The prize of not being famous is to be able to retreat into solitude.  What a nightmare it must be to have millions of people think about you and voice their opinions and judgments of you; to be invisible is a great treasure. 

What other people think of you invades your thinking, even when you are alone.  That is why a key component of knowing yourself is not spending a lot of time around people who don't.  When we listen and talk to people who don't know us, we tacitly see their concept of us, and the person we started as slowly vanishes, even in our own minds.  Thus, when we finally find ourselves alone, we first see who others see us as, and have to tear through the gauze until we get back to the eyes we had when we first entered the world.

I find we slowly disappear as we play new roles in people's lives; our initial reaction to life becomes a dim memory of the faintly echoing past.  A friend who knows that old soul of yours, who knows what you fundamentally mean when you say things, is thus something dearly irreplaceable.  You find yourself in solitude when you are with them. 

Life in a small theatre of people who know you thus seems the only life worth living; to be put in the spotlight on the large stage is to disappear to ourselves completely.  Celebrities are people who are known by the most people and are therefore the least known.  It is a paradox which reminds us that as strangers on earth there is not much use in living as anyone other than ourselves.

After all, how can we ever work out our salvation if we can't even see ourselves, if solitude is impossible?  Thus, if this life is indeed meant for working out our salvation with fear and trembling, then certainly to be invisible to the eyes of the masses is a great treasure.

I hit new lows all the time.

Friday night I thought I knew where a certain library was, but I couldn't find it in time before it closed.  When I got home later on and looked up where it actually was, I realized that it wasn't even the right library to be going to.  It was failure on multiple levels.

But I feel a little bit better about that than I do about last night when I stopped at a stop sign, and then proceeded to sit there thoughtlessly for thirty seconds, until I woke up and realized that I was in fact at a stop sign, and not at a red light. 

As I drove on, I realized how ironic it was that I had done that, because my little sister Melody and I had once formed an idea to put up stop signs that looked just like real stop signs only they said "Stop For 30 Seconds", and then we would hide in the bushes and laugh at the people who stopped for the full thirty seconds when no one else was around.

Speaking of irony and thus the last post, my little brother has been intently trying to come up with his own catch-22s ever since he heard me talking about them.  Yesterday evening he came up to me and said,

"Wanna hear my catch-22?  Well I'm not sure if it's a catch-22.  Okay, well here it is.  So there's a man with a car, but his car uses milk for its gasoline.  But his car runs out of milk, so he needs to buy more milk.  But to buy milk, he needs to give the store his feet, because feet are the currency of the country where he lives.  So now he has milk in his car, but he has no feet, and he can't drive without his feet.  But to get his feet back, he has to give back the milk, but then his car won't have any milk and it won't work.  So I think it is a catch-22. . . . is it??"

After giving him some constructive feedback, he says to me really excitedly at the dinner table, "Okay, so I don't have a catch-22, but I have an idea for a catch-22, and I really think it could warm up into one.  Okay, here is the idea: something to do with time."  Then he just looked at me with a huge grin on his face, eagerly anticipating a response.  I love my brother.

Everyone have an amazing day like you know it's the only time you'll ever live it. 

And there's an old Chinese guy who puts him to bed, and I am glad it's raining because today I made a friend. I wonder how much longer the government will have the sky uner contract to rain. I feel like death. My brain is saying no.  I've been thinking less than they have about this .  . . where are they.  Thoughts make us pick lives we wouldn't have otherwise.  They're so important.  No one can foresee effects, what will our words do to reality? Sadly, we must find out. I have not stayed awake through this whole point. Post. I meant post.

Cruising toward the airport on a bright Florida evening, I was reading a book when my sister Melody suddenly delivered the straightforward remark, "We just passed a van that said 'Quick Taxi' on it.  Well that's ironic."  

"That is ironic," I agreed as I saw the van and its overconfident title on the driver door.  

"What does 'ironic' mean?" my little brother then asked.

"When you think something is funny but you don't laugh at it, that means it's ironic," Melody proferred as an explanation.

"Irony is when something unexpected happens," my mother said from the front seat.

"Not quite," I began, "I think irony needs both for something to be unexpected and for it to in some way foil people's intentions.  For example, a married couple is having relationship problems so they decide they need some time away from each other.  So they plan separate vacations, but then they find themselves right next to each other on a beach on an obscure island halfway around the world.  That's ironic."

"Yeah, I think that's right," my mom said.

"So irony is not just when something unexpected happens, Paul.  For example, if Alex came over to the house and knocked on the door, I wouldn't say, 'Alex! How ironic!'  Even if I wasn't expecting him, it wouldn't be ironic.  I would have to consciously think he was not going to come over for it to be ironic."

By this time we were at the airport, and we wrapped up our litte conversational digression about irony as we got out of the car.  Once inside my mother was figuring out the boarding pass situation as I noticed I had missed a call, which I immediately returned.  Alex picked up, "Sup bro'."   

"Yoooooo," I said.

"Dude, where you at?"

"I'm in Florida with the family.  We are working on not being in Florida anymore, however, as we are in the airport on our way out.  What's up?"

"Oh. That explains a lot. I was just at your house. I knocked on the door and looked in all the windows, and there was no trace of you.  I was wondering where you were."

The world froze for a moment.  "Well that's ironic."

Not only does Alex not live in that neighborhood anymore, and so he never really goes to my house, but if anybody would know I was on vacation, it would be him.  Thus, in trying to give an example of something unironic I gave example of something that would be ironic, and that ironic thing was happening at the very moment I was saying it wouldn't be ironic. 

It could also perhaps be argued that it's ironic such an ironic situation was born out of a conversation which was attempting to define irony.  In a way, it was a triple entendre of irony. 

(And if we further took into account that I had been reading Catch-22 the whole trip, a book replete with irony from cover to cover, and that the end of said trip had just ended with a situation of irony three layers deep, we might conclude upon a fourth layer, or, if not that, perhaps a layer of frosting on the cake of irony.)

(And on top of THAT, if we remembered that it's ironic I was reading Catch-22 at Disneyworld in the first place, then there's a sort of tag team of irony, or at least there are giant ornate roses on the frosting of our cake.  Why is it ironic to be reading Catch-22 at Disneyworld? Well because Disneyworld is built on a catch-22.  It is a place that kids want to go to, but a place adults don't want to go to.  But if you're a kid you don't have the money to go and so you can't go, and if you're an adult you have the money to go, but you don't want to.  Thus, either you want to go and can't, or you can but you don't want to.  Catch-22.)

Wow.  And just think if my parents had wanted me to go on this trip to get away from all the irony in my life.

And let me say, despite the extended metaphor I've been using, happening into such a situation is no piece of cake.  But the joy of it is now caked onto my memory of the trip, which of all our family vacations may just take the cake of being the most ironic. 

P.S. And it's even more ironic that all this metaphorical cake has invaded my life, because I don't actually eat cake in real life at all because I don't eat desserts. 

Okay, okay . . I am getting carried away, which is entirely to be expected from me when it comes to things like this, and is therefore not ironic at all.

But wait.  Ending a post all about irony with something entirely unironic?  How ironic! 

Although I guess after that last sentence it's now not the end, and therefore it isn't ironic anymore.  Thus the only way it will be ironic is if I leave something unironic as the ending . . . but if something unironic is the ending, then it won't be ironic.  Catch-22.

Sometimes I am so afraid of other people, like I arrived late to a party after there had been a big demonstration of everything everyone needs to know.  Then when I say something stupid everyone looks at me and I mutter, "I only just got here . . ." as some kind of excuse.

Reality goes deep.  People stretch far back in their pasts, having thoughts they don't even remember having.  And yet those thoughts shaped them.  Sometimes people can be terribly inaccessible.

There is such a finality about writing—once the words are down you are doomed to have written them forever.  Even if no one ever sees them, they were still words you thought worth writing.  Who can support such a burden?  Every moment the weight of proper thought smashes down on us; it is a hard thing to know what is the right way to think, what we ought to do.  There are so many options, and not enough brightly blinking signs. 

What if everyone else uses words in ways I don't know?  When they say certain words, what if they have a secret meaning for those words that I don't know anything about?  That is how it is I think, because when you get to know someone eventually you learn to speak their language.  Because then when they say a word you can think about it in terms of its normal meaning or in terms of what it means to them. 

I guess these winds pass through, there's nothing you can do about it.  Life is a grand scenery we can usually do nothing about, like a colorful safari that suddenly turns into an elephant graveyard. 

The stars, our watchful keepers, see us to sleep. We rest as they shine, until it is our turn.  Goodnight.

I saw the moon over the water
and I thought of you
you are as bright as the moon
and just as far away

I appreciate your glow
but you don't say a word
we sit there in the dark
and I wish that you'd come home

But soon enough day comes
and I see that though I'd laid awake
I dreamt the whole night through

There are some people who make lists of characteristics that they would like their significant other to have (once they "find" them), a practice which I find overwhelmingly odd.  But it's probably true that I only find it odd because I also find it quite problematical.

I suppose the first thing wrong with such a practice is that it doesn't seem to actually address the question you are trying to tackle, namely "What person should I be with?"  Once you have composed your list, you haven't actually described any person at all.  A list is simply not a person.  If you are trying to find a person, then you should stick to thinking about people, and not the characteristics a person may have.  There are only people in the world and not lists, so making a list will never help you find a person; there's an asymmetry between the two ideas.  Besides, ultimately whether you like someone has much more to do with the relationship you have between you, rather than the sort of person they intrinsically are. 

Another big problem with the whole activity of making lists like these is that they presuppose that people are really just bundles of characteristics.  But aren't people more than just whatever characteristics we would use to describe them? 

My friend Roy was making fun of me once and told a story of a conference for newly weds.  To start the conference, each of the spouses was asked to stand up and say why they were with their partner.  The first round of people stood up and said things like, "Well, she's funny. She likes the same movies I do.  And um . . she's very pretty," and Roy at this point says, "All the people in the back who've been married for years are just shaking their heads going, 'They have so much to learn.'"  But then after a bunch of people had answered like that, one guy stands up and answers about his wife, "I have no idea . . . I'm just better when I'm with her."  The guy said it in a way that made it seem like he tried for a long time to think of an answer, but he just couldn't.  There was a mystery about his wife that made her everything to him.

Now that seems to me to be right on.  The wife of this man was more to him than just all the characteristics she possessed; she was that something which he didn't understand, something above everything he knew about her, and all he knew is that he couldn't help but love her.  To truly love someone is to find the reason you love them a total mystery. 

The last thing that seems to me to be fundamentally backwards about romantic list-making is that it presupposes a conception of love which is non-sacrificial.  The philosophy behind it says "They have to measure up to my standards."  But this attitude is completely backwards; love is first about looking for someone to serve, and then about having someone who will serve us.  But list-making seems to say that the other person is the one with work to do, a potential candidate vying for your heart in some sort of competeition in which you are the ultimate judge.  And that seems to be the exact wrong attitude to take toward other people. 

One of the reasons this last one is a problem is that it is a version of the crush fallacy in which you love someone only because you are in love with romantic love, and you only see them as a means to fulfilling that idea.  But we are not supposed to use people to satisfy our idea of life, we are supposed to see them as an ultimate end in and of themselves. 

Those are some thoughts on the idea of romantic list-making.  If you disagree, I will be very mad at you for not chiming in.  I'm not entirely sure how I would know you didn't chime in, but if I were you I wouldn't take that chance. 

The first music album I ever got was at age thirteen.  It was by a lanky white rapper named John Reuben.  It was amazing.  I would lie on the carpet and listen to it for hours and hours, sometimes all day. 

And then I decided I wanted to start a radio station.  I figured it must be possible because there were so many numbers left.  There was 88.1, then 88.7, then 90.1 . . . obviously this meant that 88.2, 88.3, and 88.4 were still available. 

Thus, I looked up all the things you needed for a radio station.  There were several pieces of equipment, some for the transmitting, another for adjusting how the music sounded, an antenna for on top of the house, and they were all pretty expensive. That's okay, I thought. I will probably have to work for mom and dad, but they will probably help out until I can pay them back.

My head became enthralled with the idea of running a radio station from my room.  I would walk around the house all day practicing what I would say in-between songs. "How about it, folks? What a great song. One of my favorites. Now for the next song from John Reuben . . ."  I'm sure family members probably said things to me at times like this, like "Philip could you go turn off the timer?" or "Philip do you have any homework?" but unfortunately for them they were a part of the normal world, and I was not in the normal world at that point in time.

Of course, I only had one CD, so I would just have to play all those songs.  Hopefully people wouldn't get bored of the same songs over and over again.  But I didn't, so I guess they wouldn't either.  But am I allowed to just play one CD? Radio stations seemed to only play certain songs from artists.  This made me very worried that John Reuben was going to sue me if I played all his songs over and over again.

Then a tragedy happened.  After a few days I found out about this thing called the 'FCC'.  It was horrible.  They were a building of Big Brothers who demanded that you pay them lots of money to be on the radio.  I was barely going to be able to afford all the equipment, but this extra fee for a 'radio license' was really going to sink my battleship.

However, it was okay! Surfing around on the web for solutions proved successful. Eventually I found out about this great way to start your own little radio station without being one of the big stations called being a 'pirate' radio station.  As I looked over it, it was everything I had dreamed of.  Lots of people had pirate radio stations, and they probably played their favorite album over and over again too.  And the best part about it is that the FCC didn't have to know anything about it.  Which was great.  No FCC, no license, no fee.  Huray!

Tragedy again.  Later on I discovered one key problem to pirate radio stations . . . they were illegal.  I began to suspect this as I read about how to keep the police from finding your pirate radio station on all the websites about pirate radio.  So I went back to the FCC site and sure enough it said that pirate radio was illegal and you would get a huge fine if they caught you.  My heart sank as I read this.  All my dreams were crushed.

Thus ended the saga of my quest to become a radio DJ in the sixth grade with only one album.  I am still not a radio DJ.  It is very sad.  But the few days I spent imagining I was were good enough for me. The world is a big world with lots of possibilities, and as long as finding out that being a radio DJ in the sixth grade is not one of them does not make us all dead and sleepy, we will have quite a fun time chasing wildly after something crazy that is possible. 

The real problem with pride is that we are not nearly so great as we think we are.  Of course, it is perfectly well to accept the exact right amount of praise and credit that is due to one's accomplishments.  Normally, however, we are quite wrong about how much credit we deserve.  We simple balloons are apt to make gargantuan planets of our achievements.

Take the example of a person who is really smart.  To be smart usually means to have 'figured things out' so that you have a lot of right opinions and know how to think about things the right way.  Sometimes it seems incredible how much someone knows and how right they seem all the time.  But the truth is that they are a part of the nexus of the wider human community, on whom they depend for everything—including their judgments about things.  Many times forming a right opinion consists in agreeing with someone else, who had to be the one to say it.  It is startling how easily we turn this into a fact which is so marvelous about us, as though we figured it out all by ourselves. 

Think about how odd it is that we feel more intelligent than people who lived a thousand years ago becuase we now know not to bleed and purge, and that there are electrons, and so on.  But what did I have to do with figuring out any of that?  And if I didn't have anything to do with it, why should I feel so much smarter than those lowly medieval doctors who simply were going off of the best people had come up with?

There are so many times it seems like credit is supposed to be put upon us for having judged something else to be of value.  What movies, authors, sports teams, and bands a person likes can become a grand fact about them, even though they didn't make any of it.  They just like it.  That seems to me to be pretty odd. 

Then again, a lot of things seem pretty odd to me. 

Haven't written a post at the crest of its inspirational wave for awhile now.  Perhaps we're due?

It seems sometimes that people can be in love with their emotions, even if they are negative emotions.  Of course this is not something that someone who was deeply melancholy all the time would think.  But well enough I still think it is something that can be true.

Why would someone be in love with sadness?  Perhaps it's because there's a kind of gravity and importance around tragedy—Macbeth and others are people whose stories are worth telling.  So while a person may be sad, the thought is that at least they are important enough to be sad. 

For as Lord Henry says, it is ennui which is to be avoided at all costs.  I suppose from there it wouldn't matter whether it was happiness or misery that was one's vehicle of escape.

Why do we have to write anything down at all? 

I can imagine a conversation had with a person on a deck overlooking a large field that meets a treeline, beyond which an orange glow receded into the midsummer day's phosphorous evening.  We were sort of friends, and while the view was one to be hidden forever in one's heart, we didn't know how the evening would go.  "This is how I imagine every day I eat a bowl of lucky charms ending.  The magic carries through the whole day," one would say.  "That probably depends on how well you eat the lucky charms."  "Save the marshmallows for last?"  "Exactly."  

The intricacies and strategies of eating different cereals would go on to be discussed in detail.  And then the two would depart, never having to tell anyone of the experience again.  It would be a full interaction, for it started with a comment that caused a mutual understanding of the magnificence of the view, while then delving into the particular details that the mind appreciates along life's way, a perfect suspension of conversation between the silly and the sublime.  It is furthermore often the case that a person feels their existence is most fully appreciated when the specific things their mind appreciates along life's way—things they normally would never have spoken of—are noticed and discussed with another person.

Perhaps we will get sad at times, but it seems we should strive for another kind of interaction with people and view of life, one that sees sadness only as a necessity in responding to sad states of affairs.   But oftentimes people do get sad, and seem to be that way all the time, even though we exist in a world with such fun to be had.  Such a habitually sad person would have been off and distant on the deck of that summery evening.  There would be a distance between them and the other person, perhaps for no real pinpointable reason whatsoever.  No words would be spoken, and thus conversation would not be the pleasure for which one was happy to be alive.

And that is why one must write; for ideally, either person on the deck would not have to think about their experience as though they were someone else.  They would not have to notice why it was that the evening was so delightful, how it filled them with life, how it let them feel like their memories were secret treasures no one else could know about, all in attempt to recreate the experience in the mind of someone else through writing.  Instead they would just feel happy themselves and move on in life.  One need only enter a third person point of view about life in order to know how to represent it to someone else.  And if there are valuable ways of looking at life, if it something which we know we should not always be sad about, then it seems it is worthwhile to write as a way of showing that to be true.  Art is the rhetoric for the way you see life.

Besides, we are all so sleepy.  We need writers to wake us up, to remind us we're alive.  It's a startlingly easy thing to forget.  So I wasn't planning this, but (raises glass), this one's to you Jack!  Thanks for reminding us we only live once, and that we must not fall asleep.