Madye Stromboli > Recent Status Updates

“Nothing that weighs as little as a Ping-Pong ball can be lethal, yet when Jerry whacked that thing murder couldn’t have been far from his mind.”

Oh you want to read about Don Corleone? Maybe his immediate family? Well all I've got is a gross chapter about a girlfriend's "weak pelvic floor" and the surgery that followed, will that do? It's got really out of pocket male behavior and a woman that is of course so chill, excited even, about it! Is that what you want from your book that was incredibly influential on pop culture????

so this isn't gonna be a casual read, this is gonna be a 'finish in one week' kind of reading

'To treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence, is to disown its' present value.'

One conclusion that follows that "this is it", is that striving towards sanity is never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead. ...Using sanity to refer very broadly to what if feels like to live the life you want to be living.

Treat your to do list as a menu: a list of tasks to pick from.

a good listen for cleaning the garage

If anything, it's constantly berating yourself that's the self-indulgent path. Reflecting the inner taskmaster's hubristic belief that they can bully you into doing anything, merely by shouting loudly enough. Facing up to reality means facing up to the reality of your moods, desires, and interests too.

To inquire what your life task might be, is to switch your perspective in a manner that makes it possible to think new thoughts. It permits you to dig beneath the crust of assumptions that all to easily end up governing a life: that you have no option but to continue on your current career path, or that you mustn't make choices on which others might frown...

That's why indecision can feel so oddly comfortable. Its a form of postponement - a temporary avoidance of the painful sacrifices involved. Put differently: its a way of trying to dodge the inevitability of consequences. To make a decision, any decision, is to take ownership of the situation instead.

had to switch to an audiobook because someone put a hold on my copy of the book 3

My wife vividly recalls the moment in her teens, after a childhood steeped in moviegoing, when she realized that if something obliteratingly awful were to happen to her, or to someone she loved, it wouldn't be foreshadowed by sinister film music. No: it would just happen. Anything always could.

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.

Actions don't have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that's what we already are.

...We fall into the error of believing that we somehow don't belong to the world, and must therefore spend our lives trying to earn back the right to belong. But who could ever decide we don't belong?

The main point - though it took me years to realize it - is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it's part of any system or habit or routine.

The magic of it all. The literal magic, that which exists to give a suspension of belief. That which exists to wash away the knowing of a wretched world and replace it with another. What appears when there was once nothing. What miracles a love for our people bends us toward.

When you grasp the sense in which your situation is worse than you thought, you no longer have to go through life adopting the brace position, desperately hoping someone will find a way to prevent the plane from crashing. You understand that the plane has already crashed. (It crashed, for you, the moment you were born.)

reading a chapter a day for march :-)

"In the early hours of the day after Michael Jackson died, my friends and I stumbled out of the basement of Hampton's on King at two-thirty in the morning and dragged ourselves home singing along to the cars and their open windows blaring Michael's old hits. This is how one should be laid to rest, I thought. Loud and with memories of their voice making the sky tremble."

remember when I said I was reading the physical book.... well when i had to tear away from the book to go to work I simply had to continue.... with the audio book :-)

I guess she was trying to help me, like a mother hugging her child when he’s just broken his ribs.

just woke up from an abstract dream about this book where the pattern is obvious but there is trust for mosley to make it interesting and entertaining. dreams