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29 July 2009    12:02 pm

Hang Around Enough Of ‘Em

More from The Sword (but this time, on drugs):

The Sword #13, p.8

Musicians and thespians tend to have extensive knowledge on the topic, too.

categories: humor, literature, media, society, visuals
tags: , 0 spoke back
29 July 2009    10:40 am

You And Your Acquired Disability

I’ve been reading The Sword, a comic series about a paraplegic who found a powerful sword and the three siblings who would do anything to reclaim it. The creators, the Luna Brothers, write realistic characters with intriguing storylines. I loved their two previous works, Ultra and Girls, so I felt compelled to read this new title.

The main character Dara acquired paraplegia after a car accident. She was cured very early on in the title, when she found the sword, but the event reads less like the desire for an abled title character and more like the revelation of the sword’s special abilities. The Luna Brothers do show Dara’s struggle with paraplegia in flashbacks. As I read about her past, I see that her present strength grew from her courage to confront her difficulties.

In these pages, Dara realizes the reality of her situation. When reading, I found this very moving. This is what it was like for me after my car accident. This is reality.

The Sword #8, p.17 The Sword #8, p.18 The Sword #8, p.19
categories: health, life, literature, media, visuals
tags: , 0 spoke back
25 July 2009    11:37 am

Playing The Neg

This is how I feel about arrogant, sleazy people using annoying, sleazy pick up techniques (and yes, I have played the player this way):

How does one determine if a pickup technique has “worked”? What counts as success? You say that “the neg” does indeed work sometimes. What does that mean? I guess it depends on what the pickupper’s goals are. But I bring this up because that discussion about pickup techniques seemed to assume that women are all looking for nice guys to have solid relationships with – they could be seduced by “the neg” and then get burned. But women can spot pickup techniques that are disrespectful and still respond positively (outwardly). A man who uses “the neg” or some other slimy pickup technique can be taken to be someone whose feelings are not of great importance. So he could be used for free drinks, free tickets, meaningless sex, whatever – and all without guilt because, hey, he’s no better, right? It may not be moral, but it is fair. A man’s pickup techniques can signal exactly where he belongs on the relationship food chain. Has a guy who has used “the neg” and then ends up buying lots of drinks been successful? Depends on if he likes buying women drinks, I guess.

– Sonja, commenter on The Daily Dish

categories: life, quotes, relationships, society
2 spoke back
21 July 2009    09:38 am

The Extremists

Atheists are awfully quiet about the one historical attempt to mass-inculcate – and enforce – atheism. Of course this attempt was communism. Stalin mass-murdered up to 50 million of his own people, plus a few million non-Soviet citizens. My dear atheist brothers & sisters in Science, it’s not religion that bends people to pursue curious, terrorizing, or murderous ends – it’s any belief, or non-belief, taken to extremes that turns human beings into pitiless thugs and murderers. Were religious faith and religions to vanish from human kind at noon today, mankind would not be propelled or elevated to some new and Utopian age.

– Reader response on The Daily Dish

categories: history, links, philosophy, quotes
1 spoke back
04 July 2009    09:24 am

What People Do To Other People

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

– Jodi Picoult

categories: life, quotes, society
0 spoke back
02 July 2009    10:25 am

There’s A Reason Why People Don’t Stay Where They Are

Chez at Deus Ex Malcontent throws in his two cents on the Sanford affair. While many pundits snicker at Sanford’s hypocrisy—having an affair while having loudly condemned others who had them—Chez sees something sad and human in the entire fiasco.

Love can fail. Relationships don’t last forever.

Chez explains:

Once again though, [Jenny Sanford] had to know that this day would, in one form or another, come. She had to grasp, even from the beginning, that no matter the ostensible strength of the foundation she’d built with her husband — years together, kids, a home, mutual friends, a joint membership at the local country club — that it could all come crashing down and be rendered utterly meaningless at some point. That he’d be willing to betray it all for a cheap, ego-stroking thrill. Or that she might. Humans are painfully flawed creatures — maybe too inherently flawed to make a marriage, the brass ring marriage we’re taught to strive for by movies and TV commercials, work and last.

I want to believe in a love that lasts forever and can withstand anything — the good times and bad. And for a long time I believed just that. I clung desperately, passionately to the fantasy that there was a “right person” and that being in a committed relationship with her or him — while not without conflict, trauma, and a lot of hard work — would be rewarding in immeasurable ways, because that person would bring out the best parts of you and you would do likewise.

I believed so strongly in that. I don’t anymore.

[...]

Like everything else these days, love is a many fickled thing.

If you don’t think this is true, don’t worry. You’ll eventually find out the hard way.

The comments at the blog take offense at the implication that marriage is a doomed, pointless contract, but I don’t think that is the point at all. The ideal romance doesn’t exist except in stories—and apparently not in the good, memorable ones either. We all know relationships require work, that there will be bad times along with the good.

But, in the end, we all think that love can always save us from the beatings that hound a relationship.

Patty Smyth had it right: Sometimes love just ain’t enough.

categories: life, links, lyrics, news, relationships
tags: 0 spoke back