Literature

Literature is born when something 
in life goes slightly adrift.

Simone de Beauvoir

in Park Honan's Jane Austen: Her Life

2903

Fair well to an old and dear friend.

Where's a girl to go home to now?

Lifestyle choices?

I'm a pretty healthy eater and doer, but I have always found those super obnoxious folks with vegan-healthiness-environmental-agendas to be a bit silly. And, as I have always believed, our bodies are still turning out the same; it seems healthy-rhetoric can only get you so far-

"The first is a chemical engineer who works directly in the synthesis of compounds added to plastics to give them desired properties such as flexibility and hardness. By some analyses, this person has taken on voluntary risks related to the workplace; furthermore, this person is protected by federal and state regulations governing chemical exposure and worker safety.

The second is a vegan environmentalist who works in a natural foods store and enjoys hiking in national parks. This person makes lifestyle choices to avoid exposure to synthetic chemicals and reasonably assumes that federal laws regulating the introduction of new chemicals ensure safety under normal conditions.

Yet when their blood is tested, they have similar levels- measured at parts per billion- of compounds known to cause harm as much higher doses. How should they interpret this finding?"

Source: Arthur Daemmrich, "Forum: Risk Frameworks and Biomonitoring: Distributed Regulation of Synthetic Chemicals in Humans," in Environmental History

Continue to treat your bodies well, but switch your rhetoric that asks not where your chickens are being raised, but instead about the nation that is raising them, the industries that create your iphones, cars, wars, and builds your homes. Think bigger.

French Press

my baby french press

makes coffee so much nicer

War

"War is merely the continuation of policy by other means."

Carl von Clausewitz

in The Dominion of War, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton

seal it

I like to melt a wax seal onto my letters.

It seems to please my sense of history and romance.

logistics

If I let them,

the logistics of life

might swallow me entire.