The study also found that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.”

“Positive mood is not universally desirable: people in negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages,” Forgas wrote.

 http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/i…

Cutting books

About 15 mins before the previous. Again, no photoshop whatsoever.

Untouched by photoshop.

The problem with making baby booties is that the joy of completing one lasts only a few seconds, then you have to start all over and make another.

I’ve taken up knitting. This is a power-cord scarf. First attempt so it’s a bit rugged. Making another for someone that hopefully will turn out a bit more polished. I am totally addicted to knitting, it’s all I want to do…

Someone is getting excited. Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person. This person has dressed for the occasion. This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. This person is laughing out loud with relief and playing the message back to get the address of the place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life. It is really exciting, and it’s not just a dream, it’s real.

They are all waiting by a picnic table in a park this person has driven past many times before. There they are, it’s everyone. There are balloons taped to the benches, and the girl this person used to stand next to at the bus stop is waving a streamer. Everyone is smiling. For a moment this person is almost creeped out by the scene, but it would be so like this person to become depressed on the happiest day ever, and so this person bucks up and joins the crowd.

Teachers of subjects that this person wasn’t even good at are kissing this person and renouncing the very subjects they taught. Math teachers are saying that math was just a funny way of saying “I love you.” But now they are simply saying it, I love you, and the chemistry and PE teachers are also saying it and this person can tell they really mean it. It’s totally amazing. Certain jerks and idiots and assholes appear from time to time, and it is as if they have had plastic surgery, their faces are disfigured with love. The handsome assholes are plain and kind, and the ugly jerks are sweet, and they are folding this person’s sweater and putting it somewhere where it won’t get dirty. Best of all, every person this person has ever loved is there. Even the ones who got away. They hold this person’s hand and tell this person how hard it was to pretend to get mad and drive off and never come back. This person almost can’t believe it, it seemed so real, this person’s heart was broken and has healed and now this person hardly knows what to think. This person is almost mad. But everyone soothes this person. Everyone explains that it was absolutely necessary to know how strong this person was. Oh, look, there’s the doctor who prescribed the medicine that made this person temporarily blind. And the man who paid this person two thousand dollars to have sex with him three times when this person was very broke. Both of these men are in attendance, they seem to know each other. They both have little medals that they are pinning on this person; they are badges of great honor and strength. The badges sparkle in the sunlight, and everyone cheers.

This person suddenly feels the need to check her post office box. It is an old habit, and even if everything is going to be terrific from now on, this person still wants mail. This person says she will be right back and everyone this person has ever known says, Fine, take your time. This person gets in her car and drives to the post office and opens the box and there is nothing. Even though it is a Tuesday, which is famously a good day for mail. This person is so disappointed, this person gets back in the car and, having completely forgotten about the picnic, drives home and checks the voice mail and there are no new messages, just the old one about “passing the test” and “life being better.” There are no e-mails, either, probably because everyone is at the picnic. This person can’t seem to go back to the picnic. This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed.

In the bathtub this person pushes the bubbles around and listens to the sound of millions of them popping at once. It almost makes one smooth sound instead of many tiny sounds. This person’s breasts barely jut out of the water. This person pushes the bubbles onto the breasts and makes weird shapes with the foam. By now everyone must have realized that this person is not coming back to the picnic. Everyone was wrong; this person is not who they thought this person was. This person plunges underwater and moves her hair around like a sea anemone. This person can stay underwater for an impressively long time but only in a bathtub. This person wonders if there will ever be an Olympic contest for holding your breath under bathwater. If there were such a contest, this person would surely win it. An Olympic medal might redeem this person in the eyes of everyone this person has ever known. But no such contest exists, so there will be no redeeming. This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft. This person sighs. This person’s eyes begin to close, this person sleeps.

“Comedy is like a very cokey, druggy sugar. You get hits of comedy, and it’s very, “More, give me more of that stuff,” because serotonin is being released in the brain. So it’s basically, everyone becomes serotonin junkies, and we are serotonin dealers.”  –Eddie Izzard, who deals the quality stuff

“Israel really turned us around on the whole Jew-hating thing,” said Hezbollah leader Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, shortly after a U.N.–brokered ceasefire was declared on Aug. 14. “After destroying much of our infrastructure and displacing nearly 1 million civilians, we’ve come to respect Israel as a legitimate power and a beacon of democracy…”

…

“It’s remarkable to think that, had Hezbollah been capable of making surgical pre-emptive strikes against Israeli military installations and densely populated urban centers, Israel would most likely be renouncing Zionism and abandoning the region at this very moment,” Talbott said in August.

The bombings have had the most significant impact on Lebanon’s youth. Many who saw parents and friends killed in the attacks said they will now spend the rest of their lives supporting Israel.

I can’t find a direct link to just the one song but here’s his mspace page and it’s song #4. Go listen.

had he simply looked at that protester and said, “Hey, do I come down to where you don’t work and knock the bong out of your mouth?”

…as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.

Othrwis thy’ look lik this. So until I gt nw kybor or nw omputr I won’t b posting muh.

Tht ws xhusting.

Fascinating story of the creation — and abandonment — of National Art Schools in Cuba just after the revolution. The buildings’ design was intended to reflect the revolutionary spirit, but before they could be completed the architects found themselves and their buildings labeled counter-revolutionary, one fled the country, another was jailed. Half-completed, though, they are still in use as an art school, though one in considerable decay. Read the whole story here and see more awesome images here.

“Perhaps it is not incidental that the two schools that inspire us the most are the two schools that lay in the greatest ruin and neglect today; they are also the two schools which most closely connect with the natural terrain of the landscape and most closely relate to the Quibu River. To visit this landscape is to feel, in a very fundamental way, the union between the process of nature and the process of culture. The seamless integration between building and landscape does not engender a feeling of imbalance between what is “man-made” and what is nature; only a feeling of natural process where nature will, in the end, always take its own course. As landscape architects, the value of this landscape is enhanced by its sense of ruin, especially when we understand the special and unique cultural circumstance that gave rise to the school’s creation and ultimate abandonment. To now ignore the value of the ruin would certainly be to end the cultural and historic lesson that the National Schools of Art teach – that an interim of neglect in this case was necessary for a process of cultural renewal to begin.”

“Who do you think’s gonna win American Idol tonight?”

“As long as they’re both here legally, I don’t care.”

I know I should write a poem about you.
a friend, a former lover, dead.
I should write things about how much

                                                                         I’ll remember you
                                                                         I’ll think of you
                                                                         I’ll miss you.

I should write things about

                                                                         The good times we had
                                                                         The laughs we shared
                                                                         The love we felt.

It doesn’t seem appropriate to say

     that it’s hard to remember your face
     that more than your touch I remember
          your withdrawal
     that others who have shared my unmade bed
          have crowded you out of my head
     that I can’t suggest I loved you the best
          or even that I think of you often.

It doesn’t seem appropriate to say

     that I don’t grieve your death
          but your life.