Phoenix of Love

An article I once read claimed that most Americans are two paychecks away from bankruptcy. In other words, if the typical American missed two paychecks, they would be scraping the bottom of the piggy bank. Recently I was thinking of this, and it occurred to me that this could be true of people’s social lives [...]

This word makes up a surprisingly large chunk of the material of everyday conversation. Once in a while it catches my attention and I’m shocked at how disjointed and bumpy my sentences sound and how many “hedging phrases” like “well,” “kind of,” “I guess,” “you know,” “like,” and “um” poke out from the gaps between [...]

Traveling is a kind of limbo. It doesn’t belong to any world, or any routine, and it has a satisfying flavor of detachment that can be addictive. To me, traveling is the most enjoyable way of detaching. In the absence of flight cancellations and other insurmountable obstacles, it also feels empowering. It’s easy to get [...]

This is what happens when you randomly turn into a state park in the morning on the way to work:

I highly recommend turning off the road at every opportunity when the sun is rising. It only happens once a day, after all.

There is something deeply uninhibiting about traveling. I always seem to have fantastic conversations when I talk to the person sitting next to me on planes. On this particular plane trip, I decided that I would start a conversation with whoever sat down next to me. It seemed as though the risk of missing a [...]

Does anyone else find it incredibly frustrating wanting to describe some experience, or express it somehow, and not being able to find specific words (or sounds, gestures, movements, images, depending on what you’re doing) or even get beyond a vague, general feeling? This has to be universal. In the evening I was stuck in exactly [...]

Well, I tried. I made a serious effort to go through the entire day moving at half speed. Doing everything really slowly makes some tasks much more enjoyable. Others just seem really strange. But the upshot of it all is that I couldn’t seem to KEEP doing everything really slowly. I kept speeding up, fueled [...]

Speaking of interesting Latinate words, I love the word extraordinary. What’s great about it is that when you take it apart it just means “outside ordinary”—from the Latin extra ordinem, if you believe what www.etymonline.com says. I enjoy the idea that the word has gone from meaning “outside the routine” to “amazing.” Just stepping outside [...]

If you take the word apart into its Latin pieces, to “sacrifice” is to do something sacred; to make something holy. I was thinking about this, and it struck me that although we’re always talking about sacrificing things we want for what is right or what is better, it could be a lot handier to [...]

My task today was to listen to people, which is difficult when you’re at a party where the music drowns out almost all conversation. When the party is on the deck of a boat, you can’t even walk out the front door to get some fresh air and chat away from the noise.
Someone said to [...]