Between printing, copying, and postage, it just cost me nearly five bucks and a dedicated 45 minutes, not counting the time to fill out the application itself, to send in my voter registration for New York. A fiver and a few minutes may not seem like a lot, but as an Unemployed American, I find it a little ironic that I have to squeeze my budget even tighter in order to ensure my constitutional right to vote for officials who might actually create a job for me.

And to be totally honest? That five dollars matters right now, and the 45 minutes was the difference between me being able to finish an application before I have to leave the house or not (circa now). I don’t know the right solution (although there’s always the ol’ indelible ink on the thumb trick), but the current arrangement strikes me as fishy.

[They could let me vote twice for the inconvenience, that would work. Except I don't live in Chicago anymore, damn it all.]

An excerpt…

When I came here last year I was completely unmoored. Despite spending three months feverishly writing cover letters, I turned down offers in three other cities and moved to you without a job, took a sublet I’d never laid eyes on in a neighborhood I had no hope of understanding, and let the tides of an ill-fated relationship dictate my movements within you. As it turns out, the job came along fast, but that was the only thing I got right on the first try, and thank goodness I did or who knows if we’d have made it anywhere at all.

My summer was spent swept up in the heady currents of your upper class, letting a woman drag me so swiftly through your streets and tunnels I could not spare a glance for anything but keeping up with her. She settled me in your tidepools in the Hamptons and Vermont for a few days at a time before sucking me back into the dense center of your core. She held the reins and I held on for dear life, not knowing what to do with myself on the odd evenings when she left me alone with you. I didn’t object to being dragged, of course. I didn’t know there was another way, and I was in love, and didn’t realize traversing your boroughs this way was in fact the opposite of exploring you. I was a jet-ski, skimming your surface, all my energy spent on trying to maintain balance and avoid the inevitable bump that would send me, flailing and gasping, through the false wall that separated us. The accident that would allow you to envelop me and subject me, alone, to the dangerous and terrifying pressure of your enormity and depth.

Continue reading here.

I will never again feel bad for buying a book based on its cover. ESPECIALLY when Jodi Foster is on the cover.

I don’t know what to say about this book exactly, except that it makes math and science beautiful in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. Every chapter has its own page of epigraphs from an incredible range of literary sources, everything from medieval Church doctrine to Dickinson poems to the philosophers and astronomers you’d expect (you know, the Greek ones).

Much like most members of the goodreads community, I’d imagine, I graduated with a BS in theater and poetry (can’t make up material that good, folks). My grasp on physics, at least on the astronomical level, is surprisingly good thanks to a dorky younger brother and a science credit I needed. Still, I had a hard time separating fact from fiction, if you will, in the parts of the book that got technical. Which were many. I don’t think this detracted from my reading experience — it was nice to learn things. What did distract me is my embarrassing lack of familiarity with international relations during and after the Cold War, which is pretty central to the political questions Sagan raises in the book. Still, I’d say that Sagan made me feel a useful sense of shame — it would have been an easier read were I not completely uninterested in military/political history. Shame on Dinah. Still really interesting.

Before reading this book, Carl Sagan was little more to me than a challenging-but-effective card in an Apples-to-Apples hand. Now he is much more, and I want to go back and watch all those science specials and marvel at the universe. I miss stars, we don’t get them here in New York. But I’m glad to be reading about them. And amazed at how right Sagan was, not only about science that hadn’t been discovered at the time of the book’s writing, but about people. He must have been some kind of genius to understand both of those things — the universe and the human condition — so well.

Very old. We’re both doing better now. Mostly.

Just had to send an email apologizing to one of my favorite professors (and favorite poets, for that matter) for unintentionally spreading a rumor that she had named her newborn daughter Ophelia.

Really, my friends need to get better at identifying when I am joking. And I need to recognize when they don’t, prior to them putting epically large feet in both of our mouths.

I hope not to have to sign another email “Sheepishly Yours, Dinah” for a long time.

An excerpt:

What really stands out to me after this reading is the essential question Cunningham asks through the three novellas: what is the purpose of poetry in a world growing ever-more mechanized, isolated, and emotionally cold? Each story gives its answer, and I am enamored with all of them. Poetry, once deeply learned, speaks for us in moments when we cannot untangle our feelings enough to form our own words. Poetry is bone-truth, truth beyond rhetoric, truth proved by resonance. Poetry done right is the great equalizer: none of us understand it fully, but all of us may feel it fully.

Keep reading here.

An excerpt:

I’ve been considering working these words into a tattoo for about a year now. Cum Hoc and Post Hoc are logical fallacies of causation: roughly, that correlation suggests or constitutes causation. There are philosophers that go so far as to argue that causation itself is a logical fallacy, based on our unproved assumption that the future models the past. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I find deep questioning of our collective reliance on causal thinking appealing. Causation allows us to wrap things up neatly, to feel we understand how the world works, to believe negative outcomes can be easily fixed or avoided.

This is especially damaging when dealing with issues of privilege. In a thousand small ways, we harbor the belief that good things happen to good people, and conversely, that those who suffer brought it on themselves. This allows for an enormous degree of indifference and cruelty, especially toward the poor, the sick and disabled, the fat… any group in which membership should be morally neutral, attributed to chance and circumstance, rather than some underlying moral turpitude.

Keep reading here.

The other day David came marching into the living room demanding the source of a quote which had been rattling around in his head. For the life of me, I could not remember if it came from Leaves of Grass or Elizabeth: The Golden Age. What a world, what a world.

I contain multitudes…

Same dif, right? Oh I have blasphemed the poetry Gods. I hope their wrath rains down in rhymed couplets.