gnerval

I've been researching Borderline Personality Disorder, which the ex- shows classic symptoms of, but not in order to contact her, diagnose her, or advise her to seek therapy but to come to terms with the relationship, all the damage it's caused, & to take care of myself. It's been somewhat comforting to know I'm not alone in dealing with being in love with a Borderline...
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Off to the east coast for a long weekend to visit family. It will be good, and hopefully healing, to be out of this city for awhile.

Tough breakup. A year is a long time to share your life with someone, and it takes more than a few days to get over.

Kierkegaard wrote, "Life must lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards." I...
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The heart, it hurts.

And such anxiety. Maybe it's the body rejecting the love it knows it can no longer bear.

The finality: I know I can't ever care for her in the same way, can never feel comfortable with her again, that there's no longer a possibility for us.

Loneliness, too.

I have a calcium deposit in my neck. I'm convinced, however, because of its size and shape, that it's not a calcium deposit at all but rather a transmission device implanted by aliens to monitor my stress levels and reading habits.

I miss my girlfriend so much. The long separation has been difficult. Three more weeks to go.

Been reading Herbert Marcuse, my favorite Marxist philosopher, again. I was especially struck last night by his "Agressiveness in Advanced Instrustrial Society," which appears in <i>Negations</i> (Boston: Beacon, 1968). Marcuse's hypothesis that, in an "affluent" society, our humanity is continually denied appears terrifically apt forty years later--and I wonder what Marcuse would make of the present day United States. The "healthy" individual, so considered, Marcuse...
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Despite the digital switchover from analog reception, I've noticed my primitive TV still gets a few channels: the Home Shopping Network, DayStar, and one other "faith-based" network. I'm certain it's a conspiracy of some sort, aimed to keep the nation's poor replete with American values: Jesus and shopping.

Meanwhile, my sweetheart's in Europe studying until the first week of August. I've been trying to keep...
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Back together with the girl! Let's hope it's for good.

I'm smiling this morning.

Love is crazy. I almost want to invoke the Koran.

There's a definite downside to the rise of home video, DVDs, TIVO, and the Internet: there's no longer a need for the Fotonovel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonovel

I like the idea that we once loved certain films and TV shows so much that we bought them in paperback form and fetished over what was essentially film stills with word balloons plastered over them.

I'm hanging in there. By a thread, perhaps, but hanging nonetheless.

Meanwhile, was anyone as disappointed as I am with "Slumdog Millionaire"? I watched it last evening, and I watched the film fall apart in so many ways. The plot is clever but soon becomes contrived, predictable, and manipulative. I was also turned off by Danny Boyle's penchant for the music-video-like montage.

What is it...
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I'm certain there's evidence to the contrary, at least in terms of humans' propensity to turn to violence, but I love this quotation by J. Bronowski from the BBC series "The Ascent of Man" (1972):

"Of course it's tempting to close one's eyes to history and instead to speculate about the roots of war [as though it has its cause] in some animal instinct--as if,...
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The political weather, that is.

Coinciding with Obama's and Cheney's dueling speeches, Noam Chomsky reminds us that torture is really nothing new in American history or practice:

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/1046/noam_chomsky_why_we_cant_see_t/