Basing your friendships on what people have to offer, vs. what you want from them, can make them closer than they’ve ever been.
Tag: relationships
What Facebook’s IPO means for women | Penelope Trunk Blog
It’s no coincidence that the number-one woman on the list of self-made millionaires is Oprah. She has no kids and no husband. She’s fascinating, nice, and smart. But few of us would really enjoy her life.
That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed.
Chad Harbach in The Art of Fielding. Cf. John Cage:
I am frankly embarrassed that most of my musical life has been spent in the search for new materials. The significance of new materials is that they represent, I believe, the incessant desire in our culture to explore the unknown. Before we know the unknown, it inflames our hearts. When we know it, the flame dies down, only to burst forth again at the thought of a new unknown. This desire has found expression in our culture in new materials, because our culture has its faith not in the peaceful center of the spirit but in an ever-hopeful projection onto things of our own desire for completion.
Uncouple your own grief from the hopes you pin on others. All relationships stand alone; there are no replacements.
They cannot admire you for intellect. Granted–but there are many other qualities of which you cannot say, “but that is not the way I am made”. So display those virtues which are wholly in your own power–integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity. Do you not see how many virtues you can already display without any excuse of lack of talent or aptitude? And yet you are still content to lag behind.
It is ridiculous not to escape from one’s own vices, which is possible, while trying to escape the vices of others, which is impossible.
Does cheater deserve a second chance? – Carolyn Hax – The Washington Post
Carolyn Hax tumbles are going to become a regular feature here. On the dangers of storytelling:
My advice is to discard whatever narrative you’re tempted to superimpose on yourself, your boyfriend, your relationship and whatever else, and just live by the reality you have in hand. That means recognizing that your partner is a temptation-wrestler or birthday-forgetter or stress-eater or emotion-bottler or whatever other trait just isn’t going away, no matter how much better life would be if it did. And it means choosing to stay with someone only if you can see these things as the price of a life that suits you well, not as temporary obstacles to some imaginary better life.
Does cheater deserve a second chance? – Carolyn Hax – The Washington Post
KAREN: What difference does it make? Who cares if she doesn’t like you? Does everybody in the world have to like you?
GEORGE: Yes! Yes! Everybody has to like me. I must be liked!
George Costanza on being liked. Episode 73 – The Masseuse. (via via)
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
By seven everyone is gone. They all offered to help, and you waved them away. There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.
Excerpt from Bright Lights, Big City, a swift, often funny book with a terrible ending. Another favorite bit:
You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don’t want to invite anyone inside.
For a single person, thinking something through marks the end of the reasoning process; it becomes habit. But that gets the married (or life-partnered) person only halfway through at best.
Carolyn Hax. I used to read Hax all the time in the newspaper. Many thanks to Justin for reminding me that she’s still at it.
Igor Stravinsky bowing down to kiss his wife, Vera de Bosset. Hollywood, 1947. Photo by Loomis Dean for Life Magazine. I should really have more stuff with a Stravinsky tag.
Remembering a Relationship, One Chat at a Time – GOOD
Y’know, just in case you need to read something depressing this morning. Previously in morning heartbreak.
On Tranquillity of Mind – Seneca
As predicted, I’ve been on a stoicism bender. This was a good one to dive into early, as my recent Heraclitus and Seneca might have tipped you off. This bit on friendship was one of my favorite parts:
Nothing, however, gives the mind so much pleasure as fond and faithful friendship. What a blessing it is to have those to whose waiting hearts every secret may be committed with safety, whose knowledge of you you fear less than your knowledge of yourself, whose conversation soothes your anxiety, whose opinion assists your decision, whose cheerfulness scatters your sorrow, the very sight of whom gives you joy! We shall of course choose those who are free, as far as may be, from selfish desires; for vices spread unnoticed, and quickly pass to those nearest and do harm by their contact.
A rural person expects to know every person in his world, and therefore thinks of every person as an individual. An urbanized person never expects to know the people he comes into contact with, and therefore rarely focuses on them as individuals. Stating the same thing in a different way, when you have more categories in your mind than people, you tend to see the categories as characteristics of the people. […] But once you have more people in your world than categories, you start to sort the people into categories.
Bill James in Popular Crime. Food for thought.
Eero Saarinen’s list of Aline Bernstein’s good qualities, ca. 1954. Aline and Eero Saarinen papers, 1857-1972. Featured in What we can learn from lists. This reminds me of Charles Darwin trying to decide whether or not to marry Emma Wedgewood. Sounds like a cool list-focused exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum.
This continuous modification of man by his own technology stimulates him to find continuous means of modifying it; man thus becomes the sex organs of the machine world just as the bee is of the plant world, permitting it to reproduce and constantly evolve to higher forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s devotion by rewarding him with goods and services and bounty.
Envy works upon what is close at hand, and things that are far off we are more free to admire.
Social occasions can work a certain magic. You see your friends in costumes and onstage as it were, and suddenly they turn from ordinarily familiar to strangely familiar: They achieve sudden glory.
Eva Brann. (via christmasgorilla)
Puberty was a bag of cement lashed to my ankle. At least conversationally. Everything I thought and said now had this burning undercurrent of “How’s this going to get me laid?” And wit can’t have an agenda.
It takes no work to fall in love. It takes real work to rise to a real and lasting friendship.
Andrew Sullivan. I find so much good stuff in Ben Casnocha’s Delicious feed.
Mark Larson 