humans are dependent upon interaction with other humans to survive. various tests that basically placed two deafmutes with no previous contact with people on a deserted island, proved that even in this absurd of a situation, we will eventually develop our own language, our own belief system, our own society. to receive necessary aid from other humans, we need the approval of them. part of existing in a society is understanding your place and your meaning within it- we crave the approval of others because the structure of our lives is based around it. in constant reflection upon our self-worth, our confidences are consequently easily bruised- most obvious when we hit the peak of our lives as teenagers and young adults. in everything we do, we strive to defend the meaning of each of our lives, maybe for the same reason animals who travel in groups hide weaknesses in hunting or reproducing from the rest. we want to evade natural selection, we want to be among those who are succeeding, we believe in the survival of the fittest.

where was i going with this? i guess i was trying to piece together a logical explanation for fashionable clothing, fashionable people, fashionable lifestyles, and fashionable material possessions. 95 percent of us are avid, hungry and nervous consumers, perpetually bouncing up and down on the edge of our seats to snatch up the next socially respected fad. 5 percent of us are either too brilliant to connect with people in the physical world, or else too mentally impaired. basically, most of us are driven- even if we don't realize it- by social acknowledgment at large or from those we most respect. we thrive on it, progress because of it, reproduce with faith in it. we want to be the fittest members of our herd, the strongest leaders of the pack.

so with all of our bullshit about wanting to be seen not through our relationships with others but entirely by ourselves, we couldn't live in that way. kind of a depressing realization.

whatever, i'm tired and spouting nonsense.

Dear Immanuel Kant,

you are a ridiculous excuse for a philosopher, namely because half the time, I don't know what the fuck you're saying. i also do not think it's fair that i am required to write a detailed objection ladder on your wacked-out theories about how we should never be driven by happiness of any kind. at least j.s. mill says we should work for the happiness of others-- you're all about this goddamn ambiguous DUTY, we all have this DUTY to perform and our lives are nothing unless we perform it. i don't want to hear your grounding for the metaphysics of morals, unless you can articulate it so a fairly intelligent freshman in college can understand you.

preciate it,

Maura

He wanted to touch her breasts because they looked so soft. He imagined they would feel like ripe peaches, with the faintest of nude fuzz protecting their centers. Her hardened nipples would be the small, rough stem equidistant from the other sides of the peach. He wanted to touch the stem and watch the fuzz make itself visible, sprouting from the delicate goosebumps that had risen all around it. He wanted to run his hands along the tight, fresh layer of skin that was stretched to hug her every curve and indent and muscle. He wanted to fuck her and hear her orgasm. He wondered what her orgasm might sound like; everyone’s was different. Some were artistic about it; they had perfected the integration of well-timed exhales of breath and articulated cries that were indicative of one being immersed in the throes of pleasure. These women often sounded silly and screamed things like “fuck me harder!” and “THAT’S the spot.” Some were creative. They wanted to try things new, to toss out new phrases or moans, to play with the decibel level so that the wriggling sound waves they ejected would bend around the furniture and the bed and their naked copulating bodies in such a way that the man might be fully convinced they were orgasming wonderfully.
He decided that Linda Carr’s orgasm would be the first aesthetically pleasing one he’d ever heard a woman procure. It would sound like this:
OHHHHH MMMAH AAAAAAAHHHHH
then it would flow into a sort of vibrating, humming sound like a kitten when it is purring. it would emanate from every part of her body, little wiggling molecules of pleasure rising from her sweating body like the heat rays from a stove.

He was convinced Linda Carr’s orgasm would sound precisely like this.

Current Music: the velvet underground

I have adjectives to describe my present state: despondent, uncomfortably full, sleepy, cross, and in need of nicotine but too lazy to pursue it.. for now.
The other night I had this dream that I was dirt-poor and entirely alone in this rat-infested apartment in some big drippy cold city. And I had to resort to working at this strip club where girls with long legs and shiny ponytails rolled around on rollerskates and bikinis and flirted with lecherous middle-aged men. One of the owners came to the back of the club, where I was waiting to be told what to do and getting increasingly agitated at the state of things. This guy was pretty young, probably in his twenties.. and he was just crass and disrespectful and I remember him because he made me cry harder than I ever have. I don't know what he could have said, but when I started crying he pulled me into his lap-- not to comfort me, but to make a move on me. I cried harder and tried to pull myself free from his lap, but he just held me more firmly and pulled me back onto him. And-- THIS is the strange part, I kept struggling and fighting his grip, but part of me felt strangely attracted to him and to what I was when in this place. Part of me liked struggling with the assurance that I would never be strong enough to be free. I woke up horny and confused and distressed.

Current Music: the shins

you're around-about the kind i like to like.
if you're real then that means I'M real. and that's why i stick close to you,
so i can exist even if by default.
we'll do anything to feel something, we'll fuck and fight and smoke morning cigarettes on the warm brick sidewalks just to feel the sun filtering through our hair to tingle our scalps and pick up a thousand hues in our irises.
there's something radically alive about you when you speak, when you're silent, while you sleep.
there's something breathing and tingling and desperately LIVING about your character.
don't you know?
i am pinned and wriggling, on display even while i walk and talk and think.
i'm moving without moving, is that possible?
i want you for me and not you.

I liked you better when you smoked.

You're looking at a new writer for The Monitor. My first story has been smashed to smithereens. I have to remove half of it-- all of my opinions, go figure, newspapers dislike that-- but I haven't had the heart yet. I'm writing an editorial in addition to the story though, so I'm trying to accept this one being torn to shreds. I'll post the FULL version here:

Take an Outward Bound
By Maura Metcalf-Kelly
If you arbitrarily stop a student on the Jewell Campus and ask them to define Outward Bound, you’re likely to get variations of the same vague description— an annual wilderness retreat for the forty William Jewell students a year who are part of the Pryor Leadership Program. If they really knew their stuff, they might add that Outward Bound caters to high school and college students around the nation and stresses the development of skills like “responsibility, teamwork, confidence and compassion, as well as environmental and community stewardship.” Sounds cool enough.
Everybody probably imagines this retreat differently. Some might exhume memories of yuppie middle-school church camp trips to Colorado. Personally, I picture a Kashi granola bar commercial, complete with healthy ponytailed women in their mid-thirties grinning as they hoist their North Face hiking backpacks over their tanned shoulders and clomp through a clean, bubbling brook and voiceover something about fresh air and the start to a “more vibrant, energized life.”
As it turns out, Outward Bound is neither privileged thirteen year olds jamming to intensely Christian rock bands, nor robust outdoorsy women embarking on adventures inspired by the Seven Whole-Grain Puffs cereal they downed at 5 am that morning. It’s an empowering voyage of self-discovery, an electronics-free thirteen-day canoe trip through the Mangrove jungle, a trip fueled by camaraderie and endurance, and not necessarily a nonstop party.
“I don’t know if I would’ve done it without being pushed,” laughs Cody Johnson, Oxbridge music major. “By the fourth day, I was ready to leave.”
On December 27th, forty Jewell students disembarked from a plane in Miami, Florida. Carrying the bare essentials in heavy-duty backpacks and accompanied by eight trained Outward Bound instructors and four Jewell faculty members, the students split into four groups (two instructors and one faculty member per group.) Each group began its journey at a pre-decided location in Everglade City, with the ultimate destination of Flamingo, Florida, about 130 miles away. The first day of their journey, the instructors gave the students loose instructions on canoeing and led the groups into the Everglades.
The students canoed for up to ten hours a day, generally from sunup to sundown. There were pre-determined stopping points every day, but circumstances sometimes prevented the students from reaching them.
“If we didn’t get far enough in one day and weren’t by a beach or anything, we’d have to do what’s called “boarding”,” says Nathan Watts, a second-year religions major. “Basically, you take big pieces of plywood, set them in your canoe, and sleep on it.”
Many students claimed they left Florida with a new respect and understanding of relationships. Because the groups weren’t self-selected, the students were compelled to forge friendships with those they hadn’t taken the time to know previously. In their unique situation, simmering tensions were not an option; they were forced to resolve their differences and relinquish grudges. A student who participated summarized it simply: “If two people are angry with each other, the whole group suffers. You have to consider that you’re all constantly together.” The setting resulted in new or strengthened bonds the students may not have forseen.
“I feel very close to my group members,” says Watts. “This particular experience was unique to the nine of us. It showed us how to live in a different way than any we were accustomed to.”
The most life-changing result most experienced was the knowledge that they were self-sufficient. Determining their own sleeping, eating, and rest schedule and depending on their own physical and mental endurance, the Pryor students leave this experience with a boost of confidence.
“It’s empowering, knowing that you survived in the wilderness for thirteen days,” says Johnson. “It’s not something I would do again immediately, but at the same time I’m so glad I did it.”
I leave you with the words of Henry David Thoreau, on finding knowledge through nature: Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

basking in the limey glow, light rays falling and slipping and dripping through those badly kept ditches in the sky. shining and grinning, i'll just keep on sinning till there's a solution some may forget. she's risen up before; jades and topes glowingly touching the hairs on the end of her head, her long neck, her sharp and clean digits. she is the adjective monster and i've seen her once before, many times before that i can't remember. she is long and lean and exquisitely bloodthirsty. cruel and calculating, this queen of words . and i try but mine won't match hers; mine slip and drip through these fearsome ditches in the sky fly in sweet spits to the children playing down below.

My New Years' res is to erase drinking from my life. If a bottle of cheap-middling whiskey were a woman, she'd be a fucking bitch. We're going to imagine here, that there's this woman named Sandra or Markie, she's Evan Williams. If she's vodka, she's McCormicks and she goes by Carrie [she is consequently even bitchier and slings her Wet Seal thongs off even faster.] She's mildly attractive at first glance, but merits nothing more than a brief once-over at best. She's acceptably hot after like three half-half drinks, and her ass and breasts become more shapely with every drink following that. So you say to yourself, okay, this woman is hot and she's here with me currently, we might as well sleep together. The sex isn't memorable, you can really only remember the sloppy kissing and clumsy fumbling with jeans [hers, a size too small to begin with and even more so after she's been bloated up by a few too many natty lights] that led up to it. You wake up the next morning, naked and confused and unable to pee straight. And she's gone, leaving behind a few stray fake-blonde hairs, some cigarette butts and the faint memory of a realization that she didn't really have that much going for her. You also discover, upon rousing your buddies, that several of them have slept with her before and in fact were propositioned by this same woman the night before. Who could legitimately reason with themselves, and determine that having sex with this skankho another time and perhaps making a habit of it is really self-beneficial? But somehow, the sex just creeps up until it IS a pattern, until you don't remember a time when you weren't engaging in regular uneventful sex and waking up with your breath reeking of her cigarettes and your penis incooperative. You could slowly slip out of the habit [either because you've found someone hotter and equally as willing to engage, or because you've got a bad case of herpes], but one night you're feeling a little lonely and a little bored and you see this same fucking bitch AGAIN and think why not AGAIN and wake up feeling even shittier than the first time. What you've got to do here is get it together here and quit her altogether. Because the longer the breaks between sex with her, the more vulnerable you are to her decietful charms.

..So that's what I'm going to do. Turning my back on booze for months at a time is even less beneficial than drinking on a regular basis. b-b-b-b-bullllshit.

Current Location: my BED.
Current Mood: sick
Current Music: jolie holland

scarecrowed, ribs
and hollowed bluish smears indented
an efficacious nervousness in (every
thrumming twitch
and
it is instantly exhilarating; i feel like my emotions have been put in hyperdrive. I make my way out to the floor surrounding the stage. i hear "It's going to hit when you start dancing, when Ben starts playing," and I feel a wonderful bubbling inside of me. And then Ben arrives. We are screaming insane, punch-drunk high on the close proximity . And then i'm dancing, my eyes closed and my hands twisting sensually in the air. I'm not sure when it hits me but thirty minutes later I am singing, tapping, rocking from heel to heel and unable to keep every last fingertip from twitching and shaking and flowing. my pupils are dilated and I feel a rising, fizzing feeling in my stomach and my heart and my lungs. i've somehow slid to the front and I can feel people watching as I rhythmically chainsmoke, my fingers clicking the lighter as mechanically as I move from side to side. I feel a strange and wonderful warmth for everyone around me i gush vigorously to strangers and acquaintances alike.
it is dark and i can see the glittering city lights outside as i walk with my friends. We are laughing as we tell jokes and make funny observations, our voices echoing loudly in the calm, warm silence. Once we're in my car listening to loud obscene rap with burning cigarettes in our fingers I feel safe. I feel warm and happy and energetic; even my feet cannot stop bouncing as I move to the music. All I want to do is go to a party; all I want is a glass of liquor in my hand and loud music blaring for me to dance to. All I want is to stay awake till sunrise, just drinking and dancing and driving.

Ww1, ww2, Korean war, Vietnam war, civil war, war in iraq, presidents of the US, the atomic bomb in japan, candidates in 2008 race, effects of cigarettes on the ozone layer, works of jane austen, the interworkings of the government, republicans/democrats, theories of freud, European history, Marxism, the reproductive system, the relevance of commas, detrimental effects of fluorescent bulbs to the environment (there is no such thing as very unique,) despotism, what is the relation between arbitrary and artificial?, WHY is Wednesday spelled Wednesday, what religions is Christianity derived from, is Judaism truer to God?, study of two pears by Wallace stevens, opusculum paedagogum?, quebec, montreal to Canada, st. anselm’s writings,


What is the nature of justice that would lead us to believe justice is real and presides over injustice?

Conventionalists- Justice is created by human beings, its lineation determined by them.
Sports. Music? Nietzsche. Language.

Nature- justice has always existed, and is part of the world
EX: F=MA (law of gravity.) math. Music? St. Anselm.

Socrates argues that justice is built into the nature of existence.

Current Music: jay z allure