When I searched for “inspirational quote” this week on Twitter, the above 2 Chainz graphic came up. I’m always looking for inspirational quotes, even though many of them are terribly cheesy and/or don’t make sense. But sometimes things like funny 2 Chainz lyrics come come up, and things like this from Rilke, and it makes all the searching worthwhile:

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

I like Twitter best on Saturdays, probably because all the people who incessantly post all week are doing other things, like writing blogs to post on Twitter the following week.

I reread this Dear Sugar column today, her last column. It was over a year ago, which seems crazy. I used to read her columns at Mother Jones and cry at my desk. Many people did, I think. Cheryl Strayed made crying at work okay. She made a lot of things okay, actually.

Lately Kelsey has been waking up early and reading depressing news on her phone. Before putting in her contacts even, she’s scrolling through the fuckedupness of the world while I lay there next to her asleep. This week has been particularly awful. After the Trayvon Martin ruling, there were riots in Oakland for days. Windows were smashed all along Broadway — the Chase bank, the beleaguered Foot Locker, Sears, local restaurants, the Tribune.

As we passed the boarded-up side of Sears, Kelsey joked that it was an improvement to its usual windows, like its Man Casually Lounging with Microwave display. Rioters also smashed the storefront of Oaklandish, which doesn’t make any sense. Oaklandish sells local art and wares that directly support the community. A waiter at Flora also got bashed in the head with a hammer. I was reading about mob mentality recently, for a Redeye advice column, weirdly enough. Anonymity makes people feel a kind of invincibility, a freedom from consequences. It makes sense when you think about all the vitriol in Internet comments. All the vitriol online everywhere, actually. Most of us hide behind screens and not hammers, but it happens all the time, nonetheless.

I keep meaning to write, to, at the very least, post links to my writing elsewhere, but it feels so redundant and self-important a lot of the time, so I don’t. If you want to read that stuff, you should visit my FB page. You should visit it, anyway. There’s a video of a cute girl playing a ukulele with a kitten.

I was on the Frank Relationships podcast a few weeks ago, talking about how to come out to your mom as polyamorous, etc. It’s an hour long and was at 6 a.m., but if you want to listen to it, it’s here:

Also, my friend Louise asked me to do a “how we met” story for her Tumblr, and that’s here. This is my favorite line:

…that’s the beauty of taking chances. Everything begins as infinite potential — like listening for waves in the desert. Only later do we learn if we’ve been lucky or crazy, or both.

It’s strange how doing a little bit of everything can sometimes feel worse than doing nothing. That’s how life seems lately — I’m on a boat and it’s moving but where it’s heading feels largely out of my hands. But that’s life in general, I suppose. There’s no meaning except too much. I distract myself by looking for vacuum cleaners on Craigslist. I distract myself by reading The Joy Luck Club again because my mom gave it to me and she was in the hospital this week which made everything more meaningful because death does that. Even the threat of it does.

One time I was obsessed with a girl named Rose and told my roommate that I kept seeing roses everywhere and didn’t that mean something? And she said, “You’ve been seeing the most common flower around? No way!” No meaning. Except too much.