overheard quotes from a particular person pt. 3

"That boy is lost as a goose in the fog."

recently random quotes

"Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

- T.S. Eliot in The Rock

and a paraphrase: "sometimes we misplace wisdom for information."

also: "The problem with conservatives is they cannot distinguish a vice from a crime, and the problem with liberals is they cannot distinguish a virtue from a requirement."

-William A. Niskanen

Advice

It isn't about how good you are at the task at hand, as long as you exceed a certain threshold. It's about how you handle people, specifically, how good you are or seem to be at adjusting to their quirks and foibles. You have a personality that a lot of people find agreeable, but you don't usually change it when it comes to dealing with different personality types. This is fine and dandy in short bursts or as a part of personal interactions (like when we dated), as you have a lot more leeway as to what your choices are, but at work it isn’t. This also applies to people with whom you aren’t necessarily friends but see often due to circumstance.

It isn't about being scared of showing who you are or feeling like to need to hide your personality. In the same way you look at a painting or sculpture from different angles to take it all in, you should be slowly showing people different sides of yourself until, one day, they see it all, including the parts they might not have liked if they had seen it first, and realize they have mad respect for who you are and what you’ve done.

overheard quotes from a particular person pt. 2

"How peculiar, he thought, watching the snowflakes and bits of sleet alight on the river, dance for an instant on the surface, then acquiesce to oblivion. How strange to have been anyone, for there to have been anything at all."

Yammer pt. 1

Self-esteem is a symptom, not a virtue.

Also, I wanted to share this.

"...a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved."

Trippin'

Gulf Breeze and the Pensacola Bay Bridge, which Desmond convinced me was in a perpetual state of near-collapse when I was younger, but later on in life saw me singing Devotchka's "We're Leaving" at the top of my lungs, windows down, spirits as high as the sun in the sky.

The tunnel under the Mobile River that always gives me a bit of a thrill, whether from terror when I was younger that the river above would come gushing in, or excitement like the time I went careening into it at night with Cut Copy's "Hearts on Fire" as the soundtrack.

The foundries near Pascagoula, with their giant smokestacks that have taken on new significance. They were his favorite on the trips to and from Florida.

The swamps, marshes, bayous and all the little bridges they require that start shortly after the foundries, but keep on coming, even after crossing that giant arch over the Pearl River.

Sunsets on the trips that start late, and the vaguest of memories of me and my brothers, in the car with Dad, wanting to know why we were going to Florida to see Grandpa on a school night.

I might not live there any longer, and I might be comfortable (as can be) in Washington, DC, but these things, these landmarks from the past, they still point the way home.

This is accurate

“Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up.”

Regarding a picture

The anger-stoked passion play taking place over budget cuts and federal salaries for the people in our government is distracting from the real issue: whether fair or not, the people who have run our government previously promised too much without asking for the necessary sacrifices from everyone to pay for those promises. Cuts must be made, even if we were to give in and increase taxes (which I do not prefer), and there is no way to get around that. We need to approach those cuts rationally, and with some sense of what our priorities must be, and that is what our current debate is about.

You will hurt them

You know you might have put it behind you, that you're ok, and that you have set aside the possibility of hating them, but you also know that you're going to hurt them, that what you do is going to drive the dagger deep; you'd have to be inhuman to not pause and reconsider. Your previous statements to the contrary, full of bravado, feigned disinterest in their well-being and coated in a coldly calculated varnish of malice, mean nothing, because it isn't right to give up on someone you think of as good inside, but misguided, unknowing, and young. To give up on people, to cast them aside, to pretend like you really know what produces growth and how loyalty is born, feels wrong, especially when you both feel and know, from experience, that with patience you can help them improve.

But then you cast those thoughts aside, because you realize you are not really over it, and you rationalize what you will do by saying that a shock is just what they need, that you are, ultimately, better anyway, and that they will either rationalize away their own failure, just like you have done, by blaming others, or you will have successfully short-circuited the process, and gotten them to grow without wasting too much of your patient, seemingly-endless time.

And at the end of the night, before you doze off, you will still feel like shit for what you have done, but you will also still sleep, because it is all you can do.

About someone

It is a relationship built on trust rather than honesty.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

The entire book is amazing and should be read, if you haven't heard of it already. It is also all eminently quotable, so much so that, while I started out trying to do the usual and take down particularly good snippets, I gave up halfway through the first story, just because I think each of them should be read and enjoyed in totum. I will, instead, recommend specific stories as my favorites, the first being the eponymous one "Stories of Your Life", the structure of which lends so much weight to the content of the story, which is incredible and moving in itself; "Hell is the Absence of God" concerns itself with the nature of faith and devotion by using the conceit of a world in which the existence of heaven, hell, angels and demons are known and provable, and in which the latter make regular visitations to Earth; then there's the first story of the book, "Tower of Babylon", which follows a miner as he first ascends the completed tower and then begins his attempts to open the vault of heaven. Despite my reticence to quote, however, there are three quotes I would like to share, just to give you a flavor of things.

The first is an incredibly beautiful image he commits to paper in "The Tower of Babylon", when the main character, Hillalum, is experiencing sunset after a few days climbing the tower:

Hillalum and Nanni looked down. At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight.

Hillalum rolled over and looked up, in time to see darkness rapidly ascend the rest of the tower. Gradually, the sky grew dimmer as the sun sank beneath the edge of the world, far away.

'Quite a sight, is it not?' said Kudda.

Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky."

The second is from "Hell is the Absence of God":

He understood how life was an undeserved bounty, how even the most virtuous were not worthy of the glories of the mortal plane.

For him, the mystery was solved, because he understood that everything in life is love, even pain, especially pain.

The last is from the "Story Notes" section at the back of the book, where he discusses the inspiration for each of the stories. A (typical, in a good way) Kurt Vonnegut quote from Slaughterhouse Five:

"Stephen Hawking...found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now...To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say 'Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.' "

Desmond

"People pay for what they do and what they have allowed themselves to become, very simply, through the lives they lead"

-paraphrase from James Baldwin's No Name in the Street

No matter how many times you are told it wasn't your fault, and that you have to accept the decisions others have made for themselves, you cannot shake the idea that they are wrong, and you are, at the very least, partially responsible. Every February, for the last four years since I found it, I have read the same post by one of my favorite writers of philosophy, Eliezer Yudkowsky. I have always had a rough and tumble relationship with God and faith, and while I never agreed with his stances on things like the "singularity" and transhumanism, everything more human, especially his feelings about God in a time of dealing with death, has always felt spot on. There is now a new date that will find me returning to that post. Since it has passed, I have found myself zoning out, expecting the world to stop and take notice that one of us is gone, and it keeps not happening.

I never had the relationship with my middle brother that I did with my oldest. I presume it's just because the normally fractious nature of any sibling relationship (which, in our case, was sometimes much more fractious than normal) won out, and I failed to look beyond it. That doesn't lessen the fact that I loved, and continue to love him, and that, beyond reflecting on what my actions towards him say about myself, my thoughts have returned to the same bottom line: "My brother, Desmond, is dead, he took a piece of me with him, and it is my fault."

What I know for certain, if anything, is that my oldest brother was right. I have, for a very long time, been a selfish and self-centered person, who hasn't been the man he has wanted to be. This isn't a new revelation, by any means; with Desmond gone, though, the idea has been at the forefront, and it has served to focus what I've been feeling and thinking, thus far, into trying to be better. I hope this period of striving sticks, that I can continue with it and protect it from becoming buried under life's inuring constancy. It helps in doing that to feel, whatever others might say, that I was responsible for what happened to Desmond. I didn't treat him the way I should have, and provide him the support and love that someone should to their brother; in short, I wasn't any measure the family that my oldest brother and my sister-in-law were, when it came to Desmond.

He didn't see any way out, partially because I wasn't who I should have been, and I will be paying for the lesser man I was for the rest of my life.

Thought for the day

From a friend:

"Don't corner something meaner than you."

Money quote

the modern definition of happiness is, “A pleasurable sensation.” The old definition of happiness (as in, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of”) was, “Living a life of integrity and worth.” I like the old one better.

from here

overheard quotes from a particular person pt. 1

The first post of (hopefully) many, in which I record the greatest morsels of wisdom and observational humor that tumble forth from the mouth of someone I find imminently hilarious.

"Don't be a fool, wrap your tool."

(on dealing with withdrawl) "WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, got nothin' in mah system, but I.AM. DRUNK. Whose got a lip?!"

Also, not from the same person, but still hilarious:

"The Epoch of When Shit Got Real"

Grime

Through the front door, down the stairs, past the laundrette, right up to the big red door marked "Boiler Room" with a prominent warning not to smoke.

Past the giant boiler and the buzzing a/c compressor, up some stairs and into the room with the compactor.

There it is.

A portable dust bin that janitors use, a worn out broom, one or two minutes of patience, all mixed with a contortion or two.

SUCCESS!

Down the steps, past the still buzzing a/c compressor and giant, now hissing, boiler; out the big red door marked "Boiler Room", passing again the laundrette ("Have you seen my card?"). Up the elevator (11th floor), into the apartment, off with the clothes, into the shower.

On dating

"You get your shit together, and you find other people that have their shit together. If you're a needy co-dependent or an emotionally retarded tinman, then you'll find people who are all out of whack too."

-from here

Displaced on facebook

"Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked."

Not everything in a social conversation is funny

and you don't need to laugh at every little cute story you tell. I wonder sometimes if you notice that you're the only one laughing.

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara

To the Film Industry in Crisis, pgs. 3-5

Les Etiquettes jaunes, pg. 9

I picked up a leaf

today from the sidewalk

This seems childish.

Leaf! you are so big!

How can you change your

color, then just fall!

As if there were no

such thing as integrity!

You are too relaxed

to answer me. I am too

frightened to insist.

Leaf! don't be neurotic

like the small chameleon.

For Grace, After a Party, pg. 17

You do not always know what I am feeling.

Last night in the warm spring air while I was

blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't

interest

me, it was love for you that set me

afire,

and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of

strangers my most tender feelings

writhe and

bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,

isn't there

an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside

the bed? And someone you love enters the room

and says wouldn't

you like the eggs a little

different today?

And when they arrive they are

just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather

is holding.

Mayakovsky, pgs. 50-52, is the poem quoted in the episode of Mad Men titled after this book.

And just so I don't seem too bourgie, here's what I've been listening to this morning.

Had a dream about you

and when I woke up this morning, I rolled right over, hoping it wouldn't end.

Displaced from facebook

"The threat is stronger than the execution."

Marching orders for politicos in the 21st century

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

A paean to Jackass 3-D

"I saw a midnight showing of Jackass and it was well worth it: a film this ridiculous is the one legitimate application of otherwise gimmicky and lame 3D projection technology. If you're going to make me wear polarized glasses in a theater, I want to see a kazoo inflated by a man's anus jump out at me in the third dimension.

To anyone who thinks Jackass heralds the end of western civilization... well, I have to disagree.

Fifty years ago a bunch of self-important tightwads feared that allowing us to see base obscenity played out on a screen would result in the moral decay of society... yet here we are, with almost no boundaries left to push, and we're OK. Our minds aren't that fragile, so we collectively decided not to act offended and outraged when we didn't actually feel that way. All we've done is finally and completely drop the pretense that people don't enjoy baseness and vulgarity.

You might say that we're all jaded husks of what people once were: shell-shocked zombies walking around being assaulted by vulgarity that would have been unthinkable five decades ago and committing acts of reckless violence and depravity on a daily basis... and yet we aren't. We work, we love, we feel: society functions well, better in fact than it did in any previous era, once you remove the rose-colored lenses of nostalgia and idealism.

I wouldn't even say we're jaded to the horrors of this movie: far from it, we laugh in disbelief, we cringe, we retch... call us jaded and numb when we can sit through this without being interested.

This movie is far less a threat to western civilization than the widespread banality and stupidity in most mainstream cinema and television. Not once did Jackass 3D insult my intelligence. Not once did it try to convince me that the main character's use of Pepsi is an integral plot point. Nor did it try to make me care about the petty and stupid reactions of inconsequential people to ridiculous events. It didn't misrepresent the laws of physics, it didn't feature ridiculous plot holes that require not just a suspension of disbelief but of all reasoning... I may not have emerged from the theater smarter, but I didn't come out angry or disappointed. Just entertained.

Jackass 3D was just goddamn awesome, and I'm pleased beyond words that it made far more money than whatever mediocre garbage was playing in the adjacent cinema."

-from here