Author: Mark

~ Mark

In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber–if you can find one–is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.

Mike Rowe’s Senate Testimony on why we still need to work with our hands.

The New Inquiry: Comfortably Alone

~ Mark

Shyness had made me so deficient in empathic experience that I could only view social life in terms of risk rather than opportunity. The best way to manage that risk, I thought, was to be unapproachable but legibly fascinating at a distance, to present myself as an object to be read but with a message that’s inscrutable and fleeting, one that could convey the complexity of the real me without reducing it to something superficial. I could not get past the wish to broadcast my identity without having to interact with anyone.

Facebook, of course, caters to that desire.

The New Inquiry: Comfortably Alone

~ Mark

My daughter just turned 16 years old, and you can see it on MTV’s [‘My Super Sweet Sixteen’], where they get cars, and things that depreciate and just don’t mean nothing. I wanted to give my child something that she can grow and build and nurture. So I gave her her own label.

Big Boi. (via andyhutchins)
~ Mark

When it’s midnight and it’s raining and you’re on the steepest hill you’ve ever climbed and you’re bleeding from briars and you’re alone and you’ve been alone for hours, it’s only you around to witness yourself quit or continue.

The Believer – The Immortal Horizon. One reason I “enjoy” long days hiking.