Decongestant
From a coworker: You’ve never fully experienced marriage until you’ve experienced your spouse vomit on you… Not sure if I look forward to that one… tags : vomit
On Style
From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. …The ability to see directly what “looks good” would be ignored. The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes things all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars...
Cityscape Paradox
The daily trip into the city is one that I thoroughly enjoy. I sit relaxed, instinctively shifting to compensate for the jolting of the bus, reading, contemplating–looking out the window meditatively digesting the shifting cityscape. We live in an ambivalent world, and evidence of this is seen in nearly everything. If ambivalence is ever lacking it is because one is far too close to what is being examined; or, conversely, because one has succeeded in getting far enough away so as to have a perfect, eternal perspective. It is in the mean, the not-too-close and the not-far-enough-away place, that paradox is born. Cityscape is filled with paradox, yet the one on my mind at the moment is that of Beauty in Ugliness. I’m sure you’ve seen it; the dead...
On Book Reviews
I’ve seen a smattering of them here and there. Some types of blogs are saturated with these types of posts. I’m not sure that I’ve ever really done a formal one before, but I love books just as much (or more) than anyone else out there so this blog has had its share of titles dropped and ideas mentioned and critiqued. But the formal, linked-to-Amazon version has never had its day here, and perhaps it never will (never was chosen entirely arbitrarily, as I’m ambivalent at the moment). Philosophy has its mark in my perspective on book reviewing, just as in everything else, and I suppose the mark itself is found in the answer to the following question: Just what is the purpose of a book review anyway? This is turning into stream of...
Indelibility
There are a number of things that influence the culture of particular environments. Rules, regulations, ways of enforcement, social mores, etc. In all of this, I think one of the more important variables in determining the feel of an environment is the particular culture imposed by the Leader’s personality. You can change departments in the same company, you could take an identical class from a different instructor, you may have the exact same job with a different boss; and in every scenario you will inevitably find that the atmosphere changes. Often times quite deeply. I remember visiting a sister restaurant to pick up some noodles (is this perhaps the oddest sentence you’ve ever run across?). Walking in through the front door I encountered an...