Tonight, I decided to start organizing my CD collection. I unboxed everything, and found that Richard D. James was somehow nestled between Ella Fitzgerald and Blossom Dearie, an unlikely arrangement but you can’t fault his taste. I like to think that if she’d stayed with us for a while longer, Ella would have dug the Aphex Twin. My soul music collection seems somehow smaller than I remember, except for the Ray Charles: I don’t remember buying Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music, but I’m sure glad I did.
When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don’t crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true of false, gleaned from one’s parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child’s exodus from the parental nest, sooner of later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants.
–David James Duncan, The River Why
Today, our founders were all out of town, leaving their desks completely unprotected.
I’ve started going back to judo practice. For now, I’m skipping the ろんどり (“rondori”, or sparring) because my shoulder is not 100% just yet, but even so I’m so out of shape that I feel nauseous most of the time.
Am hoping this goes away, as am annoying myself.
Anyway, the shower afterwards felt great. I find it easy to forget that enjoyment often comes from contrast. If I don’t work out, a shower is just a shower. If I wasn’t working hard, a vacation wouldn’t mean much. If I had never felt lonely, I wouldn’t appreciate much the nice things people sometimes say.
I have a friend who is doing her Ph.D. research on well-being, and I don’t pretend to understand her work but I do remember that she once told me about the result of a massive survey she helped with. They found that a sense of well-being was uncorrelated to the amount of enjoyment in one’s life, but was highly (inversely) correlated to toil and hardship.
I sometimes feel like I’m slowly but surely wearing myself down. But that’s okay, isn’t it?
Joe Bar is three blocks up the hill from me. They serve good coffee, wine, wifi and crêpes — that is to say, the place is just giggly enough to repel all but the most fraudulent of hipsters.
This photo was taken using an eight-second exposure from across the street.
