Opening scene of Super Troopers. I wanted to watch it because I’ve never watched it sober and I wanted to see if it was just as funny. When my sister asked why I was watching it I told her why and she ran away.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: The important thing
Credit: Gavin Aung Than
This is a picture of me in every second of every class ever.
(via quantumchaology)
Marina Keegan: The Opposite of Loneliness
The piece below was written by Marina Keegan, a recent Yale graduate, for a special edition of the Yale Daily News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday, May 26. She was 22.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.
It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.
Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.
This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.
But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”
Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.
But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.
We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.
When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential energy – and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never had to choose and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.
For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d thought to apply for this or for that…
What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.
In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.
We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.
The opposite of loneliness… This is beautiful.
thesis
I’ll never make it home. I’ll never make it home. I’ve found out the problem and that’s that I’ve gotten too familiar with myself. Too much time in this head. I’ve gotten too predictable, know the exact fracture of the next breakdown before it can even happen. And in this way, I don’t know myself at all. Can’t create anymore, not when I know what the feelings are going to be before they’ve been felt. Secondhand emotion. Anger coated in rubber, grief insulated in flame-retardant. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I can’t create because I’ll never make it home. And home, home isn’t a place or a feeling but just a moment, years ago, lying on my back in a field just off campus while the dew starts to soak through my shirt. I’ve run the whole way but the vodka-sweat is wicking away and it’s too cold to stay but it’s been a night, a long night, and nothing ever goes the way it’s supposed to, and the sky’s lightening but I’ll be asleep before the sun comes up, tracking mud into my bed, but I don’t know this yet, only that I can see my breath despite it being May and that I can feel the Earth turn if I just sit quietly enough. I can feel it better than my own pulse. Home is this moment, this moment that keeps trying to write itself but never comes out correctly.
(Photo: Ieuan Griffiths)
If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years, how man would marvel and stare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (via lookatthesefuckinstars)
(Source: endorfins, via lookatthesefuckinstars)
Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.
Carl Sagan (via sweetcalamity)
(Source: tomahawxe, via fyeahcarlsagan)
If the Universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?
This is one of my favorite questions and it inspires me greatly. It emphasizes the fact that we only know an extremely small percentage of what’s truly out there. Perhaps all that we know, all that we refer to vaguely as “everything”, may just be a small blip in a vast, encompassing existence.
