시간이 흘렀어도 나이가 들어도

Assorted and unrelated thoughts, collected:

I do like textbooks with a sense of humor. Also awesome are judges who have a sense of humor and write hilarious court opinions.

I will write you 3 million footnotes in the final draft, I promise. Have no fear at my ability to BS in abundance, at great length, with citations.

It is such a literary turn on when authors really know their stuff and convey it through their storytelling, without infodumping. So much "do want".

I joke about the world ending in 2012 but there's a part of me wishing fervently for it because I don't know what I'll do with my life, what I'll be left with, if it doesn't.

(So Mei totally cries at commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NQaWk_GTNc)

I build my fences high to protect myself, but I've built them so high that you can't see me behind them.

I've never known what it means to "drink someone in with your eyes" until you.



And, to end, a little bit of prose poetry:

This was once a love poem, before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short, before it found itself sitting, perplexed and a little embarrassed, on the fender of a parked car, while many people passed by without turning their heads. It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement. It remembers choosing these shoes, this scarf or tie. Once, it drank beer for breakfast, drifted its feet in a river side by side with the feet of another. Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy, dropping its head so the hair would fall forward, so the eyes would not be seen. It spoke with passion of history, of art. It was lovely then, this poem. Under its chin, no fold of skin softened. Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat. What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall. An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks. The longing has not diminished. Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat, the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus. Yes, it decides: Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots. When it finds itself disquieted by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life, it will touch them—one, then another— with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

—Jane Hirschfield