for brian

April 21, 1984 - August 10, 2013

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

things I like this week, vol. 33

It's called "Fireflies on the Water," by Yayoi Kusama. If you look carefully you can see the platform leading from the door of the room so that you can stand in the middle of it.

. . . 

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

 - Anaïs Nin

. . .

I love you, Daddy.

. . .

You have to cut the grass by hand to maintain it, but you can plant anything you want in it - even flowers.

. . .

Love.

. . .

"Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky . . ."

. . .

A list of fifty awful lines from literary sex scenes. They're mostly hilarious, though I question the inclusion of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

. . . 

Shakespeare's grammar does awesome things to your brain. Also, it makes me really happy that the accompanying jpg references Hamlet: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams . . . "

. . .

McCurry the Master and the Yugoslavian Ballet.

. . .

This piercer, J Colby Smith, works at a shop called New York Adorned. Some of the jewelry he makes himself. I love his aesthetic - if I ever make it out there, I'll get something from him.

I usually list septum piercings as my least favorite by far, but these are so pretty and delicate that I'd be almost tempted to get one.

. . .

A fascinating blend of smoulderingly sexy and absurd.

liftoff and subsequent justification

In case you had not deduced from the last post, I shaved my head on Monday.

While I like it, I have quickly gotten tired of the constant iterations of "why?" (sometimes with the subtext of "you must be crazy," sometimes just out of curiosity). I have yet to come up with a response that accurately conveys my feelings about the question; it does not cease to amaze me that I'm expected to justify with some especially persuasive reason why I would shave my head; no one would ever bother to ask why I decided to get an inch trimmed off. To me, it is very nearly the same question: it is hair either way.

Lately, I'm tempted to start quoting Merchant of Venice at them; Shylock's speech in Act 4 scene 1 is an accurate and eloquent answer to the question of "why":

. . . I'll not answer that:
But, say, it is my humour: is it answer'd?
What if my house be troubled with a rat
And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats
To have it baned? What, are you answer'd yet?
Some men there are love not a gaping pig;
Some, that are mad if they behold a cat;
And others, when the bagpipe sings i' the nose,
Cannot contain their urine: for affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes. Now, for your answer:
As there is no firm reason to be render'd,
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig;
Why he, a harmless necessary cat;
Why he, a woollen bagpipe; but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend, himself being offended;
So can I give no reason, nor I will not . . .

Unfortunately, even if I managed to recite the whole thing, I would still get blank stares.