grapevineblossom

[grapevineblossom]

some of the tables i’ve encountered this summer

[grapevineblossom]

“The divisions of time are arranged so that we may have a start or shock at each reopening of the question. The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. It is that we should look out instantaneously on an impossible earth; that we should think it very odd that grass should be green instead of being reasonably purple; that we should think it almost unintelligible that a lot of straight trees should grow out of the round world instead of a lot of round world growing out of the straight trees.

The object of the cold and hard definitions of time is almost exactly the same as those of the cold and hard definitions of theology; it is to wake people up. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

— G.K. Chesterton: Lunacy and Letters

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[grapevineblossom]

“Leisure, Hannah, Does Not Agree With You,” Hannah Gamble

[grapevineblossom]

I know this isn't gonna help anyone on the Luigi Mangione jury, but I feel like I see a lot of people throw around "Jury Nullification" without actually understanding the responsibility it entails.

Jury Nullification is NOT your explicit right. It is a legal gray area that rides on the back of your explicit rights. Specifically, a jury has the right to

Return any verdict it sees fit.

Not be punished for the verdict it selects.

Not have their verdict challenged or directed.

For these reasons, you (as a Juror) and the people (as a Jury) have the right to vote whichever way they see fit for whatever reason they may choose. That includes voting "Not Guilty" in a situation where the defendant has broken the law, but the circumstances or law, itself, require an alternative verdict.

However.

Just like you have the right to return whatever verdict you choose, a judge has the right to remove you from the jury if they feel you are being deceptive about your impartiality. The point of a trial is to be as neutral and impartial as possible. After all, a trial with biases is not a "fair" trial. Jurors who have prior knowledge and opinions about a case and its circumstances must be removed from the case and relieved of their jury duty. Jurors who intent to disregard the letters of the law in favor of opinion, morality, whatever, must also be relieved of their jury duty and replaced. Therefore, if you approach your fellow jurors and tell them about Jury Nullification and your plans to utilize it, someone may very well tell on you to the judge. It is then that judge's obligation to remove you from the jury and replace you with a more impartial juror (one that may not know about Jury Nullification). Therefore, if you openly support Jury Nullification in a court room, you can (and will) be removed from it.

So, even if it means hanging the jury with a non-unanimous vote, you cannot inform others about your intentions, and you cannot encourage others to utilize Jury Nullification, too. It sucks, but it's reality. Court rooms are very disapproving of Jury Nullification to the point that they have (wrongly) charged individuals with Contempt of Court for telling jurors about it. Lawyers are even forbidden from telling juries they can use this right, in the first place. That's how disliked this ability is. So one more time:

If you intend on actually utilizing Jury Nullification, you have to be completely silent about it. Period. You cannot inform your fellow jurors about it, and you cannot inform anybody in the court room about your plans to utilize it. That is it. That is how things work, and you have to tread lightly and carefully.

[grapevineblossom]

shorthands for dumbassery that i have grown to love deeply

"how dare you say we piss on the poor" in response to someone misinterpreting your post

"_ isnt gonna fuck you" for suck up behavior

"woah. should we tell everyone? should we throw a party?" for who the fuck cares

"and what if the world was made of pudding" for when would this ever matter.

"and sharks are smooth both ways" for a group of people heatedly arguing with 1 guy who is fucking with them all

".. but its about a witch in the alps finding her lost cat" for someone trying to sanitize something to the point of absurdity

[grapevineblossom]

the purpose of friends is to have people who unconditionally hate your shitty exes & relatives. like maybe YOU have a complex relationship with your father but i sure don't. i'm outside his house with a gun. he's not the unforgivable asshole who raised me he's just an unforgivable asshole

[grapevineblossom]

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (via sunrec)

[grapevineblossom]

[grapevineblossom]

Give And Take

Give me sweet lovers.

Lovers who pick me up and spin me around. Kiss my hands and call me fairy, mermaid, nymph, witch. Who sing for me and call me their muse.

Make me cry with laughter, then lay me down and kiss me for three days. Give me little homemade gifts sometimes, just for my smile.

Lovers who look at me with awe and respect.

Let my waist be the only home for their hands, their lips my well in a desert land, the smell of my hair their obsession.

I ask for all this, and I promise to give the same.

I promise to be a kind, attentive lover. To apologize sincerely, make you chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast on the weekend, write you poetry. I promise to give you my time, my attention, my love, my respect.

I will look at you the way people look at the horizon from a mountain cliff. Wonder and hope in my eyes.

I will hold your big, rough hands in mine and I will kiss them and call you my gentle, sweet king.

When you need me I will wrap my arms around you, I will kiss your tear-stained cheeks and whisper what you need to hear.

I am giving, I am giving, I am giving.

Give me love, give me love.

Love,

Love,

Love.

[grapevineblossom]

An Essay On Approachable

Approachable. Is that what I need to be?

I have agonized over comments that I seem snobby, bitchy, unapproachable. But I think I'm over that now.

I've been told that I come off as distant, uninterested in getting closer.

The truth is that I don’t like attention from people that I don’t like, that I'm uninterested in. it doesn’t appeal to me.

I like my privacy and my space, and I'm prepared to give it up for a select few. It's not that I think I'm better than anyone.

I'm nice. I'm polite, curious, considerate and understanding. If you talk to me, I'll never be cruel. Anyone can approach me if they wish, and I'll treat them with kindness. But I will only encourage attention from, will only want it from, and will only myself approach, a select few.

Why is this wrong? Why do I need to make myself available to all the world, to anyone who wishes?

I am not a 24/7 gas station. I'm a person.

I am not a house and its door. Open, closed, locked. Difficult, pliable.

I am not a path or a sidewalk.

I don't exist only to tend a doorstep. I don't need to be decorated and passive.

When has a man ever been criticized for being unapproachable? Does he not need to be so? Because he is always the one who approaches?

He walks, he chooses, and I sit?

I will manage the door to me however I wish.

Most of all I wish to never be a door.

I am a walking thing.  

[grapevineblossom]

I want to be eloquent in love.

One day I will be a perfect mix of jagged terrain and generous fruit tree.

I know that sometimes I am too much rocky mountainside, to hide the fact that inside I am too much marshmallow.

I will offer up my lungs to you.

More marshmallow than I would like to be.

Stop yourself from asking the questions and you will slowly become numb, you were aching so bad to wonder at the answers.

On my bus ride to school there are two important things I go past every day.

The first is a tree with a dark hollow in its trunk like a witch cloaked in black creeping through the woods.

The second is a boulder in the shape of a lion's head.

I will wrap my arms around my knees to warm my wary heart in my cavernous, empty chest.

I will try to hold still while my body chokes with shock.

Give them back. No, keep them. It is good now.

I will learn to breathe in your arms, without the shelter of my chest.

[grapevineblossom]

Maya

I'm sorry, I'm sorry I once tasted a girl who smelled like clean sheets and denim and you can see the stitches on the inside of my mouth.

But it's the color of her hair that’s written in the space between my lungs.

We're oranges born sliced for easy eating.

We're just pre-cut girls.

So don't look at me like a drowning dog.

It's the same forest we're lost in.

I'm in here too. I'm frozen in place and running and burning.

But I kissed a girl and I'm so glad I did.

It was my first kiss and she said I was so much better than her boyfriend.

[grapevineblossom]

My beautiful, bleeding, troubled land.

[grapevineblossom]

How songs should be heard

Whenever I listen to a Bon Jovi song on the bus to school, I tell myself that one day I will listen to this song driving on a desert road, the only car in sight, with an open roof, going where I want to go, and I’ll blast this song so loud it’ll feel like the god damn desert is singing. I figure that’s how Bon Jovi songs were meant to be heard. There are songs that I can’t listen to sitting on the bus, they shake my lungs and stretch them until there’s no more room in my chest. I get this cramped, restless feeling, and just tapping my foot doesn’t help. The songs want me to dance. There are songs that even when I dance to them in my room, I still feel the tension. I haven’t let loose everything they’ve given. When I listen to the Eagles, I watch the trees go by and imagine that I’m sitting peacefully underneath them, admiring the sunset, humming in tune. It’s hard to sit still when Springsteen tells you that he was born to run. At home, my speakers aren’t that great and the songs feel like they’re at a party wearing a painfully tight dress. There are songs on my phone that I haven’t listened to lately, because I can’t think of listening to them while doing anything less than flying.

[grapevineblossom]

He’s Alive

It's midnight and he has to wake up early tomorrow. He's been sitting on the towel naked for half an hour. It's his second cigarette. He's slouching. The fluorescent lights are harsh on his body. So is he. Today he saw a quote online, something about exquisite agony and a broken heart, and staying alive when you think you're going to die. He closed his computer and wrote a poem about suffering. The speaker is next to him, connected to his phone. He doesn't usually listen to music at night, but right now it feels like it would be better to listen to someone other than himself. He's scrolls through his phone, sucking hard on his cigarette. Shrugs and picks a song. For a second there's no oxygen in the room. Bon Jovi's voice hits something tender. Didn't he used to love this song? "Hey man, I'm alive. "I'm taking each day and night at a time. "I'm feeling like a Monday but someday I'll be Saturday night!" The words explode into his conscious. Something widens, lets him breathe. I don't know what he'll do tomorrow. I don't even know what he'll do when the song ends. All I know is that his eyebrows have finally moved from where they were since he lit that cigarette.

[grapevineblossom]