Category Archives: Life Philosophy

What Causes Heartbreak (#3)

I was informed once that I couldn't properly understand the movie Swingers because I'm not a man. For those who haven't seen Swingers, it's set in Los Angeles, and follows the lives of young, out-of-work ...

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What Causes Heartbreak (#2)

My high school sweetheart ended up attending the same college as I did. We both knew it was a bad idea (we had widely different interests), but ah, young love, right? It didn't take long before he transferred to a different school … overseas. We knew it was over once he left the States, though we still ...

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What Causes Heartbreak (#1)

In middle school, I had a best friend who my mother deemed a bad influence. Twenty years later, I take this to mean that I behaved more like an immature teenage brat while cohorting with this friend. My mom ...

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My Most Valuable & Destructive Physical Possession

I've been keeping a journal off and on ever since I was about 12 years old. The earliest journals, written in hand, survive. During high school, for a brief period, I switched to disk, and promptly lost every disk by the time I graduated. So I got smarter, and started a habit of only ...

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Reading Notebook #20: Humanness Is Superior to Righteousness

From The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: It was a basic Confucian principle that "it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great." For this reason, "humanness" or "human-heartedness" was always felt to be superior ...

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Reading Notebook #19: Death As Liberation

From "Letting Go" by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker (August 2, 2010): Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they—along with their doctors—were unprepared for the final stage. … Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to ...

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The Night I Was Sent to Hell

In early 2007 I had the following dream: I went to Hell—without a fight. I walked down a long and dark corridor with many others, with my (then) husband next to me. Suddenly the corridor opened up onto a square of a city. It looked like Naples—crowded, noisy, dirty. A large university was on the square, and I ...

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If You Watch Less TV, Will You Be Happier?

I'm now moving through Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus, which begins with a study revealing that the more time you spend watching TV, the more ...

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I Distrust Too-Happy People

I may get myself into trouble with this one. But I've always been suspicious of happy people. I do NOT mean these people: People who are generally cheerful and ...

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Reading Notebook #16: Life Interferes With Work & Vice Versa

From Bill Murray interview in Entertainment Weekly (via TerryStarbucker.com): “I just really want to work when I want to work. Life interferes, you know. When you’re young and all you have is your career, some of your life can be in second place. And then you want your life to take first ...

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