Miscellany

The postmodernists say (said? are there still any out there?) that there's meaning in random jusxtaposition. Let's hope:

I've known for a long time that as men get older, their hair stops growing out their head and start coming out their ears and noses. I'm learning to live with it. But what I wasn't expecting were the bushy eyebrows. Long, straight, hard hairs that come out akimbo. Omigod, please, I don't want to become Dennis Healy! What does one do with them? Pulling one out seems like cutting off the Hydra's heads; two grow back in its place.

I dreamt the other night of Bill Gates doing stand-up. He was pretty darn good. He was enjoying himself, and the audience was with him. He ended his set with some hilarious impersonations of a few Microsoft VPs - that nobody in the audience got.

I saw a stage adaptation of Chaim Potok's Chosen last night. It is a coming-of-age story about people discovering what gives meaning to their lives, and then devoting themselves to it. I am still searching for meaning after all these years. I tell myself that I shouldn't expect to find it. If it weren't essentially impossible to find meaning, why would there be so much literature - and religion - about it? One could say the same thing about love. Which gives me hope: I didn't imagine I'd ever experience true love until the day I did.

Cheskin have done a wonderful piece about the meaning of color around the world. I first saw it just around the time when the 76 gas company started confusing me. I've always been fond of the orange livery of their filling stations, and I started seeing the orange as more and more red; was I beginning to lose my sense of color? And then one day I saw a tanker truck in the old orange delivering fuel to a station decked out in red. Side by side, orange and red; there could be no doubt. It must be a rather pathetic attempt to wrap themselves in the flag. In these days of patriotism, the board must have decided, red and blue was better than orange. What a pity. Red is already so overused, especially in the gas market (Conoco, Texaco), that it has no distinguishing meaning any more. I'll treasure my little orange 76 car antenna bobble even more now.

Before and after:

I copied out this quote from Thomas Merton's "The Love of Solitude, IV" ages ago:

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to
live and begins to live.

(A longer excerpt here.)

Two epigrams:

If I can think of it, someone else is probably already doing it.

The least trustworthy person in the world is my future self.