A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility…
— The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky
Either Dostoevsky had a Twitter account (though I can’t imagine him being a fan of the 140-character limit) or people really, really haven’t changed in a hundred and fifty years.
This is an excellent article in AV Club by Cameron Esposito about overcoming body issues. All I want to add is my own story about how I had pretty serious body issues until my early twenties, when I was finally persuaded to go to a nude beach in broad daylight. That walk, from my beach blanket to the ocean, was the most awkward I had ever felt in any situation that didn’t involve tubes, wires, and latex-gloved fingers going in places that weren’t really designed for such a thing. Then that first wave broke over my head, and I felt the complete and utter absence of anything between myself and the ocean… no cloth, no polyester, nothing between me and the sun and Planet Earth. I felt alive and freed from an old, outdated existence. I stood up in knee-deep water and said “I AM ONE WITH TRITON! WORSHIP ME, LESSER FOLK OF DRY LAND!” Then the second wave smacked me in the face and I got a seashell stuck in my nose.
Exposing Myself
This is exactly what the characters in my head do when I’m not writing about them. And people sometimes wonder how I can write so much. Folks… it’s not discipline so much as it’s self-preservation.
News Anchors on Commercial Break
Here is an excellent post from the MightyGodKing blog, and there are more like it if you dig through the pages. I have to warn you, the publisher’s blurb on the Robert Jordan book nearly twisted my esophagus in half, I was laughing so hard.
Honest Fantasy Covers
Pretentious Pretentiousness Pretending Pretences