Dreams: Night School | Psychology Today →
Dreams are a dojo for perfecting waking activities
“But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if that means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.
The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us. And to save us.”
- Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept) (via kari-shma) (via mariamjaan)
Unlike most sports boxing has always had the threat of death looming over it. It is the only sport where inflicting pain is the goal. While giving is a huge part, the inevitable fact is that the sport is far more about receiving blows than it is about giving them. That said I don’t think the sweet science is something that should be avoided, even with its drawbacks, its damages, and its risk, the game invokes people to rise above themselves, an otherwise mundane person can become a hero in the ring for a few minutes.
Individualism, Identity and Bicycles in Northern California - NYTimes.com →
PALO ALTO, Calif. On the hour they come, great clouds of cyclists pulsing between classes along the street called Serra Mall — the main axis of Stanford University — like so many slowly charged particles in a physics experiment. Campus is flat enough — and large enough — and the weather so brilliant that nearly everyone cycles. And whoever all these cyclists are, as individuals, their individuality is burnished by the bikes they ride and by the way they ride them. It’s as though the bikes are only partly transportation, as though they were really machines for differentiation. And what aids the differencing is that few people wear helmets, and everyone is wearing ordinary clothes — none of the sleek and gaudy costumes you see on cyclists pumping through the peninsular hills and whistling down Sand Hill Road to the Caltrain station. They are themselves on wheels. There is a deeply pleasing randomness about the campus cyclists, as though one morning university officials had assigned a bicycle to every member of the Stanford community, come as you are, without considering for a moment matters of fit — or fitness. Some riders are clearly adepts, like the ones riding fixies — fixed, single-gear bikes. There goes one now — zooming past on yellow-walled tires, riding fully upright, texting with both hands on his iPhone as he goes. But all around him there are cyclists riding à la 8 years old, prey to the wobbling clutches of gravity, prone to every distorting posture a bicycle can inflict. One pedals past with his saddle tipped up so far that he rides slipping backward, hanging onto the handlebar to keep from falling into the rear wheel. One rides high-kneed, spilling all the energy as he pedals. A cluster of young women comes along, one with streamers flying from her hand-grips, all with handlebars high and seats low, knees gesticulating as they go. One tugs at her hem as she rides. One rides in heels and pinions a cellphone between her shoulder and her ear. The women are only accidentally riding together, and, suddenly, through the group — nearly dispersing it — pedals a subcluster of young women on mountain bikes, agile, balanced, weight forward, utterly at home on two wheels. Behind them rides a young man wearing a King Tut headdress, glistening in the sun, churning furiously in a gear too low. And everyone — everyone — is a hostage to gravity, adding to their burden by carrying distended bags of every description. The champion is a woman who cycles past wearing a golf bag like a quiver across her back. Truly, we are the only species so discontented with our natural gaits, so ambitious to exceed a foot-pace. It all puts me in mind of Thomas Jefferson, on the subject of walking and horses and their deleterious effect on human exercise. “I doubt,” he wrote, “whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal.”
It’s funny how we crave the authentic, the unspoiled, the genuine — the un-globalized and un-homogenized and un-gentrified — only to destroy them. And then, as if in remorse, attempt to create unthreatening Disney versions of the authentic, the unspoiled and the genuine. It’s funny how the rich, tired of grilled tuna or Chilean sea bass, weary of New York generic (never simmered, always seared), want to eat like the poor, while the poor just want to be rich.
Op-Ed Columnist - Advice From Grandma - NYTimes.com →
What I increasingly fear today is that America is only able to produce “suboptimal” responses to its biggest problems — education, debt, financial regulation, health care, energy and environment. Why? Because at least six things have come together to fracture our public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions:
1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.
2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.
3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own political echo chambers.
4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.
5) The Internet, which, at its best, provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices and, which, at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs from across the political spectrum that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.
6) A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.
These six factors are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis. To get anything big done now, we have to generate so many compromises — couched in 1,000-plus-page bills — with so many different interest groups that the solutions are totally suboptimal. We just get the sum of all interest groups.
Field Guide to the Drama Queen | Psychology Today →
Drama queens and kings enliven dull parties and crack the best jokes during staff meetings. They add a welcome splash of color to a black-and-white scene. But their insatiable hunger for attention can look a lot like arrested development. If they don’t keep in check their need for an adrenaline rush and a captive audience, they risk spinning themselves into caricatures—rarely respected and eventually resented for their selfishness and the chaos they create.
