thinking about how great it would be if Betty White hosted SNL:)


http://www.facebook.com/pages/Betty-White-to-Host-SNL-please/266442514828?ref=ts

How can a stuffy-looking man who lived in the nineteenth century reach out and touch me so? I'm moving into the third day of a snowed-in week-end and very much at peace (thanks to Snow Patrol and some really good herbs!) but still it can get a little lonely when you live by yourself and the apartment building is eerily empty...even out in the parking lot where I thought more people would be digging out their cars.

So many things John Stuart Mill writes in his Autobiography speak to me or the me that had lost her love for books until this very week-end:

.:...In vain I sought relief from my favorite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded that my love of mankind , and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out...

We all have gone through periods of empty sadness, where it's hard to want to do anything, much less read.  But whether it's depression or not is another matter and one I never really thought of as applying to any time before the 20th century, though of course why wouldn't it have?

 Mill also writes: My course of study had led me to  believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.

Funny how, except for some of the modern music I like and my strong belief in social and civil rights issues, I would much prefer to live in an earlier time when thinking and living could be done in quieter times and self-reflection was entirely possible.

I would give almost anything for a world without cellphones and other obnoxious noises. Occasionally I feel so out of time here...

But since I DO live in this century and certainly don't hate living here I love taking advantage of the easy access to all the great classics I love. One cause (I think) of my inability to read much over the past year was my conviction that everything I read was so blatantly false. I could not be tricked into forgetting that fiction was fiction.






Mill also wrote some wonderfully fitting things in _On Liberty_:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.

On Calvinist Theory (oh how I detest Calvinism):

It is so, on the Calvinistic theory. According to that, the one great offense of man is self-will. All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised of obedience. You have no choice; thus you must do, and no otherwise: 'whatever is not duty is sin.'

The thought of living under the thumb of a set of pre-determined guidelines terrifies me...Hell sounds so much better than any place where you have no control over your own actions and life.

It's weird: my mind has been mush and mellow lately, but it has also yearned for deeper meaning and maybe that's what I want to finally read again.

If you're going to be snowed in for the weekend (like most of us are in Maryland, DC and Virginia), at least you can be comforted with having great books:

(which I'm reading for the first time)

and great music:

(certainly an appropriate enough title)

And speaking of music I've discovered two goodies...



I've never seen the movie "Bandits," but for some  reason I picked the soundtrack up at the library today and wow...what a pleasant surprise. One of my favorite songs from my childhood is on here, only I didn't know it was until the first notes of "Wildfire" started...

Also terrific is the music from "Babel":


There's a very fun, poppy song called "Oh My Juliet" by Takashi Fujii, which you can watch the video for on You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TBp_yyWz6c

 

Some things together just seem wrong...like pickles and ice cream, cigarettes in coffee (don't ask!) and Big Macs in tortilla wraps...

As a former half-way committed vegetarian who has strayed back to meat I've got to say I HATE the new Big Mac Wrap...I shudder, not so much at the taste as at how dirty it feels eating it...like I'm trying to hide a porn magazine behind a copy of the New Yorker.

This is a Big Mac, people, and no amount of hiding it in a sweet little wrap is going to change that fact...I think I'll refrain from checking the calorie content this one time and go back to turkey burgers without the bun...

 

from deviant art

We probably all have a history of crushes/first love/ things gone amuck measured in songs and the memories associated with those times can still come flooding back years later when we hear those songs unexpectedly on the radio...my top three "time travel" moments are brought on by:


"I Can't Fight this Feeling" REO Speedwagon

"Is This Love?" Whitesnake

"Don't Want to Lose You Now" by Gloria Estefan


I think the fact these songs are so old and I have no newer ones of association has a great deal to do with the fact that I handle emotions a lot better than I used to:) That...and the fact that I'm a firm believer our youth and our music are irrevocably tied together forever, no matter how many years go on and no matter how many groups/singers we go on to love...sadly, that era of music for me is the wacky 80s.