I have a tendency towards overreaction. Over-enthusiasm, over-excitement, over-expression, exaggerated hand gestures. There's a video someone made of me in college where I am talking about something lame like grass, but I am gesticulating wildly.

Quiet people know things quietly. In their bones. Occasionally, I feel this way, and I shake the feeling off. It is uncomfortable to be ruled by something larger than you, calling all the shots.

It is like those precious emo bands, where the lead singer sounds like he's on your shoulder, singing in your ear. And you just want to hold your hand up and say, "Stop. Stop it, please. Please get off my shoulder. Please get out of my ear."

Because externalized pseudo-hysteria is preferable to the quiet contentment of knowing, perhaps, how the narrative actually resolves. That is to say, in the midst of your own unpreparedness for life to reveal itself, there is a satisfaction to the the tension of resisting, or at least pretending to resist certain truths.

Agency

To approximate, in words, strange and contorted longings feels impossible. I am not as articulate as I hope to one day be (when I am old). And even then, I suspect I will be misunderstood because people will only communicate in texts in the future.

T once told me that I need to stop seeing everything I do as entirely purposeless. Which is ironic, given the sheer volume of things I do. If we met, over coffee, or dinner, you would never know how cynical I am capable of being. I don't even know where it came from, given the number of peace rallies I have attended, the number of times I have had tear gas sprayed in my eyes. We exist in our own solipsistic bubbles of mental real estate. We pass each other by as if in cars at an intersection. Perhaps we even recall moments when it wasn't such. We can't be read as easily as we'd like.

How did the spaces between us become so vast when once upon a time it simply wasn't so?

That episode of Battlestar Galactica

Where there's a food shortage and Athena goes on an exploratory mission and finds a planet that has algae, but the planet is located on the far side of a star cluster that would take too long to go around, because the fleet would starve to death in that time, so the only option is to go through it. But the cluster is saturated with radiation and the ships aren't protected against exposure.

Spoiler alert: Kat dies. Because she's the only one who stays inside the ring of radiation for too long. It's sad even though we don't much like Kat. And she was an apt character to get caught on the inside too long and die as a result of it.

I think about the ring of radiation quite a bit. This inexorable need to journey right into the center of things, and the uncertain thresholds that require crossing to get within. This is in part because predictably, I like on-the-nose metaphors. But this particular one feels personal, tailored to my own psyche. I dream of the ring of radiation. To get caught within the ring, on the journey in, or out, is life-threatening. But the crossing over is unavoidable. To stay within means a certain insanity, an inability to acknowledge the material reality of the world. It is entrapment within yourself, within your own mind. But to stay on the outside is another kind of death altogether, the death of something deeper within you. So I make this journey often, sometimes several times a day. We all do. Does this make us interlopers on the various parts of our lives or migrants with dual homes?

This reminds me of a Jewish tradition that a college roommate told me about - to give someone a dollar everytime they are about to embark on a journey. The dollar is to be handed to someone in need once the person arrives at his or her destination. The idea that you are protected as long as you are doing God's work.

To expand, or maybe merely restate the metaphor - it is our own work, but I can't say I don't worry about the journey. I worry about the threshold of radiation and hope that I can seamlessly make it in and out as many times as my life can hold.

Question

What happens to the contorted desire for magic (contorted by age and time) if you can't directly meet its gaze?

I was up till 1:00 AM last night, making jams, processing jars. The kitchen is sticky with marmalade and honey. The jars are sealed and sterilized, labeled. In my fridge, or in care packages being handled by the postal service.

If writing is an imagined connection, or any art really, once outside of it, you must train yourself to stop thinking in webs. The effort to gains ratio is skewed here. I can't escape the spiderweb, as much as I've tried. Better to just give into it.

I dreamt that someone who had died came back from the dead. He showed up at the miracle berry party at my house and made a joke about his own death that we all laughed at. It was funny because he wasn't really dead anymore. Then I woke up, and it wasn't funny. Context determines everything.

I dream of death a lot. Endings. A couple of times I dreamt I was pregnant. This wasn't as anxiety-inducing as one might imagine.

I've been spending a lot of time in Mount Washington. I stole a bagful of loquats from someone's tree in their yard. D watched, but wouldn't participate. We all live by our own code of ethics. Mine has emerged as oblique over the years. Like this: sometimes you'll wake up in the morning after the jam has been made, thrown in jars, sealed and labeled and realize that it never really set.

This is how I learned myself.

How many things lie incomplete? Truth requires a kind of painstaking patience. So does art. Or jam. Kumquat marmalade, for example, is a serious bitch to make. You have to slice the kumquats really thin and reserve the seeds to put in a bouquet garni for pectin. And even then, it sometimes ends up tasting sort of cloying.

My sister once said that she comes up with ideas, sees them through in her head, so then she doesn't have to actually live them. I told her I used to do this with relationships.

When jars arrive at an equilibrium, air pressure within and without the same, they make a popping sound. There's something satisfying about this sound. It's a process complete. I wonder if there is a similar popping sound that occurs when your interior life matches your exterior life in some way. Like there is an equal amount of mass on both sides to balance the equation.

It's odd running into a person who doesn't know they were your boyfriend in your head, so many years ago. That you considered the entirety of a relationship with them and then arrived at conclusions about the whole thing yourself, without any necessary consultation on their part. Have you violated them in some way? No need to explain such things.

It's not that I didn't have the vocabulary to explain what happened, or even a lack of understanding of it. Just that, the pop that I wasn't waiting for hadn't occurred and you can't force it. It happens in its own time, and the only thing required of you is patience. And a kind of gentle care for your own creation. Whether it's good or bad or loaded with consequence.

What I'm listening to right now...

Birthday, 2010, Megan Curran

A tree is a wonderful living organism which gives shelter, food, warmth and protection to all living things. It even gives shade to those who wield an axe to cut it down.

– Gautam Buddha

In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.

The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.

“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”

Mini-modern enthusiasts are usually quick to distance themselves from other adult dollhouse collectors, who have a reputation for being somewhat eccentric.

Annina Günther, a graphic designer in Brighton, England, said that when she first started her collection, she “worried about telling people, like they would look at me funny. But when they see it, they get it.”

Ms. Günther, 28, has four dollhouses, which she stages for photographs that she posts on her blog, Miniatures by Annina and on Flickr. The pictures are remarkably evocative and artistic: with rain boots and trash bags left by the door and notes taped to the mirror, the rooms have a lived-in quality and urban melancholy reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting.

“I am not creating dream places,” she said. “I want to show the reality, the grit and the mess of living in the city.”

Breakfast of Champions

A corollary to the How to Make it in America discussion:

Protagonists can either be hard-working and dumb, or lazy and brilliant, but they can't be lazy and dumb and have a trajectory within a narrative in which a viewer is expected to root for them.

You champion the assiduous dimwit because there is some sincerity in his mission, and a clear acknowledgment of overcompensation for his shortcomings.

And smart, insouciant people can be loved for their roguish charm. Not always, but if the character is properly crafted, you're at least entertained by his entitled shortcuts in life.

The problem with How to Make it in America is that the characters are passionless, quiescent retards. And as a result of this, you want them to get hit by a bus.

Please Don't Make it in America

Can we talk about this show 'How to Make it in America?'

I finally got around to watching a few episodes of it last night and I have to say, I don't want any of these characters to make it in America. In fact, 15 minutes into the first episode, we were actively rooting for all of these boring douches to fail and hoping to see their lame dreams go down in flames. Also, Bryan Greenberg has that particular look that I can't stand - like if Shia LaBeouf and Sam Worthington had (the most inoffensively boring-looking) child on Earth. It's amazing to me how these actors with entirely characterless/expressionless faces do so well in Hollywood. Except, Greenberg occasionally graces the audience with a constipated look when he's disappointed.

What else? I don't buy the relationships or the chemistry between characters, their lives look empty and lame, and the show is sort of appalling in its brazen token-y casting. Did the casting director work at Benetton before this stint because it's like 'if we don't have a black person, a brown person and an Asian woman in every shot, ummm...there would be no show.'

Also, the stylized photo snaps of supposedly "cool" looking youths before Bryan Greenberg walks into any lame party/gallery exhibit/cocktails mixer/insert any other "we're supposed to believe that this is what cool people in NY do" event (which is just going to end with him and his token Dominican friend going home with drunk women/date raping them/feeling empty about their lives and/or relationships afterwards) are super annoying. Seriously, Vice already has their own TV network. And it's actually good.

So of course the designer guest appearance is going to be John Varvatos, the douchey-est designer on the planet. In case you are not familiar with his work, see below:

Yeah, he's that guy. What self-respecting designer actually likes John Varvatos? He makes people look like assholes. And he is an asshole himself for driving up the price of Converse sneakers.

Anyway, How to Make it in America. I saw four consecutive episodes of it last night. And will probably complete the season. But I will feel like I am being eye-raped the entire time.

Dream

I am sorting through the pile of shoes that sits just adjacent to my front door (the pile that my mother says is reminiscent of an entrance to a Hindu temple), looking for a pair of black Marc Jacobs kitten heels, and out pop two black kittens and a black puppy. They have been bound and gagged and thrown into the pile of shoes as an initiation ceremony into a gang.

"Who did this to you?" I ask them after I remove the socks from their mouths.

"It's the Crips," the puppy tells me, "And they're coming back for us. You have to do something about it."

I'm so angry I can't handle it. I start to grow till I am over eight feet tall. A group of men arrive on the front porch. They ring the doorbell.

I open the door. They are scared of me; I am over eight feet tall.

"Did you do this to my kittens and my puppy?" I ask, showing them the socks.

They deny it but I don't believe them. Then I start lobbing them with punches. The kittens and the puppy stand on the sidelines cheering me on.

I wake up sort of euphoric. I've never beat anyone up before. Not even in a dream. I imagine that if you're big enough and it's for a cause you believe in, it could actually be kind of fun.

My sister wrote this piece for HuffPo

(Follow closely now; this is about the science of English.) Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a joke on Monica and Chandler after they learn the two are secretly dating. The couple discover the prank and try to turn the tables, but Phoebe realizes this turnabout and once again tries to outwit them.

As Phoebe tells Rachel, “They don’t know that we know they know we know.”

This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.

Now English professors and graduate students are asking them too. They say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?