"Never assume the obvious is true"

and now

into the wilderness

persona literally means mask, although it does not usually refer to a literal mask but to the *social masks* all humans supposedly wear

The persona is also the mask or appearance one presents to the world. Importantly, the persona, used in this sense, is not a pose or some other intentional misrepresentation of the self to others. Rather, it is the self as self-construed, and may change according to situation and context.

hide out from adulthood for a few more years

"Squabbles and footnotes aside, in the pages of history books and The FADER, New York rock in the 21st century began with the Strokes. Of course the Strokes always evoked New York rock of the 20th Century, but that was kind of the point. The band captured the city’s borrowed nostalgia for a time when young men wore tight jackets and let their hair fall into their faces, then wrote thrilling songs about the dejected glamour such lifestyle decisions would lead to. At the time of their arrival, downtown Manhattan was still stuck in the orange plastic/white vinyl hangover of lounge culture, but the Strokes were a band for dark bars where the bathroom door was always broken and you could sink into a booth and hide out from adulthood for a few more years. They were a great band for New York because no one could agree on them: they were either the best or the worst thing that could have happened. People would tell you they hated them and everything they stood for, then a couple of beers later they’d confide that they’d never actually heard them or that they secretly loved them. They were one more part of the city you could endlessly kvetch about, then take pride in because no other city had anything nearly as good."


see source here

Live the questions

...try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet




image: see source here

the mess we're in

"So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so."

see source here.

the view from nowhere

Clifford Geertz

it's easy to think big when you don't know what's involved

what the free market costs

"contracting is out of control and that the new president needs to do something about it."

listen.

the never ending story

what you wish you could have back

six sounds that define you

things that were cool when you were a kid

what gives you the chills/shivers (in a good way)?

controlling undesirable behavior

is sadness the same as depression?

or just a normal period of adjustment.






photo credit: Panda?

meet me anywhere

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves." – Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel”


drawing by: Doug Boomhower