Firstly: ThisLast year I had the opportunity to be spoken at by a guy named Thomas, who'd spent several years recovering from severe frontal and generalized white matter injuries, sustained in a car accident. It was disturbingly illuminating because his cognitive defects were my defects magnified to the point of caricature -- distractability, poor ( Read more... )

( ten minutes with my program director )

( Want to hear something really lame? )

Here is an illustration of the manifold costs of ressentimentWhile sitting in a coffee shop reading, I overhear some guy sitting behind me running his yap about how "people who think there's a cure for cancer don't understand what it is" and how, apparently, it just happens like death and taxes. (Actually, it was worse: he threw in more painfully ( Read more... )

I think I just figured something out about why I clash with people who rely more on etiquette than I do in their social lives ( Read more... )

This op-ed and this data make for a nice juxtaposition. Bwahahaha . . .

We're back where we belong
straight back where we belong
-- Matthew Good, "Born Losers"

Events of last weekend got me meditating on people's masochistic tendencies, and then with impeccable timing Patri linked to an old essay about Bruce. Bruce is the guy who hangs around a pool hall losing at pool, or a card table losing at cards -- not because he ( Read more... )

The sons of Hermes love to play ( Read more... )

A new record!

"Hypocrisy" is one of those words with an obvious, well-understood meaning that gets curiouser the more closely you look at it. In Greek plays the hypokrites was the actor, the pretender, and it's easy enough to see how the modern meaning descended from this -- we call someone a hypocrite who makes a pretense with which their actions stand in ( Read more... )