A quote which originally appeared on Maxine's

Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.
— André Gide

A reaction

My heart is broken, my soul trying to push open the cracks, screaming to be heard.
— Charly Z

A kind word

At about age 8, all hearts are broken, never to be mended. There is no Santa Claus. Then we discover there is no Santa Claus for adults either. So now our hearts are in pieces. We desperately need for someone to know that we exist. If we have interesting, but unexpressed thoughts, or even talent, we are then doubly desperate to be heard. Why do you think many of us are here--blogging ourselves into oblivion? You are not alone, Charly Z.
— Maxine Locker

geek·o·la n. Magical elixir which will allow the drinker to understand the obscure details of modern technology. Coined by el Señor Farr.

She's Actual Size, Nationwide, Believe discusses metrosexuals: "Are men really becoming more vain these days, or is it just okay to talk about it now?" (I chime in: we've always been vain, but now we're even more because we make it a point to talk about it. ) This post has generated a very active comment thread (how do you do it Kate?), where fellow commenter Harald points to a Reuters story that informs that men are made anxious by all those hunky male models on ads, just like women are by the fembots on display.

For some reason,  I keep hearing the phrase "Self-improvement is masturbation" over and over in my head. Must be some kind of defense mechanism.

At Gnosis, Morgan asks: What are you doing September 11th? He mentions the Rose Cinema's scheduled showings of Woody Allen's Manhattan and ponders massive comfort through TV (as proposed by The Onion).

What intrigued me, though, was his comment that "the destruction of the World Trade Center didn't have much of an effect on me." As he explained for me, "intense emotions are not something I deal in," and though the event was horrible, the human loss is dwarfed by everyday killings like those by drunken drivers, the evil, by "events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia."

And yet, I continue recalling my feelings when I saw first one and then the other tower falling on TV; its destruction didn't shake me, but I kept thinking on all those who were still trapped inside. It's them who left a void in Manhattan's skyline.

Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?
By Kurt Andersen and Andrew Sullivan
September 3, 2002

This one seems so twisted it deserves immediate attention. According to Slate:

Kurt Andersen, the author of Turn of the Century, is now at work on his second novel. He's also the host of the public radio program Studio 360. Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at the New Republic, writes daily for andrewsullivan.com. Slate has asked them to discuss the Weblog phenomenon as well as two new books about blogging, We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture and The Weblog Handbook.

The wonk factor will be high, and the response from the weblogging hoi polloi will no doubt send tremors through the Net. Loggers, start your keyboards!