Vacation Mode Quotes

Nothing exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual relationships, and the pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being and to show that the everyday meetings in the marriage bed are parodies of their own pretensions, that the freest unions may contain the seeds of the worst exploitation.

It is not only the weary Homo faber, who objectifies the world in the 'doing' mode, who must vacate his place on the logical stage; the time has also come for Homo religiosus, who turns to the world above in surreal rites, to bid a deserved farewell. Together, workers and believers come into a new category. It is time to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition. Just as the nineteenth century stood cognitively under the sign of production and the twentieth under that of reflexivity, the future should present itself under the sign of the exercise.

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.

I feel alive in ghost mode.

Peretti by now understood that media, by any other name, was simply another mode of communication. It had been a one-way line during the print and broadcast eras, but as millions logged on to the internet, they entered a connective framework where media content, whether interoffice memoranda, vacation photos, or wartime reports, could move not just in one or two directions but ubiquitously and faster than the speed of light.

Children in war zones play out the violence they see around them; they’re impulsive and cannot access critical thinking skills because they’re in the “fight or flight” mode, too busy fending off their fears and anxieties. These results made me wonder if my work at the RFS was futile. Perhaps what these children needed more than anything else was to receive psychotherapy treatments to help them recover from these traumas, and the end of the Occupation, two things I obviously had no control over. In my readings I came across only one hopeful aspect—the most important resiliency factor predicting psychological adjustment in traumatized children is a loving and present mother or father. I could tell how much the children at the Ramallah Friends School were loved by their parents. The children were held and kissed with obvious affection; they went on vacations with their parents; they were well fed, dressed nicely, and had toys. I was not surprised to read about the importance of a constant loving figure in a child’s life, since responsive mothering is at the core of attachment theory. When you know you can count on your mother or father’s presence and unconditional love, you grow up able to function in the world with a sense of confidence and security. Despite the Israeli Occupation, Palestinian children will grow up to become confident adults because their parents love them. I think of my own mother, of how much she had suffered and lost but how much she has infused me with her love, courage, self-reliance, and trust. I am who I am today because she was capable of transcending her own trauma to create a stable, loving, and responsive home for me. My father, too, gave me his unconditional love and modeled a poised and assured demeanor in the world.