Category: Quote

Is Your Life Just a Vacation from Boredom?

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Here’s a good quote i recently read which does point out the subtle but very important difference between happiness and pleasure. It’s good thing for me to think about as i cruise through life:

If there is no opportunity for joy. If we never find some activity that leads us into flow, or if that flow is shut off by spiraling self-doubt – the we’re likely to settle for pleasure instead: the sterile comforts of the television of the bottle or the slot machine, which offer no challenge, no room for growth, but only a kind of vacation from boredom or from worry.

Or we will work harder for extrinsic rewards, to accumulate some tangible feedback for our existence. Status, power, and money are signs that one is competent, that one is acquiring control. But these are secondary rewards that matter only when the primary enjoyment is not available.

– Csikszentmihalyi

Love is a Mix Tape is a Sad but Good Book

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I recently read the book “Love is a Mix Tape” by Rob Sheffield. It’s a book about Rob and his wife: how they met, how they fell in love, how she died suddenly and how he’s coping with it. They were both rock critics so every step of the way, there’s music and a mix tape. It’s a sad book, but it’s a good book. If you want something to cruise through, and you like music of the 80’s and 90’s i’d recommend it. Some of my favorite passages:

Every time i have a crush on a woman, i have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo. No matter who she is, or how we meet, the synth-pop duo fantasy has to work, or the crush fizzles out. The girl is up front, swishing her skirt, tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker. I’m the boy in the back, hidden behind my Roland JP8000 keyboard. She has all the courage and star power I lack. She sings our hit because i would never dare to get up and sing it myself. She moves the crowd while i lurk in the shadows, lavishing all my computer-blue love on her, punching the buttons that shower her in disco bliss and bathe her in the spotlight. I make her a star.

The new wave girl knows what pop dreams are made of. She knows that Debbie Harry was just kidding when she sang, “Dreaming is free.” She knows dreams are something you have to steal. The new wave girl scams on other peoples identities, mixing and matching until she comes up with a style of her own, knowing that nothing belongs to her, that she just gets to wear it until somebody else comes along with faster fingers to snatch it away. She knows pop dreams are a hustle, a deception, a “glamour” in the witchcraft sense of the word. She knows how to bluff and how to scam. She sings about counterfeiting, shoplifting, bootlegging, home taping. She’s in on the hustle – you steal it, it’s yours, it’s legal tender. The new wave girl knows all this, which is why she is dangerous. The new wave boy knows how dangerous she is, which is why he stands behind her. The boy and the girl, together in electric dreams.

Because the book is mostly about his wife’s death, there are quite a few sad parts. Such as…

We drove away with nothing inside us. I talked to Duane a bit, kept repeating to her the line Harvey Keitel says to Tim Roth at the end of Reservoir Dogs: It looks like we’re gonna have to do a little time….Every time i started to cry, i remembered how Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn’t. Everybody nows what it’s like to drive while crying; feeling like a bad country song is part of why it sucks.

The book is great to read and i especially like how he interprets Nirvana as a band largely speaking to us about marriage and how Biggie Smalls played a huge part in his mourning process.

Fortuitous Beauty of New York

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According to Franz (the European academic) in Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We’ve always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That’s what enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry

Continue reading “Fortuitous Beauty of New York” →

Technology and Genetics – When Should We Stop? When is it Enough?

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A couple of years ago i read Bill Mckibben’s book Enough. It’s a great read. In the book he discusses what it means to be human. There are 3 subjects he focuses on in the book: genetic research, nanotechnology and robotics. In each one he explores that ever shrinking moral and spiritual boundary. Eventually, we’ll get to an “enough point” where we should stop trying to push the limits of technology and medicine.

My favorite part is the discussion of genetically enhanced children and how science (and our ambition) continues to push the limits of what is possible and how children, in enhacned, will never be strive to be great or to achieve as pianists, painters, or athletes because of their “programming.”

I always like Mckibben’s summary of the state of affairs and the recognization of trends in society both on a cultural and technological level – and he does a great job here. Here, more than his others he looks at the family structure and how it has been altered due to television and he doesn’t paint a good picture…

So, in the last century, the invention of the car offered the freedom of mobility, at the cost of giving up the small, coherent physical universes most people had inhabited. The invention of radio and TV allowed the unlimited choices of a national or global culture, but undermined the local life that had long persisted; the old people in my small rural town can still recall when “visiting” was the evening pastime, and how swiftly it disappeared in the 1950’s when CBS and NBC arrived. The 60’s seemed to mark the final rounds of this endless liberation; the invention of divorce as a mass phenomenon made clear that family no longer carried the meaning we’d long assumed, that it could be discarded as the village has been discarded; the pill and the sexual revolution freed us from the formerly inherent burdens of sex, but also often reduced it to the merely “casual.”

…how all this has happened and what it means to us…

Whether all this was “good” or “bad” is an impossible question, and a pointless one. These changes came upon us like the weather; “we” “chose” them only in the broadest sense of the words. You may keep the TV in the closet, but you still live in a TV society. The possibility of divorce now hovers over every marriage, leaving it subtly different from what it would have been before. What’s important is that all these changes went in the same direction: they traded context for individual freedom. Maybe it’s been a worthwhile bargain; without it, we wouldn’t have the prosperity that marks life in the West, and all the things that prosperity implies. Longer life span, for instance; endless choice. But the costs have clearly been real, too: we’ve tried hard to fill the hole left when community disappeared, with “traditional values” and evangelical churches, with back-to-the-land communes and New Age rituals. but those frantic stirrings serve mostly to highlight our radical loneliness.

All of this makes me hate myself for loving the show Seinfeld, which is actually just a show exploring what it means to live a life that has no meaning. It is true, when i look around I see a world where there’s nothing but consumption – and when Mckibben points it out, I had to step back and let out a big whoa.

Where it all ends – the mindless consumption, the lack of context – is that we need to take a stand as individuals and produce context for ourselves. If genetic engineering takes place, the human race can lose the ability to be an individual and for each person to have meaning. If technology continues, we can continue to go beyond nature to a world that is completely unrecognizable. McKibben concludes that it is our capacity as humans for restraint-and even for finding great meaning in restraint. “We need to do an unlikely thing: We need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough.”

As a lover of technology and change, the concept of “Good enough” is quite a thought. You should definitely read this book.

Technology Incantation for Muggles

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My friend danah boyd gave a talk at the Etech conference last month (link is here). I just got around to reading the speech which i thought was fantastic. She begins it….

Isn’t there something magical about how fast the Internet went from a defense project to a key part of social infrastructure? Isn’t there something magical about how grandparents are blogging and activists are remixing popular TV shows to make social commentary? It is my belief that if we stare solely at the technology, we lose track of the true magic that exists around us.

What she does in the speech is break down how startups, corporations and almost anyone thinks

if you want to think about people, you need to understand how technological and corporate decisions interface with people’s lives and practices…

danah breaks down America’s society into stages and then describes the top 5 priorities of each stage, which are:

Life Stage #1 Life Stage #2 Life Stage #3 Life Stage #4
* Friends * Sex * Labor * Family
* Attention * Friends * Family * Health
* Play/Leisure * Money * Money * Religion
* Sex * Play/Leisure * Power * Hobbies
* Consumption * Labor * Property * Friends

As someone who is moving from stage 2 to stage 3 (damn that’s scary) i see this switch happening. Friends are harder to get access to as work and relationships/marriage take a more important role in everyone’s life.

I like how she can switch from looking at behavior patterns to how corporations and startups behave and deliver products:

Startups typically are naive about people’s practices but utterly passionate about technology. If they’re lucky, their technology will reach the hands of a population for whom it will make complete sense. This population will morph their product to meet their needs. And if the startup is not stupid, it will support this morphing, learn from it, and seek to make more and more happy users. Companies typically try to model out demographics and design for the market that they think is most monetizable. They go straight for mass adoption based on need, not love. Even more so than startups, they tend to blow through their early adopters so that they can get to the cash-cow as fast as possible. Warning: once you destroy the trust of your early adopters, you’re on the greed path.

All in all, it’s a great speech and worth checking out if you’re at all interested in technology (even if you’re not technical).

Quotes from Feast of Love

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For no reason at all i picked up the book Feast of Love today. It’s a great book, one of my favorites. Here are two quotes from it. The first is an interesting story about Kierkegaard. The second just nails the sadness and self-reflection of Charles Baxter, the main character and narrator.

feastKierkegaard, the Danish philosopher fell in love with an attractive girl, Regine Olsen, and then he had concluded that they would be incompatible, that the love was mistaken, that he himself was so complex and she was simple, and he contrived to break the engagement so as to give the appearance that it was the young lady’s fault, not his.

He succeeded in breaking the engagement, in never marrying her. Cowardice was probably involved here. Kierkegaard wished to believe that the fault lay with the nature of love itself, the problem of love, its fate in his life. From the personal he extrapolated to the general. A philosopher’s trick. Regine married another man and moved away from Copenhagen to the West Indies, but Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, carried a burning torch for her, in the form of his philosophy, the rest of his days. This is madness of a complex lifelong variety. He spent his career writing philosophy that would, among other things, justify his actions toward Regine Olsen. He died of a warped spine.

For some reason it give me great pleasure to read of someone who, out of bitterness of letting his love get away, spent an entire career postulating that love & God can’t be spoken of and are thus dying. Just think what the religion and philosophy worlds might have been had he just gone through with the marriage. Oh, but then again, he literally did not have any backbone.

Now, here’s the 2nd…

What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you – if you happen to be me – with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel.

Just so you know, he (Charles) does end up with someone at the end.  So, the world is just and it does end well (for him at least).

Good Advice

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“And if you are asked about your Christian hope, always be ready to explain it. But you must do this in a gentle and respectful way.” (1 Peter 3:15-16)

Take Your Body for a Ride like Dean K.

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There’s a good article in this month’s Wired Magazine about Dean Karnazes who is the most hard-core runner i have ever read about. He wasn’t a serious running until his 30th birthday when, after taking down a few too many tequila shots, he stripped down to his underwear and like Forest Gump – just started running. That was 1992. Since then, he’s been a frickin’ machine.He recently ran 50 marathons in 50 days (age 44). He ran 350 miles without sleeping (over 3 days). He ran the only marathon to the South Pole. The list goes on and on. The guy is awesome.

One of the great quotes of the article is this:

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!

Good to remember as i get my ass back in shape now that i’ve finished my holiday ass-expansion program.

More of the article after the jump….

Continue reading “Take Your Body for a Ride like Dean K.” →

Top Phrases of 2006

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Here are the top phrases – some ironic, some funny, and some just great in the way that your grandfather is great. Not because he’s cool, just because he is.

  1. A tie with “Double-True” and “I’m dropping Hamiltons like my name is Aaron Burr” from the best video of 2006, SNL’s Lazy Sunday. Which just goes to show that the internet is where it’s at. Remember these guys began on the internet doing funny stuff on thelonelyIsland.com, then got hired by SNL and made a kickass video which showed on TV where nobody watched it and then it only became famous when it want BACK on the internet. They came full-circle.
  2. “It was very hot, I think that was the only explanation for the water. Or maybe it was because the beer I had last night.” -Floyd Landis in Cycling News which reminds me of another great quote: “Son, when you participate in sporting events, it’s not whether you win or lose: It’s how drunk you get.” – Homer Simpson
  3. “Keep in mind Brian McBride is playing with titanium plates in his face.” John Harkes discussing McBride’s condition while the states were playing World Cup champion Italy.  McBride broke his face in the first game when the US lost a shocker to Poland and then with a lot of grit and heart they tied the eventual champs 1-1.
  4. “Join Bode” from a huge marketing campaign from Nike for the 2006 Olympics. It fell flat on its face when Bode fell flat on his ass and didn’t win any metals.
  5. “I think it’s better to buy real estate than say, a yellow and purple Corvette or an elephant that can speak sign language. My parents help me out a lot with that stuff. They don’t want to see me when I’m 30, dead broke, selling bootleg tapes of my snowboard movies on the side of the freeway.” — Olympic gold medalist Shaun White on how he spends his endorsement money. Unlike Bode, he won a few. My take on Snowboarding in the Olympics is here although this is helping me possibly change my mind.
  6. “I enjoy Cocaine because it’s a fun thing to do.” – Representative Robert Wexler. Said on the Colbert Report in mid-July by the Boca Raton representative, who was running unopposed for reelection. He played along with Colbert’s “Say Anything, You Can’t Lose” game and jokingly expressed his fondness for cocaine, and it was genuinely hilarious. Colbert then came under attack from the morning shows and responds in typical Colbert fashion
    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbhLKgzep1w]
  7. “I’m sick and tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane” said by Samuel L in Snakes on a Plane one of the most anticipated and ironic movies to come out in a long, long time.
  8. “Little 8 lb 6 oz baby jesus, i’d like to thank you for….” – Ricky Bobby saying grace before dinner.
  9. “I had one margarita (and) was starving because I had not eaten all day. Maybe I was speeding a little bit and I got pulled over. I was just really hungry and I wanted to have an In-N-Out Burger.” – Paris Hilton, establishing herself as a professional name-dropper.

Hugh vs. Bale Makes The Prestige Great

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I just saw The Prestige and while not the best movie of the year, it is really really good. I’m going 8 out of 10. It man be too slick and not the best written, but it is captivating and completely enjoyable. Not because of the magic (which i thought was really cool) but because of the rivalry between Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale and their obsession to being the best in London.

This film reminds me of a quote i heard from Steven Spielberg when he was doing the DVD commentary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He remarked that he made that movie as a young man and it’s the type of film he would never make today. That is a movie where a man follows his gut and beliefs even though it leads to the destruction of his entire family. This is a similar movie. It’s about dreams, ambition and the sacrifice required to be the best. Jon Faverau’s character in Friends went through a similar ordeal when he was trying to be the worlds best Ultimate Fighting Champion. However, that was about 1/100 as good as this. As the film unwinds, you find yourself amazed at what the two are doing to themselves and to those they love, yet you can’t look away. It’s worth your while to check it out.

The film also does a great job of juggling between the Victorian age and industrial revolution, traditional actors (Caine) and rockstars (David Bowie), traditional film (analog) and modern techniques (digital), and most importantly between true the illusions of magic and actual science and innovation. Also, no one seems to be talking about the true rivalry to come out of this one. Do you think it’s too early to begin talking about a Wolverine vs. Batman film?