To surrender to my ignorance. If one can never know exactly what game one is playing, it becomes much easier to avoid getting worked up about whether one is playing it right or whether one will “win” or not.
The hot, molten core. Because it is hot, and molten… And because I am a fancy bag of water.
I don’t have a favorite restaurant, but I do have a type: mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall that only does a few things but does them all exceedingly well. I don’t care for frou-frou places, and it drives me batty when a place has a thirty-page menu and you have to play the “guess what they actually have” game. I always loved watching Monty Python’s “Cheese Shop Sketch,” but have loathed reprising the John Cleese part in so many restaurants.
Chains have their place in the travel pipeline or in a busy schedule, but I generally prefer a novel experience over a cookie cutter one.
Kipling called prostitution
The world's oldest profession.
Now, I'm pretty sure that it
Will be the last, as well:
The last professional endeavor --
The last profitable activity --
That humans do better than
Machines.
Whores will be the last holdouts
To shift from being workers
To being Artists of Humanity. . .
Or - maybe - they will be
The first in that, as well.
If there’s anything that I learned in all those years of Social Science education, it’s that forecasting is a sucker’s game.
I don’t know where I’ll be, but I hope it’s someplace I never saw coming. #embracethechaos.
My wife, movement, new & interesting ideas, play, and epiphanies.
[I’m presuming we’re using the word “thing” in the broadest possible sense — as a stand in for any noun. If it is meant in the narrower common usage of trinkets, gewgaws, baubles, and tchotchkes, then I’ve got nothing.]
A psychology teacher taught us about what he called “the gestalt of expectations.” It’s when one builds an alternative reality in one’s mind (typically a worst-case scenario) and then one acts as though it is a reality, when – in fact – it is not. (Though sometimes it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy situation, which — of course — triggers selection bias in people of the unexamined life.)
It was my introduction to what I would come to know as the most fundamental insight of human existence — i.e. that one’s experience of the world is not the world itself, and while one has minimal influence over the latter, one can have tremendous influence over the former. One can even train oneself to perceive difficulties and sorrows as learning and growth opportunities.
Daily practice of feeling gratitude. (As opposed to being grateful that one November day a year and wallowing in how horrible everything is the other three-sixty-four.)
Wu Song (武松) from Water Margin (水浒传.)
Because he’s a traveler with zero f#&ks to give. There is no more freedom to be had than that.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot,
and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
Isn’t making a smoking section in a restaurant
like making a peeing section in a swimming pool?
I don’t believe there’s any problem in this country,
no matter how tough it is,
that Americans,
when they roll up their sleeves,
can’t completely ignore.
Here’s all you have to know about men and women;
women are crazy,
men are stupid.
And the main reason that women are crazy
is that men are stupid.
I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete.
It’s so fuckin’ heroic.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 