Phoenix of Love

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 [...]

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 [...]

In the field of human-computer interaction (yes, people actually study it; and no, it doesn’t involve talking robots) there’s a fair amount of talk about something called “excise.” Literally speaking, excise is a type of tax, apparently inspired by Holland. In the realm of computer interaction design, excise is basically the extra work you have [...]

It’s astonishing and frightening how completely people can tune out what’s going on around them and become selectively oblivious. A while ago, the Washington Post conducted a clever and slightly wacky experiment, and had Joshua Bell, the world-famous virtuoso violinist, pose as a street musician in the Washington D.C. subway. The article is well worth [...]

Different cultures have different ways of “handing over the floor” to the next person in a conversation. In some cultures, people basically interrupt all the time, and whoever can talk louder gets the next turn. In others, there are long pauses between when one person finishes talking and when the next begins. In the U.S. [...]

You may remember that a while back there was quite a stir about huge numbers of bees absconding from their hives and vanishing. Well, I’ve determined conclusively where they’ve all gone and why. Today I was eating lunch with a coworker at a sandwich shop, and as I was polishing off the last corner of [...]

Neck tension is annoyingly difficult to get rid of. I carry enormous amounts of tension in my neck and shoulders, even when I’m otherwise quite relaxed. It’s painful and can also make me look uncomfortable for no particular reason. You’d think that lying down and taking the load off of your shoulders would release the [...]

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of amor fati—love of fate; love of the way things are. I was thinking recently that loving another person is the closest we can come to the relationship we have with the world itself. Ultimately, the only way you can survive loving someone is to love their sheer [...]