In the ninth grade, we played flag football in p.e. in Central Park. On the first day out, while I was lobbing beautiful, high-arcing 40-yard spirals, the loveliest girl in school said to me, "the ball is so pretty when you throw it."

Be still, heart. My first thought was to respond, "Not as pretty as you." But I didn't think I could pull it off. So instead, I said the somewhat less flattering, "No it's not," and mumbled something about "pretty" being way too girly to describe the magnificent spirals I was launching.

So when an even lovelier lass recently paid a similar compliment I had to go with the line I couldn't pull off, which was, of course, bad in its own stilted, smarmy way.
  ¶ 11:14 PM 0 comments

  Michael Newdow, a true badass, at least for us intellectual types.   ¶ 12:02 AM 0 comments

  Another problem with philosophical therapy - mood (a significant source of mental discontent) seems unhinged (conceptually) from justification, so it would seem philosophy should be powerless to change it.   ¶ 12:31 AM 0 comments

  I was listening to "Affirmative Action" by Nas, for the first time paid some attention to the lyrics and heard this keeper: "Life's a bitch, but God forbid the bitch divorce me." Rather brilliant, I think. This line also reminded me of Kant for some reason.

So about that article in NYT Magazine about Lou Merinoff (author of "Plato not Prozac" and founder of the American Philosophical Practitioner's Association or something). I haven't read it yet. But my general take on philosophy as therapy is this: philosophy is rather good at straightening out people's thoughts, and a lot of problems people have do depend on confusions. And many of the philosophers I know do seem to have a slightly better sense of perspective than other people I know. On the other hand, they are no less likely to suffer from depression, existential crises, etc. Of course, if your problem is that you think God hates you because you're gay, maybe philosophy can help to show you that there's no reason to believe God exists. Or if your problem is that you think life is meaningless without God, philosophy can show you that God couldn't supply the kind of meaning you want anyway.

But it's unclear that philosophy can really help you deal with the deepest problems of existence, and it may only be through philosophy that some of these problems (e.g. the Absurd) are encountered. Perhaps philosophy can help ensure that you suffer from deep versions of those problems rather than shallow versions of those problems. As Bertrand Russell wrote (while at UCLA), "the net result [of philosophical investigation] is to substitute articulate hesitation for inarticulate certainty." So rather than be certain that life's a bitch, one can note that there are many ways in which calling life a 'bitch' confuses things, but nevertheless there's an important way in which life is bitchy.
  ¶ 5:19 PM 0 comments

  I've been reading up on laryngitis, since I've come down with it. They say you should consult a doctor "if you have a deep cough or, in a young child, a cough like the bark of a seal." If my child barked like a seal, I'd have her exorcised. Or put in a zoo. Or on America's Funniest Home Videos.

I've also taken to drinking ice-blended drinks, and communicating my order to the cashiers with pen and pad. I've discovered that people are quite nice to you when they think you're mute. So I may make a practice of it, especially since speaking is generally more onerous than writing.


  ¶ 4:38 PM 0 comments

 
Big Blue's customer service guy emailed me back:

"Thank you for the suggestion... I will forward your suggestion to our planning department but it is highly unlikely that riders are going to listen to any such instruction from a bus driver." Rather pessimistic, no?  ¶ 9:35 PM 0 comments

  I have only one pet peeve about people in LA - they keep their backpacks on when they're standing on a crowded bus, thus making the bus even more crowded. And nobody says anything. If you did that in NYC, you'd get shot. Or bitched at. Or at least glared at.

Thus, I've sent a suggestion to the folks at the Big Blue Bus that their drivers should instruct people to take off their backpacks just as they tell people to move to the back of the bus.
  ¶ 9:00 AM 0 comments

  I've been trying to remember the grossest falsehoods I've ever believed:

Age 3: That I wanted to grow up to be a dragon.
Age 5: That 'a thousand' denotes something bigger than 'a million' (importantly, though, not that 1,000 > 1,000,000).
Age 20: That free will and determinism are incompatible.
  ¶ 1:50 AM 0 comments

  There's a scathing article in this month's Harper's about reality tv. But however vicious reality tv is, i think it must have one salutary effect: it makes its viewers confront the absurdity of human life.

Exhibit A:

I, um, happened to catch the end of Average Joe: Hawaii tonight. The hot chick dumps the average guy and chooses the hunk. But on day 5 of their prize trip, she reveals to hunk that she once dated Fabio, which is too much for hunk to handle, so he dumps her, leaving in a fuss. "All I have to say to anyone watching," says the hunk oh-so-earnestly, "is, man, put yourself in my shoes and think how you'd feel. *Fabio* - think how'd you feel."

No writer could make that shit up, or get away with making that up (perhaps they edited out the part where she said she made an porno with Fabio and his pet goat). And those oh-so-deliciously earnest and completely absurd confessions happen all the time on reality tv!

Maybe it's not the great yawning abyssmal absurdity of philosophers, but it's half-way there. How can the viewer not start thinking about the absurdity of their own life after this? Despite my generally low opinion of people, I gotta think this gives people pause, and causes them to reflect on such matters.
  ¶ 8:48 AM 0 comments

  Here's a message I almost sent to someone:

(Worrying about) implicatures makes writing about a kazillion times harder than it would be otherwise. E.g. - I must think there is something that needs to be communicated if I send this to you. What could it be? I have no clue. But if I send it, there's gotta be a reason - 'gotta' in the normative sense - I *can* send it without a reason, but then I'd be guilty of violating the conversational imperative or something. Otherwise, I'd be no different than someone who repeats himself endlessly. Believe it or not, I actually try to follow conversational norms.

But even if I say I don't have a reason, because of the principle of charity, or some such thing, you gotta try to figure out what my reason could be. Not that you actually will. Which means you're gonna flout the conversational imperative too!

But if you did try, you might come to some horrible conclusion, e.g. that I was trying to communicate that there was nothing to communicate. What a disaster!

But mustn't there be a reason for me to send this to you rather than to someone else? Must be that I want to say something to you without actually having anything to communicate. Or I could be acting completely randomly.   ¶ 12:37 AM 0 comments