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musethirstypoet
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Name: Nat
Gender: Female
Expertise: Photography and Art History. I love calling the titles, artists and allegories of great paintings before I read their labels when I visit museums.
Occupation: Student, Art Editor, RA, Slave
Industry: Art
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  musethirstypoet
Yahoo:  natmg02
Member Since:
2/17/2004
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| Dedicated to Rob.
MySpace is useless. Yes, I have a MySpace, yes I peruse it once in a while to see how miserable my ex's are, but rest assured: it is useless.
Here is MySpace's big thing: "A Place for Friends." Well, I guess I have added friends on there, and I suppose we can look at one another's pictures. But the thing about MySpace is that it places itself as middle man between party A and party B, and tends to remove so much about friendships that is personal and affectionate.
It does give people the means to communicate verbally, but it removes what we once felt as obligations to make phone calls, to hear the voices of our friends, to say "How are you?!" and to give them as much time as they need to tell us everything that is going on. They can take all the time they need when they're talking, can't they? Why not go a step further and meet them for coffee or movie night to do this? How much space would that take up on MySpace? I don't know how to equate time to megabytes, but everyone keeps their messages short online because they don't want to have bad online etiquette.
That's another thing, we now have to abide by "MySpace etiquette." Sure, your Space is "yours" but not really. You're putting something together according to another person's format, you're backspacing, deleting, and editing your wall messages to have minimal dorkiness, and if you want a private conversation, you have to have it in a non-user friendly messaging service or MySpace message.
But even then, you're typing, you're editing, you're keeping it short, but you're just not being yourself. We can think about the things we say, but we can't edit them once they are out of our mouths...and so, our friends can accept who we really are (or not) when we talk personally.
MySpace even hooks us up with access to our favorite music artists, which means...well, I think MySpace killed the radio star.Sorry Video, you're not the number one killer anymore. Are we discouraging our favorite bands from putting out new albums by being complacent with one or two new songs posted once every few months? The quality of sound on that thing isn't so great either, and when did we stop trusting DJs, or start putting them out of business?
But all of that aside, it is supposed to be a place for friends. Unfortunately it's taking everything out of friendships that once made them truly strong. My strongest, most wonderful friendships are so far removed from MySpace, I'd hate to link the two together and see what happens in the long run. Will we stop calling one another on our birthdays for the great convenience of leaving a wall post? Will it be our excuse to not call or fly back home to visit friends when we grow up and move away? "Don't miss me...we both have MySpace! We can practically see each other any time we want!"
All of that aside, think about the crap MySpace does do to our relationships: A new friend posts "BFF" on your life-long friend's page. Jealous? Hurt? Annoyed? Maybe not. But what about the day you log on to your boyfriend's page. Wait, you didn't know he had one, why the big secret? There are at least 50 messages from half-naked girls* about how much they miss him, and why won't he call them? I mean, that can be platonic just as easily as it can be something else, but who needs the added worry?
Or what about when you get a little more saavy at perusing (at this point you're probably pretty emo**) and you see your boyfriend's best friend and family's pages, and see ex girlfriends asking about him and gah...it's enough to make you want to strap him down, hook up the polygraph and start the questions. Or maybe that's just me.
Basically, if MySpace isn't removing all the effort and warmth from friendships, it's setting you up for failure some other way. Place for friends? Puh-lease, it's a place for loneliness. It's a place of empty electronic shrines to ourselves, which, I have to admit...is pretty useless.
* & ** - Fact: You cannot be truly MySpace compatible unless you're slutty enough to post pictures of your boobs and your ass hanging out of those shorts that are, by the way, smaller than my tiniest thong, or unless you're emo enough to cut yourself while you lie naked on the bathroom floor (and post a MySpace video of it via iSight). It's basically for people who don't have enough self respect to save the most private or personal parts of their lives for the people who are close enough to them worth sharing that with. It's about putting it ALL out there for complete strangers, or acquaintences (if your profile is public) and then wondering later why so many relationships feel so damn empty.
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| I have a Xanga? I forgot. Does anyone read this? Or...is anyone subscribed?
If anyone does, I might actually keep writing. Pick a topic, ANY topic, fictional or non-fictional. If you pick a topic, I will post an entry about it. If nobody does, I'm going to delete this account.
I keep a MySpace blog, it's personal...nothing about current affairs, politics, entertainment, or science. So, it's not really universally appealing or interesting, but I might pick a cause and start writing about that. myspace.com/sexysouthernskygirl. I know, it's really lame.
Anyway...I have a Xanga, and I'll keep it if you pick something for me to write about. Anything. Even if there are different requests from different people.
Ok, thanks.
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| what follows is not a reflection in any way of the person i am currently dating. he's very respectful. i've simply realized lately that in the past, it wasn't always so. it's never really been so for any girl who makes an attempt to be respectable. i wish all men respected all the women who attempt to live lives that command respect. i fell asleep and i had this dream that i said this to someone, and i managed to wake up quickly enough to record it:
in movies, people fall in love with the good girl. people say...
i respect you
i love you
i cherish you
i miss you
i honor you, and
i protect you
...to the good girl.
but in real life, everyone just wants to deflower the good girl. there's something enticing about unwrapping the mystery to a flavor of candy that has yet to be tasted. i'm the girl who didn't kiss a boy until she was 15 years old, the girl who pledged in high school youth group to save herself for the man to make himself her husband. i'm the girl who never wears skirts or shorts more than a few inches above her knee and never publicly advertises her body as if it's a thing to be had.
i am not a toy in a toy chest waiting around for someone's childlike selfish moments of instant gratification only to be thrown aside later, waiting for someone more adult to come along later and clean up the mess.
it feels good to be respected.
i wish that real life was more like the movies for good girls the world 'round.
i am timeless, not a trend.
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| Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson, won its place as my top-favorite book a long time ago. I read it again last week and extracted so many beautiful quotes from it. Honestly, the entire book is beautiful and quote worthy, but I guess I found these especially "quotable." I took so many out that I divided it into categories based on subject matter. Hopefully, for anyone who reads this (does anyone read this?) it will make it easier to skip around to topics of interest.
Love:
"Why is the measure of love loss?"
"You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?...yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them."
"Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid." (Does this define love?)
"You were careful not to say those words that soon became our private altar. I had said them many times before, dropping them like coins into a wishing well, hoping they would make me come true. I had said them many times before but not to you. I had given them as forget-me-nots to girls who should have known better. I had used them as bullets and barter. I don't like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don't mean it then what else am I?"
"You said, 'I love you and my love for you makes any other life a lie.'"
"You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?"
"I came to you for a crown and you offered me a kingdom." (If you read this, you'll see what a great play on words it is..)
"It's odd being in someone else's room when they're not there. Especially when you love them. Every object carries a different significance."
"No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading an unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation."
"Love it was that drove them forth. Love that brought them home again. Love hardened their hands against the oar and heated their sinews against the rain."
"'You've got to forget her.'
'I may as well forget myself.'"
"You don't run out on the woman you love. Especially you don't when you think it's for her own good."
"She opened up the dark places as well as the light. That's the risk you take."
"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: neglect."
The Human Condition:
"Why do human beings need answers? Partly I suppose because without one, almost any one, the question itself soon sounds silly."
"Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives."
"Sometimes the best company is your own."
"There are too many of us on this planet and it's beginning to show."
"Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who's kidding whom?"
"Maybe it's my face. Maybe I look like a doormat today. I feel like one."
"THINGS HAD CHANGED, what an areshole comment, I had changed things. Things don't change, they're not like the seasons moving on a dirunal round. People change things. There are victims of change but not victims of things."
"I'm not the kind who can replace love with convenience or passion with pick-ups."
"Is happines always a compromise?"
"Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it's not an absence of feeling?...Contentment is the positive side of resignation."
"What you risk reveals what you value."
Friends:"But its difficult with old friends; difficult because it's so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about."
"If in doubt be sincere."
"As a friend I had been amusing. As a lover I was lethal."
Marriage:"I used to think of marriage as a plate-glas window just begging for a brick."
"It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is. I've been through a lot of marriages. Not down the aisle but always up the stairs."
"Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python."
Desire:
"I've tried to get you out of my head but I can't seem to get you out of my flesh."
"When I try to read it's you I'm reading."
"We shall cross one another's boundaries an make ourselves one nation. Scoop me in your hands for I am good soil. Eat of me and let me be sweet."
"Those brief days and briefer hours were small offerings to a god who would not be appeased by burning flesh."
"I had to keep my heart to myself in case I infected somebody."
"You kissed me and I tasted the relish of your skin."
"It was necessary to engage her whole person. Her mind, her heart, her soul and her body could only be present as two sets of twins. She would not be divided from herself."
"What other places are there in the world than those discovered on a lover's body?"
"You are a pool of clear water where the light plays."
"Sex can feel like love or maybe it's guilt that makes me call sex love."
"I don't want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new."
"I don't want a pillow I want your moving breathing flesh. I want you to hold my hand in the dark, I want to roll on to you and push myself into you. When I turn in the night the bed is continent-broad. There is endless white space where you won't be. I travel it inch by inch but you're not there. It's not a game, you're not going to leap out and surprise me. The bed is empty. I'm in it but the bed is empty."
"The naked eye. How many times have I enjoyed you with my lascivious naked eye."
"Night flying I know exactly where I am. Your body is my landing strip."
"Nail me to you. I will ride you like a nightmare. You are the winged horse Pegasus who would not be saddled."
Fidelity:
"How can you say that to one person and gladly fuck another?"
"I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it." (Perfect in its own way)
"When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little."
Time:
"How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it."
"My experience has been that time always ends."
"God's children had no need of progress."
"Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose."
Relationships:"If I rush at this relationship it's because I fear for it. I fear you have a door I cannot see and that any minute now the door will open and you'll be gone. Then what? Then what as I bang the walls like the Inquisition searching for a saint?"
"She didn't want to do it but she felt a writer doesn't make a good companion. 'It's only a matter of time,' she said, 'before I become an alcoholic and forget how to cook.'"
Death:"'You'll get over it...' It's the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
I've thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn't finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you're not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?"
Misc:
"Nouns have no worth these days unless they bank with a couple of Highstreet adjectives." | | |
| I quite literally forgot about my Xanga. Which means I haven't kept it updated with quotes from books I've recently read. I am so neglectful. I think I may ween off of this blog anyway since I am better with MySpace. Until then...
From A Long Way Gone, By Ishmael Beah:
"We must strive to be like the moon."
"The adage [strive to be like the moon] served to remind people to always to be on their best behavior and to be good to others. She said that people complain when there is too much sun and it gets unbearably hot, and also when it rains too much or when it is cold. But, she said, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own special way."
"If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die."
"We are all brothers and sisters. What I have learned from my experience is that revenge is not good. I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I've come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end..."
From Utopia, by Thomas More:
"I would rather say something inaccurate than tell a lie, because I would rather be honest than clever."
"Most people know nothing about learning; many despise it. Dummies reject as too hard whatever is not dumb."
"Some have so little nose for satire that they dread it the way someone bitten by a rabid dog fears water."
"Let fewer people be supported by idleness."
"For a human life cannot be equated with the goods of fortune, not even the whole sum of them."
"God forbade us to kill anyone, and are we so ready to kill someone because he has taken a bit of money?"
"If you cannot thoroughly eradicate corrupt opinions or cure long-standing evils to your own satisfaction, that is still no reason to abandon the commonwealth, deserting the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds."
"For everything will not be done well until all men are good, and I do not expect to see that for quite a few years yet."
"Indeed if we are to avoid as odd or absurd everything that has been made to seem alien by the corrupt morals of mankind, we Christians will have to ignore almost all Christ's teachings, and he forbade us to ignore them, so much so that the teachings which he himself whispered in the ears of his disciples, he commanded them to preach openly from the rooftops. And most of his teachings are far more alien to our common customs than that speech of mine was, except that preachers (following your advice, I imagine), whenever mankind refuses to make their behavior conform to the rule of Christ, adapt Christ's teaching to the behavior as if it were a ruler made of lead, so as to make the two match in some way or other. I don't see what good that does except to allow people to be wicked with a better conscience."
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