Tag: thoughtfood Page 1 of 2

Tiny Beautiful Things

On April 6, 2014

Every so often, a book comes to my attention that perhaps wouldn’t have normally. I’ll read a review, or hear it recommended, and think “Hey, that sounds interesting”, and I’ll make a note to myself to pick it up if I see it, or sometimes i’ll just grab it off the Amazon Kindle store where it will sit, waiting for me to find a moment to crack it open.

I don’t, at this point, remember who recommended the book “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar” by Cheryl Strayed. It’s been sitting in my Kindle Library for some time. But a couple of days ago I randomly opened it and began to read. Today I finished it.

I don’t recall the last book that so often made me laugh out loud, so often moved me to tears, so often stopped me dead in my tracks with a perfectly phrased insight or so often made me just stop, walk away from the book because I needed time to think and digest.and reflect on what I had just read.

I’ve read collections of advice columns before, from Dan Savage and Miss Manners and others. This is very likely the first collection of advice columns I will read again and again, because as much as I took from it, there’s more to take and find and connect with.

If you’re a human being who is currently in the process of living a life, I recommend this book.

Friday Five: Perspectives

By autographedcat

On November 15, 2013

In Blog

The Friday Five is a set of interesting things I ran across over the course of the week that I thought were worth sharing widely. Most of these were already shared on my Facebook feed, but I wanted to elevate them and put them in front of people for a second time. I hope to make this a weekly feature in the future.

whose deadly web ensnareth thee abouttywinning asked you: 2012-08-09 03:37 As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction? I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.

via Tumblr

Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling Address Gender BiasLena Dunham interviewed Mindy Kaling for Rookie: Yearbook Two, and the interview covers what you’d expect those two to cover: showrunning, pop culture, moms, feminism, Nora Ephron, women’s magazines. They also both expressed their exasperation with institutionalized misogyny. Dunham: Do you ever get embarrassed to point out gender bias?

via Vulture

Stonekettle StationI’m not a particularly reflective kind of guy. I don’t spend a hell of a lot of time dwelling on the past. For me, as someone who spent most of my adult life in the uniform of my country, every day is a day to remember those I served with.

via Stonekettle

How I Learned To Stop Explaining How Old Things Make Me Feel“Get ready to feel old.” I read this on Twitter almost every day, and usually it’s a good-natured reminder that something loved by many people of approximately my vintage (born in 1970) has hit a particular anniversary. Big was 25 years ago, you know. She’s So Unusual was 30 years ago.

via Npr

The Things Nobody Tells You About GriefI’m on countdown mode. It’s been almost a year without my mom. In my head, this breaks down into hundreds of phone calls, cups of tea, and hugs and kisses that haven’t been exchanged, and a landmark birthday of mine-all missing from my 2013 memory log.

via Lifehacker

Slip Off The Edge And Never Worry About The Fall

By autographedcat

On August 7, 2012

In Blog

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Here are my questions: Will you thrust your foot across that imaginary line, or will you back away from it, scouting around for an escape route? Will you risk causing a commotion in order to scratch the itch in your ambition? Or will you shuffle on back to your comfort zone and caress your perfect daydreams? Personally, Cancerian, I’m hoping you will elect to do what’s a bit unsettling. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should. If you make a bold move, make sure you’re not angling to please or impress me — or anyone else, for that matter. Do it as a way to express your respect for yourself — or don’t do it.

(from Rob Brezney’s Free Will Astrology)

QOTD

By autographedcat

On November 28, 2011

In Blog

Ran across this while looking for something else:

“You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.”
~Jan Glidewell

If we try to engineer perfect children, will they grow up to be unbearable? – By Katie Roiphe – Slat

By autographedcat

On November 24, 2010

In Blog

Not being a parent myself, I have no personal insights to add here, but have long wondered at the incredible amount of structure most kids seem to grow up in these days, compared to when I was growing up.

If we try to engineer perfect children, will they grow up to be unbearable? – By Katie Roiphe – Slate Magazine

Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the 1970s and ’80s? I can remember my parents having parties, wild children running around until dark, catching fireflies. If these children helped themselves to three slices of cake, or ingested the second-hand smoke from cigarettes, or carried cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words, they were not noticed; they were loved, just not monitored. And, as I remember it, those warm summer nights of not being focused on were liberating. In the long sticky hours of boredom, in the lonely, unsupervised, unstructured time, something blooms; it was in those margins that we became ourselves

The Distillation of Wisdom: Forgiveness

By autographedcat

On November 4, 2010

In Blog

I love a good quotation, because a good quotation is a concentration of thought, whether profound or humorous. I keep an extensive quotes file of things that have struck me as worth reading over from time to time, as many others I know do.

So today, I was over at the excellent Making Light blog. I read ML regularly, but I generally do so via RSS, so I don’t often find myself on their actual webpage. But today, I was, and a quote in the sidebar caught my eye and literally made me catch my breath.

“Forgiveness requires giving up on the possibility of a better past.” (unknown)

Now, this is nothing I didn’t already know, and its even something I’ve tried to express in the past. But I’d never seen it put so elegantly and succinctly.

More on Money and Happiness | Big Questions Online

By autographedcat

On November 1, 2010

In Blog

Some things to think about here. I’ve often half-joked that all I’ve ever wanted was for someone to PROVE to me that money can’t make me happy. But the real truth is, maximizing your happiness isn’t about how much you money you have, but how you invest it to get more of the things and experiences that make you happy.

More on Money and Happiness | Big Questions Online

[Elizabeth] Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and in a new paper, she’s teamed up with Dan Gilbert of Harvard University and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia to show us how we can spend our money to better maximize our happiness.

According to them, money “can buy many, if not most, if not all of the things that make people happy, and if it doesn’t, then the fault is ours.” Because, they say, we’re not spending it right.

The problem, they argue, is that:

Most people don’t know the basic scientific facts about happiness—about what brings it and what sustains it—and so they don’t know how to use their money to acquire it. … Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don’t.

Thought for Today

By autographedcat

On October 18, 2010

In Blog

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.

You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, but it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises.

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke.

h/t to Andrew Sullivan for the pointer.

You can call, but I probably won’t hear you…

By autographedcat

On June 2, 2009

In Blog

Following up to the concert, some musing on a specific song. On Twitter, sfeley writes:

One concert annoyance: why do people laugh and shout out during “Shop Vac?” That song is TRAGIC. It’s a tearjerker. Does nobody else get it?

Which got me to thinking about the song, and the nature of comedy…or, more specifically in this case, satire.

“Shop Vac” is a very bouncy pop tune, with a catchy sort of Fountains of Wayne vibe to it. It tells the story of a couple who has moved into their little suburban castle, with their two kids and the yard and the basement workshop and the convenient shopping nearby. But if you listen closely, its obvious that they are utterly miserable. As Steve notes, it’s a tragedy set in a pop song.

I’ve complained in the past about songs where the emotional centre of the song and the tenor of the tune felt at odds to me. Most famously, the Beatles “Ticket to Ride“, which I’ve always thought was a terribly jaunty tune for a song about losing love. (I much prefer The Carpenters’ melancholy cover.) But sometimes, the dichotomy is part of the point — it creates a dissonance between what we’re feeling and what we’re being told.

“Shop Vac” is satire, and it’s target is the American Dream^TM — or at least the ideal of it presented by our current culture. The couple in the song has everything that we’re all told we’re supposed to want, but everything we’ve been told we’re supposed to want turns out in many cases to be empty and unsatisfying. Somewhere on the way to “success”, they’ve found that along the way they’ve lost their dreams. Lois McMaster Bujold expressed it best: “The one thing you cannot trade for your heart’s desire is your heart.”

So….why is this funny? For some, it may be a measure of shadenfruede, because the person laughing may think “Ah-hah, but I didn’t fall into that trap! I reject that lifestyle and all it represents!” (This is a very geek attitude, and geeks are Coulton’s primary audience.). For others, it’s the hollow laughter of recognition. Coulton is certainly not the first to mine this notion for humour. Erma Bombeck wrote a dozen best sellers by extracting comedy from the soul-crushing ennui of suburban life. In the 1960s, The Monkees had a huge hit with Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Pleasant Valley Sunday“, which had a slightly more detached air, but lampooning the very same ideals.

This is why it’s one of my favourite Coulton songs, and why I requested it. Because it’s complex, and thought provoking, and more than meets the ear on first hearing. I don’t think that it’s funny because I don’t get it. It is funny (and tragic) because it is revealing a truth in a way that only the court jester can. Dry black humour, indeed, but humour none the less.

The only thing we have to fear…

By autographedcat

On May 22, 2009

In Blog

While Andrew Sullivan is on vacation this week, he’s turned over his Atlantic Monthly blog to a series of guest writers. Today contained a post by Lane Wallace which really struck me as being tasty thoughtfood:

In the course of the past 20 years, I’ve flown small aircraft on five continents. I’ve been stranded alone on a glacier in shorts and tennis shoes. I’ve found myself in the middle of rapidly destabilizing situations in African countries. And I’ve started two businesses and navigated a career that, more often than not, has lacked a stable paycheck. Do I love all the uncertainty that comes with that? No. But I’ve learned how to survive it, and even embrace the possibilities it offers. (I’ve even written a book on the subject.) Not every lesson translates to surviving uncertainty in everyday life, but a surprising number do. A few big ones:

1. Don’t panic. Self-explanatory. Panic and fear never helped anyone think their way clearly out of a tight spot.

But how do you control panic and fear?

2. Focus on the present. Fear is almost always related to something we’re afraid will or might happen in the future, not what’s actually happening in the present. In the present, we get busy with the business of coping. It’s our fears of amorphous monster threats down the road … realistic or not … that tend to paralyze us. Ask yourself, “Am I okay right now?” If the answer is yes, take a deep breath and relax a little bit. You can figure the rest out as you go.

3. Keep perspective. Ask yourself, “what’s the worst thing that happens here? Does anybody die?” Sometimes, in an adventure setting, the answer to that is yes. But that’s rarely true in everyday life. And keeping that fact in perspective helps ratchet the fear and worry down a notch or two. As long as you’re alive, you can regroup to fight another day.

4. Separate what you can’t control from what you can, and then focus on taking action on those items you can control. In an airplane, I can’t control whether the weather is going to deteriorate or something mechanical is going to break. But I can make sure I at least have enough fuel to look for a second airport, a flashlight in the cockpit in case the electrical system goes out, and a plan of what I’m going to do next if Plan A doesn’t work out.

5. Learn to prioritize what’s essential, and loadshed everything else.

6. Stay flexible. Be open to innovative options that pop up unexpectedly, or aren’t along the path you initially planned to follow. Sometimes those out-of-the-way places you end up diverting to end up way better than your original destination.

7. Remember to look at and enjoy the scenery, even when things get challenging. Few experiences are without any moments of beauty or grace. And these days … “good old” or otherwise … will pass all too quickly. You may have more money or safety down the road, but you’ll never be this young again.

Stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait? Only if we choose to be.