Busy

You know you're a parent when you've been hard at work for four hours, and you've just gotten to work.

Deep Thought

There's not much that feels better after a day at the beach than taking an outdoor shower and emerging into a cool ocean breeze.

Deep Thought

Kids are in the kiddie pool, dog's asleep on the clover, I'm with K on the outdoors couch drinking fancy cocktails (the Leland Palmer) in the heat. Life is good.

Refuting Arguments

Found on Brain Pickings, I thought this passage from Susan Sontag's September 16, 1965 entry in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library) to be quite insightful:

The main techniques for refuting an argument:

Find the inconsistency
Find the counter-example
Find a wider context

Instance of (3):

I am against censorship. In all forms. Not just for the right of masterpieces— high art— to be scandalous.

But what about pornography (commercial)?
Find the wider context:
notion of voluptuousness à la Bataille?
But what about children? Not even for them? Horror comics, etc.
Why forbid them comics when they can read worse things in the newspapers any day. Napalm bombing in Vietnam, etc.

A just/ discriminating censorship is impossible.

Crappy Google Searches

Is it me or have Google searches been more ineffective ever since they started prioritizing more recent news in their search algorithm? It certainly seems like i'm getting a higher percentage of crap in my search results over the last few months.

Deep Thought

Women take the time to actually talk to their friends on the telephone. Men just text or email.

Deep Thought

Why do all of the horrible hurricanes I remember have female names?

Deep Thought

Is it better to know a lot about a little (specialization) or a little about a lot (generalization)? I've always thought the latter, but i'm starting to question that assumption a bit. It's good to know a lot, but I also feel like I sound like Cliff Clavin at times ("It's a little known fact that...").

Deep Thought

Honestly, does anything beat live music on the beach?

Deep Thought

There is nothing like beach light. You have the regular sun, and then the light bouncing off of the sand and water. It permeates everything, and is a wonderful experience.

Deep Thought

It would be really nice to be able to take a vacation from being a parent.

Deep Thought

Jealousy is the shadow of greed.

Deep Thought

The attendee necklaces that conferences give you to hold your credentials couldn't be less sexy.

Deep Thought

Emo as an urgent celebration of whatever capricious emotion you happen to be experiencing at the moment.

Deep Thought

Everything looks better after a nice long exhausting run. No matter how shitty it is.

Deep Thought

If I don't fill in the blanks, who will? Am I strong enough to let them remain unfilled?

Deep Thought

Kitchens are never as big enough as you need them to be.

Deep Thought

I'd watch more TV with my son if the shows he watches weren't so inane. Yes, I'm looking at you, Dora the Explorer.

Sunday Pondering

The Dish pointed me toward two great observations on this lazy Sunday road trip. The first is when Alice Gregory contrasts the drama of nature on the US west coast with the east coast:

...what the East Coast lacks in menacing spectacle it makes up for in a sort of scaled-down obedience. East Coast nature yields to us. With its lapping, Amagansett waves and sweet sugar maples, the wild here, such as it is, seems to be ours for the sculpting. Perceiving nature’s rhythms feels less daunting, and our observations can be quieter, more microscopic. There are no incisor-like mountains or blazing forest fires to blast your sense of self. It’s a place where a poetic feeling can be maintained in relative peace, where the flora, fauna, and mild geology make space for introspective rumination and a notion of society. You can nurture a private sense of romance. The East Coast does not demand that you bow down before it in awe, nor does it require constant, humble apology for being tiny and human. You can be surrounded by the quaint prettiness of nature, not terrorized by its beauty as you are in California.

The second is Frank Wilson's thoughts on magical thinking:

I have certain stones that I feel especially attached to and have from the moment I first laid eyes on them. I feel similarly attached to my house plants. I think of them as persons. I feel certain they have a sense of who I am. ... Unfortunately, we tend to run from our own mythologies, or to bury them away, afraid that if others learn of them they will think us eccentric at best or else flat-out nuts. But such a personal mythology is actually the record of our profoundest self’s encounter with the world. My own, of course, is grounded in my Catholic faith. But one’s faith needs to be lived as a musical score is played — not with metronomic monotony, but with a generous dash of rubato.

Deep Thought

Feedback's better in person.