February 2012
“
When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide which drugs to use and how quickly to use them. I’d been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and I remember once early on when I couldn’t get my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, flames licking the inside of my ribs fighting for a way to burn out of my body, my parents took me to the ER. nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn’t even speak, so I held up nine fingers.
Later, after they’d given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my head while she took my blood pressure and said, “You know how I know you’re a fighter? You called a ten a nine.
But that wasn’t quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here is was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating face up in the water, undrowned.
” —― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars (via innerinertia)January 2012
“I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.”
—Charles Bukowski (via henrycharlesbukowski)
lonely, vaguely pedophilic swing set seeks butts of children
Listen
John Green says something.
(From the TFiOS audiobook. No spoilers.)
I’m going to say this once and only once.
Not everything needs to be dubstep.
ONCE- AND ONLY ONCE- AND ONLY ONCE- AND ONLY ONCE- AND ONLY
NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT
“not everything needs to be-“
.
WUB WUB WIWIWIWIWIWIWIWIWIWIWIWIWIWI WUUUB WUUUUB
Why did the chicken cross the road?
- Plato: For the greater good.
- Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
- Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.
- Hypocrites: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
- Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!
- Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.
- Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.
- Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
- Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
- Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
- B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.
- Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
- Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
- Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.
- Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
- Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
- Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.
- Salvador Dali: The Fish.
- Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
- Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
- Epicurus: For fun.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
- Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
- Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
- Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
- David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
- Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it [censored] wanted to. That's the [censored] reason.
- Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
- Ronald Reagan: I forget.
- John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.
- The Sphinx: You tell me.
- Mr. T.: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!
- Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.
- Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
- Molly Yard: It was a hen!
- Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.
- Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.
- Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
- The Godfather: I didn't want its mother to see it like that.
- Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.
- Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
- Othello: Jealousy.
- Dr. Johnson: Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have, you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the Need to resist such a public Display of your own lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.
- Mrs. Thatcher: This chicken's not for turning.
- Supreme Soviet: There has never been a chicken in this photograph.
- Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.
- Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
- Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.
- Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.
- Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
- Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter.)
- Hamlet: That is not the question.
- Donne: It crosseth for thee.
- Pope: It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.
- Constable: To get a better view.
- Yeats: She was following the Faeries that sang to her to come away with them from the dull, bucolic comfort of the farmyard to the waters and the wild.
- Shelley: 'Tis a metaphor for the pursuits of man: though 'twas deemed an extraordinary occurrence at the time, still it brought little to bear on the great scheme of time and history, and was ultimately fruitless and forgotten.
- Tolkien: Chickens are respectable folk, and well thought of. They never go on any adventures or do anything unexpected. One fine spring day, as the chicken wandered contentedly around the farmyard, clucking and pecking and enjoying herself immensely, there appeared a Wizard and thirteen Dwarves who were in need of a chicken to share in their adventure. Reluctantly she joined their party, and with them crossed the road into the great Unknown, muttering about how rude the Dwarves were to take her away on such short notice, without even giving her time to brush her feathers or fetch her hat.
- Hussie: He didn't, he died four pages after being introduced.
“Gods always behave like the people who make them.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (via nevver)
“So I sent an email to 7 of my friends, including Sarah, and I said, ‘Does anyone want to go see ‘Lost in Translation’ tonight?’ and then I sent an email immediately afterwards to the 6 of my friends who weren’t Sarah and I said, ‘NOT YOU.’”
—John Green, on how he asked out his wife for the first time. (via imaginecomplexly)
