Michael Ian Black

I recently stumbled upon this quote from my favorite talking head on I Love the '80s.

"i never understood those people who said, “enjoy high school, these are the greatest four years of your life”. i hated high school, man, i fucking HATED high school. i hated everything about it. i hated the classes, i hated the teachers, i hated the building itself - made out of the cinder block walls painted in mismatched high school colors, i hated going to lunch at 10 o’clock in the morning! i hated all the cliques, y’know? the jocks, and the fuckin’ stoners and the metal heads and the rockers and the popular kids i really hated cause i wasn’t one, and the theater fags i REALLY hated cause i WAS one. i hated waking up at 6:30 in the morning in january and praying to god for DEATH TO COME AND TAKE ME. because DEATH would have been preferable to getting on the school bus which i had to take through my senior year of high school in 1988. so you know what? i didn’t love the ’80s. for me, they were a fucking disaster."

I can't say I feel quite the same way- all the things he mentioned did suck, but I made some amazing friends by sophomore year.

I’ve never told anybody that I love them.

I’ve never been in love.

I used to lie all the time—I’m surprised I’ve never lied and said ‘I love you’ to someone. I almost have, during those quiet times when it would be stupid to say anything else, like “funny weather we’ve been having” or even “I like the way the pillow dents your hair.” I take love too seriously to fib, to use words to fill the silences that scare me so much.

Even the words we never speak hang over us. Like clouds, or rouge balloons. I am brimming with all the love I haven’t gotten to give to anyone. My red paper heart is heavy with it. That’s why my posture is so bad.

Quotes

Sometimes I touch the things you used to touch, looking for the echoes of your fingers.

Foer:
"When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

"Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."

"The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you."

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."

Emiliana Torrini

Two amazing videos from one of my favorite singers.

Switzerland

Early on a winter’s morning, a train speeds into a mountain. At least it looks that way. Really a tunnel gutted through the mountain swallows the train and spits it out into more snow. The train circles an impossibly blue lake before dropping off travelers, many of them struggling in their ski boots, in the Interlaken Ost station.
Interlaken, Switzerland is a tiny town surrounded by mountains. It is as if the brown shops and houses are a wooden floor and the mountains are four walls surrounding it. The mountains are wallpaper samples of scratchy dark pine trees, pillow soft snow and, closer to the base, jagged tan rock. Fog hangs about them, as if they are exhaling hot breath into bitter air. Clouds cast shadows, but when they move aside the sunlight burns into the snow causing it to sparkle like the lake’s water. Houses are built into the mountains and crammed along the clear water’s edge.
…
“How do the people who live there get to their houses?” asks a young train passenger.
“They fly. They think happy thoughts that lift them to their houses,” her older companion explains. The young woman laughs.
“No, but really.”
“There must be a path, maybe it is on the other side of the mountain. We just can’t see it from here.”
“I can’t even imagine what that must be live. Everyday. Living here.”
…
The houses in the heart of the town, for those who are not lucky enough to live on a snowy mountain, are like dollhouses. They come in a variety of colors, sweet sugar pink, mint green, as if the painter had just visited one of the many confectionary shops and thought to himself “well, this seems like a good idea.” The walls of these Victorian style houses are rough to the touch, unlike the smooth brown homes toward the western side of town.
…
A toyshop is nestled between a watch and chocolate shop. “How very Swiss!” a tourist says. The toyshop is bright and gives off a feeling of magic like only toyshops can. It feels like it could make anybody a child again. Every treasure is hand carved out of light colored wood. Sleds with curlicue handlebars line the windowsill, as if they are in constant need of a mountain view. Little dolls with rosy painted cheeks hold the red Swiss flag with a white cross on it. There is a basket full of tops; many of them are also painted with the nation’s flag. There is a shelf lined with simple wooden cows, all identical and all adorned with golden bells around their necks.
Out the window, past the sleds, it starts to snow yet again. This is snow that stays cold enough to keep its individual form when it lands. You can see every crevice and every crystal. In mere moments there will be more snow on the mountains, more snow on the colorful houses, more snow on the sleds accidentally left outside by children lucky enough to live in houses you have to float to.