September 2011
2 posts
Light Touch
Waking from an afternoon reverie, it surprises me that we’re not all insane and I take a few minutes to stare out my apartment windows and watch the traffic lights slowly flicker from red to green. In the fading light, everything seems strangely romantic and naive but I am left with a lingering sense of unease.
It suddenly seems inappropriate that we live our lives like this; each day...
Meeting Others
Our souls are molded not so much by the imprints of biology or schooling or status — at least not primarily — but rather by the trials and tribulations and sorrows of loneliness. The only story that truly matters in a person’s history is the one about their loneliness. Through it springs every other major tale: the pleasures and disappointments in work and love, family and...
July 2011
1 post
Passive
All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to.
But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it....
December 2010
1 post
Curiosity
It’s arguable that living your life well is the most important mandate humans have. Why is it, then, that we place so much deliberation into becoming masters at pottery, or web development, or love making — rather than living well?
In talking about his fellow Athenians:
To point out the peculiarity of their passivity, Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to...
November 2010
3 posts
Status Anxiety
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or...
The Power of Names
When you name something, you own it. When you assign a symbol to something previously without, you have created meaning. Part of the loneliness of growing older is that as we become increasingly more complex and specialized, the vocabulary for modeling our shared cognitive landscape becomes increasingly scarce to the point where it’s hard to ask a person what you hold in common.
The...
Appreciating Art
As we grow older, we trust less other people to fill the gaps in our soul. We become more complacent with goodbyes, the rotating carousel of people in our lives. When I was young and had so much faith in people, it felt so devastating to lose someone — sometimes, someone I never had. You pin your hopes and dreams on stolen glances and dark thoughts. Every love was so full of...
December 2009
11 posts
Depression
Depression exaggerates character. In the long run, I think, it makes good people better; it makes bad people worse. It can destory one’s sense of proportion and give one paranoid fantasies and a false sense of helplessness; but it is also a window onto truth.
You survive depression through a faith in life that is as abstract as any religious belief system. Depression is the most cynical...
An Essay of Four Parts: How I Would Run the World
One of the most insightful observations I have received regarding my personality was this: “Edwin, if you ever do become ruler of the world, the rich and the poor will be fine. It’s the middle class that will suffer.” I think this explains much of my behavior, from dating mistakes to choice of literature. What separates the middle class from everyone else is their uniform...
Two Parables of Rage
As they start, so too do relationships end: emotionally. The initial attraction, curiosity, and anxiety towards another person is (hopefully!) reciprocated and contentment soon settles in. At this point, relationships diverge in destination. Some lovers mimeograph each other well: their beliefs, eccentricities, and pacing converge over time. Most others are less fortunate. Compromises are won...
Ink Blots and Ten-Year Plans
If you lose your purpose in life, one of the first diagnostic exercises a guidance counselor will give you is to ask what you would do if you had ten million dollars — if you never had to work again. A Rorschach inkblot test of sorts. (Incidentally, works great as an icebreaker as well.)
I never had a purpose to lose or a guidance counselor to keep track, but I have administered this...
Why Blog?
Contrary to the prevailing opinion of my peers, I wish interview processes were longer. I wish college application processes were more detailed, had more essays. I wish exams were multi-day affairs, complete with bed and breakfast. And ideally, relationships would be judged on past performance instead of a wink, nod, and quality (quantity?) of drunken sex.
I have a hard time conveying myself...
Plotting for Kisses
A boy of seventeen who has been trying for weeks to work out what it is about his girlfriend that is “driving him mad” — the frustration, that is to say, for which he uses her — arrives at his session in an unusually bumptious mood. He has realized, he announces to me triumphantly, what it is about her: “She doesn’t kiss properly.” He mooches around in...
Old Friends
One of my most bitter misgivings is that I never quite figured out who I am or what I stand for. In some ways, I stand as a paragon of rationality: I carefully think through my lifestyle decisions to make sure they are coherent. But at the same time, I realize that in a larger sense I am not rational at all. Logical systems need frameworks of assumptions to have external purpose. No matter how...
The Bell Jar
There seems to be two ways to explore the literary world with any sense of true enjoyment. The first is to find an author that is like oneself and to discover yourself in their works. The second is to find a person that is like oneself and to discover yourself in their adulations, consolations, and eulogies. Anything else and you’re not reading for yourself but for someone else: a...
Tales of Brilliant Scientists
I am currently reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The part that interests me is not the theory on evolution but the details on how we are constructed from basic building blocks — how atoms form molecules/amino acids/nucleotides/DNA which are subsumed by cells which in turn construct many-celled bodies … and eventually, if you go up this chain far enough, you find us.
...
Fear of Commitment
Silly as it seems, for a brief moment in time after watching House (one of the four television series I’ve ever watched), I wanted to be a doctor. I think this has more to do with my current inner job turmoil than any love for the medicinal persuasion. As elegant as I find organic chemistry, I can’t imagine making a career out of it.
I was attracted to the MD not (primarily) out...
Medium is the Message
A friend and I were talking about why I tended towards books and she tended towards films. At the heart of it, we engage for the same reason: as a metaphor for our own lives. To learn ephemerally. To think from an objective outside perspective. But what are the differences between the mediums that turn me onto the written word and her onto the visual one?
The core argument I was trying to...