Life Abbreviation Quotes

And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact. You have this: You are thin.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.

I wasn't kidding about the flying-kids part. Or the talking-dog part. Anyone who's up to speed on the Adventures of Amazing Max and Her Flying, Fun-Loving Cohorts, you can skip this next page or so. Those of you who picked up this book cold, even thought it's clearly part three of the series, well, get with the program, people! I can't take two days to get you caught up on everything! Here's the abbreviated version (which is pretty, I might add): A bunch of mad scientists (mad crazy not mad angry- though a lot of them seem to have anger-management issues, especially around me) have been playing around with recombinant life-forms, where they graft different species' DNA together.

I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC. And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with 'And' and 'So' and end so many paragraphs with '...and so on.' And so on. 'It's all like an ocean!' cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.

If you wanted to greet him or get his attention, you had to say: “Oh, Mr. Forest-Ranger-who-stands-in-the-tower-watching-out-for-forest fires!” If you abbreviated it, or, heaven help us, addressed him simply as “David,” you would get no response.

You try to blunt certain emotions, but your tool isn’t a scalpel, it’s a sledgehammer. And you’re blunting all of them. To protect yourself from feeling the horrible things, you prevent yourself from feeling some of the positive things.

MY ADULTHOOD HAS been about recuperating. There was no compulsion to give life to anyone else because I was depleted. There was nothing to give.

Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker’s life while convincing him that it is becoming more “efficient.” - The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free. - You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits. - With terminal disease, nature lets you die with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged dying. -

In modern society the term "no" have changed meaning. It now seems to be an abbreviation for "Negotiations Open".

Never abbreviate your dreams. Only short-hand people always do that. Their punishment is that they can't stretch far, further and forward into the future. Dream only big dreams!

MCLEAN HOSPITAL IS known for its former residents who, with their distinguished madness, gave it a noted reputation. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.

BECAUSE HER LOVE was a vapor. It didn’t touch, it didn’t heal, it didn’t soothe.

I would have liked to have known you when you were happy.

And not trusting one’s mother is, on a cellular level, unjust.

My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere. I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There's a part of me - no matter how childish it sounds - that wonders how they are. "Is everything all right?" I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were "Take care." Sometimes I dream that I'm talking to my parents, and suddenly - still immersed in the dreamwork - I'm seized by the overpowering realization that they didn't really die, that it's all been some kind of horrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right. That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human.

When you have an erratic, unpredictable, and aggressive parent, a child will detect signs and know when not to say something or know when to hide, so a threat-detecting sense begins to emerge early on. In the end, it wires the individual to be acutely aware and highly reactive to perceived threats.

She glanced pointedly at the flopping tadpole. "What?" "Take it back." "You're kidding, right?" he said disbelievingly. "Do we have time?" He considered that. "Yes, but--" "Then, no I'm not." "That lake was three hops ago," he said impatiently. "If you don't take it back it's going to die, and while you may think it's just a pathetic little thing with an abbreviated little life that hardly even signifies in the fairy scheme of things, I'll bet in the tadpole scheme of things it's really looking forward to becoming a frog. Now take it back. A life is a life. I don't care how tiny an almighty fairy thinks it is." One dark brow arched and he inclined his head. "Yes, Gabrielle." Scooping up the tadpole in one big hand, gently enough that it gave her pause, he popped out. -Gabrielle and Adam Black

Properly, an acronym is a word that is created from the initial letters or major parts of a compound term whose pronunciation is a word (“NAY-toe,” “SNAF-oo”), and an initialism is an abbreviation created from the initial letters of a compound term, like “FBI,” whose pronunciation is a collection of letters (“EFF BEE EYE”). “Acronym” gets used of both of these, however, and such use burns the biscuits of some.

What did the real damage was buried beneath the surface. Her denial that these incidents ever occurred and the accusation that I was looking to punish her with my unjustified anger. The erasure of the abuse was worse than the abuse.

I read about a little girl who had to navigate an unsafe world, a world without boundaries. This child was left alone most of the time—if not physically, emotionally. And then every once in a while, it would hit me that that child was me.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

it was a traumatic time for him, but that’s as far as it goes. There is a blackout—emotional amnesia for any negative memory. It’s how he coped. The pain and the stress and the strain have been deleted. As if it didn’t occur. He remembers uncomplicated, joyful times; sunshine and white sand. The darkness of this memory is mine alone.

Instead of my bucket list book, this is the story of my abbreviated life, short but nonetheless possessing secret love, joy and pain, adventure and hard work, luck and its opposite

Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, it is clearly central to their moral and emotional vocabulary.

Children who are exposed to trauma and stressful situations become hypervigilant as adults. So they’re always scanning, looking for danger.

What she missed out on and what I missed out on, too. I am grieving for someone who is still alive.

WE ARE NOT calling it brain damage. We are calling it an altered brain. A brain that was denied nutrients such as stability that were needed to feel safe and grounded.

Passing pedestrians pay no attention to me. I am no one. Just another crying woman wandering in Manhattan

Solitary confinement, with company.

Attempting to Soar" A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights. As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window, cupping it around the wind. He’d been assured this is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you put your hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew, and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, until the weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up. For many years afterwards he was perpetually attempting to soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breast in his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep. He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now. As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused to abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He often pretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings, he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow. He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.

WHAT CONNECTS US are the basics, tenets of normalcy I never had. Need is redefined. Pots and pans, knives and dish towels, bed linens and bath mats don’t have to match. They don’t have to even exist.

...your zeal to face life's rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students...' He shook his head of disagreeable hair. 'I need not tell you,' he deplored, sinking to paralipsis, 'that there resides in almost every one of 'em the unconscious desire not to grow up. For once the academic goal is attained and the doctorate irradicably abbreviated after the name, the problem of facing the world is confronted. The subtlest, most unremitting drive of the student is his unconscious proclivity to postpone the acceptance of responsibility as long as possible.

The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful. This day may possibly be my last: but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow about fifteen years. I shall soon enter into the period which, as the most agreeable of his long life, was selected by the judgement and experience of the sage Fontenelle. His choice is approved by the eloquent historian of nature, who fixes our moral happiness to the mature season in which our passions are supposed to be calmed, our duties fulfilled, our ambition satisfied, our fame and fortune established on a solid basis. In private conversation, that great and amiable man added the weight of his own experience; and this autumnal felicity might be exemplified in the lives of Voltaire, Hume, and many other men of letters. I am far more inclined to embrace than to dispute this comfortable doctrine. I will not suppose any premature decay of the mind or body; but I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life. ...The warm desires, the long expectations of youth, are founded on the ignorance of themselves and of the world: they are generally damped by time and experience, by disappointment or possession; and after the middle season the crowd must be content to remain at the foot of the mountain: while the few who have climbed the summit aspire to descend or expect to fall. In old age, the consolation of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents, who commence a new life in their children; the faith of enthusiasts, who sing Hallelujahs above the clouds; and the vanity of authors, who presume the immortality of their name and writings.

Thankfully existing only in SMALL pockets within our discipline, is “intellectual” snobbery. It’s a hushed but ugly truth that people are made to feel not worthy to be among a certain set – didn’t attend the right school or don’t have the requisite abbreviations to follow their name. I know what that feels like. Good thing I'm pigheaded, have a bigger vision and committed to my craft, or I would’ve succumbed to it long ago. That is why when I meet an emerging writer who’s serious about developing their craft, I try to encourage them as much as I can. I say IGNORE the highbrow cliques and prove your mettle by growing, accepting balanced feedback and most of all, creating work that will stand the test of time. Period.

But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

Pierre de la Vérendrye and his companions had encountered a people blessed with material abundance. “Corn, meat, fat, dressed robes, and bearskins” were all among their riches. “They are well supplied with these things,” the Frenchman wrote. But his abbreviated journal barely mentions the villagers’ equally rich ceremonial life.1

Ad hominem: An abbreviation for argumentum ad hominem, meaning an argument against an idea or statement based on the character of the person who authored it. It is sometimes used to discredit a philosophy of life proclaimed by someone who does not live up to it himself, as in, “He talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the walk, so I’m not listening to his advice.

It is wonderful, and rare, being out of the city, being back at their house, and the four of them enjoy one another's company. He even feels well enough to give Andy an abbreviated tour of the property, which Andy has visited only in springtime or summer, but which is different in autumn: raw, sad, lovely, the barn's roof plastered with fallen yellow gingko leaves that make it look as if it's been laid with sheets of gold leaf.

THERE ARE STILL days I descend. On these days I am diving alone and no one can reach me. I am out of my depth. I pass twenty meters, pass thirty meters, rapturous with the descent and entering nitrogen narcosis. It’s called the Martini effect. But in this instance, the delirium is not a sensation of drunkenness but of nothingness. I descend with abandon, and there is no limit to how far I will go because the ocean I’m in is bottomless.

is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he’d checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn’t been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK.

MY MOTHER MADE me doubt and question my perceptions. The loving and warm persona that followed the tirades confused and destabilized me. I wanted a witness. An ally. To verify. To have proof. Someone I could turn to and say, “This happened, didn’t it?” Someone who could see the transformation I saw. “I have a right to be angry, don’t I? I don’t trust her,” I say. Only I didn’t say this. Because I was seven years old and I didn’t know yet that’s how I felt. And not trusting one’s mother is, on a cellular level, unjust. I needed to be heard and kept hoping she would hear me. As a child, it was too overwhelming to believe that she couldn’t recognize reality. My craving for her to be different was powerful. It inoculated me against the tumult. I descended deep within myself, far away to a place in the future. Where things would make sense and right was right and wrong was wrong. I was able to crawl away from my rage. But I never crawled away far enough.

The more dutifully scholars acknowledge that the concept of race belongs in the same category as geocentrism or witchcraft, the more blithely they invoke it as though it were both a coherent analytical category and a valid empirical datum. In place of Jefferson’s moment of impassioned truth-telling, his successors fall back on italics or quotation marks, typographical abbreviations for the trite formula, ‘race is a social construction.’ The formula is meant to spare those who invoke race in historical explanation the raised eyebrows that would greet someone who, studying a crop failure, proposed witchcraft as an independent variable. But identifying race as a social construction does nothing to solidify the intellectual ground on which it totters. The London Underground and the United States of America are social constructions; so are the evil eye and the calling of spirits from the vasty deep; and so are murder and genocide. All derive from the thoughts, plans, and actions of human beings living in human societies. Scholars who intone ‘social construction’ as a spell for the purification of race do not make clear—perhaps because they do not themselves realize—that race and racism belong to different families of social construction, and that neither belongs to the same family as the United States of America or the London Underground. Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity.

This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable. In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, were short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words—goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joy camp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others—were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further. So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised.

Dietrich Eckart always judged the world of jurists with the greatest clear-sightedness, the more so as he had himself studied law for several terms. According to his own evidence, he decided to break off these studies "so as not to become a perfect imbecile". Dietrich Eckart, by the way, is the man who had the brilliant idea of nailing the present juridical doctrines to the pillory and publishing the result in a form easily accessible to the German people. For myself, I supposed it was enough to say these things in an abbreviated form. It's only with time that I've come to realise my mistake. Thus to-day I can declare without circumlocution that every jurist must be regarded as a man deficient by nature, or else deformed by usage. When I go over the names of the lawyers I've known in my life, and especially the advocates, I cannot help recognising by contrast how morally wholesome, honourable and rooted in the best traditions were the men with whom Dietrich Eckart and I began our struggle in Bavaria.

This Socratic possibility of beginning wherever he might find himself — although when actualized in life it would as often as not go unnoticed by the multitude, for whom it always remained a mystery how they had come to discuss this or that subject, since their investigations more often began and ended at a stagnated horse pond; this steady Socratic perspective for which no subject was so compact that he could not instantly see the Idea in it — and this not hesitatingly but with immediate certainty, yet also having a practised eye for the apparent abbreviations of perspective and so did not draw the object to him surreptitiously, but simply retained the same ultimate prospect while it emerged step by step for the listener and onlooker; this Socratic parsimony which formed such a biting opposition to the empty noise and undigested fodder of the Sophists — all this is what one must wish that Xenophon had let us feel in Socrates. And what a life would thereby have been depicted when in the midst of the busy labour of the artisans, the braying of the pack animals, one had seen the divine web which Socrates worked into the very fibre of existence.

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. If we would follow the advice, so frequently urged upon us, to adjust our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement, we would in all earnest adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful. For the sciences today have been forced to adopt a “language” of mathematical symbols which, though it was originally meant only as an abbreviation for spoken statements, now contains statements that in no way can be translated back into speech. The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of “character”—that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons—or their naïveté—that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use—but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power. And whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves. Closer

I’ll take care of it.” I snatched the offending bottle from the counter. “Are her sister and mother with her?” “Frankie, yeah. Natasha went to sleep in a guest room. Guess she felt like she could take a break because Dal’s feeling better.” I took the stairs two at a time. With each step I climbed, my spirits lifted. The lilt of Shortbread’s sweet, bell-like voice filled the corridor. Quiet, but unmistakably her. Why did it take me until today to realize I enjoyed her voice? Her sound? Her general existence? Maybe because it marked the one thing that wasn’t complete silence that my ears cherished. When I reached her door, I raised my fist, intending to knock. I couldn’t wait to show her the book. Childish pride filled me. I supposed this was what kids felt when they did something they knew would grant them their parents’ approval. I wouldn’t know. My parents rarely paid attention to my existence. “…can’t believe you didn’t tell me you two were having S-E-X.” Franklin abbreviated the last word, whisper-shouting in excitement. A chuckle lodged in my throat. I wasn’t one to eavesdrop, but staying back for a few moments to hear Dallas’s response wouldn’t enter the list of top ten-thousand worst things I’d done in my life. “How’s the sex?” Franklin demanded. “It’s okay, I guess.” Dallas coughed, still weak. “I’m not suffering.” Understatement of the generation, sweetheart. “Does that mean that you like him?” Frankie gasped, holding her breath. For an odd reason, I did the same. There was no pause, no hesitation, in Dallas’s response. (chapter 58)

There are,” I countered, with a conviction that surged from the tips of my toes, “certain people who have been front-loaded with trauma that shapes who they are. They are disabled. Psychologically. And this does not make them victims. It makes them soldiers.

I did not hate my mother. I feared her...I feared her in the way I did as a child because I was powerless then to protect myself. There are days I am still that child. She frightens me. And her power is undiminished by the passage of time.

The life at the Semmon Dōjō, which, by way of abbreviation, will be later spoken of as the Zendo life, is something altogether out of keeping with modern life. We can almost say that anything modern and many things ordinarily regarded as symbolic of a pious life are absent here. Instead of labour-saving machinery, what may appear as labour-wasting is encouraged. Commercialism and self-advertisement are banned. Scientific, intellectual education is interdicted. Comfort, luxury, and womanly kindness are conspicuous for their absence. There is, however, a spirit of grim earnestness, with which higher truths are sought; there is determined devotion to the attainment of superior wisdom, which will help to put an end to all the woes and ailments of human life, and also to the acquirement of the fundamental social virtues, which quietly pave the way to world-peace and the promotion of the general welfare of all humankind. The Zen life thus aims, besides maturing the monk's spiritual development, at turning out good citizens as social members as well as individuals.

First principal (Satz): the great politics aims to make the physiology to be mistress of all other questions, they will create a force strong enough to humanity as a whole and higher breed, with merciless severity towards the degeneration and parasitic alive — against that what corrupts, poisons, defamed, to basically done ... and sees the destruction of life, the insignia of a higher kind souls. Second principal (Satz): death war (Todkrieg) against vice, every kind is vicious anti-nature. The priest is the most vicious kind of man: for he teaches anti-nature. Second principal (Satz): to create a party of life, strong enough for big politics: the big politics makes the physiology of the mistress of all other issues — they want the Mh [FN abbreviations] as a whole breed, it measures the rank of the breeds, the peoples of the individuals according to their future — by its guarantee for life, which it carries in itself — it does with everything degenerates and parasitic (Parasitischen) inexorably to an end. Third principal (Satz). The rest follows.

I believe that we shocked each other by how swiftly we went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of the most mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived. But it was vital to my survival to have a one bedroom of my own i saw the aprtment almost as a sanatorium a hospice clinci for my own recovery I painted the walls in the warmest colors i could find and bought myself flowers every week as if i were visiting myself in the hospital is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty why are you studying Italian so that just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again and is actually successful this time? ciao comes from if you must know it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval venetians as an intimate salutation Sono il Suo Schiavo meaning i am your slave. om Naamah Shivaya meaning I honor the divinity that resides whin me. I wanted to experience both , I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence the dual glories of a human life I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos the singular balance of the good and he beautiful I'd been missing both during these last hard years because both pleasure and devotion require a stress free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety , As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion. four feet on the ground a head full of foliage looking at the world through the heart. it was more than I wanted to toughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. same guatemalan musicians are always playing id rather be a sparrow than a snail on their bamboo windpipes oh how i want italian to open itself up to me i havent felt so starved for comprehension since then dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontanana dolce sitl nuovo Dante wrote his divine comedy in terza rima triple rhyme a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating here times every five lines. lamor che move il sole e laltre stelle we are the masters of bel far niente larte darrangiarsi The reply in italy to you deserve a break today would probably be yeah no duh that's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon to go over to your house and sleep with your wife, I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch i peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all,)I put some olives on the plate too and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the fromagerie down the street tend two slices of pink oily salmon for dessert a lovely peach which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm form the roman sunlight for the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing finally when i had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal i went and sat in apatch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bit of it with my fingers while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian happiness inhabited my every molecule. I am inspired by the regal self assurance of this town so grounded and rounded so amused and monumental knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history i would like to be like rome when i am an old lady. I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in

You’re not programmed to trust,” Mario says. “You’re programmed to doubt. The fact that there is the possibility to trust leaves you in an uncomfortable place that you don’t want to accept. So you keep doubting and you create stress. And when you create stress in the other person, from never being trusted, it will give you what you’re looking for and push them away.” He looks at me with a mixture of sadness and patience.

Her behavior threatened my safety. I deserved it. I was out to get her. I’d been poisoned against her. I wasn’t smart enough to get it. I wasn’t appreciative of who she was and what she did. I was special, brilliant, and talented. All she cared about was my happiness. I love you meant nothing. I hate you meant nothing. She meant all of it. I felt none of it. By the time I finally grew up, I was exhausted.

Sometimes the invisible failures are not understood until it’s too late. And what prevails is the sense of unavoidable destiny. Standing in the pit of a crevasse, with a rope to safety just inches away and out of reach. If only I was half an inch taller. There is always that wish for the impossible. For the sick parent to recover, the impulsive parent to have self-control, the unpredictable parent to be consistent, the irrational parent to respond to logic; the profoundly disturbed parent not to be profoundly disturbed and to give unconditional love. MY ADULTHOOD HAS been about recuperating. There was no compulsion to give life to anyone else because I was depleted. There was nothing to give.

My mother desperately wanted to have a child. She wanted someone to cleave to her. Having a child was insurance. A lifetime of companionship.

MY SURVIVAL INSTINCTS come to the surface in other areas. Spotting the cracks so I know where I can tread. This is my reflex. There is no instruction booklet. Only I know how to fend her off, hold her back, back her down —and these impulses are automatic. Will it be a good day or a bad day? I am graceful at sidestepping perilous eventualities. I had no choice but to exist in the sea that she swam in. It was a fragile ecosystem where the temperature changed without warning. My natural shape was dissolved and I became shapeless. A plankton drifting in the current of her expectations. Unable to swim against it. And any attempt to swim away would harm her.

WHAT I SAW was a diplomat. At seven years old I was strategizing. Understanding that asserting myself was not just useless but harmful. It didn’t matter if I was right or wrong, what mattered is that I didn’t make it worse. What mattered was making sure my mother was taken care of.

She’s my daughter and my best friend,” she says. She has said this all my life.

She felt endangered by circumstances, but protected by love. This, I believed, was the formula for not being crippled by anger. A consistent optimism that was indestructible. It enabled her to defy the circumstances.

Now I want a quiet life. A home where I am not faced with circumstances that are out of my control. And conflict is not routine. When I need peace, I don’t want to have to explain why or bargain for it. I did that throughout my childhood. The need is not trivial. The roots are deep. I am compensating for what was absent. Seeking at the Lost and Found a missing childhood.

There are,” I countered, with a conviction that surged from the tips of my toes, “certain people who have been front-loaded with trauma that shapes who they are. They are disabled. Psychologically. And this does not make them victims. It makes them soldiers.” I thought of people whose limbs were not long enough to step over the mess or swat it away. They tried and failed. Why? Did they lack strength of character? Were they simply not dogged enough?

Whether abuse of a child is physical, psychological, or sexual, it sets off a ripple of hormonal changes that wire the child’s brain to cope with a malevolent world.

Children who are exposed to trauma and stressful situations become hypervigilant as adults. So they’re always scanning, looking for danger. It’s hard to settle down and feel secure if you’re wired to always be on your toes. You can wind up with a mismatch if the world you live in is much more benign than your childhood. And so you may be overreacting and over-interpreting stimuli because you’re wired in that way.

The consequence of my childhood trauma is a bespoke suit of armor that can’t be discarded. Love is unreliable. Joy does not sustain. Good things will go away. I need certainty in an uncertain world, and the tyranny of the past dominates the present.

I IMAGINE THAT if someone were to see this, they would think what a horrible daughter I must be. Heartless, as my mother says. Indecent. But disconnecting is something that is necessary or I will be devoured. It is her or me—and I choose me. There is no middle ground.

MY INTERIOR CLOCK was set to her mood. When her mood was stable, my life was better. I accommodated that. I believed I owed her. I believed that after everything she’d done for me, everything she’d given me, this entitled her to her due. But there were no limits to her entitlement, and for those in the path of it, there were only two options. Give in or pay a price. I gave in. I wanted a peaceful life and believed this was the only way to get it. These acts of betrayal were self-preservation. Or so I believed.

This is the cartography of oppression. To navigate the options, as I have all of my life; to predict the unpredictable. I am good at it. It’s a skill I know well. A skill I can rely on to cope with the unknown. But it’s a skill that has had side effects, too.

THE TWO EXTREMES. My mother, who feels entitled to sympathy and has no recognition of being a burden. My father—who doesn’t want to impose, doesn’t want to encumber me with his problems—has become my biggest worry.

My mother was too powerful. He had to retreat. There was no alternative; he had to disengage. There is no one who identifies with this better than I do. I compensated for the absence of his presence with understanding. He was protecting himself. He had no choice but to leave and I had no choice but to assimilate. I never felt abandoned.

to be separate was to be safe. The destructive beliefs were too entrenched in the landscape of my psyche, rooted in a soil that couldn’t be tilled. I believed what was missing would never regrow. Adult life would be recovery from the past. Stasis is all I could have.

MY EQUILIBRIUM IS interior. A refusal to succumb to inherited feelings of helplessness. Equilibrium, for me, was balancing internal conflict. It wasn’t possible for my mother to have a feeling and not discharge it immediately. It was up to me to not lose my balance and adjust.

DEADLINES FOR PERSONAL choices weren’t overlooked. They weren’t postponed. They were nonexistent. They must have been. Or I would have considered the outcome before making that phone call. Before responding to that email that I should have ignored. Before saying yes when I should have said no. Seemingly inconsequential actions with predictable outcomes. Actions that added up and left me in a holding pattern. Hovering above the runway of trust without ever having to land.

When stress hormones are being released in a developing brain, the physical shape of it changes. These hormones mold the brain to overreact and overrespond. A permanent state of living on high alert. “But,” he adds, “what gets really complicated is that not everybody who gets exposed to something threatening activates and runs. Sometimes people freeze. Sometimes people shut down. Sometimes people dissociate.

TO COPE, IN childhood, was to be on guard at all times. Sentiment was not to be trusted. Hope would be met with disappointment. This was an operating system that allowed me to function, and it carried over into adulthood. The result was to live a life within brackets. An abbreviated life.

My mother imparted her devotion through words. But words were also weapons. They could embolden and they could destroy. They provided security and ripped it away. She was sensitive to words and she passed that on to me. I inherited the belief that what was spoken could always fix what was broken.

No matter how unfit she was as a parent, he knew that when the time came, she would pull it together, streamline her mental state, and perform with credible conviction. She would manipulate, charm, and bully to get her way.

If I had a different opinion or a different feeling, she felt threatened. Not giving her what she wanted provoked her wrath. There were no limits to how far she would go.

In Atlantia, it is tradition to be given a second name, a middle one, so to speak. It's given in honor of a cherished family member or friend, usually picked by the mother, and it is a well-guarded secret only shared outside of the family with the closest of friends and with those who hold a special place in one’s life. My mother chose my middle name in honor of her brother. His name was Hawkethrone. My full name is Casteel Hawkethrone Da’Neer. When I was a small child, my mother took to calling me an abbreviated form of that name. And so did my brother. They, and only they had ever known me as Hawke,” he said. “Until you.

He lowered his hand. “In Atlantia, it is tradition to be given a second name, a middle one, so to speak. It's given in honor of a cherished family member or friend, usually picked by the mother, and it is a well-guarded secret only shared outside of the family with the closest of friends and with those who hold a special place in one’s life. My mother chose my middle name in honor of her brother. His name was Hawkethrone. My full name is Casteel Hawkethrone Da’Neer. When I was a small child, my mother took to calling me an abbreviated form of that name. And so did my brother. They, and only they had ever known me as Hawke,” he said. “Until you.

I’m giving you the abbreviated version. My father’s alcoholism is like a footnote to every chapter of my life. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never be free of it.

One thing that army and civilian worlds did share was propaganda. There was no escape from the lectures and slogans. Every soldier was taught that he was privileged to serve in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, a mouthful that the state abbreviated to its Russian initials, RKKA.13 Recruits were also told that they were the standard-bearers of the future and the heirs of a heroic past. Whatever it was called upon to do, this was an army that would muster under banners colored red with martyrs’ blood.

In 2014 the FBI drew ridicule for having compiled a list of 2,800 acronyms and abbreviations used in text messages, Facebook, and, yes, Myspace. It was an Urban Dictionary for the oblivious, paid for with tax money. The list contained a handful of abbreviations that are actually used and known to almost everyone (except some FBI agents). They were accompanied by thousands of obscure or obsolete abbreviations that the feds somehow dredged up. BTDTGTTSAWIO, we’re told, means “been there, done that, got the T-shirt, and wore it out.” The FBI effort demonstrated two points. One is that the life of online abbreviations and slang is short. The other is that those who use abbreviations like BTDTGTTSAWIO don’t care whether anyone understands them. Maybe they’re hoping someone will ask.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.

Perhaps no topic touches on the importance of choice in longevity as directly as does that of suicide. The act of taking one's own life is truly a tragedy because it creates so many victims. Family and countless friends are left to bear feelings of undeserved misery and guilt. The commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is written in nine verses of scripture. Not one of them grants self-exclusion. The rational mind knows it is wrong. Unfortunately, forces of stress and depression incite behavior that is not always rational. . . . We know that the good done and the desires of the heart will also be weighed when final judgment is rendered. Alma taught: [Alma 41:2-3.] . . . Repentance operates in the spirit world as well as on earth. . . . Suicide is a choice--a grievous choice--that abbreviates longevity. Its victims include those who suffer because of that choice. They need and deserve the reassurance of the gospel and the knowledge that life for their loved one continues. Immortality of the soul applies to all, as does the privilege of repentance and forgiveness.

When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted. There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.” It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed. And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.” Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . . [C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . . Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . . She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.” And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language? According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . . By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . . That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit. “The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . . Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live." [DN, Apr. 13, 2014]

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society, or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a most wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit at home with might and main, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the governments of the world . . .

Open the "book of life" and you will see a "text" of about 3 billion letters, filling about 10,000 copies of the new York Times Sunday edition. Each line looks something like this: TCTAGAAACA ATTGCCATTG TTTCTTCTCA TTTTCTTTTC ACGGGCAGCC These letters, abbreviations of the molecules making up the DNA, could easily mean that the anonymous donor whose genome has been sequenced will be bald by the age of fifty. Or they could reveal that he will develop Alzheimer's disease by seventy. We are repeatedly told that everything from our personality to future medical history is encoded in this book. Can you read it? I doubt it. Let me share a secret with you: Neither can biologists or doctors.

Bonhoeffer was thinking in a new way about what he had been thinking and saying for two decades: God was bigger than everyone imagined, and he wanted more of his followers and more of the world than was given him. Bonhoeffer recognized that standard-issue “religion” had made God small, having dominion only over those things we could not explain. That “religious” God was merely the “God of the gaps,” the God who concerned himself with our “secret sins” and hidden thoughts. But Bonhoeffer rejected this abbreviated God. The God of the Bible was Lord over everything, over every scientific discovery. He was Lord over not just what we did not know, but over what we knew and were discovering through science. Bonhoeffer was wondering if it wasn’t time to bring God into the whole world and stop pretending he wanted only to live in those religious corners that we reserved for him: It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness. . . . The church stands not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village. That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes is something that I’m thinking about a great deal and I shall be writing to you again about it soon. 468 Bonhoeffer’s theology had always leaned toward the incarnational view that did not eschew “the world,” but that saw it as God’s good creation to be enjoyed and celebrated, not merely transcended. According to this view, God had redeemed mankind through Jesus Christ, had re-created us as “good.” So we weren’t to dismiss our humanity as something “un-spiritual.” As Bonhoeffer had said before, God wanted our “yes” to him to be a “yes” to the world he had created. This was not the thin pseudohumanism of the liberal “God is dead” theologians who would claim Bonhoeffer’s mantle as their own in the decades to come, nor was it the antihumanism of the pious and “religious” theologians who would abdicate Bonhoeffer’s theology to the liberals. It was something else entirely: it was God’s humanism, redeemed in Jesus Christ.

I never reply with LOL (laugh out loud) as most people seem to do these days. Or PMSL (piss myself laughing), LMAO (laugh my arse off) or ROFL (roll on floor laughing). I don’t use these abbreviations, as I don’t know the order that they should go in. Does laughing your arse off rank higher than pissing your pants? I’ve never had a reaction like that to any joke to be honest. I’ve ROFC (rolled on floor crying) with kidney stones, but I don’t laugh that much. When I do, it’s normally at things that you shouldn’t laugh at.

he moved . . . toward preventive psychiatry, recommending some kind of 'personal inventory' — that is, an abbreviated training for anyone who dealt as an expert with other people, such as teachers . . . lawyers, and ministers . . . he voiced . . . despair about psychiatrists per se having the necessary humility for the work.

Okay, I've verified that there are indeed twelve towers.' 'A numeral that harkens to a surfeit of associations: months of the year, the apostles of Christ, fruits of the Cosmic Tree. The list is endless.' 'And let's not forget, the signs of the zodiac.' When he nodded, Edie continued and said, 'Okay, so we've established that twelve is a number chock-full of significance. But it's a mystery to me how these twelve towers relate to the known constellations. I thought the word "zodiac" meant "circle of animals"?' Again, Cadmon nodded. 'The word is taken from the Greek zodiakos, from which is derived the abbreviated "zoo". ' 'As you just mentioned, the signs of the zodiac are based on twelve constellations or star groups, each designated by a different animal; an ancient mnemonic device originated by the Babylonian astrologers.' 'While the circular zodiac is the more familiar design, during the Middle Ages a square zodiac containing the twelve houses was occasionally used. The triangular shape is symbolic of the fact that each house of the zodiac governs mind, body and spirit and does so throughout the course of one's life from birth through adulthood until death.

Sleazy. An abbreviated form of silesia. A linen that took its name from Silesia in Hamborough, and not because it wore sleasy (1696). A piece of Slesey (1706).

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: • • • And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with “And” and “So,” and end so many paragraphs with “… and so on.” And so on.

Lewis himself was known as “Jack” to his family and friends. Warnie dates his brother’s rejection of the name Clive to a summer holiday in 1903 or 1904, when Lewis suddenly declared that he now wished to be known as “Jacksie.” This was gradually abbreviated to “Jacks,” and finally to “Jack.”[15] The reason for this choice of name remains obscure. Although some sources suggest that the name “Jacksie” was taken from a family dog that died in an accident, there is no documentary evidence in support of this.