The Nana nana nana nana Rises.
“The sun rises in the West” lmfao
(Source: tiissam, via meditating-leo)
Mornings
I woke up.
I do not think that strikes you as massively as it does me. To know that I am awake, that my blood still vehemently pulses from the tiniest toe on my feet to the epicenter of my body. To know that I am alive, it’s something else.
Poets talk about how amazing it is, how depressing it is, how mundane and worthless it is, how fundamental and sound it is. Life itself, sure, I can see being all those and more. Life can be pretty exciting, and it can be pretty mirthful. Don’t you ever feel like that, happy, joyous, cheery, with sparkles in your eyes? Don’t you feel like prancing from one room to the next as if you were a ballerina knowing full-well that you are not despite all the times you have tried to stand on your tip-toes like all the experienced ballerinas?
Now, could you believe that there are people in this world who find that exact feeling devilish, fruitless? As if endless happiness was not the end-goal but a relentless obstacle!
On the other end, life can also be boring, uneventful. I am quite sure the lot of us have felt that way, maybe once or twice in our childhoods when we could not go outside and were forced to stay inside by the dictum of our overlords or even into our later years where we lose touch with the people we were once close with. We become alone. One might call such a life solitary, but another might call it a prison. The masses might call it every-day occurrences, and an interest group (or two) might call it sign of mass obedience to a flawed ideology.
What have you, reader, life is nothing. They say you make it into what you will, but I do not think that; you do not make it. No one makes life. You do not intentionally lose friends, become alone or happy. You are to simply be awake, conscious of your surroundings, and you are to build upon it, like a road across a void-like plain. Brick by brick, you set it, you make it known to you, and bit by bit, that void becomes less of an abyss and more of what you know as your own experiences.
With that said, I say it once again:
I woke up, and holy fuck does it feel fantastic.
As a New Zealander I thought it was high time I posted some archaeology a bit closer to home.
A very important Pacific archaeological site located on the south eastern coast of Raiatea, French Polynesia -the Taputapuatea Marae.
For those of you who don’t know, a marae is a sacred religious gathering place in Polynesian societies. This particular marae was already established by 1000 AD, and was once known as the religious centre and central temple of Eastern Polynesia. Here, people such as priests and navigators would meet to share knowledge and preform sacrifices to the gods.
Member of the Moari iwi Te Rangi Hīroa (anthropologist, politician), upon visiting the site in 1929 was overcome with grief due to the state of the once great marae, and consequently wrote:
I had made my pilgrimage to Taputapu-atea, but the dead could not speak to me. It was sad to the verge of tears. I felt a profound regret, a regret for — I knew not what. Was it for the beating of the temple drums or the shouting of the populace as the king was raised on high? Was it for the human sacrifices of olden times? It was for none of these individually but for something at the back of them all, some living spirit and divine courage that existed in ancient times of which Taputapu-atea was a mute symbol. It was something that we Polynesians have lost and cannot find, something that we yearn for and cannot recreate. The background in which that spirit was engendered has changed beyond recovery. The bleak wind of oblivion had swept over Opoa. Foreign weeds grew over the untended courtyard, and stones had fallen from the sacred altar of Taputapu-atea. The gods had long ago departed.
(ref: D. Hanlon, Voyaging Through the Contemporary Pacific)
Fortunately, as of 1994, the archaeological remains of Taputapuatea has been restored, and is currently being pushed to become a recognized United Nations World Heritage site.
Photos courtesy & taken by Pierre Lesage.
(via meditating-leo)
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
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NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants | Politics and Law - CNET News
If this is true, then it was—help me out here, is there any way to characterize it more charitably than calling it a “lie”—okay, a lie, when President Obama said, “No one is listening to your telephone conversations.” So let’s hope Nadler got it wrong, because I don’t want to believe that what he’s saying is accurate, and I don’t want to believe that the President would so directly lie to the public about an issue of this significance.
(via jeffmiller)(via jeffmiller)
I really don’t understand why people think men have no body image issues
I’ve never met a man who has felt confident and sexy in his body. The media tells women that they are divine and beautiful and works of art. It tells them that they need to be this way, and makes them diet and obsess about it.
The media tells men that we are big and hairy and smelly, that women are out of our league, that it’s ridiculous they find us attractive, that we should to grateful to them if they have sex with us, that we need to repay them for that chore. It tells us that we are this way, and no amount of dieting will change that. It tells us to give up.
The old adage is true — writing is rewriting. But it takes a kind of courage to confront your own awfulness (and you will be awful) and realize that, if you sleep on it, you can come back and bang at the thing some more, and it will be less awful. And then you sleep again, and bang even more, and you have something middling. Then you sleep some more, and bang, and you get something that is actually coherent. Hopefully when you are done you have a piece that reasonably approximates the music in your head. And some day, having done that for years, perhaps you will get something that is even better than the music in your head. Becoming a better writer means becoming a re-writer. But that first phase is so awful that most people don’t want any part.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates on the process of evolving your writing. (via thepoliticalnotebook)
