This post relates my journey of self-discovery as I cleaned out and organized the boxes in the basement of our house.
I’m decluttering my life; going through all the boxes in the basement I’ve been moving around for years. It’s part of an idea I’ve had about simplifying, organizing, streamlining. Maybe I’m just ready to move on and I can finally let go of my comfortable security blanket of possessions.
It started with the boxes and ended with me going to Barnes and Noble and buying five copies of The Night Circus. It’s not something I wanted to do, but I had to.
I should begin by telling you my friend Angie likes to read in book stores. She likes the feel of books in her hands, the smell of ink and paper. Angie likes to do nice things for other people. And Angie likes a pleasant surprise.
Angie’s the kind of person who will take a book off the shelf, turn to the last page and write, “Great book, huh? Love, Angie.” She will do this to random books in a bookstore including books she’s never read and doesn’t intend to read. This is what irritates me about Angie.
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This post examines the line between eccentricity and insanity.
I enjoy talking to crazy people. They’re the only ones who make sense to me. People with big ideas are interesting, but people who are always talking about big ideas and never accomplishing anything are intriguing. These are the ones people give up on. These are the ones relegated to the fringe of society.
My buddy Bill is constantly talking about big projects he’s thinking about doing. I love talking with him, I love hashing through ideas and figuring out problems. It’s like a game, a hobby, a sport in which the ball is constantly in motion but never reaches a goal line. You see, Bill doesn’t actually do much of anything.
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This post explores the idea of assumptions about perception and comprehension in interpersonal communication.
What would my life be like if I really understood people I talked to? I often catch myself making assumptions about other people’s thoughts and intentions when talking with them. How could I ever possibly know such things? The answer, I know, is that I cannot. But it’s a difficult tendency to overcome.
Oddly, I don’t act this way when confronted with a person who has some obvious deficiency of perception or comprehension. Because the fact they see things differently from me is so obvious, I make an effort to understand their views. For everyone else I assume they see things the same.
Yet how often can we say our mental processes are exactly the same as another’s? I imagine what a plot of comparative abilities would look like, a scale on which each aspect of my peculiar world view were compared with those I come in contact with. I know there would be people on every side of me, both near and far.
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This post is about discovering failure isn’t so bad and about how liberating that knowledge can be.
I grew up with hard-working parents who never had enough money to survive. We lived on the edge of starvation and it wasn’t beneath my folks to find dinner in a dumpster behind the local grocery store.
People cringe when they hear that but really, it sounds worse than it is. Once you get dumpster groceries home and cleaned up, they’re just like all the other expired groceries in the cupboard. And frankly, some of the most fun I had with my dad growing up was finding salvageable stuff in dumpsters.
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This post is about finding happiness in whatever we are involved in and overcoming psychological weakness.
My favorite job was working for a restaurant called Frontier Pies in Provo, Utah. As the name indicates, they were known for their delicious pies and had an extensive bakery to keep the refer stocked with their soul-satisfying goodness. I worked in the bakery as a pie maker.
I was in my early twenties and once again working my way through college, still hacking away at an associate’s degree. To save money I was living out of my car and needing to be at work at five in the morning was a good excuse for being caught sleeping in the parking lot.
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This post explores my fascination with the market economy and the random nature of success.
This is a story of unrequited love, the story of a lopsided romance. It’s about a man who cherished an idea so deeply he could not see the truth, a man so enamored with the love story in his mind he could not perceive reality. It’s a tragedy from one perspective–as all love stories ultimately are–but it’s also a story of rebirth as illusion gives way to reality.
This is my story. And my erstwhile lover…well, you’ll meet her momentarily. She was both my muse and my demon, my inspiration and my condemnation. You see, every once in a while you meet someone so attractive, so alluring and radiant, so surprisingly blunt they consume your thoughts. They make sense of a chaotic world and make you feel good about yourself. They make your chest swell with pride before you even realize you’re doing it.
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