I see the light is holding up my heart

I've been going through the fiction archives over at Strange Horizons, looking for a particular story, and of course reading a shit-ton of stories in the meanwhile. Today I was struck by just how much talent is on that site. I followed author bio links to really awesome blogs and it feels like the Internet is alive again. Basically this is an excuse for me to post this excerpt from "Up In the Air" by Richard Larson:

"Break-ups are sometimes necessary, and they are painful, and actually they're always entirely unnecessary. They make you feel worthless, like you wasted your time. Break-ups are like big battles in ancient wars where two armies run at each other from opposite ends of a field, waving big wooden weapons. Break-ups are like being hit in the head with a big wooden weapon after running across a field while knowing all along that you are about to get hit in the head with a big wooden weapon."

It is pure genius, and I think it has everything to do with the relationship of the last two sentences. There's that initial letdown of not carrying through with the metaphor of the armies, and then Larson attacks it from a slightly different angle (we last left the armies whilst they were still running, and now we are at the time after that running) that perfectly fills the expectation of using that metaphor. An added bonus is that note of fulitily that reflects the relationship it's representing. Marvelous.

I have a lot of favorite stories at that website. Link droppings!
Tim Pratt: Another End of the Empire - Clever reversal/antithesis of the "typical fantasy story"
Leah Bobet: Bears - Wonderfully bizarre
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Down the Well - The cincher is that small epiphany the narrator has about his education
Kit St. Germain: As He Was - Tragic, but damn
Tina Connolly: On the Eyeball Floor - One of my all-time favorites

I have started classes here in Germany and it's going as well as I was expecting. If everything gets counted as the classes I want, I'll be on my way to graduation and the overwhelming world that lies in wait. I've been playing with the idea of staying longer and picking up a few minors and maybe "cum laude" but then I remind myself to be a realist. I'm going to have an assfuck of student loans to pay off.

My spare time is generally made up of lots of thinking, and these days I'm trying to be more constructive with what my mind meanders through. Lately it's been on the separation of one's actual, inner self, and the presentation of self that various media give. I don't know if any of you whopping 2 people who read this do it, but sometimes I catch myself thinking of my self in terms of some outside source. Then the question becomes, is there a self of my own that exists without these outside sources? I don't have an answer, because the me that is thinking this doesn't exist without influence from an outside source. I have been raised around people, radios, televisions, the internet, and globalization. People are raised by people, with or without all the technology of today. So has there ever been a definite sense of one's own self? If our universe is our interactions with the world, where is one's self in that tangle? I can understand the urge to hermit oneself, to rip one from the "modern" (read: connected) world in a desire to solidify/form that elusive self.

I'm really interested in philosophy, but it seems like such a huge subject to broach. In order to understand modern philosophy, I have to understand the ancient, and somewhere along the lines I just get distracted. Leads to trolling wikipedia a lot. Today I was reading about solipsism and fallibilism. The former is basically the tenant that one's mind is all there is; everything else is out of one's own context and therefore uncertain. Fallibilism, in short summary, states that all knowledge could be wrong, for nothing is objectively knowable. When I was trolling TED.com earlier today, I watched this talk and it echoed some of (what I understand of) fallibilism and all that. Really nice insights. I seem so intelligent today, jeesh.

Another thing about not knowing about philosophy is that I don't know if what I'm mulling over has been mulled over before, and with better results. I need a walking talking philosophy encyclopedia.

Started the bare bones of a story during the trip back from Berlin. It was refreshing, because it's been a while since I've felt comfortable enough to do so? I think a lot of it had to do with having a row of seats to myself (us BCA-ers had the entire top of a train car) and with really inspiring music, by which I mean Elbow. What's funny is that the whole thing erupted out of some mindless doodling, which is really the first time that's happened. What sucks is that I started with a terrible, mindless droning of a prologue before getting to characters, so the world is set up in my head, but not on page as an easily accessible port for a reader. But I was in a German mood so I made a German character which is a shameless blatant ploy to use random German sentences. Mwhahahaha. German German German.