new noise

Recovery has been largely a change in what I give my attention to. The old life still draws me in, but I'm aware now of an alternative, which makes all the difference. 

Stories that always seemed to be so many cold, soulless data points have now become interesting. I can make my own. 

misnoma

Sorry, but I'm not going to take life advice from someone publicly known as 'the rapist'.

Therapist! I'm a therapist, not 'the rapist'!

knead

I always wondered what it would be like to be addicted to drugs, and then I experienced it with Valium, but now that I'm very nearly off Valium, I don't have a sense of what it's like to be addicted to it. 

I remember needing it but remembering needing it and needing it are very different things. I always remember the most traumatic and painful times in my life with a sense of fondness - a sense of their value. 

warp

History can't be written impartially. It is replete with assumptions and value judgements. The best history justifies the assumptions though. There's no getting around it. There is a narrative being woven. 

out of the overflow

How we appear to others can be different to how we feel inside. That's why people's behavior sometimes seems strange and inexplicable - they're responding more to some inner drama than to what's going on around them, and we can't see that inner drama.

When people speak to us, especially people we don't know, they aren't really talking to us, they are talking to what we represent in their world. For Christians, other people should represent their neighbor or even Christ himself, and we should talk to them accordingly. 

The Bible talks about the fruits of the spirit - the qualities that the holy spirit will bear in your life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (see Galatians 5:22-23). They aren't like KPIs, where you strive to meet the criteria. No, they are qualities that will grow naturally when you have a relationship with God and they are qualities that are reflected (or not) very clearly in how you speak to others. 

rules of trolling

One of the things kids do to troll is to talk in a way that sounds intelligent but doesn't mean much. They aren't very good at it though. To do that well, you have to have a solid grasp on language so that you can use words in a way that sounds like it makes sense but ultimately doesn't. That's what makes it funny. If you're just putting long words together randomly, it's not very effective trolling. Some people do this kind of trolling unintentionally when they're trying to actually be smart, like when Kevin Rudd used the term 'parametric specificity' and said we should aim to get more of it, and everyone laughed at him about it. 

moved

Björk said that she left London because 'everybody was trying to corner me off like some kind of elf'.

She has such a wonderful economy of language - saying so much in a few words.