My head is trying really hard to become a philosophic instrument, but really its got no background for this sort of thing. I have no beliefs because they're too complex to form. You have to be sure of something to form a belief system. I'm sure of very few things. Let's make a list. I like lists.

I believe that gravity works and that most of physics pretty accurately describes our physical world.
I believe that cigarettes are bad for you and that knee high purple tiger print boots are ugly.
I believe that I love my family.
I believe that knowledge can be passed from generation to generation. I believe that cars and generalizations are bad for my health.
I believe in beauty.
I believe that people are dangerous creatures.
I believe that brushing and flossing my teeth daily will improve and maintain my dental hygeine.
I believe that my doctor generally knows her shit.
I believe that light can be both a particle and a wave at the same time.
I believe that understanding is possible.

That wasn't so hard. I bet there're a lot of other things I believe too. but these seem important right now.

I sound like the world. There are so many words out there, I'm not sure why I'm creating new ones. Perhaps I should be finding words that have already been created and stringing them together, creating a mantra. repeating them until they become my breath, until they become solid. There are words that describe this and they are good words. I just have to find them.

opinions are dangerous things to have when you have no beliefs. Or maybe they are just difficult and tenuous things to hold onto.

There was something in Cryptonomicon that hit home. i underlined and marked it, and then sent the book home with my brother, having finished reading it. something about atheist intellectuals and their dogmaticly iron stubborness in their opinions on right and wrong and blah blah blah. This is a terrible paraphrase.

I have been making budgets and reading lists. I have been living inside my head, trying to hide from my failures. My inaction is in itself a failure, but does not always come from the inside. Action is not always possible. Sometimes I am frozen by my surroundings.

I need books and I need to read them and eat them and taste them in my mouth. I need to talk worlds that make me think and make me understand. I need to have synthesis become part of my world again.

The list:

(this is incomplete)

The Russian Canon
Chekhov
Dostoyevsky
Gogol
Bulgakov
Goncharov
Tolstoy
Turgenev
Bunin

Shakespeare
Histories: Henry's and Richard III
Tragedies: Duh

Theory, Philosophy, Background
Chomsky
Foucault
Aristotle
Nietze
Plato
Hericlites
Hegel
Rousseau
Etc.

"Classics"
Dante
Milton
Faust
Oddyssey
Illiad
etc.

Misc.
Rushdie
Marquez
Woolf
Melville
Nabokov
etc.

Sci Fi
LeGuin
Asimov
Bradbury
Tolkein
Lem
I know this is horribly inadequate

Myth and Skazki
Russian
Norse: Edda
Persian
Greek
The Bible
Gypsy
Egyptian

History
Russia and the Church
England and WWII
Truman - McCullough
The Fifties (US History)
Spanish Civil War
Latin America and US interference

In fact this whole thing is terribly inadequate.