Resurgam

While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect, and life in its colour; and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and borrowed my beams from the lustrous ripple. I had often been unwilling to look at my master, because I feared he could not be pleased at my look; but I was sure I might lift my face to his now, and not cool his affection by its expression. I took a plain but clean and light summer dress from my drawer and put it on: it seemed no attire had ever so well become me; because none had I ever worn in so blissful a mood.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

cheers, darlin

nothing unusual nothing strange / close to nothing at all / the same old scenario the same old rain / and there's no explosions here / then something unusual something strange / comes from nothing at all / i saw a spaceship fly by your window / did you see it disappear? / amie come sit on my wall & read me the story of 'O' / tell it like you still believe that the end of the century / brings a change for you and me / nothing unusual nothing's changed / just a little older that's all / you know when you've found it there's something i've learned / 'cause you feel it when they take it away hey hey / then something unusual something strange / comes from nothing at all / but i'm not a miracle and you're not a saint / just another soldier on a road to nowhere / amie come sit on my wall & read me a story of old / tell it like you still believe that the end of the century / brings a change for you and me / amie come sit on my wall & read me the story of o / tell it like you still believe that the end of the century / brings a change for you and me

Amie , Damien Rice

Chicago

The room was suddenly blanketed in darkness, and the girls fell quiet. Then the lights rose, a dim blue now, and seven black women appeared on the stage dressed in flowing skirts and scarves, their bodies frozen in awkward contortions. One of them, a big woman dressed in brown, began to cry out:

...half-notes scattered
without rhythm / no tune
distraught laughter fallin'
over a black girl's shoulder
it's funny / it's hysterical
the melody-less-ness of her dance
don't tell a soul
she's dancing on beer cans and shingles ...

As she spoke, the other women slowly came to life, a chorus of many shades and shapes, mahogany and cream, round and slender, young and not so young, stretching their limbs across the stage.

somebody / anybody
sing a black girl's song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin' / struggle / hard times
sing her song of life ...

For the next hour, the women took turns telling their stories, singing their songs. They sang about lost time and discarded fantasies and what might have been. They sang of the men who loved them, betrayed them, raped them, embraced them; they sang of the hurt inside these men, hurt that was understood and sometimes forgiven. They showed each other their stretch marks and the calluses on their feet; they revealed their beauty in the lilt of their voice, the flutter of a hand, beauty waning, ascendant, elusive. They wept over the aborted children, the murdered children, the children they once were. And through all of their songs, violent, angry, sweet, unflinching, the women danced, each of them, double-dutch and rhumba and bump and solitary waltz; sweat-breaking, heart-breaking dances. They danced until they all seemed one spirit. At the end of the play, that spirit began to sing a single, simple verse:

I found god in myself
and I loved her / I loved her fiercely

Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama

A Banquet of Consequences

Within only a few years, OPEC countries will have control over virtually all of the exportable surplus oil in the world (with the exception of Russia's petroleum, the production of which may reach a second peak in 2010, following an initial peak that precipitated the collapse of the USSR). The US -- whose global hegemony has seemed so complete for the past decade -- will suffer an increasing decline in global influence, which no amount of saber rattling or bombing of "terrorist" countries will be able to reverse. Awash in debt, dependent on imports, mired in corruption, its military increasingly overextended, the US is well into its imperial twilight years.

The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg

Thy will be done

How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, "If what he said is so good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?"

But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.

I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

"The function of the artist," the Navajo answered, "is to provide what life does not."

Amanda became pregnant during a fierce thunderstorm. "Was it the lightning or the lover?" she was sometimes heard to muse.

When her son was born with electrical eyes, people no longer thought her foolish.

Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

Reflections of a forensic entomologist

The welfare of children is seen by some as being a very modern, civilized concern of enlightened twentieth-century humanity. Again, let us look at history. In 1483, men wept in the streets of London when the Princes in the Tower were thought to have been murdered. In the wars between the Turks and the Byzantines in the Middle Ages, the Byzantines would sometimes place children at the head of their army in order to confuse the enemy, who would nont attack while the children were there. Whatever one might think of the ethics of such a tactic, it showed that both sides would not move to harm a child and that each was confident of the other side's aversion to doing so. Today, children in the Balkans are killed by snipers and murdered for political ends. When teh murders of children make headline news, people no longer weep in the streets.

But why do these things happen? Here we enter into territory that is even more subjective than the question of whether or not certain kinds of depravity are new, for much depends on one's moral viewpoint. I think that no-one will disagree that the very notion of morality is ebbing away, in the sense that there are few moral principles that can be said to be held by more or less everyone in Britain or, for that matter, in the West, generally. Moral relativism has undoubtedly fragmented society, making it much easier for people with extreme views to secure an audience.

Maggots, Murder and Men by Dr. Zakaria Erzinclioglu

I swear to God Janice Glabman will never laugh at me again

I go off to college. I weigh 106 pounds. I come back from college three months later. I weigh 126 pounds. I was once thin and shapeless. Now I am fat and, ironically, equally shapeless. Nothing fits, except for my wool plaid Pendleton pleated skirt, which makes me look even fatter. It's tragic. My father takes one look at me as I get off the plane and says to my mother, "Well, maybe someone will marry her for her personality."

I go back to college. I stay fat. There's a machine in the dormitory cafeteria called The Cow, and when you press a nozzle, out comes the coldest, most delicious milk you've ever tasted. Also there are sticky buns and popovers and scones. I have never been exposed to such wonders. I love them. I have seconds. I have thirds. There's butter everywhere you look, and of course, that cold, delicious milk. We're not talking low-fat milk, my friends. This was so long ago no one even knew about low-fat milk.

Anyway, months pass. I come home for the summer. I'm as fat as ever. None of my clothes fit.
I already said that, and it's still true. And because it's summer, I can't even wear my wool plaid Pendleton pleated skirt. So I go over to my friend Janice Glabman's to borrow some clothes from her. Janice has always been overweight. I try on a pair of her pants. They're too small. They're way too small. I can't even zip them up. Janice laughs at me. These are Janice's exact words: "Ha ha ha ha ha." The next day I go on a diet. In six months my weight drops back to 106. I have been on a diet ever since.

I have not seen Janice in more than forty years, but if I do see her, I'm ready. I'm thin. Although I now weigh 126 pounds, the exact amount I weighed when I came home from college having become a butterball. I can't explain this.

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron