Sorry for taking up all the space in this thread but I see quotes I really like all the time
Sorry for taking up all the space in this thread but I see quotes I really like all the time
We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.
Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.
Tim Kreider, I Know What You Think of Me
Jenny Holzer’s famous truism “Protect me from what I want” renders in a very precise way the fundamental ambiguity of the hysterical position. It can either be read as an ironic reference to the standard male chauvinist wisdom that a woman, when left to herself, gets caught in the self-destructive fury, so that she must be protected from herself by the benevolent male domination: “Protect me from the excessive self-destructive desire in me that I myself am not able to dominate.” Or it can be read in a more radical way, as pointing towards the fact that in today’s patriarchal society, woman’s desire is radically alienated, that she desires what men expect her to desire, that she desires to be desired by men. In this case, “Protect me from what I want” means “What I want, precisely when I seem to formulate my authentic innermost longing, is already imposed on me by the patriarchal order that tells me what to desire, so the first condition of my liberation is that I break up the vicious cycle of my alienated desire and learn to formulate my desire in an autonomous way.
Slavoj Žižek, How To Read Lacan
Yeah. I really like this. Other people to people are too often either idealized or hated- we don't see the complexity.We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.
"The only thing I can tell you is that it’s an abyss. I call this place the black hole … You probably have never seen a star? Or did you say you once saw one? And do you know anything about the cosmos? Well, a dying star can look like a hole if, when it goes out, it is affected by its own incredibly powerful energy and it starts to consume itself, taking matter from the outside to the inside, to its center, which is becoming smaller all the time, but more dense and heavier. And the denser it becomes, the more its force of gravity grows. This process is irreversible and it’s like an avalanche: with the ever increasing gravity, the growing quantity of matter is drawn faster and faster to the heart of the monster. At a certain stage, its power achieves such magnitudes that it sucks in its neighbors, and all the matter that is located within the bounds of its influence, and finally, even light waves. The gigantic force allows it to devour the rays of other suns, and the space around it is dead and black - nothing that falls into its possession has the strength to pull itself away. This is a star of darkness, a black sun, and around it is only cold and darkness."
A Poem for Father's Day:
THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden, 1913 - 1980
One idea central to understanding subjectivity is that the self is constructed in ordinary speech (Lacan, 1977b: 245). That is, we draw on discourse to construct our identity in everyday conversations. The self we so construct is a fundamentally alienated one (Lacan, 1988b: 210) because when we draw on discourse we always draw on a symbolic order, the linguistic conventions handed down through generations (Fink, 1995: 5), that is not of our own making.
To fulfill our desires we have to express ourselves in the symbolic and the symbolic is the order of others, or as Lacan put it, the order of a generic otherness also called the big Other (Lacan, 1977b: 206). In the symbolic, there is always something missing. What is missing is what we really want to express, a reflection of our true selves and our true desires (Lacan, 1988b: 210). This is lost from the symbolic as the real that we can never get back, as that which we gave up when we were born into the social order of the symbolic (Verhaeghe, 2001: 24).
We try to cover up this lack by constructing an imaginary order (Lacan, 1988b: 177), our illusion of the real, where we pretend the symbolic is the real and we can say what we want, know who we are and therefore get what we want (Muller and Richardson, 1982: 22). Unfortunately, this imaginary construction is routinely disrupted whenever fundamental lack surfaces (Lacan, 1977b: 276).
From a Lacanian perspective listening to such disruptions is crucial. By listening to ambiguities, tangents, omissions, contradictions and other failed rhetorical constructions (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986: 13), we hear how subjects are experiencing fundamental lack as a presence they continue to circle in their own unique and creative fashion (Verhaeghe, 1999: 247).
The stressed subject: Lack, empowerment and liberation’, Michaela Driver
Organization 2014, Vol 21(1) 90 –105 © The Author(s) 2012, org.sagepub.com
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
In general, emotional ties are very important to human beings. But they still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree. Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible.
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
"He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul."
"Dreams are the most curious asides and soliloquies of the soul. When a man recollects his dream, it is like meeting the ghost of himself. Dreams often surprise us into the strangest self-knowledge.... Dreaming is the truest confessional, and often the sharpest penance."
~Alexander Smith (1829–1867), "On Dreams and Dreaming"
"That which the dream shows is the shadow of such wisdom as exists in man, even if during his waking state he may know nothing about it.... We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself."
~Paracelsus, quoted in The Dream Game
"Last night—I cannot know which way it came
Or what star-way it went—
There was a little dream without a name
That left my soul content..."
~Margaret Widdemer (1884–1978), "The Joyous Dream," The Factories, With Other Lyrics, 1915
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
“Who was the fool, who was the wise man, beggar or king?"
"Whether poor or rich, all’s the same in death.”
„Man can do what he wants but he cannot want what he wants.“
– Arthur Schopenhauer
So Here’s To You, Mrs. Robinson
jesus loves you more, oh nevermind–
we have bad news, we have an empty pool, we have a shadowy boy
in the foyer looking to you to wave a hand
in the general direction of a reasonable next move
it’s unforgiving but you knew this–every woman ends up alone
we tell ourselves we know better, shudder internally at a car moving like an ocean down the black of street before your house
and hope it’s someone who can tell and steal us back
at 2 am you try at urgency, sincerity
but maybe that’s just what this time of night
does to everybody
i think i’ve met you, mrs. robinson
you spilled a drink on yourself at a house show in my best friend’s basement
and cried about your boyfriend in a stranger’s lap
there is a vague ‘better’ in your peripherals, you lean on it
to push you into the various rooms your life allows for now
you are running out of reasons to believe yourself, you did not anticipate
understanding this much of what the world is about
so here’s to you, mrs robinson, i’ve been told i’m angry
but trying to impose order on a chaotic universe is totally
a square-peg-round-hole situation
what are people like us supposed to do?
i think another amble down the long foyer of adolescence
does everybody a little good
it’s so relieving to live in that guileless realm where we are still learning
so every time it stings a little less knowing we have that immortal excuse
we didnt mean it–we know it’s bad
but we didnt know it would look like that
http://kaaatemoooonnnica.tumblr.com/...u-mrs-robinson
"'And I saw remnants of many a strange
shadow too. Did you know stars
.............................................."'have
shadows?
................"'They do. And can you
....imagine what it feels like to walk
.........upon the shadow
.............................................."'of a day?
"'I can’t but I don’t have to.
Acquainted with the Night
By Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the Night
--------
I walked a mile with Pleasure, She chatted all the way, But left me none the wiser For all she had to say. I walked a mile with Sorrow, And ne'er word said she But, oh, the things I learned from her When Sorrow walked with me!
Robert Browning Hamilton
------------
Metamorphoses: The Creation of the World ~ Ovid
Of bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
'Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc'd from Nature's birth, to Caesar's times.
Before the seas, and this terrestrial ball,
And Heav'n's high canopy, that covers all,
One was the face of Nature; if a face:
Rather a rude and indigested mass:
A lifeless lump, unfashion'd, and unfram'd,
Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam'd.
No sun was lighted up, the world to view;
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew:
Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky,
Nor pois'd, did on her own foundations lye:
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.
No certain form on any was imprest;
All were confus'd, and each disturb'd the rest.
For hot and cold were in one body fixt;
And soft with hard, and light with heavy mixt.
But God, or Nature, while they thus contend,
To these intestine discords put an end:
Then earth from air, and seas from earth were driv'n,
And grosser air sunk from aetherial Heav'n.
Thus disembroil'd, they take their proper place;
The next of kin, contiguously embrace;
And foes are sunder'd, by a larger space.
The force of fire ascended first on high,
And took its dwelling in the vaulted sky:
Then air succeeds, in lightness next to fire;
Whose atoms from unactive earth retire.
Earth sinks beneath, and draws a num'rous throng
Of pondrous, thick, unwieldy seeds along.
About her coasts, unruly waters roar;
And rising, on a ridge, insult the shore.
Thus when the God, whatever God was he,
Had form'd the whole, and made the parts agree,
That no unequal portions might be found,
He moulded Earth into a spacious round:
Then with a breath, he gave the winds to blow;
And bad the congregated waters flow.
He adds the running springs, and standing lakes;
And bounding banks for winding rivers makes.
Some part, in Earth are swallow'd up, the most
In ample oceans, disembogu'd, are lost.
He shades the woods, the vallies he restrains
With rocky mountains, and extends the plains.
And as five zones th' aetherial regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign'd:
The sun with rays, directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:
The two beneath the distant poles, complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt th' extreams, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.
The fields of liquid air, inclosing all,
Surround the compass of this earthly ball:
The lighter parts lye next the fires above;
The grosser near the watry surface move:
Thick clouds are spread, and storms engender there,
And thunder's voice, which wretched mortals fear,
And winds that on their wings cold winter bear.
Nor were those blustring brethren left at large,
On seas, and shores, their fury to discharge:
Bound as they are, and circumscrib'd in place,
They rend the world, resistless, where they pass;
And mighty marks of mischief leave behind;
Such is the rage of their tempestuous kind.
First Eurus to the rising morn is sent
(The regions of the balmy continent);
And Eastern realms, where early Persians run,
To greet the blest appearance of the sun.
Westward, the wanton Zephyr wings his flight;
Pleas'd with the remnants of departing light:
Fierce Boreas, with his off-spring, issues forth
T' invade the frozen waggon of the North.
While frowning Auster seeks the Southern sphere;
And rots, with endless rain, th' unwholsom year.
High o'er the clouds, and empty realms of wind,
The God a clearer space for Heav'n design'd;
Where fields of light, and liquid aether flow;
Purg'd from the pondrous dregs of Earth below.
Scarce had the Pow'r distinguish'd these, when streight
The stars, no longer overlaid with weight,
Exert their heads, from underneath the mass;
And upward shoot, and kindle as they pass,
And with diffusive light adorn their heav'nly place.
Then, every void of Nature to supply,
With forms of Gods he fills the vacant sky:
New herds of beasts he sends, the plains to share:
New colonies of birds, to people air:
And to their oozy beds, the finny fish repair.
A creature of a more exalted kind
Was wanting yet, and then was Man design'd:
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire form'd, and fit to rule the rest:
Whether with particles of heav'nly fire
The God of Nature did his soul inspire,
Or Earth, but new divided from the sky,
And, pliant, still retain'd th' aetherial energy:
Which wise Prometheus temper'd into paste,
And, mixt with living streams, the godlike image cast.
Thus, while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft; and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.
From such rude principles our form began;
And earth was metamorphos'd into Man.
Improving your happiness and changing your personality for the better
Jungian theory is not grounded in empirical data (pdf file)
The case against type dynamics (pdf file)
Cautionary comments regarding the MBTI (pdf file)
Reinterpreting the MBTI via the five-factor model (pdf file)
Do the Big Five personality traits interact to predict life outcomes? (pdf file)
The Big Five personality test outperformed the Jungian and Enneagram test in predicting life outcomes
Evidence of correlations between human partners based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of traits
"Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft star that shines at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there; I did not die"
The general who is skilled in defense hides in the most secret recesses of the earth; he who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven.
-- art of war
Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated.[…]
I have only to adduce examples for my proposition: everybody will grant that they confirm it. A murderer is led to the place of execution. For the common populace he is nothing but a murderer. Ladies perhaps remark that he is a strong, handsome, interesting man. The populace finds this remark terrible: What? A murderer handsome? How can one think so wickedly and call a murderer handsome; no doubt, you yourselves are something not much better! This is the corruption of morals that is prevalent in the upper classes, a priest may add, knowing the bottom of things and human hearts.
One who knows men traces the development of the criminal’s mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relationship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became embittered against the social order — a first reaction to this that in effect expelled him and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime. — There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer! […]
This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.
GWF Hegel, Who Thinks Abstractly?
O wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
translation by Roger Pulvers
The phenomenon called I
Is a single blue illumination
Of a presupposed organic alternating current lamp
(a composite body of each and every transparent spectre)
The single illumination
Of karma’s alternating current lamp
Remains alight without fail
Flickering unceasingly, restlessly
Together with the sights of the land and all else
(the light is preserved…the lamp itself is lost)
These poems are a mental sketch formed faithfully
Passage by passage of light and shade
Maintained and preserved to this point
Brought together in paper and mineral ink
From the directions sensed as past
For these twenty-two months
(the totality flickers in time with me
all sensing all that I sense)
People and galaxies and ashura and sea urchins
Will think up new ontological proofs as they see them
Consuming their cosmic dust…and breathing in salt water and air
In the end all of these make up a landscape of the heart
I assure you, however, that the scenes recorded here
Are scenes recorded solely in their natural state
And if this is nihil then it is nothing but nihil
And the totality is common in degree to all of us
(just as everything forms what is the sum in me
so do all parts become the sum of everything)
These words were meant to be transcribed truthfully
In the monstrous bright accumulation of time
Of the present geological era
Yet they have gone ahead and altered their construct and quality
In what amounts to a mere point of contrasted light
(or alternatively a billion years of ashura)
Now it is possible that both the printer and I
Have been sharing a certain turn of mind
Causing us to sense these unaltered
In all probability just as we are aware of our own sense organs
And of scenery and of people through feeling
And just as what is is but what we sense is common
So it is that documents and history…or the Earth’s past
Are nothing but what we have become conscious of
Along with their divers data
(at the root of the karmic qualifications of space-time)
For all I know in two thousand years from now
An appropriately different geology will be applied
With fitting proofs revealed one after another from the past
And everyone will surmise that some two thousand years before
The blue sky was awash with colorless peacocks
And rising scholars will excavate superb fossils
From regions glittering with iced nitrogen
In the very upper reaches of the atmosphere
Or they might just stumble
Upon the giant footsteps of translucent man
In a stratified plane of Cretaceous sandstone
The proposition that you have before you are without exception
Asserted within the confines of a four-dimensional continuum
As the nature of the mental state and time in and of themselves
The only natural responses to vulnerability are love and violence.
—Elisa Gabbert
Invictus
William Ernest Henley, 1849 - 1903
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
among the Untrodden Ways
By William Wordsworth
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
Wild is the music of autumnal winds Amongst the faded woods.
William Wordsworth
Define loneliness?
Yes.
It’s what we can’t do for each other.
-Claudia Rankine
Improving your happiness and changing your personality for the better
Jungian theory is not grounded in empirical data (pdf file)
The case against type dynamics (pdf file)
Cautionary comments regarding the MBTI (pdf file)
Reinterpreting the MBTI via the five-factor model (pdf file)
Do the Big Five personality traits interact to predict life outcomes? (pdf file)
The Big Five personality test outperformed the Jungian and Enneagram test in predicting life outcomes
Evidence of correlations between human partners based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of traits
People who’ve Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I’m touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself and did not wait for salvation, you’d be self-sufficient. How dull.
Marya Hornbacher, Wasted
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life–its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness–conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is more important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all … In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
—Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”
------------------
For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child’s boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.
And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.
It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else.
I would have done anything to feel real again.
—Gillian Fynn, Gone Girl
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." - J. Robert Oppenheimer
"Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't." - Stephen King
"Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
“Life sucks, but in a beautiful kind of way.”
“Is the sky painted?” Isidore asked. “Are there really brush strokes that show up under magnification?”
“Yes,” Mercer said.
“I can’t see them.”
“You’re too close,” Mercer said. “You have to be a long way off, the way the androids are. They have better perspective.”
"If wishes were horses the English language would seem to be unraveling."
All I have in this world are my balls and my word And you can't have my fucking balls. No way.
A trigger warning is a spoiler alert for reality.
"Labor costs" is the answer to every political and economic question.
I hear it's very debatable as to whether fish actually feel pain, and many scientists believe they don't have that neurological capacity. So I guess in this case the catfish just feels a bit sad or something. Maybe an emotion like, bloop bloop bloop.
it is the responsibility of the older generation to take the bullet so that the younger generation has a chance. This is why CEOs step down and generals resign, it isn't simply that "they are ultimately responsible" but that it is their job is to throw themselves on the grenade so that the area is cleared for everyone else, and if your CEO or general or father isn't willing to do that, then you don't actually have a CEO or general or father, you have a politician.
Projection is ordinary. Person A projects at person B, hoping tovalidate something about person A by the response of person B. However, person B, not wanting to be an obejct of someone elses ego and guarding against existential terror constructs a personality which protects his ego and maintain a certain sense of a robust and real self that is different and separate from person A. Sadly, this robust and real self, cut off by defenses of character from the rest of the world, is quite vulnerable and fragile given that it is imaginary and propped up through external feed back. Person B is dimly aware of this and defends against it all the more, even desperately projecting his anxieties back onto person A, with the hope of shoring up his ego with salubrious validation. All of this happens without A or B acknowledging it, of course. Because to face up to it consciously is shocking, in that this is all anybody is doing or can do and it seems absurd when you realize how pathetic it is.