this evening, lying belly-down on mussed white sheets and the plump mound of a raspberry velvet pillow, i was casually finishing up my reading from john stuart mill's essay, on liberty. one of the first assignments for my moral reasoning class, the essay discusses the importance of freedoms of opinion and of action, to cultivate a progressive society and to maintain a genuine humanity. despite mill's eloquent profundity, i admit to yawning and (perhaps) dozing off, my nose unexpectedly finding itself nested between inky words blurring from "rational being" to "assumption of infallibility." however, reading the excerpt below gave me reason to smile:

In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

oooh la! so, through my bizarre liuliu antics, i'm obviously helping the development of mankind. pure genius! purely fantastic.