Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
* * *
Simple enough rules to live by. On a gorgeous day like this, I feel like the whole world is being very kind, and it makes me happy.

The marshmallow ghosties don't have time for your ennui.

Anis Mojgani-"Shake the Dust"

This is for the tired and for the dreamers,
For those families that'll never be like the Cleavers
with perfectly made dinners and sons like Wally and the Beaver.
This is for the bigots, this is for the sexists, this is for the killers,
and for the springtime that always seems to show up right after the winters.
This--this is for you.
Every time I write, every time I open my eyes I'm cutting out parts of myself to give to you,
so shake the dust and take me with you when you do,
because none of this has ever been for me.
Make my words worth it.
Make this not just another poem that I write,
not just another poem like just another night that sits heavy above all of us.
Walk into it, breathe it in,
let it crash through the halls of your arms like the millions of years of millions of poets,
coursing like blood, pumping and pushing,
making you live, shaking the dust.
So when the world knocks at your front door,
clench the knob tightly and open on up,
running forward into it's widespread greeting arms
with your hands before you, fingertips trembling though they may be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ-Ox5uH3FM

Temptation and Ordeal (exercise in translation)

"Temptation"
Nina Cassian
English translation by Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you
that for the first time you’ll feel your pores opening
like fish mouths, and you’ll actually be able to hear
your blood surging through all those lanes,
and you’ll feel light gliding across the cornea
like the train of a dress. For the first time
you’ll be aware of gravity
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will ache for want of wings.
Call yourself alive? I promise you
you’ll be deafened by the sound of dust falling on furniture,
you’ll feel your eyebrows turning to two gashes,
and every memory you have—will begin
at Genesis.


"Ordeal"
Nina Cassian
Translated from Romanian by Michael Impey and Brian Swann

I promise to make you more alive than you've ever been.
For the first time you'll see your pores opening
like the gills of fish and you'll hear
the noise of blood in galleries
and feel light gliding on your corneas
like the dragging of a dress across the floor.
For the first time, you'll note gravity's prick
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will hurt from the imperative of wings.
I promise to make you so alive that
the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you,
and you'll feel your eyebrows like two wounds forming
and your memories will seem to begin
with the creation of the world.

This makes me so angry.

From Jon Meyer's article in the Monday, November 22nd, 2004 issue of the McGill Daily:

Political correctness, in his opinion, has created an unbalanced culture that’s unnaturally constraining. “Feminism is extremely restrictive. You can’t call a woman a bitch, you can’t call her this, you can’t call her that. But that’s what life’s really like. Yet she can do whatever she wants. It’s out of balance and that’s why young people haven’t embraced feminism, because it’s out of balance.”

Charney’s rant against the “lawsuit culture” of the West seems convenient, considering the man is rumoured to sleep with each and every one of his female models, and once masturbated in front of an interviewer from Jane Magazine.

He pursues his point. “Out of a thousand sexual harassment claims how many do you think are exploitive? There are almost no sexual harassment charges from men against women. They’re not acceptable – it’s considered that only women are the victims.

“Women initiate most domestic violence, yet out of a thousand cases of domestic violence maybe one is involving a man.” And this, Charney decries, “has made a victim culture out of women.”
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=3253

"Man, it takes a silly girl to lie about the dream she has.
But it takes a lonely one to wish that she had never dreamt at all."
Dashboard Confessional

***
This lyric has never really left me, and keeps reappearing in some strange ways. The other night, I quite literally wished that I hadn't dreamt of him, and I remembered these lines.