"My favorite sort of Facebook status update is the sort that is obtuse and unknowable.... A good status alludes to some sort of emotion, some sort of yearning, but it doesn't offer any sort of clues. It does not, for instance, report on the mundanity of one's evening meal. It doesn't compliment one's 'hubby' or report on an interesting journey or ( Read more... )

A background process that's probably been running for years delivered its result this morning, causing me to emit a chuckle and roll my eyes in mid-task at work. Another slice of conventional weirdness figured out ( Read more... )

"How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it."
- Paulo Coelho
Around March or April, I decided to go to RMFC. It was the thing to do. I can't say why, or what that means. Just one of those things. So I registered and booked the flight and hotel and only then started thinking about how a chronic wallflower like me would make it ( Read more... )

My hang-up probably isn't really about virtue and selflessness at all. It's probably just obsession with the importance of an intelligent human being having thought about First Things, having asked why, having arrived at an answer (thoroughly turned over and thought through, however incomplete and groping), and then making subsequent decisions ( Read more... )

"We are, at our heart, a nation of rugged individualists. Not in the absurd, capitalistic manner of an Ayn Rand protagonist or a blue-blooded intern at the American Enterprise Institute, but certainly in the manner of our philosophical forefathers - Emerson, Thoreau, Jefferson, Paine. These men all advocated a nation, a way of living, where men ( Read more... )

MARK: I wonder how Alison found out about Mimi?

ROGER: Maybe a little bird told her.

COLLINS: Or an angel.

I was on a brief Wikipedia rabbit-hole trip Saturday morning. Goddess only knows what led me to bald eagles, but from there we got to nests, thence to parrots, then to this little fellow, who in one caption told me the meaning of life:


( Read more... )

"It was February in Boston, and I was cold and wanted to go home. Rum and tonic was the antifreeze, and the newspaper was full of ads for warmer climates. I was in a place owned by Derek Sandersen, who was a very famous player for the Boston Bruins in the '70s. I came out of the bar and couldn't find a cab except for the one that was running in ( Read more... )

My sixth grade English teacher, one of my great teachers (a smaller group by a couple orders of magnitude than the middling-to-evil ones), once had us read an essay by, I think, Nikki Giovanni. It included the line, "You've got to have a built-in shit detector." This made us gasp and giggle, because we were 11 years old and the teacher had just ( Read more... )

Compromise or persevere?
His mind is racing
'Coonie has no guide - 'coonie wants to hide
Can he make a mark - if he gives up his spark?
'Coonie can't decide

Here is maybe a decent way to frame my hangup about "What do you do for fun" - that dagnabbed question I was asked again last weekend. (I answered more honestly, which is also to say more ( Read more... )

"Is it my own brokenness that has brought me here? I am happy at Engeye, but I have a scaffolding of modernity by my side: protein bars, a reading lamp, safe drinking water. I don't want to live the way the villagers live. But I don't really want to live the way I do either ( Read more... )