I am happy.

I like the idea of synthetic diamonds

moving up in the world

I have a new bedroom, in which I hope to lead a completely separate and private life, somewhat "protected" from my family. The new room is twice as big as the old one - I have room for my desk and sewing table. Also for an old couch and a bigger bookshelf. It's still ugly, and all of my things are still in piles against the walls, but I have high hopes for the next few weeks. I like setting up apartment using only my own things, as few and shabby as they are. They are mine. I will have nicer ones eventually.

It will be wonderful to have a place to study.

excerpt

"The justification of sacrifice, that your morality, propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love - the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men - this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

"As there can be causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.

"Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you're incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant; not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgement; that true love transcends, forgives and surives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them - the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love - the more unfastidious your love, the greater the virtue - and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection."

-from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

summer agenda

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-read books [Utopia, What is Symbolism?, my new Anna Akhmatova books, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, The Lord of the Rings, the rest of the Time Quartet, books on trees]
-go on a lot of hand-holding walks
-see Shakespeare plays
-get a lot thinner
-ride my bike
-make money
-sleep
-practice violin, bass, piano
-finish crocheting my scarf
-learn to knit mittens
-bake a lot of cake
-write a lot of poems and at least two stories

Notice the correlations between this list and the Wants list.

the innocents

imposter!
stop threatening
panamanian
spaghettification
exponentially
infantile stress
buckets of tremble
pluralizing
pen skids-

young men and
women
continue
to name clouds
"walrus"
"dragon"
"the mountains of Mordor"

so even the sky
belongs
to our perpetually
fresh batch
who know nothing
of oxymoronic
maurauding harmonics
doomsaying scum