Phoenix of Love

While shopping for groceries today at Food 4 Less, I was winding my way out of the produce section when I took a momentary detour to pick up some sweet potatoes. There was a slightly elderly lady standing in front of the sweet potatoes, sifting through them intently. When I picked up a healthy-looking one, [...]

There’s a key principle that often gets lost in the din as our lives become more and more complicated: anything that is going to stay around needs to generate more than it consumes.
A friend once gave me the memorable advice that in life we need to be able to manufacture our own happiness. Too often [...]

The German TV licensing agency has been missing some important details.
In October, they threatened the German poet Friedrich Schiller with legal action if he failed to pay his 17 euro TV license for the month. Sadly, Mr. Schiller was unable to settle his account, as he had been deceased since May 1805.
Following up on this [...]

When frustrated with our confusion, my high school physics teacher often liked to say, in a lilting accent with rolled r’s, that “there’s a difference between wrong and absolutely ridiculous.”
It may not be for the reasons that he had in mind, but I think there is definitely a difference: being wrong is boring.
Being absolutely ridiculous [...]

Language learning fascinates me. A while back, I heard about a website called Livemocha that takes a community-oriented approach to language learning. It’s a bit of a cross between Facebook, Wikipedia, and the much-acclaimed Rosetta Stone language tutoring software, which teaches with images rather than by association with your native tongue.
On Livemocha, you can take [...]

Here’s a story for you. Harold Hartley is a sales representative for a Detroit steel company. Every Monday, he catches the disastrously early 5:45am Northwest Airlines flight to Indianapolis to work with a major client there. Every Thursday, after three and a half long days of hard selling, he topples into his coach class seat [...]

Every weekday at around 5:45pm, I ride the train home from work. Like everything that happens with such mind-numbing regularity, I have it reduced to a mostly unconscious routine: leave the office at a particular time, take the elevator downstairs, go out the north exit, walk through the alley, head up the stairs to the [...]

There are certain things you can’t do any faster. Sing faster and it will sound wrong. Breathe faster and you are hyperventilating. Laugh faster and you won’t enjoy the joke. Sleep faster and—that doesn’t even make any sense.
Actually, doing anything faster is like sleeping faster. It doesn’t even make any sense.
When we talk about doing [...]

Sartre’s famous aphorism that “hell is other people” is backwards.
Hell is disconnected self-consciousness. Hell is the lack of other people.
A characteristically brilliant and frank recent post by Mona brought this to mind:
My biggest test for the last couple of years, though, has been feeling (relatively) alone in my quest for human interdependence. It pulls me [...]

I don’t believe in umbrellas. This means that I occasionally get drenched when for one reason or another I have to walk a longish distance outside in a torrential downpour.
The reason I decline umbrella protection, though, is that being drenched by rain is really not a traumatic experience at all.
For the record, I do NOT [...]