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Burning

In the style of Glennon Doyle…

Essie,

There’s a time in your life when you’ll be striving, reaching, seeking. Every new subject, every new interest, every new person will crackle with the possibility of sparking and bringing alive a part of you that you didn’t know existed. It’s the kind of ride you’ll know you’re on when you’re on it. It needs no label. And what’s more: by definition, you’ll enjoy it. It feeds the ego. For most, it occurs in late teens, early twenties. For some, it’s delayed by loss but ignites later in life, when there is time and space. For still others, tragically, it never happens.

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No Up Without Down

Four of us were busily chatting in the kitchen the other day, and Ess came in to tell us all something. We were very engaged talking to one another, and Ess could tell and she started to get this little hitch-stutter-filler in her speech, uncertainly stretching out words, aware that nobody was listening, wondering whether to continue. Essie’s experience lasted a brief moment, but the profound pain I felt in response, my daughter here, talking, no one listening, startled me. Here’s the flip side of that:

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Perspective

“I’m not doing so well.”

My 84-year-old patient was nearing the end of another denture fitting appointment, and he had just accidentally spilled all of his water on the operatory floor. “No no,” I said, “you’re doing just fine.” Trying to reassure him, I couldn’t think of anything better to say.

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Adrian Tan

Adrian Tan delivered an amazing combination of wisdom and wit to a graduating class in Singapore:

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

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BMW X6

Yesterday, someone parked a year’s worth of dental school (in the form of a BMW X6 outside our home. As I admired the dramatic curves of the car, it felt freeing not to want one. Now, before you start thinking I’m trying to be all high and mighty anti-buying-stuff, hear me out! This isn’t some moral triumph of mine over material goods. In fact, I understand I’ll certainly need a car when I begin working in a few years. Indeed, my thoughts about this are more practical.

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Rules

Rands In Repose, on rules:

Rules are not constraints, they are optimizations and they are clarifications.

Taste

Paul Graham, on Taste:

… if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone will discover it.

The good writing just doesn’t stop:

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The Buddha

A quote from poet Jane Hirshfield in David Grubin’s film “The Buddha”, on PBS:

No matter what your circumstances, you will end up losing everything you love, you will end up aging, you will end up ill. And the problem is that we need to figure out a way how to make that all be all right.

Fruit Salad

HOWTO make the perfect fruit salad and get laid:

Wash your hands with soap. Do this in the kitchen, not in the bathroom, even if you just came out of the bathroom. Even if you spend your entire day submerging your hands in a sterile bubble, wash your hands in front of your sweetheart. Do it now.

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Attempting wisdom

In subtlety — that you’ve seen this thing 300 times before, but not quite like this — lies expertise.

Life advice

I think I need to take this quote from a post here in May and print it out:

“What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

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Hair

If you do your hair when the mirror is foggy, you’ll always love the way it looks.

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Do, Do Not

If you happen to be cooking a delicious chicken burger from Trader Joe’s on your stove top in your apartment, and you remove it from the pan in which it was cooking, you should make sure that you turn off the gas on the hot pan. If, in the event that you forget to do this, you should not panic upon realizing that the heat has been on an empty pan, and then pour water into the pan. This action will fill your apartment with incredible amounts of (admittedly delicious smelling) chicken smoke. You should, however, DEFINITELY OPEN ALL THE WINDOWS you can get to, turn on a vent fan, and hope to everything that is good in the world that your smoke alarm doesn’t go off.

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Samuel Johnson Quote

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Free programming tips

Free programming tips - Really great advice on programming, including waiting to optimize until after you find the slow spots.

And don’t write longer, more obtuse code because you think it’s faster. Remember, hardware gets faster. MUCH faster, every year. But code has to be maintained by programmers, and there’s a shortage of good programmers out there. So, if I write a program that’s incredibly maintainable and extensible and it’s a bit too slow, next year I’m going have a huge hit on my hands. And the year after that, and the year after that.

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New Things

Here’s a great quote I saw at Jimmy John’s today:

Never be afraid to try new things. A lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of trained professionals built the Titanic.

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Full Catastrophe Living Quote

Zorba’s response embodies a supreme appreciation for the richness of life and the inevitability of all its dilemmas, sorrows, tragedies, and ironies. His way is to “dance” in the gale of the full catastrophe, to celebrate life, to laugh with it and at himself, even in the face of personal failure and defeat. In doing so, he is never weighed down for long, never ultimately defeated either by the world or by his own considerable folly.

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Shigeru Miyamoto Quote

It’s important to do what you think is good.

— Shigeru Miyamoto

Marcus Aurelius Quote

We ought to do good to others as simply and naturally as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.

— Marcus Aurelius

Paul Ford Quote

Also, if you can spend any time napping in a field on a summer day when you are younger — do so. That can be the place you visit in your mind when you’re standing on a crowded subway, stooped with back pain, sweating like your pores are water-piks, while a beggar in stained and drooping sweatpants yells in your ear.

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