2 Band Names
Two band names for your consideration:
- Frumpy Misdemeanor
- Bouqedas
Two band names for your consideration:
Love in Four Acts: What is Romantic Love?:
The romantic couples who have been together for half their lives have something quite different from romantic love. Johnson calls it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love – “it represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks … to find the relatedness, the value, the beauty, in the simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama … or an extraordinary intensity in everything” (pg. 195). In a strange way, this is true love because it can be everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form in our lives.
This article talks about “limerence”, which was a new word for me; it means romantic love. We are all familiar with its intensity… and also how short-lived it is. A theory posits that limerence exists so that a couple is together long enough to support a child until it walks. The timing does seem to match up, but I wonder if limerence could even persist in the absence of the cultural trappings and traditions we have woven around nascent romantic relationships.
Recently, I was waiting in our dental school reception area to meet with Patient Financing and I opened up the February New Yorker. In it was a brilliant essay about the intersection of society and alcohol by Malcolm Gladwell, entitled Drinking Games. Gladwell’s anecdotal and anthropological evidence reveals that the effects of alcohol are not uniform — our reaction to being drunk is heavily influenced by… what we are expected to do when drunk. Here’s an awesome quote:
“Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.”
You really should read the article: Gladwell is a brilliant story-teller. Incidentally, the topic ties into a conversation with Mykala a few days ago. It began when I was biking home from the rec and school, and I considered what Past Alex would’ve done with such a cloudy yet not rainy day. It was in the upper 60s and the sky was quite gray. The answer to my question caused me to almost be overcome by a sense of loss: I would’ve played basketball with my friends. It’s not that I can’t physically play basketball (though I would imagine I’d be quite rusty), it’s more: I’m “homesick for a place that no longer exists”. Those carefree days are fading fast from memory; sometimes you feel those sands of time in that hourglass running through your fingers. Anyhow, that homesick phrase is from the movie “Garden State” and it has sometimes been called by the German word “weltschmerz”, though that word actually has a more philosophical and less navel-gazing-y meaning. Anyhow…
Growing up means more responsibility — you take responsibility for your actions, right the wrongs you do unto others, help others, honor commitments, show up to places on time. And with that responsibility… you lose the carefree feelings of youth. You still have fun, but within a structure, before your bedtime, within the limitations adults must place on themselves. And so sometimes you’re sad that those times of youth are gone.
This all relates to the alcohol because of a comment Mykala made: “Maybe people drink so they don’t have to think about tomorrow, so they can forget about adulthood for a little while.” I thought this was quite perceptive when I heard it, and Gladwell’s comment about the “myopia” of drunkenness fits in with it perfectly.
Ultimately, I think I know how to deal with the melancholy that accompanies nostalgia for youth: cultivate an environment for my own children where they can experience such wonderful, carefree, days.
Tony Hsieh’s article Why I Sold Zappos reveals just a fraction of how much he has learned in guiding his company, Zappos, from near-bankruptcy to a recent acquisition by Amazon. I think I’d like to read his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose since I hope to run a business a decade from now. Check out this quote from the article, just mixed in with everything else:
… Zappos’s policy of paying new employees $2,000 to quit if they’re unhappy with their jobs.
When I read this, I actually said aloud: “How can that work?” It sounds like it would make employees want to leave. Then, I thought about it: it does make employees want to leave! If Zappos isn’t a good fit for someone, this money kickstarts their aspirations to find a job that is a better fit. They’re not wallowing in employment inertia, poisoning the workplace environment because they hate their job. Thus, the former employee leaves happy, and Zappos gets to find another person to fill the position. However, the money says something to the employee up front: we want to make you happy to work here. After all, Zappos can’t be hiring someone each month, then paying $2000 “severance”. Interesting.
Scapegoating Craigslist Is Not Going to Solve the Problem of Underage Prostitution:
Our cities and communities are armed to the teeth to bust pot and cocaine dealers, and be prepared for the extraordinarily unlikely chance that they will be involved with terrorism. Meanwhile, a huge number of vulnerable kids are being violated and abused every day. Might we also consider what would happen if some of police departments’ firepower were aimed at pimps? If cops broke down doors of pimps that abuse kids with AK 47s in the dark of night in full combat gear? Might that not help slow down sex trafficking (not that I think it is a good idea to use that kind of police tactics in general)? But where are our priorities?
Drugs cause some serious problems in our society. But in terms of destroying lives and disrupting the coherency of neighborhoods, I wonder what is worse: drug kingpins or pimps of unwilling teenage prostitutes:
Here is what veteran reporter Dan Rather has to say: “In covering news for more than 60 years, I’d like to think that few stories shock me anymore. But this is one of them. We ran across it late last year and the more we dug, the more disturbing it became. Eighty-year-old men paying a premium to violate teenage girls, sometimes supplied by former drug gangs now into child sex trafficking big time? You’ve got to be kidding. Nope. That’s happening and a lot more along the same lines.”
I think the article makes a valid argument: eliminating the trafficking on craigslist gives politicians something to brag about, but it doesn’t address the actual problem. Far too few resources are allocated to fight this awful problem, and pushing it off craigslist means it ends up on other websites, which are not likely to cooperate with the government.
BBC News - Newsnight - Life inside the North Korean bubble:
North Korean TV only broadcasts hagiographies of the two leaders and pictures celebrating the country’s army, model farms, model villages etc.
Our minders had probably never seen any other kinds of news item or documentary about their country or the rest of the world.
They were not allowed to, and they could not, because no-one has access to the internet in North Korea.
You can see the full episode by Sue Lloyd-Roberts at the BBC. The starvation is shocking (the army had to drop their height requirement because widespread malnourishment meant they had to reject too many applicants), but the extent to which the government controls the population’s access to knowledge has truly unreal consequences. Here is an entire population that does not actually know what they are missing because they have no accurate information about the outside world. That this can go on in 2010 indicates we have not come as far as a world as we think.
One of the few truly selfish things you can do that doesn’t make you an asshole is to make yourself happy by making someone else happy.
Today, a Listerine ad taught me there are barnacles on your teeth. Wow!
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.
Some people argue against Buying Stuff because you have to organize, dust, maintain, and categorize all of it. Me, the weirdo that I am, like organizing, maintaining, and categorizing. So it’s not that. It’s the Worry Factor. Bigger house — you get security system. Nice car — you buy more expensive insurance and have trouble driving in not so nice parts of town. You worry about hail so you get a garage. You worry about the paint so you wash it all the time. Lake cabin — you worry about severe weather coming through when you aren’t there. You buy a boat because, well, if you’re on a lake you need a boat. Then you worry about where to winter the boat. And then you buy another new car with the towing capacity for the boat. Then you insure the boat so when you’re towing it around you won’t worry. Jet skis would be fun. Now, you need a bigger garage. So, you find a bigger house with more garage space. It’s a vicious cycle!
Finding a place for all your stuff can be a challenge, but protecting all your stuff, protecting your ability to buy more of it by worrying about taxes, income, government — that binds us to stuff. That seems like something to avoid.
I’ve recently unlisted this website with Google, so I do feel a bit more confident in expressing some stronger opinions. I’ll use this new opportunity to make a point about a recent situation at the School of Dentistry. You see, we are currently expected to simultaneously care for patients and continue learning in what’s called a pre-clinical lab. So, we have lab work for fake and real patients. If you take an impression of a patient’s mouth on 8th floor, you have to disinfect it, walk down to 4th floor to get your pre-clinical materials (you don’t want to take a patient’s wet impressions in the elevator alongside other patients), and then climb back up to 9th floor to pour the darn thing up in the clinical lab space (using your pre-clinical materials). See, the school hasn’t given us the tools we need to do clinic work for real patients. We’re in a weird in-between phase. Soon, we’ll transition out of pre-clinic lab. Here’s an excerpt from the email we received:
The reason you have not been checked into the clinic lab upstairs is because you are not yet checked out of preclinic lab.
Did you catch the problem there? You needn’t attend the School of Dentistry to see it. One word: “because”. It’s very powerful — it is supposed to be a clue that the writer is about to articulate the reason for something. But it is often abused!
It doesn’t say in any document anywhere, ever, that we can’t be checked in to both places simultaneously! The email explanation is circular and illogical! “We use wood for houses because it is a good building material.” There it is again! Worthless. So, watch out for “because”.
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