Friday, November 23, 2012
Sitting in a different cafe, listening covertly as, behind me, a couple of nineteen year olds break up. The chick is not quite crying, but almost — would be interesting to know if the reason they met here, now, is to avoid histrionics? The guy is repeatedly tearing apart his cardboard coffee cup. I know [...]
Thursday, October 25, 2012
So now it might seem doubly stupid to ask how you might act differently if the goal was to feel good, but the complicating factor involves direct vs indirect action. If you’re getting a PhD in psychology (to pull a completely random hypothetical out of my ass) then you’re pursuing a high-level goal whose final [...]
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
How would you act differently if your goal was to feel good? This seems like a dumb question because aren’t we trying to feel good all the time? Some people might say: “I’m trying to be an ethical person, not feel good.” But really, you’re trying to be an ethical person because being an ethical [...]
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Friday, September 21, 2012
After that it’s just a few short leaps to a variety of disturbing places. First you loosen the physicality. Let’s say you’re not in the Metropolitan with 300 other people, whiling away the time by fucking each other and growing bored by Mondrians, but rather you are just some more or less normal person. Sitting [...]
Monday, September 17, 2012
At this point several questions might be bubbling up from your skeptical mind: Where does the restaurant get its ingredients, anyway? The flour, the buckets of lard. And wait, where does lard even come from? What about that art? Somebody painted those paintings and threw those pots. And now that you’re thinking about it, where [...]
Saturday, September 15, 2012
One way that you know you’re in jail is when some beefy fucker with an outdated mustache throws you against a wall and handcuffs you and then, after a variety of inconveniences — fingerprinting, forcing you to put on a special outfit — he throws you in a jail cell, by which I mean a [...]
Sunday, September 9, 2012
You know what is annoying? People who are super successful giving advice. Like those are the people whose advice will be of any use. “I went to school and I worked very hard, and then I went to college and I worked very hard there too, and I didn’t acquire any debt. Then I graduated, [...]
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Last weekend at Wilson’s house I saw most of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. A couple of days later, on a (rather extended) study break, I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. These movies brought to mind the release of the first one, and how excited I was at the prospect. [...]
I wonder if Christopher Hitchens’s astounding erudition and productivity over the years is due to the fact that he never wasted time watching a season and a half of Burn Notice; or because he did not suffer the brain damage that results from it. Hard to tease those apart.
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I just overheard a cop at the cafe talking about how she reads Garfield every day because it’s ‘hilarious.’ I think that if someone thinks Garfield is hilarious they probably shouldn’t be allowed to have any sort of firearm.
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