Truth be told, I miss you

So i was actually googling roald dhal tattoos and that was how i found this community :) Kudos to the Esio Trot tattoo girl!
( Mr Fox! )

I'm not a blogger,
( I just tweet a lot. )
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Okay so scratch the feelings of dread with working at the hospital. After my shift I realized that, no, I don't have a problem working for people. I think that when I think about dealing with people with mental illness I think about my brother. And that's where the dread comes in and a part of me shuts down. I wonder what it would be like if I were to work for him in W5. Would I treat his illness as simple and nonexistent as the staff do? It never occurred to me that by treating the person as if there wasn't something wrong with his brain was the proper way. That's not to say I'd prefer to belittle the patient's intelligence by babying them, but I just sometimes wonder if there are ever any gaps in communication because of it.

Today I worked for a 40ish yr old woman, and the only way I could get her to think in coherent thoughts was to toss a beach ball around in a room for fifteen minutes. I've never met anyone as wired as she was. I was afraid to sit near her in groups for fear of getting hit by her kicking feet or flailing arms whenever she felt too hyper. It was as if there was so much energy running through her that her brain had to sit backseat to her nonstop body? I don't know; I don't get to make the diagnoses.

I thought this position would help me understand my brother, but so far it's only shown me how to speak to him, if anything and it's still something that I have problems doing. I can't help getting paranoid when he takes his medicine. I can't help being concerned when he says that he still hears voices. I can't help wanting to throttle him when he tells me he doesn't go to see his therapist.

When I see my brother I see someone broken. I thought I was broken; I was wrong. He's so far shattered that the person that is left is not even remotely close to who he was before. I'm trying to find someone whole, but I cannot even see that. It's almost as if he's not in control of his own decisions, which is scary. It was like watching someone relearn how to think and function. Like having to watch him heal.

I want to fix him and I don't know what to do.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

"You don't understand what I mean," says her mother.  "I'm trying to tell you.  What perturbs me, in the few quiet moments I have when not worrying about feeding myself and my ugly daughters, is that life has wrung from me any ability to respond to the beauty of the world.  I'm not sure I ever had the ability in the first place, even as a child.  Whether it be Young Woman with Tulips," she goes on, holding her hand up high, "or this portrait of a burgher, or that study of a sleeping housemaid, or, for that matter, the moon that spills its cold light on this floor.  I derive no pleasure from any of these effects.  I look on them coldly and without interest.  Is it my eyes, I wonder, or is it my soul that is bruised?"

-Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire

Yola was in a foul mood. She had discovered that morning, don't ask how, that the Slovak women who shared their hotel room had no pubic hair. How could this be permitted? Presumably they were not born this way -- well, presumably they were, but acquired it in the natural course of things, and had taken unnatural steps to remove it. There are many bad things that can be said about communism, but one thing is certain, in communist times women did not abuse their pubic hair in this way -- a practice which is unnatural, unsightly, undignified and, without being too specific, potentially dangerous.

I've been wanting to get this tattoo (which would be my first) ever since I read Everything is Illuminated when I was fifteen (currently nineteen).

( I've narrowed it down to 2 font styles... )

It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.

Stuff you liked

• Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
• We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
• Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
• Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
• After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
• Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

You got your fix

• We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
• In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
• At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

Paid features you enjoyed

• In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
• This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
• When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
• How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

Mixed reviews

• The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
• This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
• We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
• We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

Missing Inaction

• We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

Stumbling points

• Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
• A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
• That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

Full steam ahead!

As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

⌈ Secret Post #1098 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

101.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 066 secrets from Secret Submission Post #157.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 2 3 4 - repeat ], [ 1 - ships it ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

So, I just started liking the idea of getting a tattoo recently. I've been doing a fair amount of brainstorming and I definitely know that I want a literary quote and right now I'm a bit torn between three lines that I pretty much adore.
The first referring to The Great Gatsby, probably my favorite novel: "Believe in the green light".
The second is another Fitzgerald reference, but it comes from the last line of This Side of Paradise: "I know myself, but that is all".
And the third is from The Neverending Story by Michael Ende: "It has to hurt if it's to heal".
All would be without the quotation marks, by the way. At the moment I'm leaning towards the third, although I love all three. I've looked through tons of fonts and I would definitely like it in a handwritten one, I feel like it's fitting for all three.
Since I have those general ideas somewhat mapped out, I just need to figure out placement. I play collegiate volleyball, and I'd rather not have it showing during matches or anything. At the moment I feel like I want it on my ribs on the left under my chest, but considering my *ahem* size, I'm not sure how well it would work out, especially later on down the road.
If anyone has any input on any aspect of this, I'd love to hear it! Like I said, I just recently started contemplating this, so I'm trying to get it all planned out and avoid rushing into it. Thanks : )

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

...The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution.

Good $TIME_PERIOD, linguaphiles, a few questions for a translation I'm working on (French to English).

1) Is anyone aware of a location where "official" English names for the various departments of the French military might be found? In particular, I'm wondering if there's an official English name for SCAM (Service central des achats de la maintenance)? Obviously I know what the words mean, but I'm wondering if there's an official name for it in English, or if I should just go with the best I can figure out?

2) On a purchase order, what does the phrase "ETS comptables" mean, when it's directly opposed to "Lieu de livraisons" - is this the billing address?

3) Under "Destination for ordered goods", the top line says this, exactly:

FOURNISSEUR
- dont 1 ex Acc rect

I can see that this has something to do with acknowledgement of receipt, but I'm not familiar enough with the commercial language to be certain of the exact meaning. Any suggestions?

4) The translation has to do with rifle scopes. Does anyone have any idea, in that context, what an "option FAB" might be?

ETA: Is it possible that "option FAB" might be "franco à bord", a term of international sales meaning a shift in the place of transfer of goods from seller to buyer (FOB Destination, in English)?

That's all of them. My gratitude for any answers anyone has. Molto спасmergracithanke, as I've been known to say. :)

I'm trying to figure out a good placement for what would be my fourth or fifth tattoo, depending on how you count them. hopefully this counts as "literary", as well...
( details behind the cut )

What does "legs doubled up" mean? What happens to the legs 0_0?
Are they tangled together or what?
I tried to google image it but i only found some gymnastic photos.
It's from Roald Dahl's Lamb to the Slaughter.

As always, thank you for your help.

Finally! I grew up with my mother reading Esiotrot by Roald Dahl to me most nights before I went to sleep, and it's always been my favourite childhood book. For those who haven't had their coffee yet this morning, Esiotrot = Tortoise backwards =]
( ESIO TROT, ESIO TROT, TEG REGGIB REGGIB! )

I applied for a job and it seems that I can get it. The only problem is that my employer will be in Egypt while I am in Hungary. It shouldn't be a problem since it is a translation job so it doesn't require traveling. I told my future employer that I was at the beginning of the process of becoming self-employed and that I could not give an invoice. He answered:

"We can bare you and all what we need for invoicing is just a simple word document including your payment methods and amount required"

I have a little trouble making out what it means. What does it mean that "we can bare you" in this sense? [Good start as a translator :) I don't even know how to interpret this... ].
Could you please help me?

Update: Thanks for all the replies!

translated text or original text?

i've always been curious because i've thought about getting certain quotes in their original language. however, would i be better off with a translation if this is how i understand it?

thoughts, pretty please.

I would love to see anyone's Steinbeck tattoos, especially quotes or one-worders. I'm thinking about getting the word "Timshel" incorporated into a tattoo I'm planning but am not sure if I want just the word or a phrase from Lee's speech on timshel or "Thou mayest".