I got a shout out in Becky's blog. She's the amazing one I talk about who's in Argentina and getting married in December. I like to read about her Argentinian adventures, we also have conversation via our comments, which amkes me laugh.

in other news, its like 1 in the morning. and i have like eight things due tomorrow. and i've been home since three.

tell me again why i'm in grad school? i think i forgot that i'm not really good at school, and that my last few semesters of undergrad were ART STUDIOS. dangit.

um. this is a fun passage from "Self Reliance" by Emerson. You read it in high school. You were just too dumb to understand it then, I was too. But now you get it. Read it. You'll feel smarter.


To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility … when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each or us represents…but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

These are the voices we which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its member. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is it’s aversion. [Conformity] loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life. may serve as the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find people who think they know what is your duty better that you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loathe to disappoint them.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood,’ Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

night, all. -mere*