…they are not inviting you to start a debate. They are saying “what you are saying/doing is oppressing me/others,” and if you can’t just listen and respect that and acknowledge that they’re the best person in the world to gauge how oppressed they feel by your actions/statements… well, then you’re just an asshole.
If I say you are hurting me, you’re hurting me… and trying to tell me that those feelings aren’t valid is fucked up. If you want to be a better person it’s as easy as shutting the hell up and listening to what people have to say.
So: jumping, jumping; plunging plunging. 3 days ago I decided to slide off a waterfall in Selangor despite my entrenched fear of being submerged. It wasn’t as bad as I thought.
Being reckless: probably my best trait.
I don’t even know you.
even in friendly conversation
I get the bell hooks-ian urge
to kill mother-fuckers who say stupid shit to me
all day
I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.
The darkness was comforting and terrifying all at once; she couldn’t find her way out without knowing how she’d gotten there in the first place. “This way, please!” cried the Doctor, already annoyed with her wishy-washy ways. “But, Sir,” she tried tentatively, “the only place I know is here.
love,
the breaking
of your
soul
upon
my lips
—excerpt from As Is The Sea Marvelous, E.E. Cummings
The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which compounded with his sense of powerlessness dissolves into recurrent daydreams
—Ways of Seeing, John Berger
Political activism is acting with the knowledge that you will fail, but that you care enough to act under this signature of immanent failure.
—Hannah Arendt