Unpolished shit.

"Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to..."

damnguyen — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:04:30 -0400

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

- Ernest Hemingway (via inspiration-and-identification)

"You’ll be fine. You’re 25. Feeling unsure and lost is part of your path. Don’t avoid it. See what..."

damnguyen — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:29:19 -0400

“You’ll be fine. You’re 25. Feeling unsure and lost is part of your path. Don’t avoid it. See what those feelings are showing you and use it. Take a breath. You’ll be okay. Even if you don’t feel okay all the time.”

- Louis CK (via jeremyclarksons)

Photo

damnguyen — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:11:47 -0400

The 25 Greatest Quotes About Writing

damnguyen — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:20:26 -0400

The 25 Greatest Quotes About Writing:

nevver:

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.” — Clarice Lispector

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” — Virginia Woolf

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” — James Joyce

“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” — Charles Baudelaire

“Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.” — Gertrude Stein

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” — Anaïs Nin

“One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.” — Henry Miller

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.” — Alain Robbe-Grillet

“James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” — Samuel Beckett

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.” — Michel Houellebecq

“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?” — Kurt Vonnegut

“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.” — Julio Cortázar

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

“Reading is more important than writing.” — Roberto Bolaño

“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” — Ezra Pound

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.” — David Foster Wallace

“The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.” — Vladimir Nabokov

“…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. — And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” — Walt Whitman

“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.” — Samuel Beckett

“Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little overexcited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll only get asked two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. ” — J.D. Salinger

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yohjihatesfashion: kimlucille: mmmayhemspeaks: steviemcfly: s...

damnguyen — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:11:33 -0400

yohjihatesfashion:

kimlucille:

mmmayhemspeaks:

steviemcfly:

stfusexists:

jessiesula:

pizzaforpresident:

I’m so done with this planet

she saved two lives and all they care about is her nipple.

this is sexism, my friends.

Yeah that is soooo unfortunate that a complete inoffensive part of this woman’s body was exposed on the beach while she was LITERALLY SAVING LIVES. It’s not like she’s originally from a country where no one cares if you’re naked on the beach or had more important shit to worry about at that moment. Solid reporting, Huffington Post. A plus as always.

How the fuck do you reduce a woman to sexualized body parts and talk about how unfortunate it is that she accidentally showed them while she was saving her fucking child and another person from dying? How fucked up is our society that we see a woman being a hero and the first thought is, “Uh-oh, a nipple!”

“thank you for your bravery. now we are going to attempt to humiliate you”

Dear Huffington Post: Fuck All Y’all.

Also….why wasn’t the photographer helping…..?

smh

illuminami: shit i might have to dye my hair this color

damnguyen — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:00:29 -0400

illuminami:

shit i might have to dye my hair this color

vicemag: The AP Style Guide Finally Deported the Term ‘Illegal...

damnguyen — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:07:50 -0400

vicemag:

The AP Style Guide Finally Deported the Term ‘Illegal Immigrant’

Yesterday, the Associated Press declared that the phrase illegal immigrant was no longer kosher, which is a big deal, since when the AP changes its style guide, newspapers around the country go along with it. Naturally, many people (mostly conservatives) responded to the tiny tweak with howls—and tweets—of derision.

The AP’s reasoning for this fairly mild mandate is that illegal shouldn’t be a descriptor for a person; indeed, “No person is illegal” is a common pro-immigration slogan. “Illegal should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally,” Kathleen Carroll, a senior vice president and executive editor at the AP, wrote to explain the decision. So you can say, “Chen illegally overstayed his visa and lived illegally in the United States,” but Chen himself is not an illegal immigrant. Nor is he an undocumented worker, or an illegal alien, terms which have already fallen out of AP favor.

Though there are meaty—if often abstract and geeky—debates to be had over language, from the legacy of the N word to rigidly enforced political correctness on college campuses. So far, this war of words has been filled with self-righteous, obnoxious carping about terminology, which is far less helpful than discussing whether it’s wrong for poor people to cross an imaginary line in search of better lives. But at the same time, this conscious word-choice change points at the bigger issue of why 11 million people who live and work in the US are treated as an invading army by so many of their fellows.

Continue

"Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about..."

damnguyen — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:56:37 -0400

““Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a “disciplinary technique,” and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the “disciplinarian culture.” This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.””

- Noam Chomsky

Sketches From A War-Torn World: A British Illustrator In Syria

damnguyen — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:20:00 -0400

Sketches From A War-Torn World: A British Illustrator In Syria:

… The British illustrator recently returned from his second trip to Syria, and his reportage illustrations are a powerful account of life in the country’s north, where the fighting is heavy and rebels now control many areas.

The illustrations are not just about the sorrows and pain of Syrian refugees and the wounded, but often about Syrians’ stubborn insistence that life will carry on despite the pain.

Courtesy of George Butler

Halid is one of the bravest people I am ever likely to meet. After his family fled their home, his mother unwittingly told a Shiite mother in their new village that her three eldest sons were fighting in the Free Syrian Army. The neighbor told the shabiha, mercenaries paid by the regime. Halid’s father answered the door to meet gunfire that, as Halid describes, “turned his father into two pieces.” Halid and his mother escaped through a window and boarded a bus headed to Turkey. But as they approached a checkpoint, Halid’s mother dropped him from the bus and told him to “escape, move.” He did as he was told, but at a safe distance watched as his mother was beheaded. He waited for hours until the checkpoint moved on. Some civilians found his mother’s body; her head was never found. Halid’s 16-year-old brother has been killed in the fighting; another is missing. The only vaguely positive note to Halid’s story? He has been adopted, by “Mama Nazak,” and they are safe — for now.

— George Butler

Photo

damnguyen — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:06:38 -0400

nevver: A tiger doesn’t

damnguyen — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:13:25 -0400

nevver:

A tiger doesn’t

"Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance."

damnguyen — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:34:36 -0500

“Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”

- Eckhart Tolle (via skeletongarden)

BsAs pub crawl last night. Reason I am still in bed.

damnguyen — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:30:06 -0500

BsAs pub crawl last night. Reason I am still in bed.

Blip bloop

damnguyen — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:25:19 -0500

Yo, my photojournal detailing my experiences in Buenos Aires will be on confranqueza.tumblr.com.

This will still be my area to ramble, to emotionalize, etc, when I feel more inclined to type than to use my journal.

"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I..."

damnguyen — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:45:25 -0500

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

- Jorge Luis Borges (via damnguyen)

"Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more..."

damnguyen — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:41:00 -0500

“Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.”

- Nisargadatta : I Am That (via thatkief)

Might read up on nondualism this semester.

balance?

damnguyen — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 02:42:00 -0500

My current train of thought began with Tinder. As of right now, it’s just a fun little app for me to flirt and waste some time, as well as an ego-boost as to people finding me physically attractive despite how much I just mauled my hair by trying to cut it myself, again. But, of course, anyone I talk to is just for the week, before I leave for Argentina.

But this temporality is stretching throughout the next semester, as well, since I’ll be studying abroad, and most people I meet in the next couple months I won’t probably see after the months are over. And as much as my sexuality is a carnivorous, ravenous being with the judgment of a toddler, I’m getting to the point in life where I don’t really want to be doing little flings, I want something a bit more long-lasting, more fulfilling.

This refers to not only my sexual life but also my, I guess, upcoming professional life. I think most of my anxiety about studying abroad right now is that a large part of me wants to go back to Berkeley to get involved in things that will help me figure out what I want to do, get some work exp. in, resolve my anxieties about how difficult my major department has been about my concentration (this thought is so stressful to me because it’s totally out of anyone’s control, just based on what classes are offered the year I get back), etc.

In any case, with Scrubs in the background, I just took three “are you left-brained or right-brained” tests to help me figure out what I want to do in the future. Two of them answered in a tie, the last with 53% right-brained. This makes me recall highschool, which left me somewhat unsure of what I wanted to major in since I was generally good at everything. Not great, but good. And I still feel kind of the same way. The greatest boon of being a jack of all trades is that you don’t find it easy to be passionate about any one trade. Olivia recently told me a reassuring story of how her current boss is the same way, and I know things will work out one way or another, since I’m inherently optimistic, despite this irrational, frenetic side of me.

I wish my brain was a little more settled so that I could go into this study-abroad experience without feeling as if I stand on such unstable ground.

On second thought, maybe it’s a good thing that I’ll have an entire semester, not bogged down by Berkeley neurotic academia, to think about what I want to do, to make some sort of plan of attack.

observations @ low end tonight

damnguyen — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 06:24:00 -0500

Pressed against some man with long hair brushing into my face. Has he washed it recently? Maybe. I’m inclined to presume otherwise.

Reading the instagram text of a girl arm to arm next to me; an inverted snap back, snap in the front. She knows how to focus her iPhone pictures by pressing on the exact area of focus on her screen. Does so with perverse attention.

Unnumbered social reaction. Not sure if registered friendly or alarmed or meekly grateful.

“Is that FlyLo?” query heard twice.

Reminiscent blood stain on my shoe lace, but could also be moulin rouge (c) lipstick.

eco-before-ego: The Best Birth Control In The World Is For...

damnguyen — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:22:00 -0500

eco-before-ego:

The Best Birth Control In The World Is For Men by Jon Clinkenbeard

If I were going to describe the perfect contraceptive, it would go something like this: no babies, no latex, no daily pill to remember, no hormones to interfere with mood or sex drive, no negative health effects whatsoever, and 100 percent effectiveness. The funny thing is, something like that currently exists.

The procedure called RISUG in India (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance) takes about 15 minutes with a doctor, is effective after about three days, and lasts for 10 or more years…

Oh, and when you do decide you want those babies, it only takes one other injection of water and baking soda to flush out the gel, and within two to three months, you’ve got all your healthy sperm again.

The trouble is, most people don’t even know this exists. And if men only need one super-cheap shot every 10 years or more, that’s not something that gets big pharmaceutical companies all fired up, because they’ll make zero money on it (even if it might have the side benefit of, you know, destroying HIV).

Faking It Till You Make It Actually Works

damnguyen — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 22:57:00 -0500

Faking It Till You Make It Actually Works:

“Fake it till you make it… it’s not just about convincing other people you’re competent. New science shows that faking it affects the faker, as well. It changes us in physiological ways that make us calmer and more confident.”

It’s not only that you fake it till you make it: fake it until you become it. It’s not really a matter of insincerity as much as it is a matter of confidence, allowing yourself to project the entirety of yourself without the moment’s hesitation before you open your mouth, the nervous heartbeat in your flickering eyes.