go_team

"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Other Wind. New York: Harcourt, Inc. 2001

From a random FreeCycler's .sig file:

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.

-James Baldwin

Yay for insightful ideas from unexpected sources!

Well, I finished it. That went faster than expected, so I think I must've started skimming pretty hard in there somewhere. Peter was right; I'm going to have to reread it, if only because towards the end I was reading so fast that I must have missed some stuff. I saw one plot twist coming, but the whole story strikes me as so carefully constructed that I'm wondering if I was supposed to guess the twist in question... it's that kind of book. Anyway, for my own reference mostly, here are some passages I marked while reading because they struck me as interesting, or entertaining, or important: ( Quotes )

There could be lots more, but I'm cutting myself off. Also I'm a big dork for marking a few typos. Lunchtime now, I think.

This time, with less good news.

• A little quote from Inga Muscio (author of the classic Third Wave feminism for Second Wavers text Cunt and I think this is actually an excerpt from the afterword to the 2002 revised and expanded edition of Cunt):

  ( Americans remind me of survivors of domestic violence. )

• And speaking of the U.S. being abusive, here's a little article about how apparently our neighbors to the north are a little too respectful of people's rights and liberties, which I first spotted on thrasymachos's journal. What the hell? I want the Onion to cover this one.

• And finally, in case you hadn't heard (I just found out a few hours ago), apparently there's some hospitals (like hundreds) where med students practice doing pelvic exams on unconscious patients who haven't given permission for the procedure and are never told about it. That is so fucked up. I wanted it to be an urban myth, but Snopes didn't have anything about it and when I tried Hi Greg Rae on "nonconsensual pelvic exams", it turned up a pretty real-looking article. You can read more about this here. I'm going to do more research and maybe write about it. Eeeeeew!

And that's all my news for now. My random mp3 of the moment is Sisters of Mercy, which makes me think of pants_of_doom, since it was the default soundtrack for her car during my senior year at Mudd, when we used to hang out more. I miss those times, although not all the stress and insanity that was the academic aspect of that year, nor the loneliness of missing Peter more or less constantly.