“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Translation by Richard Howard, 1978 (via wine-loving-vagabond)
October 2011
26 posts
I love my workplace.
The head counselor just offered to buy me a bag of potato chips. You better believe I took him up on it.
One Lesson Learned from Dad...
My father once told me that the older he gets, the more of a feminist he becomes. He says it’s because he knows his daughters can do anything men can, and he doesn’t want societal expectations to stop us.
Women with good relationships with their fathers are more likely to marry men with similar characteristics. In my case, I’ve seen what a respectable man looks like and how he treats me. It’s only natural that I’d look when I do look for a long term relationship with a man, those qualities will stick out in my mind.
A man who values all people equally, including women, is a man worthy of respect. A man who can put himself on the same level as another person is one I call empathic, a trait I’ve learned is more of a skill than an innate characteristic.
I’m blessed to say that my parents have invested greatly in my development-I am the woman I am today because of their active participation in my growth.
Their influence has fostered a desire for me to have a family of my own one day built on mutuality, authenticity, education, and empowerment.
I know the creation of my own family is a long way off, and I’m grateful that I have time to continue to mature before taking on those responsibilities. But, I am thankful for my parents’ influence in my life and am now old enough to say that they’ve loved me better than I deserve. I’ve learned from them, and now I know what to take to my own family…whenever that day comes.
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If we observe women’s lives carefully, without attempting to force our observations into preexisting patterns, we discover that an inner sense of connection to others is the central organizing figure of women’s development…
Women’s sense of self and of worth is most often grounded in the ability to make and maintain relationships.
Play
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
—C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (via bookoasis)
I asked a counselor what I should read to prepare me to be a psychotherapist...
…He said “Alice in Wonderland.”
“…this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Orginially perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refineness-people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”
—
Mr. Tilney of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Reminds me of the lazy language we use today.
