You think your life is bad?  Imagine being allergic to allergies.  And being allergic to being allergic to allergies.  And so on and so forth.  For such a person, their first sneeze would be their last

I picked up a girl last night.  She started screaming and is going to press charges.

I walk too fast and read too slow to be influenced by chalk advertisements on the ground.

On the radio I heard someone say, "Diabetes is becoming one of the most expensive diseases to have," and all I could wonder is, "Who would pay to have a disease?"

Speed bumps: there to ensure you go through neighborhoods more slowly and through tires more quickly.

When I was little I pouted "This is completely unfair!" but then eventually I became a big person too.

There are two ways to make sure your cell phone doesn't go off in class: either turn off your ringer, or don't have any friends.  I laugh at the people who have to turn off their ringers.

Hope everyone had a terrific Thanksgiving!

Don't you love when things are magical?  I think that is part of the joy of going to a fancy restaurant.  Your waiter appears out of nowhere, the genie ready to grant your heart's greatest culinary desires.  "What can I get for you?"  Classic opening genie line.  He is ever the mind-reader, however, and leaves you to your peaceful and relaxing conversation, only to appear when you most need something.  Then some time later the magic sets back into motion as he produces out of thin air the crab ravioli you had told him was your heart's one true wish. 

As a little kid many things are magical because you don't know how they work.  The interesting thing is, not much changes as an adult.  How a car works, how planes fly, how your own body works—these things aren't really much more understood as we grow up.  It's still magic. 

As you read and learn to do a certain job you will become the expert of something and so be the magician, rather than the audience.  And that is good too.  It is good to wonder and it is also good to understand; we must not think we understand too much, however, and we must not simply stay in a state of wonder.  For wonder is the beginning of philosophy; even if it remains in the end, much philosophy should you have done by then.

Magical things can be big or small.  I remember at work there used to be this one rack of paper towels, and I never saw anyone putting them there.  They were just always there.  I thought that was terrific, because it's like they were being portaled there from another dimension.  Then eventually they ran out and I found out where we kept them.  It was a sad day, the day the magical paper towels went away.  And yet, there is still so much more.

For instance, take governments.  How do governments work?  I see lots of people talking about the government, but what are they actually referring to?  The press conferences?  In that case, that's not how the government actually works.  That's how the government says they work.  The way the government actually works has to do with what all of them say to each other at all the different times as they go about their days.  That's a really hard thing to track, unless you are watching The West Wing.  Even if you are one of the top officials in the government, you have to be very introspectively in tune to know how you make your own decisions.  So maybe no one knows how it works. 

It's a good thing when we don't know things, because being magical makes things more exciting. 

It's like a song that I found deep in the woods
  while I was dreaming
    of life and her words
     surrounded by creatures
      that know all her secrets
       they all hummed a tune
       and I fell asleep.
       My bed was their world.

While I was sweeping I thought, how deep does life go?   (This started because a song had the word 'deep' in it.)  To be 'deep' means life seems meaningful in a way that is intimately tied up with a profound emotional reaction to it.  We live at one level; and yet many truths exist way down, and they seem to be overwhelmingly real and important.  So I thought this.  Life is deep and awing when you reflect and think about it at the right moments.  Thus, life is deep.  God is the best explanation for why life is an awing reality.  Therefore, God exists.  What would atheists say to this argument?  Well, the universe can be awing.  But why is it that so many people can reflect on the universe and not feel overwhelmed by it?  And isn't the deepness of life different than the deepness of the universe?  But maybe my being awed at God is just a precontemplative bias based on what I have always been awed at; there can be lots of objects of numinous awe.  But this one seems somehow appropriate.

Into the night we go, the land of chimeras and slumber, where all our beliefs are put to the test. 

Time is short.

Life is kind of like falling asleep while watching a tank of fish in a dentist's office.  The fish swim so gracefully, even their sudden movements all being part of the soporific rhythm of their lives.  Thus even when an adventure happens to us, we tend to incorporate it into the pattern of no-adventure, then-adventure, no-adventure, then-adventure, so even the extraordinary doesn't remind us that we live only once.

Sometimes people - and by people I mean I - lament the fact that we have to sleep, for it means there is that much more life to be lived that we aren't living.  Why can't we just be awake all the time?  It feels unfair, like being kicked out of a store at closing when we had so much wanted to stay and keep talking.

But now I realize that it's sleep that makes life possible.  For as night descends, so the record books are shut on that day forever.  Every night ends with a burial: death does not happen once, it happens daily, as each day must be laid to rest.  Sleep is then the way the day passes out of existence, as we fade away into the blackness, and history sinks into the hidden depths of reality.

That there is a new day, then, to awaken to, and to feel wash over you like descending quickly into a hot bath, is the way life is possible.  For it is into the face of death that we hope, and birth that brings life.  If we just kept living one long day, we would never know how happy we were to be alive: we wouldn't get to feel the birth of each new day, as something to be cherished, for we would never see its death.  'It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.'  But now we should feel the heartbeat of every moment, for with the daylight goes this day's one and only life.

These past few days, I've been anxious.  Talking to people, reading books - always fearful that it's going to suddenly be up, like the quickening of the timer in Taboo when it's about to ring.  Each interaction ends so quickly - did it go the right way, did I say the right things, who am I?  I feel like there's a ghost of time who follows each of us around, snarling at our anxiety, always there filing his nails and smirking when we make mistakes, because he knows how much we're sweating.  After all, he's just the official there to enforce the rules; it's not like we could bribe him into making a second longer than a second: but he follows us around, always there if we just turn to him, a constant reminder of the drain toward which all thing slowly - or is it quickly? - descend.

So many people have been duped!  So many wake and think, Ah, here again, just like the day before!  Wrong!  That is the natural fallacy, the slow music in the background, the drugs in all our drinks, the slime dripping down the walls into a hazy world of swaying and smiling.  It will all be up!  You die too.  That's your private treasure of truth, the one thing you can sit alone with, and know is real.  The assumptions of the crowd are false!  Dance to the music over the loudspeakers, but only if it makes sense.  Other than that, it's up to you to come alive, and to not meet death as a stranger to your thoughts.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

....Just kidding.  Door's right over there.

I think falling asleep in public is weird. The other day I fell asleep in a library and when I woke up hundreds of people were in my room.

Other people standing at crosswalks are so stupid: they don't even know that when the walk light comes on it's a race across the street.  I win every time.

The sun was feeling distant from the earth so it used global warming to break the ice.

I interviewed to be a tow truck driver but they turned me down because I wasn't evil enough.

If I ever write a book for the Introduction I am going to write "Hello.  My name is Philip. It's nice to meet you."

If you were parallel parking tightly between two police cars, it would probably be very scary. But then if you parked successfully, you would have the safest car on the street.

I like saying words that I don't know how to spell because I feel like I am getting away with something.

If I were any kind of salesman I would want to be a carpet salesman, because then I would be able to justify talking so much since I would have the floor.

I hope all of you have a lovely Friday!

Have you ever wanted to see the stats for your life?  This has personally always been one of my hidden desires, as I think about things.  I'm not sure which stats I would want to see first, I just know that having them all on record would make me feel a lot happier.

If you had all your stats on hand, you could compare you are and your friends on all sorts of things.  "Dude, I have sneezed 567 more times than you have in life."   "I am 32.7% more likely to come to a full and complete stop while driving."   "If it's between three and four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, I am twice as likely to use the word 'capsize' in a sentence."

This would revolutionize everything.  We would no longer have to worry about how many steps it takes on average to get from the bakery to the laundromat, how many run-on sentences we've ever spoken, the total weight of all the pizzas we've ever eaten, how long in total we've waited in front of the microwave, the average horespower of our high-fives (perhaps depending on the person!), and so much more!  And of course, none of this is just the average of all the people that there are: this is for your life specifically.  Averages are fake numbers; they include all of the people, and thus indicate none of the people. 

I want to know all those things.  Although maybe it is just me who is obsessed with stats.  When I got my first box of baseball cards, I went through each card and memorized every player's entire statistical history as a baseball player.  As a cross country runner I was the same way, always memorizing all the race and split times of all my teammates and our competition.  The idea that something has a very precise value, and you can think about what that value means, is fascinating.  And it doesn't matter what the thing is to me; the littlest things are interesting—or as Chesterton would say, there are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people. 

How much fun would it be to bet on who stepped on the least sidewalk cracks in the last month?  Or who (among guy friends) has made eye contact with a girl they didn't know the most times in the last week?  Or whose life, of someone you have always lived around, has had the higher average elevation? 

I think that would be simply wonderful, because, after all, I can't tell you how many times I've thought about this.  And that's the problem.