Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
— Inscribed on the plaque of the base of the Statue of Liberty (via desayunogratis)
Kyouei Design has designed a functional and awesome hybrid of a bookmark and a book light. Titled Bookmark Light, the contemporary and minimalist design is compromised of a thin clear film that that is ingrained with a silver nanoparticle ink that is able to transmit electricity.
A young person speaks to a psychiatrist at a hospital during the patient intake procedure.
Do you have a plan?
Oh, I have lots of plans. Everyone does. We’ve all got plans, don’t we? It’s having plans and not being able to get them accomplished that’s the problem.
I mean a suicide plan.
Sure! Several. Lately, I’ve been thinking of slitting my wrists in a bath of hot water. But, I haven’t done it yet. I think about a knot under the closet door and a rope over… or a slow slide into the river with the car…
There’s the walking bridge, too. Then it would make the news. Or one of the tall buildings downtown. Then people can speculate on my motivations. My very own death politicized by the mass media. My friends would laugh.
Oh yes, I have plans. Lots of them. All of which are varying degrees of messy. I’m always thinking about the mess. When my ex’s mother killed herself they didn’t clean up the mess. Just left it there for the family to deal with. I wouldn’t want to do that. It’s rude. I like things clean and tidy.
I think about slitting my wrists a lot because it would all go down the drain in a big, red swirl with the bathwater. But, exsanguination makes a person chilly, so the water would be hot, and I’ve read terrible things about what happens to a body after a few hours in hot water. I wouldn’t want to make someone clean that up. It’s got to be hard to pick up a body and have the flesh slip off. I wouldn’t want to make that poor guy’s day worse.
I thought about adult diapers, too. You know, because the body expels everything when you die. So, even if you do something not messy, like down a bottle of pills, it still leaves a pile of shit for someone else to deal with. But, then I’d have to go buy them. And I’d be caught dead wearing them. So that’s kind of an issue… But, yes, I have plans…
Wrote website, promotional, business, and creative content. Edited a sci-fi/fantasy novel. Updated social media and blog feeds. Assigned project tasks to teams and monitored their output. Hired a UK-based Chinese comedian. Searched for an outdoor venue for 5,000 people. Ordered 200 custom presentation boxes. Located an Airbus 350 Jet on a dry lease.*
Most difficult task this week:
Getting a group discount rate for a hotel in Beijing.
Most fulfilling task this week:
Writing a satire blog insulting my client (at his request).
Most draining task of the week:
Emails. :(
*That wasn’t this week. It was a while ago. But, it makes me laugh when I think about it, so I had to put it in.
No one believes me when I say that. If they get to ask at all. From the day I learned to talk, words have hemorrhaged from mouth in profuse quantities. Loud, uncontrollable, and sometimes incoherent, the fount of embarrassing words never seems to run dry. Words build inside me like steam in an engine. They pressure my ribcage, they fill my throat, they burst out from my lips, no matter how tightly I press them together. I’ve grown accustomed to the sound. So much so that I find silence distressing. It’s the same pressure, but in reverse. When I’m quiet, I feel pressed between two great forces, the words bursting inside me and the heavy weight of the silence around me. So, I talk. But, even I get tired of talking.
“Can you take a turn talking for a while?”
I like the sound of other people talking. It fills the silence. It gives me needed rest and a beautiful new voice to listen to. I still chime in. There’s not much I don’t chime in on. Thoughts make it across my tongue quicker than my teeth can catch them. But, sometimes, it’s nice to have a break.
Most of my closest relationships are with quiet people. They always have been. My first best friend was as silent as a stone. I imagine quiet peoples’ words sit in their chests like a dense fog. That it takes effort to clear them out. I don’t know for sure, though. I’ve never been a quiet person. My relationships with quiet people are good balance most days. They provide a release valve for all my pent up words. I help them dredge up the fog. It’s hard work to keep quiet people talking. Even when they want to.
But, even I get tired of talking. I get tired of providing the momentum for conversations. Of filling the silent spaces. Of hearing my voice. It becomes an expectation. It becomes a chore. I want to hear someone else’s ideas. I want someone else to risk the embarrassment for a few minutes. Then the silence starts sinking in. It get’s heavier. Denser. Ominous.
“I don’t know what to say. I can’t think of anything.”
An abandoned shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand was left without a roof in 1999 after experiencing a fire. Without a roof, rainwater soon flooded the basement level of the mall, and the pool of stagnant water became a breeding place for mosquitoes. Annoyed, residents of the surrounding neighborhoods got together and released a few koi and catfish into the water in order to combat the growing mosquito problem. The fish multiplied quickly, and the mall soon became home to the world’s most amazing accidental fish pond.
