clad. Sweet, wonderful, kind, rich — sigh.

And then there’s what I like to call the Funk-Master-Sketch-Ex. Funk Master (for short) is that dude in high school who really screwed you over and left you an emotional wreck. Funk Master Sketch also applies to the dudes (notice the plural) who screw you over in college. Funk Master Sketch always has a way of re-entering your life whether it’s in person or in the form of a bill from your psychiatrist.

- Natalie Krinsky, Yale Daily News

Hahha extremely vivid and accurate description. Unfortunately most of mine fall into the latter category.

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She gives a jaundiced look. “There’s no way,” she says. She thinks he made a choice long ago between doing the right thing and getting rich, and when you make those choices, you foreclose other ones. “He could have been president. But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way.”

- Marianne Gingrich on her ex-husband, in Esquire

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Carpet of frogs cancel Greek road trips!

Silly NY Times blog post about frogs overtaking roads near Thessaloniki, where thankfully, we’re not going. Hope the frogs aren’t in France (haha, silly OE).

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Only the good die young...

So apparently my lack of sleep will eventually do me in… I knew this was coming someday. James Dean would be proud though, no?

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Themed by: Hunson