Internal Improvements

I often paint young girls who are reading. It’s surely because I saw the act of reading as a way to enter life’s deeper secrets. Reading is the great means of access to myths. Green, Gracq, Char, Jouve, Michaux, and Artaud were frequent passageways, as well as the great holy writings of the Bible and initiates like Dante, Rilke, the Pléiade poets, the great Chinese writers, the mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, not to mention Carroll, the pure German poet Ludwig Tieck, and Indian epics. All these texts and authors were landmarks in my life, and gave me another dimension of time to which I soon felt myself summoned. My young girls who read in dreaming poses are escaping from fleeting, harmful time . . . Fixing them in the act of reading or dreaming prolongs a privileged, splendid, and magic glimpsed-at time. A suddenly opened curtain sheds light from a window and is seen only by those who know how. Thus a book is a key to open a mysterious trunk containing childhood scents...

from Balthus: Vanished Splendors, the book here

Sharon Olds: (Guess the Title)

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,

I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept

creeping over the smooth plastic

to find your strong meaty little hand and

squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the

noble ribbing of the corduroy,

straight and regular as anything in nature, to

find the slack cool cheek of a

child in the heat of a summer morning—

nothing, nothing, waves of bawling

hitting me in hot flashes like some

change of life, some boiling wave

rising in me toward your body, toward

where it should have been on the seat, your

brow curved like a cereal bowl, your

eyes dark with massed crystals like the

magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the

delicate feelers of your limp hair,

floods of blood rising in my face as I

tried to reassemble the hot

gritty molecules in the car, to

make you appear like a holograph

on the back seat, pull you out of nothing

as I once did—but you were really gone,

the cab glossy as a slit caul out of

which you had slipped, the air glittering

electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.
Speaking of Gaitskill's unique appropriation of Sade--I have always eroticized this poem, as speaker and object.

At six years old, I painted this house Grapeshake, and yes, the Pantone color exists.

The Royal Tenenbaums - Margot's bath TV

After the Solstice: Breathing and Brooding

The sexual, jolts one's personal equilibrium, the world's leading

eyes:

My project for today, tonight:

"French Ad Campaign"

A sestina using the following end words:
sexual, jolts, personal, equilibrium, leading, yes

GREEN GRASS OFFICIAL VIDEO - CIBELLE

album : The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves

www.myspace.com/cibelleblackbird

Woman on Waterphone

Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly. --Carl Sandburg

Where is one longer living besides, grafting trees?
With the possible exclusion of the tribe whose sounds

Are unscaled--and glistening--like shower glass,

With the rest of this bathing culture, no longer swimming

Instead clutching our chests for the cuttlebone--

This is natural history, a set-in brittle, legacy

But for the bowed, bent hymns of water.

Super Cool Liquid

Cirque d'Hiver

By Elizabeth Bishop

Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,

fit for a king of several centuries back.

A little circle horse with real white hair.

His eyes are glossy black.

He bears a little dancer on his back.

*

She stands upon her toes and turns and turns.

A slanting spray of artificial roses

is stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.

Above her head she poses

another spray of artificial roses.

*

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico.

He has a formal, melancholy soul.

He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back

along the little pole

that pierces both her body and her soul

*

and goes through his, and reappears below,

under his belly, as a big tin key.

He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,

canters again, bows on one knee,

canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

*

The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.
He is the more intelligent by far.

Facing each other rather desperately--

his eye is like a star--

we stare and say, "Well, we have come this far."

Tube Worm Fossils Were Taken

Κένταυρος

Phase Change and Ultramarine

FOG NUMBERS

from Carl Sandburg's Honey and Salt

Birth is the starting point of passion.

Passion is the beginning of death.

How can you turn back from birth?

How can you say no to passion?

How can you bid death hold off?

And if thoughts come and hold you

And if dreams step in and shake your bones

What can you do but take them and make them

______more of your own?

______Of course, a nickel is a nickel,

______and a dime is a dime--sure--

______we learned that--

______why mention it now?

______of course, steel is steel;

______and a hammer is a hammer;

And a thought, a dream, is more than a name,

______a number, a fixed point.

Walk in a midnight fog now and say to it: Tell

______me your number and I'll tell mine.

Salute one morning sun falling on a river ribbon
______of mist and tell it: My number is such-and-

______such--what's yours?

Of what is fog the starting point?

Of what is the red sun the beginning?

Long ago--as now--little men and women knew in

______their bones the singing and the aching of

______these stumbling questions.

Torchlight

Water is in my mouth, a Nile is between my thighs,
I have come to extinguish the fire. --Ebers Papyrus, 1535 B.C.E.

Entering
_______you note this room
Needs a woman's touch, a tried quality
To treat the aching, that is your gaze your

Gauze, I've cast in civil language the sparks
Of the bedstraw, and its aging coming back
Further made up, yet this moment is our fluency:
Molded by sweat into the linen, a patient's indraft

Of dawn, yet like something the hand left off,
Placed firmly on a furnace grate too hot to the touch,
You turn the corner toward the tocsin curling
Up and over the hearth, the electrolier

Keeping my eyes on the electrician knowing
He is only
________a wire-pull away.

Utter Stylus-ness or Composing Mental Lists

The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin by William Logan

At dawn, death by trampling in a chain store

Sometimes, sometimes your liberty cabbage, goes dry...

Pink peppercorns or Schinus terebinthifolius

The work of Michel Henricot

Déménagement

The Carey-Yale deck

Why do we live and breathe music? Find Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

The paintings of Ana Juan

Possibly a blue wreath of eucalyptus and juniper berries bound by 22-gage floral wire

Small, cream-colored colonies are the most obvious sign of Staph epi

Recipe for vindaloo

Rhinovirus can survive up to four days on surfaces

An hour on the elliptical trainer, not because I want to work out, meet people or watch CNN on mute

What to think of AlJazeeraEnglish, hand-grenades and bags of almonds for energy

Words like, la chiromancienne

Europe, A Prophecy

Doubt, the movie.

Oxalá Oxalá Oxalá ...Directed Towards a Certain End: A Galley Proof

"THE MEMORY WAR"

jacqueline,

For the sake of recognizing my weaknesses at the most convenient opportunity, I begin with the

admission that there is a relationship between my id and my grammar. I put this forward in an

attempt to ossify your conviction in support of the war. Assured as I am of your commitment to

this cause, and assured as I am of your faith in the common good and the foundation of all such

things (WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO STRIKE THE WORD PATRIOT OR ANY DERIVATIVE

THEREOF FROM THIS CORRESPONDENCE), it is nevertheless necessary to solicit a token

of your determination as an indelible and significant contribution to our campaign against the

interminably irrecollectable. In exchange for your commitment to a one time service charge against

your spirituality, the collective memory of the third sheet of six of the interactive display of opaqueness

is willing to offer you eternal sensitivity, and, as a special offer for first time customers, we are pleased

to offer the unlimited limit on your perception of emotional bankruptcy. If you respond before you die

you may qualify for a special gift. Simply insert yourself into the slot and wait breathlessly for

recognition.

Send to: jacqueline Bohon
PO Box 5555
Middleburg, VA 20117

Abyssal Ocean Lights

Fertilizer Spikes and The Legendary Pink Dots

When ever I find myself laying out the vitamins, I think of The Legendary Pink Dots' sonic amazements. And then my rosy, sublingual B12 chewable takes on a much more literal form: it comprises part of an aportioned mineral-dirt for a pica. I like to say that my fixation with supplements is to promote evermore-effective catabolism. That is to say, I am dosing myself with pinches of magic dust to draw out the spectral bands of each nutrient...or whatever drops into the steaming, black half-pot of coffee I take with my morning bits of Scientific America online and occultist claptrap (each has the same bearing).

In another formulation, vitamins can be construed as fertilizer spikes: jabbed into the root-bound houseplants we've become. We are supplemented because we are sickly, twisting beneath a drapery curtain in a ten-year-old pot of Earth. Just imagine the delivery of a what is to be converted into a sugary spangle into every corridor of your cellulistic selves.

Just before the bathroom mirror, when I brush my teeth, I am really scouring the slime layer accumulated overnight with a host of diatoms that once shimmered in an abyss. I've come to appreciate the post-apocalyptic version of The Legendary Pink Dots even in the smaller doses I take.

Proposed stained-glass

Selfish Mistress by Raymond A. Foss

Hours per credit
Eat my life
Sunny days indoors
Reading, writing, digesting
Old brain
Slow reader
Applying principle
To facts
Distinguishing, analogizing
Preparing for Debate, dialogue
Learning

Tension, choices
1 or 0
On/off
Selfish
Me or Her –

The Law?
Lines drawn
Interests at bay
Chaos and retribution
Much to lose
Or already lost

"Being normal is a nervous place...

you are darkturquoise #00CED1

Your dominant hues are green and blue. You're smart and you know it, and want to use your power to help people and relate to others. Even though you tend to battle with yourself, you solve other people's conflicts well. Your saturation level is very high - you are all about getting things done. The world may think you work too hard but you have a lot to show for it, and it keeps you going. You shouldn't be afraid to lead people, because if you're doing it, it'll be done right. Your outlook on life is brighter than most people's. You like the idea of influencing things for the better and find hope in situations where others might give up. You're not exactly a bouncy sunshine but things in your world generally look up.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

because you can never finish performing your relation to it;
on the other hand, being comfortable is also another way of
thinking about what normativity provides, because if you can
pass as normal then you can scoot under the radar. The
whole question of how you lubricate the social never stops
being difficult, and it never stops being a matter of shame,
because when one confronts one's ambivalence and
one's incoherence one feels in a bad faith relation to the
model of ethical solidity we expect from ourselves. But
what if we just trained ourselves to accept that all of us
are incoherent, subject to a variety of aversive and
connective impulses that we are always managing?
The social would then be a totally different space of
intimacy and anxiety."

Cabinet magazine no. 31

The Broken Circuit: An Interview with Lauren Berlant Sina Najafi & David Serlin The political economy of shame

The Sheer Drape of Substance Still Tasted: Smoke, Spore Scald or Ectoplasm

What to Wear to See

Meeting in a restaurant
I am a starving, netted bird
a ball of struggling pinbones.

And this is our partsong,
(little legs secured in your
banded fingers) we are

fashioning as the service
intervenes. Where the table,
too high between our chests,

and the hot hand towels arrive
inexplicably after the course,
we alternate emptying the cache

boxes and caskets of our dreams.
Until: I am pressing you to me
leaning in these opaque tights
on these courts by which
everything is carried off.

Eyes Wide Shut analysis part three

Eyes Wide Shut analysis part two

Grenadier

Radiohead Unravel ( Björk cover )

For the musical artist, on her birthday, who revealed to me the Viking compass, the Vegvisir, with its points directed...
everywhere.

Les liens d' Eros: explicit sleeping lovers with enforceable whims

"Aimer, être aimer, quel bonheur! Et pourtant, comme tout éclat est terne, auprès de la félicité remplie de tourments, que l'on éprouve en adorant une femme qui fait de l'homme son jouet, en devenant l'esclave d'une créature tyrannique, qui vous piétine impitoyablement."

"Elle est là, ma Venus allongée, le corps et les poignets sanglés
Dans son imper en latex elle m'observe, comme la proie de ses projets
Attitude polaire de surface, sourire de Joconde apaisée
Elle est la main qui me cherche et me frôle, du bout de ses doigts laqués
Oh surtout ne crie pas avant d'avoir mal, me dit-elle, les corps étrangers
Ont le goût capiteux du parfum des roses, du romanesque et du secret
Les liens d'Eros tout puissants, sont-ils plus attachants que les liens du cœur ?
Les liens d'Eros tout puissants, sont-ils plus attachants que les liens du sang ?
Qui est la victime de qui, dit-elle, le sacrifié ou son bourreau ?
Peu importe le flacon, si c'est éphémère, mais pourvu que le charme opère
Pénètre jusqu'aux fondations de mon âme, souffle-t-elle, avant de céder
Libérée par l'impact de mes morsures, par la chaleur de mes baisers
Les liens d'Eros tout puissants, sont-ils plus attachants que les liens du cœur ?
Les liens d'Eros tout puissants, sont-ils plus attachants que les liens du sang ?"

"Qui est la victime de qui, dit elle, le sacrifié ou son bourreau? Peu importe le flacon, si c'est éphémère, mais pourvu que le charme opère. Pénètre jusqu'aux fondations de mon âme, souffle t'elle, avant de céder. Libérée par l'impact de mes morsures, par la chaleur de mes baisers."

[Refrain]

The Ambient Cookbook

If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love
by Dylan Thomas

If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

Shall it be male or female? say the cells,
And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.
If I were tickled by the hatching hair,

The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,
The itch of man upon a baby's thigh,

I would not fear the gallows nor the axe
Nor the crossed sticks of war.

Shall it be male or female? say the fingers
That chalk the walls with green girls and their men.
I would not fear the muscling-in of love
If I were tickled by the urchin hungers
Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.
I would not fear the devil in the loin
Nor the outspoken grave.

Deeply No Matter What You've Been Given

It was not the guilt she felt steaming the enamel ashtray of Venus
More so than when she first started seeing a woman's skin in a skein

Of her own hair, a snake created itself somewhere in the sea crinkling

Before these shadows of eves, and from then on an unstopping

Facsimile—these offerings of both freedom and security insinuating
Like the rising Aphrodite—better another person reaching to tip

The flare from her lip, meaning foliage and temptation embowering

In full measure of the bite, while all in the view of the balcony
She grasps her neck, her hair sloughing off for the brighter

That we might have retained, underneath our own figures.

The Body Speaking What the Conscious Mind Cannot Say

Hydra actively dreams, drowsing in her writhing hair,
Setting her door to draft with blind fingers reaching
For you, nothing ipsilateral wasn't found, for how
A mere hair stroke generally arrests the climatology now,

Cathedral-ceiling; flinging all nude existence the covering,
And it possibly just occurred once this side street, this star

Map, before clearing in this digital range with the flashbulbs
Of this ripeness, so she'd make it past the chief of antiquities

To stand at attention in a plumed casque, the breaks of yes
Before this list, among other amendable things she'd be writing

Awake in new limbs, and this is the ceremony recorded there
of the exemplary, of becoming new, the second status.

παρθενος, γενεσις ... Parthenogenesis

Hydra-dowsed You

Our coming frequently fits
Currents, like fossil water found by a freshly

Cut branch, that is the origin, and end of
Outgrowth, a second estate for the next

Uninterrupted, conditional use of
Sex you have happened to take notice of--

Daphne,

For whom a century won't touch, your
Handwriting mimes hellbine to spell relief,

The word stems safety pin swoops
Summoning us to read this scrawl, a hand's

Wish for self-injury, yet one plaintive bark
Boils from it--cinnamon, sassfras, camphor--

Laurels lay in this casual falling off of leaves,
Gradually yellowing in the undergrowth

Beneath the blue-green murk of lichen,
Within the few square years it has lived

Dashed to wordy you, in you streams
Some wingless sterile ants, and their

Mound-making means the death of each,
Where you brood to broadcast yourself.

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

Yes, I know about pilars of electrolyte with copper and zinc poles, and the river in Africa... I admire her striking originality even if her Icelandic / English vocals at times grate the harp/ghettoblaster assemblies of her albums. Homogenic and Vespertine aside, I retrace my impression of the first listening.

For a year or so, I have speculated on the origin of Björk's sixth album, Volta, and then I reviewed Miró, Man and Woman in front of a Pile of Excrement, 1936 with its acid colors, and I came up with a possibility. Had she been to a leafy slope in Barcelona? I first thought of this, looking at the feet. The radioactive colors and the supposedly untrained visionary style of the painter would undoubtedly appeal to this November Sagittarius. The pattern of each of album is the tumultous drive toward the self.

Woman in the Dunes

Cube

For Existential Friday...

Charles Bukowski - Born Into This

Like Lichenous Growth, Your Bitter Best, and the Fear of Fours

The Enneagram Type Four spreads like lichen, a few square inches per annum. Fours are compounded by a sun-catching alga interspersed in the filamentous mycelia of a rot-living fungus. Two elements, neither of which make it on their own, feeling through defects of their own. The blanching fungus sucks up the soup of metabolites on a substrate, and satisfies with a meager repass brought to it by ejecting its enzymes for the hang-dog lapping up. The rootless moss fixes light in the tangle of false roots ensuring its self-conscious sustenance in the darkest dark. One is trying to gain a foothold, while one is reaching for the one exposed bulb, and each is searching for a spot treatment to allay their troubled sleep in a coldwater room. Their bitter dance is rather a clutching to keep from falling over, shins hitting the low bed. They are susceptible to the strange wind regular to us now.

Type Fours, according to Don Richard Riso with Russ Hudson: "The Four is the personality type which emphasizes the subjective world of feeling, in creativity and individualism, in introversion and self-absorption, and in self-torment and self-hatred. In this personality type we see creative artists, romantic aesthetes, and withdrawn dreamers, people with powerful feelings who feel different from others because self-consciousness blocks them from getting outside themselves. ... In the creative moment, healthy Fours harness their emotions without getting lost in them, not only producing something beautiful but discovering who they are."

"The more intensely they feel something, the more real they feel. Thus, average Fours begin to employ their imaginations to "stir up" their emotional life. They can take even the most transitory encounter with a person and dwell on it for hours to extract all of its "emotional juice." The problem is that it becomes difficult for Fours to sustain their moods and fantasies if they are still interacting with others or taking care of practical needs."

"Increasingly, they begin to withdraw from life and real relationships and experiences, both to prevent others from interfering with their strong reveries and moods, and to avoid potential embarrassment and humiliation."

"More than any other personality type, healthy Fours are the bridge between the spiritual and the animal in human nature because they are so aware of these two sides of themselves. They sense in themselves the depths to which human beings can descend, as well as the heights to which they can be swept up. No other personality type is as habitually aware of the potentials and predicaments of human nature: human beings are spiritual animals occupying an uneasy place between two orders of existence."

"Because the formative relationship with their parents was primarily one of disconnection, Fours also begin to develop a sense of ego identity based on their difference from others. There were few qualities in their parents that they identified with, so Fours began to inventory all of the ways in which they were unlike the people around them."

"Of course, Fours also experience hostility toward others. They can become enraged if others seem to question or dismiss their self-image or emotional states, but they tend to express this by "dropping" people, suddenly and without explanation. The creativity of Fours can also be employed in sarcastic, withering remarks directed at those who have wounded their sensitivities. ... More often, Fours will simmer and seethe in silence."

"As soon as Fours devote themselves to a search for self by withdrawing from life, they are going in the wrong direction. No matter how necessary this search may seem to them, they must become convinced that the direct search for self is a temptation which eventually leads to despair."

"On the other hand, what makes healthy Fours healthy is not that they have freed themselves once and for all from the turbulence of their emotions, but that they have found a way to ride that current to some further destination. Healthy Fours have learned to sustain their identities without exclusive reference to their feelings. By overcoming the temptation to withdraw from life to search for themselves, they will not only save themselves from their own destructiveness, they will be able to bring something beautiful and good into existence. If they learn to live this way, Fours can be among the most life-enhancing of the personality types, bringing good out of evil, hope from hopelessness, meaning from absurdity, and saving what appeared to be lost."

Caruso E lucevan le stelle

Gnawing into Next Month

Open Letter for the Extra Hour

Present Day Conks

Theme from...Mystery!

I watched this compulsively on PBS as a small child for the Gorey credits.

The Tuning Fork by Edward Gorey

Brazilian Girls - Rules Of The Game

The lead singer, Sabina, reminds me so much of Martha (la française)...


Rules Of The Game

What are you to me tonight
Other than
Something we know from the past
Is that a laugh we had

Why are we here tonight
Are you sure
Before the night is over
I'll be yours

It's the rules of the game
The rules of the game
What can I do
There's nothing as a lie
Nothing as a lie
More as the truth

Do you think it's right
Just to stare
Straight into a picture
Old zero and one (?)

Who am I to you tonight
Look at me
"Don't talk", he says:
"Hmm let it be"

It's the rules of the game
The rules of the game
What can I do
There's nothing as a lie
Nothing as a lie
More as the truth

It's the rules of the game
The rules of the game
Don't ask me why
Noone knows how to win
Or knows what is fair
We just get by

It's the rules of the game
It's the rules of the game

...Nor do I.

As I have grown older I have grown more aware of the subtle, sordid private lives of adults. With wastes of broad tracts of memory our loves slowly collapse into the whole that we are--enumerations of relationships. There always remains that inward care for the unblemished acts of lovers, whose confidences can only be kept and cleared away by glances. Reading myself there, without your love, all of the details of your life are trivial, pathetic. How is it that the uninterrupted searching for meaning cleaves us, searching. This time, I will put the fuming resentment down, and like some cities, rebuild my foundations on the extinct volcano.

Tonight, I will return to the road, which is all I can to do to keep from falling over. All I can do is run, that is, falling forward. The body regains its edge by straining and sucking in the cold air. The teeming pause before--this emotional life--is reckoned in the body...becoming flaccid. Now this, is the best mental hygiene.

Ah, so it is a new moon in Scorpio with Sun/Moon conjunct.

I will soon post my running from the camera challenge ...

Brian Eno, Harold Budd The Plateaux of Mirror

All Your Immunological Effects

Celine commenced his interview for The Paris Review: Savy, the biologist, said something appropriate: [i] n the beginning there was emotion, and the verb wasn't there at all[.]"

The B lymphocyte is the agent of the humoral immune response: surface immunoglobulins and secreted antibodies do not kill pathogens, but flag their surface antigens for immobilization, eventual destruction in the peripheral blood.

The hypervariable region of the antibody, the region that binds antigen, also "fits" the unique molecular structure of the antigen (the epitope) with a high degree of specificity from induced fit interactions.

Antibodies throughout the course of an immune reponse or repeated exposures to the same antigen, will acquire an increasing affinity for binding antigen in a process called affinity maturation.

Somatic hypermutation is exactly that: the antigen-binding coding sequence of immunoglobulin genes undergoes significant single base substitutions to match the ever-changing nature of foreign cell surface proteins, yet

these mutations are not transmitted in the gametes. Programmed mutations are likely to occur during crossing over in meiosis for the variation of generations, but the immunoglobulin superfamily is singular among body cell lines with gene rearrangement mechanisms in place to do this.

The second of the two interrelated processes of affinity maturation is clonal selection, whereby the overabundance of B lymphocytes, newly developed from hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow, undergo genetic rearrangement of their receptors while remaining unexposed to antigen to amp up and diversify the repetoire.

B cells maturing with the requisite cell surface receptors gain specificity after exposure to antigen, where they are stimulated to divide and divide cells of themselves with that antigen-specific receptor. B cells that do not bind the antigen remain in circulation, and are not proliferated.

On one hand, the emotions effectively scrabble or scatter the mosiac of our immune reponse. On the other hand, theories of the immune system are probabilities that are incredibly hard to describe. An elusive,everpresent force.
Given the statement "I feel like I am dying"...Yes, but how so by the degrees you are from the somatic level, the psychological level, the cognitive level?

J posts an unfinished undertaking she began in preparation for her exam (completed Thursday morning) on the subject. The class, like anything else, is contest of egos but the few bits she has parceled away in her long-term memory will serve some purpose, if only to perplex others.

J has a clear favorite among Picasso's women and "their" respective works.

J knows the right and left eyes of Horus represent dualities of the mind, the senses, etc...but she did not know they served as measures.

These few days...

She steeps in epsom salts because they are desiccating and chalky, and she waits to see how much the sieve of her skin can swallow up the groundwater. When she gets out, her head in the evaporating steam attached to her overdried body is purified like some atmospheric dust from space. Here is the way she dresses for no one, evacuated inside her home: running shoes and a towel. Running shoes without socks accompany the mid-morning ritual of crouching on a barstool before a newspaper with their moulded high arches tucked beneath her dripping wet hair. Stages of her morning proceed with this stratagem of nimble footwork and towel-dropping until she changes for the benefit of the sun's saleman approach through the shades.

Henry Lee

Color, Rinse and Repeat

Free personality analysis of Your Friend.Generated on Sun Oct 19 07:23:00 2008.

Your Friend's Existing Situation

Attracted by anything new, modern, or intriguing. Liable to the bored by the humdrum, the ordinary, or the traditional.

Your Friend's Stress Sources

The situation is regarded as threatening or dangerous. Outraged by the thought that she will be unable to achieve her goals and distressed at the feeling of helplessness to remedy this. Over-extended and feels beset, possibly to the point of nervous prostration.

Your Friend's Restrained Characteristics

Emotionally inhibited. Feels forced to compromise, making it difficult for her to form a stable emotional attachment.
Feels that she cannot do much about her existing problems and difficulties and that she must make the best of things as they are. Able to achieve satisfaction through sexual activity.

Your Friend's Desired Objective

Fascinated by the idea of an idealized association of tenderness and mutual enchantment. Embarrassed by the thought of allowing this to appear openly, and so employs cautious exploratory tactics in the pursuit of this objective, making sure that she is neither irrevocably committed nor found out.

Your Friend's Actual Problem

Depleted vitality has created an intolerance for any further stimulation, or demands on her resources. A feeling of powerlessness subjects her to agitation, irritation, and acute distress from which she tries to escape by refusing further direct participation. She confines herself to a cautious approach and a concealed determination to get her own way in the end.

Windfall...with the luggage strewn, the least of which is...The Neurotic's Handbook.

Charles A Monagan's "Inside Anxiety: The Private [Lies] of Neurotics"

Bizarre Influences

There is something in the nature of the neurotic that loves things such as horoscopes and palm readings and the like.
Part of this fascination has to do with the neurotic's self-absorption, to be sure, but part also is due to the convenient idea that our fates may not be entirely under own own control. We are perfectly willing to accept any good fortune that comes along as a product of our own design, but it is handy to be able to blame bad luck on some grand and sinister force.
The thing is, it's hard to tell which astrologer or which palm reader to believe. You pick up three daily papers and you get three different horoscopes, each one vaguer than the last. You wonder where the "unexpected journey" will take you and which "co-worker" will need your "advice." Similarly, when someone who is trying to pick you up in a bar reads your palm you don't know whether to laugh or cry or call a cab.

What follows should clear up your doubts once and for all.

Your Horoscope For The Rest Of Your Life [Abridged Version]

Aries (March 21-April 19) : Your worst suspicions will always be confirmed.

Taurus (April 20-May 20) : You will continue to forget where you hid things.

Gemini (May 21-June 21) : The spiritual meanderings never really do stop.

Cancer (June 22-July 22) : A life of gathering useless information.

Leo (July 23-August 22) : No end in sight for the restless self-appraisal.

Virgo (August 23-September 22) : A life of impossible choices.

Libra (September 23-October 23) : Continued specious self-improvement.

Scorpio (October 24-November 21) : A life of undefined desires.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 21) : A career of seemingly linked but ultimately disparate ideas.

Capricorn (December 22-January 19) : You never run out of good last-second solutions.

Aquarius (January 20-February 18) : A lifetime of unsatisfactory afternoon naps.

Pisces (February 19-March 20): The imagined slights continue to cause problems.

The Puzzled Expression

By 1927 a wide-spread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signalled, like a nervous beating of the feet, by the popularity of crossword puzzles.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

And so crossword puzzles remain popular as the neurosis continues to spread and deepen. The puzzles have a salubrious effect on the troubled mind. For a brief time they take the neurotic away from the cares of the real world (i.e., the rest of the newspaper) and into a sanctuary of strict order, clear laws, and well-defined borders. Certain among us, of course, turn the puzzles into yet another anxiety-ridden exercise by racing against the clock, using ink only, or sneeringly rejecting any offers of assistance. These approaches ultimately can lead to the most profound sort of misery.
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Crossword puzzles also provide us with a curious aggregation of celebrities. Each of these people has made his or her mark in some other, usually worthy pursuit only to be awarded a second claim to immortality by virtue of possessing a strange, vowel-heavy name. The same undying fame has been conferred upon a handful of cities, animals, and natural watercourses as well.