Megan

“Recently, I’ve discovered something troubling about myself, that it’s the wanting that I actually yearn for. The only exciting part of life is the part where the Thing hasn’t happened yet, where I’m still chasing it. When we want something, we’re living in a fantasy of having that thing—whether that’s a person, success, a new job, whatever—”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I’ve spent more than a decade examining why I feel this insatiable need for attention and external gratification, to make people laugh, to feel seen and noticed and understood; trying to make sense of why nothing I ever do or say or create feels good enough without a financial reward or widespread appreciation, things I’ve tied to my own self-worth, which I can’t seem to untether. But how can I? Once you tie anything to survival, especially in those adolescent years, untangling that knot is tough stuff.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“There is one thing that—even if it were considered essential—no student movement or urban revolt or global protest or what have you would ever be able to do. And that is to occupy the football field on a Sunday.The very idea sounds ironic and absurd; try saying it in public and people will laugh in your face. Propose it seriously and you will be shunned as a provocateur. Not for the obvious reason, which is that, while a horde of students can fling Molotov cocktails on the jeeps of any police force, and at most (because of the laws, the necessity of national unity, the prestige of the state), no more than forty students will be killed; an attack on a sports field would surely cause the massacre of the attackers, indiscriminate, total slaughter carried out by self-respecting citizens aghast at the outrage.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

“Here, then, is another proposition: The medium is not the message; the message becomes what the receiver makes of it, applying to it his own codes of reception, which are neither those of the sender nor those of the scholar of communications.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality