nick and norah's infinite playlist / david levithan & rachel cohn

She thinks for a second. “Okay. There’s one part of Judaism I really like. Conceptually, I mean. It’s called tikkun olam. ”

“Tikkun olam,”I repeat.

“Exactly. Basically, it says that the world has been broken into pieces. All this chaos, all this discord. And our job—everyone’s job—is to try to put the pieces back together. To make things whole again.”

“And you believe that?” I ask. Not as a challenge. As a genuine question.

She shrugs, then negates the shrug with the thought in her eyes. “I guess I do. I mean, I don’t know how the world broke. And I don’t know if there’s a God who can help us fix it. But the fact that the world is broken—I absolutely believe that. Just look around us. Every minute—every single second—there are a million things you could be thinking about. A million things you could be worrying about. Our world—don’t you just feel we’re becoming more and more fragmented? I used to think that when I got older, the world would make so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You’d think we’d be getting better at it. But there’s just more and more chaos. The pieces—they’re everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself grasping, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it’s right, but because it will mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe that."

"Do you really think it's getting worse?" I ask. "I mean, aren't we better off than we were twenty yearas ago? Or a hundred?"

"We're better off. But I don't know if the world's better off. I don't know if the two are the same thing."

... Then it hits me.

"Maybe we're the pieces," I say... "Maybe that's it," I say gently,"With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces."

She doesn't reply, but I can tell she's listening carefully. I feel like I'm understanding something for the first time, even if I'm not entirely sure what it is yet.

"Maybe," I say, "what we're supposed to do is come together. That's how we stop the breaking."

Tikkun olam.

the art of getting by

Since the dawn of recorded history, something like 110 billion human beings have been born into this world. And not a single one of them made it. There are 6.8 billion people on the planet. Roughly 60 million of them die every year. 60 million people. That comes out to about 160,000 per day. I read this quote once when I was a kid, “We live alone, we die alone.  Everything else is just an illusion.” It used to keep me up at night.  We all die alone.  So, why am I supposed to spend my life working, sweating, struggling?…For an illusion? Because no amount of friends, no girl, no assignments about conjugating the pluperfect or determining the square root of the hypotenuse is gonna help me avoid my fate. I have better things to do with my time.

Snow, buses, etc...

You know, these few days have been strange...
everywhere I go, people say they know what I did...
Everyone... but howcomes I don't know!?

And yesterday, he was pressured too much and gave up...
And I broke it...

Today, there was snow, and I forgot what I did to him...
I'm such a horrible person...
I'm such a hateful person...
Jess kept getting in the way though because she thinks she's so much better than me: she wears her skirt higher and went out with Gesoff...
And John (angel that he is) didn't want to leave me alone with him in case I hurt him or he hurt me. That's the problem with having such amazing friends as L + J...
I hope tis all fine now :)

Sum

"In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it's agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

But that doesn't mean it's always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can't take a shower until it's your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you've forgotten someone's name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand."

-- David Eagleman, Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives

Thank you for lending this to me :)

you are truly the world's greatest!

Winter spices :3

Smells like Mr Miller :')

How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that
matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how
many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them
for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all?

Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the
way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that
somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The
problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say,
or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these
potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been
there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have
been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your
world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may
be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the
history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold
you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never
can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is
different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they
can never come to visit where you live.

Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

-- Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward

not the best composition ever,
but meaningful because it happened to her.
it's beautiful because of that :)


“Sure, we'd faced some things as children that a lot of kids don't. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind - gradutaing, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expecations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.

And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet will remain with you for life.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's a part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.”

― Jim Butcher