i'm really scared of one of my plants. it's a kumquat tree, according to james. it produces tiny citrus fruits. i've had it for two years and it's never betrayed me. last night i was sitting here and i noticed there was this huge leaf on it. this leaf is at least 4 times bigger than any of the other leaves. most of the leaves are 1-1 1/2 inches long, this one is 5 inches!!! it's huge and scary!! it's a different texture than the other leaves too! i couldn't keep looking at it last night because it was creeping me out. i thought it might try to kill me in my sleep. just what i need is mutating plants.
i finished Trout Fishing in America and started Within the Context of No Context by george w.s. trow. i read it in high school and i really liked it, and i figured i'd be able to understand it much better now. it's a strange little book. here is an exerpt so you will understand:
- - - - -
The Cold Child
The people who undertook revolutionary activities knew one thing: they knew warm from cold. Not a small thing to know. They saw that the power of the adult world had hidden behind masks and that the masks were fashioned from a pseudo-cheerfulness which was essentially cold. They came to understand that they had been cheated. They did not understand, however, what they had been cheated of. As their orthodoxy began to form, it cohered around the idea of the warm child.
The Adolescent Orthodoxy
The adolescent othrodoxy is the orthodoxy of growth, of becoming, of awkward search. It has embraced the most ambitious energies of the society since the mode of the cold child was established on television. It has as its aim the undoing of the work of the cold child. It is carried out in mourning for lost childhood. Its eye is always there--on childhood.
The Cold Child
Television is dangerous because it operates according to an attention span that is childish but cold. It simulates the warmth of childish response but is cold. If it were completely successful in simulating the warmth of childish enthusiasm--that is, if it were warm--would that be better? It would be better only in a society that had agreed that childish warmth and spontaneity were equivalent to public virtue; that is, in a society of children.
What is a cold child? A sadist. What is childish behavior that is cold? It is sadism. After generations of cold childhood, cold childhood upon cold childhood, one piling on the other, moving, at their best, into frenzied adolescence, certain ugly blemishes have surfaced. An overt interest in sadism, for instance, and an interest in unnatural children. Americans, unrooted, blow with the wind, but they feel the truth when it touches them. An interest in sadism is an interest in truth in that it exposes the processes of false affection. A horror of children is the natural result of the spread, across the grid, of cold childhood.
- - - - -
i thoroughly recommend this book to anyone.