Wednesday, April 1, 2015

A Random Assortment

~ The Keurig-ification of everything. My work provides tea only in little Keurig pods; I have been guilty of consuming them, but I've decided to stop: I can't think of anything more ridiculous than tea, which is perfectly great in a little bag, being sold more expensively and less environmentally responsibly in little pods.

~ Woah, I knew they met there, but I didn't know this:

As O’Connor’s earlier infatuation with the young, attractive, charismatic poet Robert Lowell, whom she’d encountered in a manic state at the Yaddo writers’ colony in 1948, ...
Also:
O’Connor’s reaction to Langkjaer’s abrupt departure from her life—the writer’s inspired revenge on her erstwhile “material”—can be gauged by the brilliantly acidulous short story “Good Country People,” clearly modeled after O’Connor’s thwarted romance, in which a crudely manipulative Bible salesman kisses the one-legged philosophy Ph.D. Joy/Hulga prior to running off with her wooden leg 
And:
Like many invalids with a predilection for the “spiritual”—the “mystical”—O’Connor seems to have made a connection, as Gooch suggests a kind of “magical thinking,” between her lupus and her writing: 
"I was five years writing [ Wise Blood ] and up to the last was sure it was a failure and didn’t work. When it was almost finished I came down with [lupus] and began to take cortisone in large doses and cortisone makes you think night and day until I suppose the mind dies of exhaustion if you are not rescued…. The large doses of ACTH send you off in a rocket and are scarcely less disagreeable than the disease…." 
Writing of the fanatic preacher Hazel Motes, under the spell of her medication, O’Connor conceived the notion that 
"I would eventually become paralyzed and was going blind and…in the book I had spelled out my own course, or that in the illness I had spelled out the book."
~ 18 women describe contractions. These are the ones I identify with the most:

 Katie: You know when you are on a long road trip, maybe several days long, and you've been sitting in the car for hours and hours and hours? And your lower back starts to ache because you are buckled in and can't move? It's like a seizing, aching pain deep in your spine and no matter how you move, you can't stretch it and it gets worse and worse until you can walk around and then it starts up again as soon as you sit back down? I think they felt like that....And when they got really crazy, it felt like being alone in a completely insufficient inner tube at sea — up and down and up and down and up and down....They hurt so much that they made me take leave of myself. They totally stripped away modesty and embarrassment....Near the end, I just floated blindly on top of my body. I don't even remember having thoughts. It felt like I wasn't in control anymore. I don't even think I would describe it as pain. Just an alternate reality in which I ceased to be me.

Mine didn't feel like this, but it's such a great description:


Lydia: They begin with the benign tightening stomach band that lulls you into thinking it's not going to hurt that much and you can just watchBroad City and laugh, to the menstrual cramp that makes you ask for Tylenol, which makes the nurses all laugh, then something that feels like it's in the diarrhea family, then ones I'll call the hammer and sickle, then the mortar and pestle, and the ones with teeth.

~ "Yuengling is No. 1 on Brewers Association annual list of craft breweries":
Yuengling was catapulted to the top of the list for the first time following a change in the definition of craft beer last year by the Brewers Association.
The non-profit group softened is stance against the use of rice and corn as adjuncts, thus allowing older breweries such as Yuengling and Straub Brewing in St. Marys, Pennsylvania to be considered craft brewers.

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