career catfishing noun [U] UK /kəˌrɪər ˈkæt.fɪʃ.ɪŋ/ US /kəˌrɪr ˈkæt.fɪʃ.ɪŋ/ the act of accepting a job offer but then not arriving at work on the first day of employment, or any other day after that “Career catfishing” — the trend of job seekers accepting a job and refusing to show up on the first day …
"Researchers found that individuals who tend to procrastinate often do so because they fear not meeting their high standards or worry too much about failing. The study also showed that this fear of failure and the habit of overgeneralizing failures (like thinking one mistake means you're a failure) strongly connect perfectionism to procrastination." — Mark Travers, Forbes, 28 May 2025
Did you know?
We won't put off telling you about out the origins of procrastinate: it comes from the Latin prefix pro-, meaning "forward," and crastinus, meaning "of tomorrow." To procrastinate is to work or move slowly so as to fall behind; it implies blameworthy delay especially through laziness or apathy. English has other words with similar meanings, such as defer and postpone, but none places the blame so directly on the person responsible for choosing a later time to do something. Procrastinate is also a malleable word: English speakers have wasted no time creating clever variations, most of them delightfully self-explanatory. Don't let coinages like procrastibake, procrastinetflix, and procrasticlean pass you by; they may not meet our criteria for entry into the dictionary, but their potentials for use are undeniable.
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 6, 2025 is:
antic • \AN-tik\ • noun
Antic refers to an attention-drawing, often wildly playful or funny act or action. It is usually used in its plural form, and is often used disapprovingly.
// It wasn't clear which students were ultimately responsible for the antics that unfolded in the cafeteria that day.
“A couple of adult gorillas, including one majestic silverback, lay indolently on the ground—seemingly reveling in the early morning sunshine, while a pair of young gorillas tumbled down from a mound and played together on the muddy earth. It was remarkable to see how similar they are to humans. They live in family groups and their movements, antics and expressions are so like ours. In fact, data shows that humans and gorillas differ in only 1.75 per cent of their DNA, far less than previously assumed. (Chimpanzees—our closest relatives—differ only 1.37 per cent from our genomes.)” — Zeineb Badawi, An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence, 2025
Did you know?
When referring to one of the grotesques—the fanciful, often fantastical mural paintings found in the ruins of ancient Roman buildings—the Italian descendants of the ancient Romans used the word antico, meaning “ancient thing.” In 16th-century English, antico (itself a descendant of the Latin word for “ancient,” antiquus) became antic, and got applied as both a noun and an adjective in contexts related to decorative art—sculptures, painting, architecture, etc.—inspired by the original grotesques. Antic shifted in meaning over time, eventually gaining the senses we use more often today: antic as an adjective describes the absurd or whimsical, and antic as a usually plural noun refers to attention-grabbing, playful or funny acts and actions.
It’s a short and sweet oldy but a goody this time out, from Buddy Holly. Why this one? Why not? It’s been covered by just about everyone, from James Taylor to Erasure, and I really like the song, and I had free time this weekend, so here we are. If you like it, fabulous, if you don’t, well, it’s two minutes long, it’ll be over quickly enough.
And for those of you who have somehow never heard the original, here you go:
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 5, 2025 is:
cantankerous • \kan-TANK-uh-rus\ • adjective
A cantankerous person is often angry and annoyed, and a cantankerous animal or thing is difficult or irritating to deal with.
// Although the former postman was regarded by some townspeople as a scowling, cantankerous old coot, he was beloved by neighborhood children, to whom he would regularly hand out butterscotch candies from his front stoop with a twinkle in his eye.
“The film ‘Hard Truths,’ which opens in New York on Friday and nationwide in January, centers on [Marianne] Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy, a cantankerous middle-aged woman who spits venom at unsuspecting shop assistants, bald babies, her 20-something son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and her dentist, among others.” — Simran Hans, The New York Times, 9 Dec. 2024
Did you know?
A person described as cantankerous may find it more difficult than most to turn that frown upside down, while a cantankerous mule/jalopy/etc. is difficult to deal with—it may not turn in your desired direction. It’s been speculated that cantankerous is a product of the obsolete word contack, meaning “contention,” under the influence of a pair of “difficult” words still in use: rancorous and cankerous. Rancorous brings the anger and “bitter deep-seated ill will” (as rancor can be understood to mean), and cankerous brings the perhaps understandable foul mood: a cankerous person suffers from painful sores—that is, cankers.
One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music, like love — is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us.
“We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” Nick Cave sings in one of my favorite songs, and yet in a world trembling with fear and cynicism (which is the most cowardly species of fear), joy — the choice of it, the right to it — is in need of constant defense.
I know none mightier or more delightful than the one Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) mounts in his poem “Defensa de la alegría” (“A Defense of Joy”), read here by the polymathic Chilean primatologist Isabel Behncke (who introduced me to this benediction of a poem) followed by my English translation and reading to the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat Major.
Defender la alegría como una trinchera
defenderla del escándalo y la rutina
de la miseria y los miserables
de las ausencias transitorias
y las definitivas
defender la alegría como un principio
defenderla del pasmo y las pesadillas
de los neutrales y de los neutrones
de las dulces infamias
y los graves diagnósticos
defender la alegría como una bandera
defenderla del rayo y la melancolía
de los ingenuos y de los canallas
de la retórica y los paros cardiacos
de las endemias y las academias
defender la alegría como un destino
defenderla del fuego y de los bomberos
de los suicidas y los homicidas
de las vacaciones y del agobio
de la obligación de estar alegres
defender la alegría como una certeza
defenderla del óxido y la roña
de la famosa pátina del tiempo
del relente y del oportunismo
de los proxenetas de la risa
defender la alegría como un derecho
defenderla de dios y del invierno
de las mayúsculas y de la muerte
de los apellidos y las lástimas
del azar
y también de la alegría.
A DEFENSE OF JOY by Mario Benedetti translated by Maria Popova
Defend joy like a trench
defend it from scandal and routine
from misery and misers
from truancies passing
and permanent
defend joy as a principle
defend it from bewilderments and bad dreams
from the neutral and the neutron
from sweet infamies
and grave diagnoses
defend joy like a flag
defend it from lightning and melancholy
from the fools and the frauds
from rhetoric and ruptures of the heart
from the endemic and the academic
defend joy as a destiny
defend it from fire and firefighters
from suicides and homicides
from vacations and ruts
from the obligation to be joyful
defend joy as a certainty
defend it from rust and smut
from the famous patina of time
from dew and exploitation
by the pimps of laughter
defend joy as a right
defend it from God and winter
from uppercase and the casket
from surnames and the pity
of chance
and of joy too.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 4, 2025 is:
Yankee • \YANG-kee\ • noun
Yankee can refer broadly to anyone born or living in the U.S., more narrowly to only those in the northern U.S., or even more narrowly to only those in the states of New England. The broadest use is especially common outside the U.S.
// It took the children some time to adjust to being the only Southerners in a classroom full of Yankees.
// After years of international travel, he'd grown accustomed to living as a Yankee abroad.
"Anthony Pettaway's coworkers at Norfab Ducting have known for the past six years he was good at getting their deliveries to the right department. They also knew from his accent that the receivables department employee was a relocated Yankee." — Jill Doss-Raines, The Dispatch (Lexington, NC), 10 June 2025
Did you know?
We don't know the origin of Yankee but we do know that it began as an insult. British General James Wolfe used the term in a 1758 letter to express his low opinion of the New England troops assigned to him, and from around the same time period there is a report of British troops using Yankee as a term of abuse for the citizens of Boston. In 1775, however, after the battles of Lexington and Concord showed that colonials could stand up to British regulars, Yankee was proudly adopted by colonials as a self-descriptor in defiance of the pejorative use. Both derisive and respectable uses have existed ever since.
This will be my last post here. I've been writing my blog for 18 years and now is the time to step back. I’ve stopped writing the blog and come back a couple of times because so many people wanted it, but that won’t happen again, I won’t be back. I’ll continue on instagram to remain connected but I don’t know how frequent that will be.
I know some of you will be interested to know the blog's statistics.
It's been a huge task for me to keep writing but I enjoyed it most of the time. It got me a book deal with Penguin, a monthly column for the Australian Women's Weekly plus many others, and it lead me to meet so many amazing people. But now it's time for me to enjoy life without the weight of a writing commitment on my shoulders. It takes me at least an hour to write and edit my posts, photos add more time to the task.
I’ll leave the blog up for you to read in the years to come but you’ll only be able to comment for a week. Then I’ll remove the comments so spammers can’t add their rubbish (which I always delete).
I hope you were supported and encouraged every time you visited.Thank you for being here. xx
We do so love the big blue marble we call home, don’t we? But what if humans had another home, and what if it was our red and dusty space neighbor? Author E.L. Starling poses this question in the Big Idea for newest novel, Bound By Stars, thinking up possibilities about the future that are certainly dystopian, but also realistic. Follow along on a journey through the stars, and try to keep afloat as the (space)ship goes down.
E. L. STARLING:
My family rewatches Interstellar together every year, which sometimes (read: always) devolves into a heated debate about complex theories, space time, and whether “they” really were aliens or just an unfathomable combination of future human technology and a natural anomaly splicing through the multiverse. (Probably the aliens, right?)
In spring of 2022, as the credits rolled, my oldest veered off our usual set of topics and brought up a certain billionaire’s desire to terraform Mars. We all responded with eye rolls and a version of the same sentiment, “How about putting that effort into combating climate change on this planet where we already have oxygen, water, and atmosphere?”
Plus, if I’m being completely honest, even if Mars was a viable option for everyone, you can still leave me here. Reading in a car going 25 mph flips my stomach inside out. And, the vastness of the unknown is a fear I would rather not face.
But, what would that be like? What if the wealthy abandoned Earth to create a utopia 140 million miles away and left the rest of the world’s population behind? Would they really leave Earth for good? Terraforming is a long game. They would still need resources. Would they use Earth like their new planet’s remote farm and factory? There was so much to consider.
This discussion sparked an idea. Two worlds. Separated by space and socioeconomic classes.
As my family members scattered, I was building the dystopia in my mind: After the Earth is ravaged by climate change, the population decimated, and society reshaped, the wealthy still control the resources, but they’ve drilled for water, built infrastructure, and established a safe haven in luxurious habitat cities on Mars.
The dynamics of the world set up the perfect main characters: two people from different classes and different planets. And what if they were teenagers in this world— still required to manage school, bullies, love, homework, and their impending futures? What if I upped the stakes further and put them on a doomed starliner between their two worlds? There was The Big Idea: YA Titanic-in-space.
Enter Jupiter Dalloway and Weslie Fleet. Jupiter is from Mars. Born at the top of society. The heir to a multi-trillion-dollar company. Unsatisfied with his predetermined future. Weslie’s from Earth. Hardened by a life of struggle and injustice. Full of confidence and armed with the attitude to call out Jupiter’s alarming privilege. Both of them seventeen, on the tailend of adolescence. Two people who learn to appreciate and celebrate each other’s differences despite the backdrop of a complex and oppressive world.
Choosing to write Bound by Stars as a YA novel was a conscious endeavor for me. At that age, you’re near adulthood, but still not fully in control of your own life. There are people who dictate the basics of your day to day, but you’re the one expected to make decisions about your future. High school graduation, college, the rest of your life is just around the bend in the road ahead. You’re shaped by every heartbreak, moment of triumph, cruel word, and act of kindness. And all the emotions inside you are bigger, stronger, more passionate. The future feels open. Possible. Big. Scary.
I love celebrating this multitude for joy, hope, injustice, and even sadness. In my opinion, this is great insight into why we often throw teenager characters into dystopian stories. While sometimes labeled as “overly emotional” or “out of control,” that “too much-ness” of adolescence is human emotion at its absolute fullest capacity. I can’t help but respect someone who can experience heartbreak like a life-ending blow and still care about their friends, show up for band practice, sing their heart out in a theater production, and write that 5-page essay due at the end of the week.
And on top of it all—today’s youth are growing up with a true fear of climate change and developing an understanding of the dangers of unfettered capitalism in real time, while being asked “What do you want to do with your life after high school?”
Of course, the compelling lightbulb of “Titanic-in-space” was fun and romantic: a chance to create parallels to an epic love story in a high-stake situation. But there was a level deeper. Underneath the outrageous opulence of the ship headed for Mars, sharp banter between characters from different worlds, slow-burn romance, and an action-packed, “there aren’t enough lifeboats (or escape pods in this case)” climax, Bound by Stars is a story about relatable, young characters navigating life in bleak future landscape. After all, dystopian novels can reflect the complexities of existing in this stage of life, while—hopefully—offering a bit of hope and inspiration.
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 3, 2025 is:
desultory • \DEH-sul-tor-ee\ • adjective
Desultory is a formal word used to describe something that lacks a plan or purpose, or that occurs without regularity. It can also describe something unconnected to a main subject, or something that is disappointing in progress, performance, or quality.
// After graduation, I moved from job to job in a more or less desultory manner before finding work I liked.
// The team failed to cohere over the course of the season, stumbling to a desultory fifth place finish.
“One other guy was in the waiting room when I walked in. As we sat there past the scheduled time of our appointments, we struck up a desultory conversation. Like me, he’d been in the hiring process for years, had driven down from Albuquerque the night before, and seemed nervous. He asked if I’d done any research on the polygraph. I said no, and asked him the same question. He said no. We were getting our first lies out of the way.” — Justin St. Germain, “The Memoirist and the Lie Detector,” New England Review, 2024
Did you know?
The Latin adjective desultorius was used by the ancient Romans to describe a circus performer (called a desultor) whose trick was to leap from horse to horse without stopping. English speakers took the idea of the desultorius performer and coined the word desultory to describe that which figuratively “jumps” from one thing to another, without regularity, and showing no sign of a plan or purpose. (Both desultor and desultorius, by the way, come from the Latin verb salire, meaning “to leap.”) A desultory conversation leaps from one topic to another, and a desultory comment is one that jumps away from the topic at hand. Meanwhile a desultory performance is one resulting from an implied lack of steady, focused effort.
We are not always able to see original Bloomsbury art in person, but yesterday I got a look at several pieces exhibited at the Tate Britain. Bell, Grant, Gertler They include paintings by Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister; Duncan Grant, Bell’s friend and lover who lived with her at Charleston; and Mark Gertler, who became […]
Over the years I have passed through Cooma a few times on the way down south, but last year I had a couple of hours in the town and was able to explore beyond the highway. Cooma is located on the junction of the Monaro and Snowy Mountains highways, which link Canberra, the coast and the mountains. It is about 400 km southwest of Sydney, with a population of approximately 7000. The area now known as Cooma is on the traditional lands of the Ngarigo people.
Cooma Post Office, circa 1872
At the time of my visit, the Cooma Post Office was still operating out of these premises in Vale Street. The building was constructed in 1872, and was located on the main thoroughfare of the town at the time. It was designed by NSW Colonial Architect James Barnet, who also designed the courthouse and gaol shown below. In the past couple of months, the post office has relocated due to the building no longer being fit for purpose.
Cooma Courthouse, circa 1886
There are three heritage areas in Cooma recognised by the National Trust, including the Court House precinct, built in the 1860s. There had been gold discovered at Kiandra in 1859, and this boosted the population and business opportunities in Cooma. The current courthouse was constructed from 1885-1888 using locally quarried granite. It replaced the previous Barnet building, erected in 1864, which is the Cooma Police Station.
Signage at the entrance to the Corrective Services NSW Museum, Cowra
Further along Vale Street is the Cooma Correctional Centre. Cooma Gaol was built in the 1870s and originally housed up to 100 prisoners. Similar to Berrima Gaol, it was used for other purposes over the decades, including an insane asylum and a secure storage facility for materials for the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme. From 2001, it reopened as a medium/minimum security centre. Adjacent to the Correctional Centre is the NSW State Correctional Museum, which has an extensive collection of information, artefacts, and displays from convict days to present times. Guided tours are available, and whilst I found it interesting, it was also quite confronting.
St Patrick’s Parish School, Cooma (former Brigidine Convent)
One of the most striking buildings in Cooma, which has many heritage buildings of note, is the Brigidine Convent. It was completed in 1884, and was home to the Brigidine sisters. There was a school at the convent until 1929, when it was moved and renamed St Patrick’s School. A brief history of the order’s arrival in Australia, and establishment at Cooma, can be read here.
View from Nanny Goat Hill, Cowra
This was one of my favourite diversions as I wandered around Cooma. Nanny Goat Hill Lookout offers panoramic views of Cooma and the surrounding districts. The sculpture of a nanny goat was a delight, and was created by local artist, the late Chris Graham. Graham also played an important role in the erection of the Mosaic Time Walk, which can be glimpsed in the photo at the top of the post. Lookouts offer a different perspective of a town, and this one reminded me of the Billy Goat Hill lookout at Cowra.
Cooma has become a popular tourist stop for travellers on their way to the snowfields in winter, and nature adventures in the warmer months. These are just some of the many points of interest in Cooma. Have you had a chance to explore Cooma?
Whilst I was perusing the produce section at Kroger last week, I came across a watermelon. Not just any watermelon, though. Private Selection’s “Black Diamond” watermelons. I figured since y’all seemed to enjoy my orange review, you might want the skinny on this here watermelon, as well:
Unlike the Sugar Gem oranges, this watermelon was sweeter than a regular ol’ watermelon. Not only that, but the label boasts a rich, red flesh. I thought it may have been all talk, but lo and behold it was indeed very red! I bought this one for six dollars, which is pretty much the exact same cost as a regular watermelon, and it’s roughly the same size, so I’d say you should go ahead and buy this one over the regular ones if you are someone who prefers a juicier, sweeter watermelon.
I served this watermelon to my parents, both of whom do not particularly care for watermelon, and they made a point of telling me how good this particular watermelon was and ended up eating a good bit of it when normally they probably wouldn’t have opted for any watermelon at all.
With the 4th approaching this weekend, I assume many of y’all will want to pick up a watermelon, and I think if your Kroger has these ones lying around you should give it a try! I’ve been meaning to buy another one because it’s the perfect refreshing snack during this recent heat wave.
It’s nice to try something new and actually have a good experience with it. Those Sugar Gem oranges may have been a bust, but this Black Diamond Watermelon is definitely a winner in my book.
Do you like watermelon? If you don’t, would you be willing to give this one a try based on my parents’ reaction to it? Do you have fun plans for the 4th? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human experience — moss on a rock, a salty summer evening at the ocean’s edge, a lover’s kiss — to a purely visual representation on a two-dimensional screen, it matters all the more that we train our vision to see beyond the veneer of the visible.
It is hardly surprising, given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness, that how we look at the world — what we choose to bring into consciousness — shapes what we see, which in turn shapes the world we make in the image of our vision. This is why we call visionaries the people who see sides and paths others do not, who catch in the prism of their consciousness the light of the world invisible to the rest and cast it back magnified, more luminous, iridescent with possibility.
The pioneering modernist poet H.D. (September 10, 1886–September 27, 1961) was such a person, and one who saw deeply into the nature of the prism itself, who located the seer’s vision not in the mind but in what she called the “over-mind.”
H.D.
Born in Pennsylvania as Hilda Doolittle, the daughter of an astronomer who liked to say that “his one girl was worth all his five boys put together,” she grew up watching her father magnify stars through his telescope and her grandfather — a marine biologist — magnify cells under his microscope. Here were layers of reality, bright and dazzling, beyond what was visible to the eye, lavishing with wonder those who have the right instruments. Such an experience at so formative an age can’t but reveal the mind itself as an instrument for gaging reality, its lens polished by our experience, its focus the making and unmaking of our lives, and all of it, all of it, not above the body but of it. H.D. would devote her life to undoing the damage Descartes has done to our cultural mythos, insisting instead on the synthesis of body and mind, of spirituality and sexuality, of love and reason.
In 1919, catatonic with grief in the aftermath of a miscarriage and a world war that had slain both her father and her brother, having barely survived the Spanish Flu herself, H.D. took refuge on the Scilly Islands on her way to Greece with her newborn baby and the woman who would become her partner for the remainder of her life — the novelist, poet, and magazine editor Bryher. There amid the lapping blue waves and lush subtropical gardens of a natural world so breathtaking it seems almost supernatural, enveloped in her lover’s intellectual kinship and passionate devotion, she started coming back to life. And, as such resuscitations of élan vital tend to do, some inner veil lifted one day to leave her feeling a profound participancy in the streaming life of the universe. At the center of it was a revelation about the nature of vision, which H.D. recorded in a series of shamanic diary fragments published long after her death as Notes on Thought and Vision (public library).
She identifies three “states or manifestations of life” — the body, the mind, and the “over-mind,” bearing echoes of Emerson’s notion of the “Oversoul,” that faculty for contacting what the transcendentalists’ hero Goethe called “the All.” The highest achievement of human development, she observes, is “equilibrium, balance, growth of the three at once” — a brain without embodiment is “a disease comparable to cancerous growth or tumor” (what a prophetic indictment of AI), a body without a mind is “an empty fibrous bundle of glands,” and an over-mind without the other two is madness. A healthy body, therefore, is not a conglomeration of certain parts, abilities, and attributes, but a harmonious integration with the mind, just as a healthy mind is not a checklist of cognitive capacities but a harmonious integration with the body, and out of these twin harmonies arises the vision of the over-mind.
Swimming in the cerulean womb of the world, she finds a metaphor — or a metaphor finds her — for the essence of the over-mind:
That over-mind seems a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jellyfish, or anemone.
Into that over-mind, thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.
The over-mind is the superorganism of the psyche, pulsating with “super-feelings”:
These feelings extend out and about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jellyfish reach out and about him. They are not of different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jellyfish feelers are the jellyfish itself, elongated in fine threads.
Vision is of two kinds — vision of the womb and vision of the brain. In vision of the brain, the region of consciousness is above and about the head; when the centre of consciousness shifts and the jellyfish is in the body… we have vision of the womb or love-vision.
The majority of dream and of ordinary vision is of the womb.
The brain and the womb are both centers of consciousness, equally important.
Lamenting that the creative culture of her time was already suffering from the debilitating brain bias that only metastasized in our own era, she shines an optimistic gleam into the future:
I believe there are artists coming in the next generation, some of whom will have the secret of using their over-minds.
But nothing feeds the over-mind more, nothing reveals it and anneals it more, than love. The world deepens and broadens and begins to shimmer when we are in love precisely because the experience embodies us and enminds us at the same time, touching the total person with its light. Surely drawing on her experience of falling in love with Bryher, which had come unbidden like a rainbow after a summer storm, H.D. considers how this happens:
We begin with sympathy of thought.
The minds of the two lovers merge, interact in sympathy of thought.
The brain, inflamed and excited by this interchange of ideas, takes on its character of over-mind, becomes… a jellyfish, placed over and about the brain.
The love-region is excited by the appearance or beauty of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character of mind, becomes this womb-brain or love-brain… a jellyfish in the body.
The love-brain and over-brain are both capable of thought. This thought is vision… The over-mind is like a lens of an opera-glass. When we are able to use this over-mind lens, the whole world of vision is open to us… The love-mind and the over-mind are two lenses. When these lenses are properly adjusted, focused, they bring the world of vision into consciousness. The two work separately, perceive separately, yet make one picture.
My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.
But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.
All it takes to recreate the old stale world, she insists, are just a few creative kindreds who entwine their vision:
Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.
Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Listen to the author reading this blog post. by Liz Walter When my dear Granny had completed a task to her satisfaction, she used to exclaim, ‘That’s a good job jobbed!’ Although she wasn’t the only person to use this phrase, it’s pretty rare, so this post will cover some much more common ways …
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Unlike the Sugar Gem oranges, this watermelon was sweeter than a regular ol’ watermelon. Not only that, but the label boasts a rich, red flesh. I thought it may have been all talk, but lo and behold it was indeed very red! I bought this one for six dollars, which is pretty much the exact same cost as a regular watermelon, and it’s roughly the same size, so I’d say you should go ahead and buy this one over the regular ones if you are someone who prefers a juicier, sweeter watermelon.
