martinimade

qotd, relationship advice

"7. ACCEPT THAT EVERYBODY NEEDS ALONE TIME. Sometimes your spouse needs to go to the bathroom for 45 minutes. Look, he's not going to the bathroom the whole time; he's trying to get away from you. And that's OK. Maybe you're being annoying. Sometimes you can be kind of annoying, you know."

-- From Samantha Bee and Jason Jones' list of relationship advice in August's Real Simple magazine. The list is both amusing and true.

qotd, complaining v. moaning

"Visitors to Britain are rarely able to grasp -- sometimes even after decades of residency -- the vital distinction its inhabitants make between complaining and moaning. The two activities seem similar, but there is a profound philosophical and practical difference. To complain about something is to express dissatisfaction to someone whom you hold responsible for an unsatisfactory state of affairs; to moan is to express the same thing to someone other than the person responsible. The British are powerfully embarrassed by complaining, and experience an almost physical recoil from people who do it in public. They do love to moan, though. THe background music of British life is a running aria of moaning about pretty much everything -- our weather, our politics, our permanently under-performing national sports teams, our reality-tv-obsessed media, and so on. Moaning, a source of entertainment in its own right, is also an important psychic comfort blanket, a way of venting resentment without taking responsibility for effecting change."

-- John Lancaster, "Letters from London: Party Games" in the June 7, 2010 New Yorker.

qotd, brute force

" If you do creative work, there's a sense that inspiration is this fairy dust that gets dropped on you, when in fact you can just manufacture inspiration through sheer brute force. You can simply produce enough material that the thing will arrive that seems inspired."

- Ira Glass

qotd, Bourdain, oiled supermodels and unfinished business

"So how did I get here – worrying about what kids eat? It's fair to say that turning 30 came as a cruel surprise to me. I hadn't really planned on making it that far, but there I was, and without a plan B. The restaurant business provided a degree of stability in that there were people who expected me to get up in the morning; and heroin, if nothing else, was useful in giving me a sense of purpose. I knew what I had to do every day: get heroin. 

But by my late 30s, detoxed from heroin and methadone, and having finally ended a lifelong love affair with cocaine, I discovered a basic emptiness and dissatisfaction in my life, a hole I'd managed to fill with various chemicals for the better part of 25 years. I'd never lived in an environment where a child would have been a healthy fit, and I'd never felt I was a suitably healthy person. I don't know exactly when the possibility of that changing presented itself, but it was some time after realising that I'd had enough cocaine, that a naked, oiled supermodel was not going to make everything better in my life."

 -- Anthony Bourdain from his new collection Medium Raw.

Tangentially related, in the sense that it's about being honest about what actually matters in one's life, Lee Kravitz, writer,* editor, father and husband of my lovely agent Elizabeth, has a blog post and video about asking yourself if you're happy. Extra treat for the knitters - the white sweater is a handknit.

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* His Unfinished Business  is about just that - and is, by all accounts, an amazing work that helps the reader figure out what he or she needs to do in order to let go. But I'm fairly certain there are no oiled supermodels in Kravitz's book. Next time.

qotd, great works of spec fic edition

"Some of the memories I mean to set down aren't pleasant ones, or flattering, and I tremble a little at the prospect of reliving them, but I intend to spare no one -- we were what we were, and we became what we became, and the facts will ennoble or demean us, as the reader chooses to see it."

-- Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America

qotd, knitting math edition

"Whether we know it or not, knitting makes use of many complex math theories. In plotting a set-in sleeve, one uses calculus to note the inflection point, and I'm told that the rate of decreases to slope anything at all can be figured with the Pythagorean theorem. Knitting is essentially a grid to which 'rise over run' applies quite neatly, and that's calculus again. Picking up stitches evenly requires an algorithm related to something apparently called a Diophantine equation -- and it goes on and on. The beauty of knitting, of course, is that you have no idea you're doing all that math (or that you're even capable of doing all that math) until some math geek tells you so."

-- Stephanie Pearl-McPhee on May 26, 2010, in the Page-a-Day calendar. 

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My standard anxiety dream -- the one we all have had that is mostly about having to take an exam in a class you've never even attended -- always involves a math class. While I am slowly getting over my mistrust of formulae, they still make my head sweat. And not in a good way. 

qotd, a small truth edition

"It's a difficult thing to explain, made more difficult still by a phenomenon I've noticed many times since starting work here: it turns out it's very hard for people to listen clearly to a woman holding a butcher knife."

-- Julie Powell, Cleaving.

I'm kinda between here and there for the next few days so updates will be slim, if not nonexistent. Philadelphia has been swell, tho, if really warm, which is exactly the sort of weather where one wants to pull out a big wool sweater and talk about one's love for it.

But, still, big fun.

qotd, warning: contains naughty word uttered by our now president

"But there was no denying one brute reality: a week after the convention, McCain had pulled even in the polls again. Some even had him a little bit ahead. Obama smirked and reprised for Axelrod another of his favorite sayings: 'This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it.'"

-- from Game Change by Heliemann and Halperin, which I can't recommend highly enough

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Also, for those who missed the live web chat hickey-do yesterday, watch it at your leisure here. And now to go torture some college students give a final.

qotd, wee fishie edition

"Standard English is, of course, the version of the language that has resulted from years of hand-wringing about the speed with which it has changed. But to try to hold back language change is like trying, as Monty Python and the Holy Grail would have it, to cut down the largest tree in the forest with a herring. The tree will keep growing. It's the herring that will perish."

-- Kitty Burns Florey in Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

qotd, antipsychotics and chickens edition

"Charlie Ledley and Ben Hockett returned from Las Vegas on January 30, 2007, convinced that the entire financial system had lost its mind. 'I said to my mother, "I think we might be facing something like the end of democratic capitalism,"' said Charlie. 'She just said, "Oh, Charlie," and seriously suggested I go on lithium.'"

-- Michael Lewis, The Big Short, which you should all go read even if you don't know squat about the whole sub-prime mortgage debacle. It is a remarkable book, both in its depth and simplicity. 

... and since I saw this this morning and couldn't resist...

"I don’t think it’s silly. It sounds like fun. But for a woman in the prime of life to stay home to do it? To be dependent on a man so you can grow your own vegetables? I don’t think that’s a wise life plan for women. And the way it is moralized bothers me too. Like, if a woman said “I’m going to stay home so I can play cards with my girlfriends” that would sound really frivolous, but if she’s growing organic salad for her family that’s a challenge to the capitalist system. It’s not. It is incredibly difficult to opt out of the system. That’s what makes it a system."

-- Katha Pollitt on Peggy Orenstein's NYT's piece about wealthy women who leave the workforce to raise chickens.