yearly portrait.
23 November 2009
30 October 2009
You are a gentleman and a scholar
Everyone who knows what that's from gets a prize:
As if that weren't enough for my un-update, here's an Irishman:
As if that weren't enough for my un-update, here's an Irishman:
01 October 2009
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups = God exists
Metal Cart! Hand Sanitizer! Dog! Synthetic Pants!
This is a threat to germaphobic, pet-owning, polyester pants wearers everywhere.
I’ve run out of room for the metal cart, so I’ve included an asterisk and a footnote over here.
This is a threat to germaphobic, pet-owning, polyester pants wearers everywhere.
I’ve run out of room for the metal cart, so I’ve included an asterisk and a footnote over here.
24 September 2009
29 July 2009
no time for writing, just last week's screencaps
RIP, Coverage of the Coverage of the death of MJ:
Sotomayor hearings:
22 July 2009
I'd Like That Redacted
Book Review of prelude to a SUPER AIRPLANE by Brian Spaeth
I am afraid to fly. My first airplane trip occurred at age four when most of our family moved across the country. I do not recall this experience in any detail. My second airplane trip was at age twenty-one during Spring Break. At this point I still followed the flight attendant's detailed instructions for turning off my electronic device for the majority of the hour-long flight. I find I have no problem once the plane is actually airborne, it's the takeoff and landing that makes my heart skip several beats. If I am stuck in the aisle seat and cannot see the ground when the plane is taking off, my anxiety levels increase and I don't want to stare past the person in the window seat. I detest "puddle-jumper" planes and always hit my head on their small overhead compartments. All this to say, prelude to a SUPER AIRPLANE has renewed my childish sense of wonder and amazement regarding the creation of flying machines. Although I just returned from vacation wherein our plane inexplicably sat on the runway for two hours, then sputtered to life, I no longer think of flights with quite the anxiety-inducing terror of my past. Plus, the TSA employing robots would be incredible.
Spaeth's tome draws the reader in to the magical colliding worlds of super airplane construction, finding love in airports, instant messaging via Facesbook (so no one will sue), self-proclaimed orphans, authorial intrusion, Mayan prophesies, and the cabal of energy-drink addicts. From the man who "also knew that this [deed] would propel him into the national spotlight as a war hero, even though America's Secret War With Brazil was a secret" to the psychiatrist who "was suggesting ill-conceived courses of action to her patients, so that their problems became larger than hers", the characters come alive through their bizarre and idiosyncratic actions. This book is perfect for the self-referential, ADD crowd of the twenty-first century, who still express Native American history incorrectly, have thumb blisters from Blackberry addiction, and want to live on a 47-story super airplane. Spaeth causes the reader to ruminate on such heady topics as how the most awesome name ever in the history of horse-naming is a horse called Pencils, and how Warmth For Monstero would be a good name for a rock band, all while trying to piece together each character's path to the super airplane.
In reading prelude to a SUPER AIRPLANE, I was taking a break from my summer commitment to read 1100-page Infinite Jest. The short paragraphs, short sentences, and absence of fatal drug overdoses in Spaeth's book piqued my interest, but I was soon caught up in comparing him to Wallace. First, they both use the word "twitter" at least once in their books, as in, "to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird." At least, I'm sure that's how Wallace meant it, as Infinite Jest was published in 1996, long before our generation's incessant need to share what we had for lunch. Next, they both use glorious footnotes[1] to further delineate important expositions to the reader. After these come footprintnotes[2], and many chapters set in the future--whether it be 2012 or the Year Of The Trial Sized Dove Bar--with newfangled technology predicted. Brad Radby's complete filmography might be largely comparable to Incandenza's own film career--the indescribable footnote 24 in Infinite Jest. Escapism is good for the soul, and in prelude to a SUPER AIRPLANE we can all fly away together.
[1]. I don't know how to make numbers appear smaller and footnotey in Blogger.
[2]. I made up that word.[1]
[1]. It means a footnote of a footnote. Alternately, toenotes.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
End of Part 1:
1. Me. Women are the only gender who can multitask, therefore I could think about airplanes whilst attending to my normal activities. (Ex. I was just thinking about airplanes, reading your book, watching The Daily Show, replying to an email, and on the phone with my sister).
2. Cheese, musicians, peanut butter, time-travel, gingers.
3. Cheese: it can be easily eaten on an airplane.
4. Fork. It cannot be easily transported on an airplane because of its weapon-like qualities.
5. Yes, it's me, Demi Lovato.
copyright: me, 2009.
21 July 2009
Thanks to NFZ's great screencapping abilities
Coors Light - delicious. it doesn't taste at all like Palmolive dishwashing soap. Oh, they’re a sponsor too?
15 July 2009
Need to DEAR (drop everything and read) to finish this beastly wonder
“So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you’re willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it’s a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it’s very high-tech and it’s very “become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z,” but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he’s really the only one there who to me is saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. And part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we’re really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we’re creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing about fascists is they’ll tell you what to think, they’ll tell you what to do–they’ll tell you what’s important.”
DFW in an interview about Infinite Jest (1996).
Brought to my attention by Bailey, I'm now wondering if David Wallace in The Office is named after DFW.
29 June 2009
I concur.
Complaint: It totally sucks that pages 17-27 of Infinite Jest (Erdedy waits for pot) are 100 times better than any short story I will ever write, and yet are only 1/100th of the whole.
(from infinite summer community)
in other news, bringing this beast of a book with me to the airport. with notebook. pens. highlighters. bookmarks. (one for footnotes). this man was a genius. why didn't any of my writing profs make me read this masterpiece?
23 June 2009
11 June 2009
TDS/TCR day 3
Look to the left at my twidiot info for the first segment of Jon as Napoleon. I love fake feuds.
Headlines don't sell papers, Newsies sell papers!
and from Colbert, I'll be so sad when this is over.
Stephen: They can't have alcohol over there. Tom Hanks: Alas.
Headlines don't sell papers, Newsies sell papers!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| End Times | ||||
| ||||
and from Colbert, I'll be so sad when this is over.
Stephen: They can't have alcohol over there. Tom Hanks: Alas.
10 June 2009
TCR day 2
can't remember anything all that exciting from TDS except Hodgman quoting the Terminator. in sunglasses. epic.
TCR made me cry, because, he talked to more soldiers. my sister told me she loves Formidable Opponent. that is all.
i can't tell you how excited i am. i'd like to, but it's classified.
TCR made me cry, because, he talked to more soldiers. my sister told me she loves Formidable Opponent. that is all.
i can't tell you how excited i am. i'd like to, but it's classified.
09 June 2009
TDS/TCR week of love
I am SO glad he brought up CNN and really every news show's proclivity to beg us to go to their website and report news for them. Even the local news does it. "Upload your pictures from the freakish rain we had last night." Um, hey reporter who gets paid to take pictures, yeah, maybe you should do that. I loves me some Andy Coop but he is incessant--live blog during the show? How about you just tell me what you think? I already pay like $60 for cable in order to watch YOUR show so you can TELL me what is going on in the world, not ASK me what is going on in the world. Do your freaking job.
CNN: We're all like, I know.
And on to ColbertInIraq:
I laughed, I wept, I clapped for our heroes. And there's a news anchor with a buzz cut now.
CNN: We're all like, I know.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| "i" on News | ||||
| ||||
And on to ColbertInIraq:
I laughed, I wept, I clapped for our heroes. And there's a news anchor with a buzz cut now.
08 June 2009
Support our 135,000 active troops
Hey all,
Stephen Colbert, my favorite faux-pundit, is in Iraq all this week as part of his USO tour, and is filming his show, The Colbert Report, for four days there, to be broadcast on the Comedy Central cable channel at 11:30pm, eastern time, Monday, June 8 - Thursday, June 11, with replays the next night at 8:30pm. For those of you who don't have Tivo, a VCR, or cable, the videos are available the next day online at http://www.colbertnation.com/home under "video clips" or "full episodes". This man is dedicated. He's already agreed to a buzz cut of his wavy news-anchor perfect hair.
__________________
It's go time Nation! "The Colbert Report" has deployed to Iraq on a USO tour entitled "Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando" and will tape and perform shows in front of the troops. "The Colbert Report" is the first TV show in USO history to produce a week of shows in a combat zone. In addition, Colbert will post updates from base on Twitter at http://twitter.com/stephenathome. "The USO counts this as military service, right? I might want to run for office some day," Colbert said.
In addition, he is the guest editor for Newsweek on newsstands today! (Monday, June 8).
http://www.newsweek.com/id/200964
This morning he was on Good Morning America giving us sneak peeks of his work in Iraq as well as information about http://donorschoose.org/
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=7781951
Bless you all and send you home safe.
26 May 2009
D.F.W.
May 21, 2005, commencement speech. David Foster Wallace.
So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- at least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
And I submit that this is what the real value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.
But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
come on, you know you want to read a 1,000 page book with me this summer. (Infinite Jest)
So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- at least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
And I submit that this is what the real value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.
But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
come on, you know you want to read a 1,000 page book with me this summer. (Infinite Jest)
18 May 2009
Fancy Feast! Colbert Eating Things
Our parking lot nearest the building closed today because they're constructing a new building there, still, close enough. And they're drilling in cement. Barrels of fun.
Colbert eating Fancy Feast. Or is it pâté?
30 April 2009
LQ music
And you know, there is one piece of music that I cannot listen to, it makes me cry so much my nose stops up, I cannot breathe, my eyes run like streams.
--wm. styron
It is majestic music; all the suffering of a millennium is in it, all the longing, and all the tenderness; it is unbearable. It ends. A telephone rings: a friend wishes to speak of this same mystic beauty that has swept down out of the skies to fill his distant home.
--wm. durant
--wm. styron
It is majestic music; all the suffering of a millennium is in it, all the longing, and all the tenderness; it is unbearable. It ends. A telephone rings: a friend wishes to speak of this same mystic beauty that has swept down out of the skies to fill his distant home.
--wm. durant
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)