edumacayshun

The 100 Best Books For An Education 

(according to Will Durant, taken from "The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time")

Outline of Science by J. Arthur Thompson

The Human Body by Logan Clendening

The New Dietetics by John H. Kellogg

The Principles of Psychology by William James

The Outline of History by H.G. Wells

Folkways by William Sumner

The Golden Bough by Sir John Frazer

The Human Adventure by Breasted and Robinson

The Wisdom of the Chinese by Brian Brown

The Bible - both The King James version and the 1749 Challoner edition of the Douay-Rheims bible

History of Art by Elie Faure

A History of Science by Henry Williams

History of Greece by J.B. Bury

History by Herodotus

History of the Peloponessian War by Thucydides

Lives of Illustrious Men by Plutarch

History of Ancient Greek Literature by Gilbert Murray

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus

The Dramas of Sophocles, Everyman Library Edition

The Plays of Euripides

- Alcestis, Electra, Iphigenia of Taurus, Medea, The Trojan Women, Hippolyte and The Bachae

The Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

The Dialogues of Plato

Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle

Politics by Aristotle

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam

Heloise and Abelard by George Moore

The Divine Comedy by Dante

History of English Literature by Hippolyte Taine

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams

The History of Music by Cecil Gray

The Renaissance in Italy by John A. Symond

Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari

A History of Modern Philosophy by Harald Høffding

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Age of Reformation by Preserved Smith

A Literary History of France by Emile Faguet

Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais

Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Shakespeare's Plays

Reflections by Francois de la Rouchefoucauld

The Plays of Moliere

Essays of Francis Bacon

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Ethics and On the Improvement of Understanding by Baruch Spinoza

Portraits of the Eighteenth Century by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Voltaire

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Origins of Contemporary France by Hippolyte Taine

The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift

A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

Vindication on the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Napoleon by Emil Ludwig

Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature by Georg Brande

Faust by Johann Goethe

Conversations with Goethe by John Peter Eckermann

Poems by Heinrich Heine

Poems by John Keats

Complete Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poems by Lord Byron

Pere Goirot by Honore de Balzac

Salammbo and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Penguin Island by Anatole France

Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen

The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

History of Civilization in England by Henry Thomas Buckle

Works by Arthur Schopenhauer

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Frederick Nietzsche

Rise of the American Civilization by Charles and Mary Beard

Poems and Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Letters and Speeches by Abraham Lincoln

Jean Christophe by Romain Rolland

Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson

The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

do you like apples?

another day under the overhang. mine always lasts five days or so, but i've come to expect it, instead of analyze. i prefer the inconsideration of telling me what you're feeling instead of what you're thinking. and you do both so well. i'm just sharing my preference. it's worth the workweek, i suppose. or it can be. maybe that says something about you, maybe it says something about me.

don't leave out a single thing. maybe i shouldn't either. send it off, on wings, like a passenger pigeon, a note to open, uncurl, an anecdote to ease that feeling every time i try to smile at the mirror.

memories, like months, are overrated but probably necessary. it might be years, and i could still write you love songs, still remember the color of the clothes you wore, the corners of your mouth.

this shouldn't sound as bad as i'm sure it does. lifeless results lead to an excuse to never try again. and it's nothing if it's not lifeless. i can't draw you through the color of these windowpanes. i draw the blinds, i turn off the lights. i spend each night staring up at the ground, looking for the reasons i expend equal amounts of effort in trying and lying. how could that be true?

if you miss it, can't that be enough? and what words do you speak when your phobias are the only conversation left? i will sit here, and patiently tap out something to rationalize my inability to actualize. so it's no surprise when you say your head is throbbing or how tired you are.

and loneliness turns into that desperate thing with teeth, with smoke in my eyes, and i don't want to think about that now.

it's exactly what i think it is. they're all gone, it took a long time. you're the only one who'd want to be my valentine. i didn't want that to drive you crazy. i never meant to drag you down, so if i'm dragging you down now i could just wait in the lost and found, if you promise me that you'll be perfect. and i'll promise to come around sometimes. all smiles, saying hello.

shake my hand and take six steps back, have a seat. light another cigarette and have a drink for no regrets, nothing sad, nothing feeling down. we'll wear our halos and look like coffee table decorations.

some lowlit photograph of all the people i can only ever do wrong.

resolving

get a car and move out

take a vacation somewhere out of the country

spend a week on the oregon coast, just by myself

donate 10% of my income to charitable causes

digitize my note/sketch -books

do one big act of service every day

exercise daily (running around in video games doesn't count)

do something with someone in real life every weekend

write for an hour every day, just write, doesn't matter what about

(keep trying to) draw something every day

clean up my music, don't listen to garbage, be more discerning

be more decisive

take a class

read one book a week (comic books don't count)

express gratitude daily

be kinder to myself

not a morning person

so i deleted my fb account. it wasn't worth the hassle i was getting from my mother. apparently complaining about work is going to lead to us losing our house (what?) so i just dropped it. it was dead weight anyway, the only people i cared about enough to check on them are people i talk to on a pretty regular basis outside of fb anyway.

was late to work. i didn't want to be here today, and it seemed like my morning routine just dragged and dragged, my subconscious was trying to be helpful. somehow my phone ended up beneath me in bed and i never heard the alarm anyway.

i'm probably going to have to delete this blog now, too, since i said i didn't want to come in to work. it'll get me fired. this is me rolling my eyes.

guess what?

bah humbug.

i took the afternoon off yesterday, and this morning i remembered why i never ask for time off, even if i desperately need it - it's because when i get back in, my entire shipping room is trashed, my desk is a mess, and i can't find a goddamn thing. including my box cutter.

how am i supposed to run a shipping room without a box cutter?

how am i supposed to slit my wrists?

oh, the melodrama. i would make fun of my histrionics, but today, right now, i kind of really want to.

same old again, i know.

i know. you're just glad you don't have to live it.

"maybe THAT is your purpose for existence, chels, you're supposed to be the cautionary tale, the person who everyone else can look to and go, well, at least my life doesn't suck as bad as hers, and then feel better about themselves."

you know what? fuck you all. especially you, seth. you pedophile. how is your child bride doing, these days?

i think most people who major in psychology only do it because they are trying to understand their own fucked up selves. like a psychology class is going to teach you anything. pfft. all it teaches you is to fake it till you make it.

i'd rather not make it, if that's the only option to get through anything.

i vote the world owes me a giant fucking favor, and if i don't get something amazing out of nothing sometime soon, then jesus doesn't love me and the whole goddamn thing is a sham.

and now, back to the gravy train.

Same as Always

This morning I found the cd case that had all the discs I burned during my year eight months in Connecticut. I've been ripping them to my iTunes library here at work. Listening to them totally takes me right back there. Driving the Toyota Sienna everywhere - basically living out of it - the trees. Oh, I miss the trees so much. I miss doing something that made a difference every day. I miss playing "mom."

I got a holiday card from them two days ago... I can't believe how much the kids have grown in two years. I want to go back, I want to go visit before they move on so much they completely forget me. I sent them Beatles RockBand for the xbox Cory got the Christmas after I left as a belated birthday/holiday present. I wanted them to remember all the times we spent playing Rock Band, just the four of us, Cory and Claudia fighting over who got to play the drums until Claude got halfway through the first song and remembered she hated playing the drums. We'd always have her sing. She was good at it. It was awesome. Oh, I miss those kids. I miss feeling like a crucial part of something. Knowing that things wouldn't get done without me, knowing that I got to - and was capable - of taking care of them. Making sure they were okay, and healthy and happy and having fun.

Now I'm back here. Useless and accessory, stuck at home because of stupid choices from my early 20s that screwed my credit. Working a job that takes no brains, that doesn't want or value creativity or ability. My... all of me... wishes I could go back to that year. Go back to being needed and wanted and challenged every day and being able to go to bed at the end of the day with a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment. I think that's why I have so many dreams about babies lately. I ache to be needed like that again, by someone, anyone. I know the things that I'm best suited for. And it's not packing boxes and beings stuck at home like a perpetual 12 year old.

I'm trying not to be whiny, I don't want to sound whiny, but I want to try and express how I feel and what I'm thinking today. Or, this morning. Mornings are slow at work, usually. And I'm avoiding work because I'm tired and I ache everywhere and it's cold. I feel so old. I'll be 30 in a little more than three years. How did I get to here? I remember being 11, and imagining myself at 21, coming back to visit the family from college, with a car and a boyfriend, tall and gorgeous with long brown hair... stylish and smart and funny... and here I am, 27 and a college drop-out, an ART MAJOR drop-out, short, with short blonde hair and still no car, no boyfriend. Not just visiting home, but stuck at home...

Nevermind. I can't write like this. It's all just the same. The same thing every time. These words aren't new.

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'. 

Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night." 

- Charlie Brown