At Moe's Books, the pensive face of Irène Némirovsky stared at me from the cover of Suite française. Until I bought and opened the book (it was only $4, and I needed to do some French reading), I knew almost nothing about the Ukrainian-French-Jewish author or her work. Turns out that she was a "self-hating Jew" whose books portrayed greedy, hook- ( Read more... )

( In which I waste even more time after wasting way too much time )

• Real altruism means doing work you don't enjoy for a cause you don't believe in, in exchange for room and board in a place where you don't want to live. Or maybe that's indentured servitude.
• The other day I heard the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity say that she would not want to be told that she was going to live for another 60 years ( ( Read more... )

( How insensitive, ignorant, and verbose can I be? Read on for the surprising answer! )

Conflicts between warring factions are like herpes viruses, erupting at irregular intervals into big, angry, painful bumps and then subsiding to sleep fitfully until, after several weeks or months, a stressful situation causes them to resurface ( Read more... )

While reading yesterday about Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, I got a tech-support call from my 90-year-old neighbor. Her clock radio kept waking her up in the middle of the night, she said. Thanks to my decades of experience with such devices, I was able to identify the source of the problem (an alarm that was on) and fix it (turn it off). If ( Read more... )

I was all set to whine about how ineffectual I am, how every suggestion and request I make gets ignored, etc., when I realized that such whining would just meet a similar fate. So, in lieu of shameless self-pity, I will engage in shaming some major news outlets.

• "Two Chinese teenagers were killed and more than 180 injured in the crash..." (Reuters)
• ( Read more... )

There have been times in my life when, working hard at a fairly tedious and somewhat stressful job all day long, I would look forward to going home and escaping into a good movie or TV drama. I figured I deserved a break from the chores and worries of the day. Hospital dramas provided the best escape, because I could say, "At least my mistakes didn ( Read more... )

Check out this cool music that I'm listening to while I clean my house! = I'm cleaning my house, because I am totally responsible, clean, and physically active. Plus I have awesome taste in music ( Read more... )

One reason hinted at for my recent dismissal from a volunteer job was that I seemed unable to handle "ambiguity." It's true that I always want to know where I stand, what I think, what others think, and exactly what's expected of me. I really don't cope well with fuzziness and vagueness. But it had never occurred to me that this desire for ( Read more... )