First they came for the bankers and the Wall Street traders, and I didn’t speak out because I thought they had more money than they deserved.
Then they came for the oil companies and the coal companies, and I didn’t speak out because I thought they were destroying the planet.
Then they came for the big corporations and small business owners, and I didn’t speak out because I was in a union and wanted better pay and benefits. Continue reading
Otherwise known as speaking in tongues
There are people who casually employ words that most of us have never heard, simply because they have a richly expansive vocabulary, and wish to express themselves with clarity and precision. When they discover that the listener has lost the thread of a conversation, they quickly repeat their points in much simpler terms. They do this, however, with such deft grace and social tact that the listener is left wondering if perhaps the speaker himself had not initially misspoken. The last thing a person of this character would ever want is to leave someone feeling intellectually inferior.
Then there are those who struggle to make use of the most obtuse language possible, even if they themselves aren’t entirely certain of what they just said, under the delusional misconception that being routinely incomprehensible raises their intellectual standing. For these people, the very goal of conversation is to make everyone else in the room feel intellectually inferior.
I am of the opinion that the first category of people make far better dinner companions.
…before he was any good.
If you want to be a writer, the one thing you need to do, which is more important than anything else, is… …well, write. How may people does each one of us know, who say they want to write, but then don’t write.
As Seth Godin points out in a recent blog post, if you want to write, you have to be willing to sit down and write, even if it means you start by writing badly. That’s all well and good, as far as it goes. Who among us hasn’t made an entry in a personal journal that left us thinking “Thank God no one else will ever read that! (at least not while I’m alive)”. But Godin takes the argument a step further. Continue reading
The ripple effect of all those after-school reruns…
There is a woman here at work, who got married some time in the past couple of years. Lately, it appears as though she has gotten pregnant, and is fairly far along.
But I don’t think she is pregnant.
She has appeared “fairly far along” for quite some time now. So, unless she is endowed with the joyous blessings of abnormally long gestation, her current, furniture-eclipsing contours must be attributable to, well, something else.
It is awkward.
Continue reading
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world,
which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime,
and falling in at night.
I miss you like hell.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
