Some helpful quotes about feelings...

I have been kind of beating myself up about feelings and how most everyone else I know seems to handle theirs so much better. I put my brownies away (because I refuse to eat when I'm like this and only want to eat when I'm genuinely hungry) and then found some great quotes that help somewhat.

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”
― Oscar Wilde

Well ^^this^^ makes me feel a little bit better about not being able to write good poetry.

And this goes a little way to realizing you can't always extinguish them:

“...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”
― Milan Kundera, Identity

Absolutely to this:

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

And definitely this:

“There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.”
― George Eliot

Alone with brownies and good books on a snow day...both a good thing and a bad, but mostly good. I am so happy I found these two books when I did the little cleaning I did today. There are both amazing and I thought I had lost them! Re-discovery is fun and perfect for this kind of day indoors.

The Music Of Your Life opens with a description that makes me think of my childhood and watching "The Lawrence Welk Show" with my grandparents, plus it's just a super collection of stories.

Giant's Bread I bought and read (and read and read) in the tenth grade. I'll never forgot how I felt the first time I read it. I couldn't believe Agatha Christie had written it nor how beautiful it could be in some parts. I read it so much the binding is barely holding together.

 

The entire piece is not online, but the current issue of Wired has a great article about using music instead of sexting to enrich a relationship. I love it...it's from the March issue.

just a snippet..from "Seduction by Spotify" by.Jenna Wortham

 

I've written about this before, but to see the topic discussed in Wired magazine takes me by pleasant surprise:

 

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/demisexuality/

It's probably not a good idea to spend time with Sylvia Plath on a snow day (all that quiet time for too much introspection), yet I found this (until now, mostly unread) on my shelf and pulled it off to read while I sip tea.

I find her journals much more intriguing and well-written than The Bell Jar, yet I imagine I will re-shelf this before the afternoon is over. It's just all a bit too much.

I can only begin to imagine what it would be like to live day in, day out with all these thoughts in one's head...it makes me so sad to think that such despair comes with such talent.


http://thoughtcatalog.com/jeffrey-ellinger/2014/06/80-memorable-passages-from-the-unabridged-journals-of-sylvia-plath/

12. “Face it, kid, you’ve had a hell of lot of good breaks. No Elizabeth Taylor, maybe. No child Hemingway, but God, you are growing up. In other words, you’ve come a long way from the ugly introvert you were only five years ago. Pats on the back in order? OK. Tan, tall, blondish, not half bad.” - Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

16. “Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair.”

17. “God, I want to get to know him. If I could build an idea and creative life with him, or someone like him, I would feel I lived a testimony of constructive faith in a hell of a world. And our reality would be our heaven. Please, I dream of talking to him again, under apple trees at night in the hills of orchards; talking, quoting poetry, and making a good life. Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen.”

"Anesthetizing myself again, and pretending nothing is there...My inability to lose myself in a character, a situation."

Except for the "except me" part, I totally get this and love the response from "Ask Polly" columnist:


http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/03/ask-polly-how-do-i-act-normal.html?om_rid=AAAigm&om_mid=_BU922iB8-swbT7


with emphasis on:

Even though I have never been in a relationship, I know it is a massive mistake to try to find your own happiness in someone else. The thing is, I already know what makes me happy in life — another academic field that is considered even more rigorous than the one I am about to graduate from. With this field, I eagerly wake up, reading self-purchased textbooks and studying online, and I feel like it gives me purpose. I count the days until I can graduate from my current college, and enroll in another master's program with the degree I want to study for.

But that means I really have nothing to offer in terms of a relationship for the next few years. I won't have any sort of respectable job. I will just look like that weirdo who stayed in college too long. It is very possible that I won't even go on a date until I am 30. On the days when I am stagnating, my mind quickly returns to thinking about my lack of friends/relationships. Should I be looking for a relationship at this point?

Of course...at age 25, the person who wrote "Ask Polly" is not that abnormal to not have had a relationship yet. I relate to this way more than I wish I did.