Phoenix of Love

Posts will appear on Monday or before.

I might be taking a trip to the Icefields Parkway in the Canadian Rockies around the end of February.
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Lately I’ve been craving a bit more focus for this blog. When I began it, the blog had a much more distinct focus, which was achieving fulfillment in every single twenty-four hour period; now it’s more of a collection of random thoughts. My thoughts run in tons of often unrelated directions, and gathering them together [...]

I have the most totally ambivalent feelings about snow. Lately Chicago has been haunted by a few clouds that just keep deluging us with mounds and mounds of snow. Restraint and moderation are not in the picture anywhere. I think it has snowed for 36 hours straight, and whenever you walk, or rather wade, the [...]

mosaic: from Medieval Latin musaicum, “work of the Muses.”
Hard shard shatter flinty break
unfashion forge repair untear unfake
create sharp fragment shrapnel make inchoate
show grow grapple. Unwrap happiness. Glass
splinter light extracting fact, impact;
raw wrecked caressingly, careen keen urgent
beauty perfect merging tender free.

Every time I ride the bus in Chicago, perhaps because I’m such an occasional rider and don’t have the a fully developed set of city blinders, I notice things. As the tired, miscellaneous crowds squash themselves further and further back into the bus in response to the driver’s shouted exhortations, these glances shoot back and [...]

There’s a whole emerging area of study that is like a quantum physics of the human mind. It is constantly churning out new research which shows that, when you look really, really closely at the human mind and its behaviour, there are extremely weird, irrational things going on. Loss aversion is one of my favourites [...]

Down the street from my apartment is one of those tiny family-owned dry cleaners, to which I take clothes maybe once every couple of months. Every single time I’ve gone there, since the first time I brought something for cleaning, the lady who runs the place has astonished me by remembering my name.
She always checks [...]

New Years resolutions have never really appealed to me. The trouble with them is that the part of my brain that makes those long-term plans seems not to be on speaking terms with the part that’s in charge of choosing, on a given Saturday morning, whether I will study for a certification exam or sleep [...]