Valuable

I want to do something valuable with my time and my life and my professional training. I've been thinking about some schools for students who are blind overseas which would like volunteers. I would love to be able to see another part of the world and how things work there - I just feel very ignorant about the whole thing. And the last thing on earth I would want to do is to think that I somehow have all of this magic information that is better than anything they have. I have to give it lots of thought and figure out how I would really like to go about things. I suppose that realizing my ignorance is a good first step.

I've heard it many times: "Oh, you teach blind kids... that's nice. Must be very rewarding." And it is, but they're still kids. They can still drive you crazy, and there aren't a whole lot of days when I feel as though I'm changing the world. Especially today, I guess. Not that I think going somewhere else will change the world, but it will change the way I see it.

from the end of chapter 34, East of Eden

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."

East of Eden

I was sitting on the couch with the cat purring at my shoulder and occasionally twitching his whiskers in his sleep as I continued reading in John Steinbeck's East of Eden just now. I haven't finished the book yet, but am so overwhelmed by the magnitude of it and a sense of not having all the knowledge to be able to understand it or wrap my mind around it that I had to write something. There are only a few things that have given me the same sense of going beyond the temporal (these are the ones that sort of fit in this group):

- Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels) by the Arcade Fire
- (possibly)) Your Ex-Lover is Dead by Stars, (click on 'Set Yourself on Fire' and 'Your Ex-lover is Dead'). I actually thought I was sick of the song after only hearing part of it several times. And that was only this afternoon. It's been in my thoughts ever since.
- Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma and Generation X in particular
- New Year's Eve 2006
- Instances where Ernest Buckler and/or John Steinbeck capture something so exactly that it makes you draw your breath sharply and read it over and over and wonder how it was possible to put that in those particular and perfect words.

I think what makes these things so... big, is that they encompass so much of what it is to be human and to love and suffer and wonder about life and death and it's expressed beautifully and, well, perfectly. Perhaps a sense of knowing that I'll probably never be able to express things in such a clear, concise, and exact way is what makes them so... big. These things give me the sense that everything fits together in the grand scheme and for that brief moment it almost makes sense.

Barnacles

I've always been interested in barnacles. Maybe because they look so alien. They feel like shell, and the little bits in the middle move. They appear under boats, on rocks, sometimes on lobsters and other sea creatures.