Phoenix of Love

It says “Tis da Season.”
It’s always the season.

This is Diversey.
The slightly agonized swoosh of opening doors.
The verbose drunk man sitting behind me keeps talking, with hardly a pause, about the Super Bowl; how he keeps getting caught drinking on the job; how people should be allowed to do what they like on the weekend, because they deserve it, after all, don’t they? [...]

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When I was younger, it bothered me tremendously that I couldn’t think straight in noisy places. I thought it was some defect of my mind that I had trouble feeling spiritual in the midst of commotion. Recently, I heard about some research that showed that, although we can become used to noise in the sense [...]

One of my insights from six months of daily 30-mile highway commutes was that most of the time we overestimate how much time we will save by going faster. In the mornings sometimes I watch myself and others hurl ourselves towards the train station, the office, the elevator at breakneck paces, as though we can [...]

Today I had my first lesson in salsa dancing. I have a fairly terrible sense of balance, hardly any muscular flexibility, and not much physical coordination, so dancing doesn’t exactly come naturally to me. But I’ve been finding that I enjoy it more and more, and now I feel like getting good at it.
What I [...]

I just realized what a huge chunk of my speech and thought during the winter is monotonous complaining about the cold weather. This has been the case for a few years now at least. I mention it in practically every conversation, because the cold bothers me so much; because it lowers the quality of my [...]

My overcoat has a small hole in the lining of its right pocket. For the most part I’ve gotten used to not putting small objects in there, ever since I discovered a few pens, my car keys, and assorted receipts burrowed into the bottom of my coat, but occasionally I forget. Yesterday evening, after buying [...]

Once in a while, I look at snow and it suddenly hits me how strange it is that a precise combination of weather conditions causes this shower of white ice crystals to float down from the sky—how bizarre it is to have huge piles of it crowding up roads and parking lots. I wonder what [...]

I want to observe more and analyse less. There is so much thinking, so much intellect and interpretation and categorizing and describing and questioning and solving in my work and in my day-to-day life, it is almost a habit. It is exhausting sometimes to think so much, to be constantly dissecting concepts, extracting meanings, and [...]