“There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land. What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.

In Albrecht’s view, the residents of the Upper Hunter were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” A neologism wasn’t destined to stop the mines; they continued to spread. But so did Albrecht’s idea. In the past five years, the word “solastalgia” has appeared in media outlets as disparate as Wired, The Daily News in Sri Lanka and Andrew Sullivan's popular political blog, The Daily Dish. In September, the British trip-hop duo Zero 7 released an instrumental track titled “Solastalgia,” and in 2008 Jukeen, a Slovenian recording artist, used the word as an album title. “Solastalgia” has been used to describe the experiences of Canadian Inuit communities coping with the effects of rising temperatures; Ghanaian subsistence farmers faced with changes in rainfall patterns; and refugees returning to New Orleans after Katrina.

In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish, N.H. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”

But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of any real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn’t written a word for years. Or like the character in Stephen King’s novel “The Shining,” he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or like Gogol at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all up. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, although she had never seen them.

It's true.

When Apple announced the name of its tablet computer today — the iPad — my mind immediately went to the feminine hygiene aisle of the drugstore. It turns out I wasn’t alone.

The term “iTampon” quickly became a trending topic on Twitter because of Tweets like this one: “Heavy flow? There’s an app for that!” A CNBC anchor, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, said the iPad was a “terrible name" for the tablet. “It reminds me of feminine products,” she said.

“Are there any women in Apple marketing?” asked Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew Media Relations, a technology public relations firm. “The first impression of every single woman I’ve spoken to is that it’s cringe-inducing. It indicates to me that there wasn’t a lot of testing or feedback.”

It is not just women who were surprised. When Peter Shankman, a public relations and social media expert, saw the name on television, he was taken aback. “I’m waiting for the second version that comes with wings,” he said.

Mr. Shankman was surprised that Apple, with its meticulous attention to detail, missed the significance. He cited a piece of company lore — when its naming conventions called for a new computer to be called the Macintosh SEx, Apple went with the name Macintosh SE/30 instead.

“A People’s History” told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

So tormented was Mr. Bowe by his inability to make the relationship work that he set out on a two-year quest to find out why. Not through conventional means, like psychotherapy, but by researching other people’s romantic experiences.

The result is “Us: Americans Talk About Love,” a new collection of first-person accounts of why love succeeds or fails, published by Faber & Faber. No aspect of lust, greed, need or devotion is ignored: The book includes tales of obsession and confusion (from a 17-year-old girl in San Antonio, Tex., who can’t get over an ex-boyfriend and a drug-addled 30-year-old living with his mother in Arizona while following his ex on Facebook); finding bliss (as a 44-year-old lesbian eventually did in Minneapolis, after more than a decade of marriage to a born-again Christian); and acceptance (from a 76-year-old widower in Manhattan who says he dated more than 300 women after his wife died, without ever finding anyone to take her place).

It is as compelling as literary fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine called it a “profound, touching work.” But it also functions as a kind of self-help manual, forcing readers to examine their own longings, failings and assumptions about love.

Dear iPad,

I haven't even met you and I already love you. You're so beautiful I can't stand it.

Love,
Aditi

New York is like many big, crowded cities in having plenty of art to bump into — or drop or toss in the trash or surrender to the cosmic banana peel. A drawing by Lucian Freud valued at more than $100,000 was accidentally put through a shredder by Sotheby’s in London in 2000. A man tripped over his shoelace on a staircase at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and managed to shatter three Qing dynasty porcelain vases, as The Guardian reported.

There’s more. A painting by Giorgio de Chirico, “Piazza d’Italia,” was hanging on the wall of a townhouse in the Netherlands when demolition began on a bank next door. The wrecking ball came through the wall of the house and shot a perfect hole through the canvas. In Germany, a Ming dynasty lacquer plate — about 600 years old — was hit by a housekeeper’s elbow and ended up in bits on the ground. These two items were soberly displayed by Axa Art at the 2009 Art Basel exhibition in Switzerland under the caption “The Thrill of Protecting,” although it might as well have said, “Let This be a Lesson to You.”

How I Feel Today

Dayana Salazar, a professor of urban and regional planning at San Jose State University, said the approach was “common sense” for the Latino community. “They understand the connection between food and the land,” Ms. Salazar said. “This is also what happens in the rest of the world: you have a piece of land, you use it to the maximum. You don’t use it for display.”

I heart architects

When Natasha Case, 26, lost her job as a designer at Walt Disney Imagineering about a year ago, she and her friend Freya Estreller, 27, a real estate developer, started a business selling Ms. Case’s homemade ice cream sandwiches in Los Angeles. Named for architects like Frank Gehry (the strawberry ice cream and sugar cookie Frank Behry) and Mies van der Rohe (the vanilla bean ice cream and chocolate chip cookie Mies Vanilla Rohe), they were an immediate hit.

“I feel this is a good time to try new things,” said Ms. Case, who did a project on the intersection of food and architecture while studying for her master’s in architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2008. “You do things you always wanted to do, something you’ve always been passionate about.”

Since she and Ms. Estreller rolled out their truck, Coolhaus, at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival near Palm Springs last April, they’ve catered events for Mr. Gehry’s office, Walt Disney Imagineering and the Disney Channel.

Their initial investment was low: they bought a 20-year-old postal van on Craigslist and had it retrofitted and painted silver and bubblegum pink, all for $10,000. With seven full- and part-time employees, they now make enough to support themselves and have plans to expand (a Hamptons truck is in the works and they are trying to get their products into Whole Foods stores).

View from my office. Thanks also for this, C.

this rocks. thanks C

“We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen told me, adding, “I can’t figure out why everybody wouldn’t want that deal.”

Sustainable whole tree architecture, 2009

"Shanty Town," Seth Neefus, 2009

Shanty Town in Lima, Peru 2009

Jorge Luis Borges and Maria Kodama on the Seine, Paris, 1975

Dream

I have a spacecraft, it is small and built to fit only one person. The planet I land on is small, not much larger than The Little Prince's Planet. It is lovely. It is perfect. It can fit about 50 people comfortably, 100 if we want to be a China or an India, but I don't want to overuse our resources so I settle on 40.

I will interview the people who come to the planet to see if they are compassionate and caring, to see if they believe in the connection between all living things and honor that connection. Because I want our planet to be a happy one, one where we can live in peace and respect all the living things that were here before us, and each other. Most of the people who come to the planet fail my interview and so I ask them to leave. If they decline, I chase them away with a stick. I am small, but quite ferocious with a stick.

A few I ask to stay. But I am tired, because I have been up for weeks conducting interviews and making plans for the planet and how we will coexist on it. I haven't slept in maybe a month, so one of the new recruits, a friend of a friend tells me to sleep. He says he'll manage while I rest. And so I sleep. I dream of how happy we'll all be on our beautiful planet.

When I wake up, the planet has been overtaken by a group of frat boys. I recognize these boys - they are the same boys who once walked up and down the main street in Rosarito with beer cans in their hands, heckling the locals. They are laughing and drunk and ripping things up, lighting bonfires and getting into fights.

I tell them to leave, I tell them they're not welcome here. But there are so many of them and only one of me. And I am small. I can't chase 30 people away with a stick. And they are big. They laugh at me. There is nothing I can do. They are here now, and they are the majority. They don't understand anything about this planet. They don't see how special it is.

There is nothing I can do. There is nothing anyone can do. In one fell swoop, it is ruined, my vision for this planet, this beautiful world that could have been. If only I hadn't slept. I have let everyone down. I have let this lovely little planet down.

I get down on the ground in a fetal position and I cry. I can't stop crying. I cry because I am so sorry and so tired and so defeated and so sad.

When I wake up, I can't stop crying. I can't go back to sleep. I get up to write everything out, but I can't because I can't stop crying.

During the day, it is fine, for the most part, but moments like this, in the middle of the night, when you can't go back to sleep and you can't stop crying, it all feels so acute. As though it is all wrong, all ruined. And you don't know how to ever make it right again.

I think women have a particular iconic woman they identify with. There's a huge Brigitte Bardot contingency, but she's not my kind of woman. Also she's a racist. Some women like Sophia Loren, but again, I don't get it. She's like too overtly sexual. She's the male fantasy of a woman. She's practically not even a person, just a one-dimensional male interpretation of femaleness, the male gaze personified. I love Anouk Aimee, but there's something too ethereal about her. Jeanne Moreau is my kind of woman. My mother and I are obsessed with her face. She has a pretty amazing face, but she also has this accessibility and playfulness and charm and wit and effortless elegance that I love. I love Jeanne Moreau. I want to marry her.

Things I Will Do When I Get Home

Visit the Cloisters
Go to The Chocolate Bar
Get noodles at Momofuku with Jo
Insist that we light the fireplace
Eat dinner/breakfast/snacks in the sunroom
Raid the fridge
Insist that my dad make me celery root avocado blood orange salad
Walk with my mom
Brush Mishan's tummy till he claws at my hands
Look through the drawer in my desk that has letters: rejection letters, acceptance letters, letters from friends, maybe a love letter or two
Read through old journals
Try to remember who I was when I lived there because it's been so so long
Come up with a Plan

Words I Like that Have the Letter B in Them

unbecoming
unbenownst
bristle
burnish
uber-anything
abate
abashed
abstract
abacus
brittle
brisk
breeze

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

-Cesare Pavese

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

-Cesare Pavese

Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

The most absurd thing about modern society is this entrapping of public appearance. The strangest thing is how we handle discomfort. People are so uncomfortable with discomfort. And as a result, they teeter between extremes of melodrama or despair. Maybe if we just dealt with being uncomfortable, we wouldn't have to lean so heavily on the graver or the escapist alternative.

People need to stop apologizing for making themselves, or others uncomfortable. Life is remarkably uncomfortable. We should all stop pretending otherwise. And encourage public acts of discomfort. Really, I am strongly endorsing a kind of emotional anarchy. Also, I just realized that "Public Acts of Discomfort" sounds simultaneously exhibitionist and dirty.

Fried twinkie-dogs are kind of absurd too. Also, American Idol. Scratch that, all reality shows are absurd. But not in a Chekhovian way. That is to say, not in a good way.

Before R left for SE Asia, she told me I need to start a blog that studies *get this, people* studies. Because I am obsessed with studies. I read source material and footnotes and everything.

Truthfully, there are no real answers to life in scientific studies. I know this. I wonder if I will end up like Henri Cartier Bresson, who one day just stopped taking pictures and when people asked him about it, he thought it was rude, like asking someone about their divorce. My sister told me that story. Maybe I will stop reading studies in a few years and get all cantankerous when people want to talk to me about studies.

C told me that it is okay to use the word "interweb" once or twice in a blog post but not like 18 times. I was not offended. I am not easily offended. Till I am. Then I am really offended. Seeing George W. Bush still offends me. When he is dead, I will not be offended by him anymore.

People are always giving unsolicited opinions and advice, including me.

Studies are a formal sort of unsolicited advice.

I was enthusiastic about the project until I wasn't.

The above statement effectively captures the narrative of my life.

“Human beings are in some ways like bees,” Professor Haidt said. “We evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives.”

los angeles, sunshine and rain, 2010

Rant

A week of interruptions. Two weeks of intermittent internet, several calls to the inept service team of Time Warner Cable, which is like, in The Ukraine or somewhere. Stolen credit card number. Calls to Bank of America's claims department. What has happened to customer service in this country? I experienced this during Cash for Clunkers. "It's like I'm in India," I told my parents, entirely perplexed. "But in the 70s. It's like a ration system." Being without the internet is at times peaceful and at times irritating. I can't send compulsive emails. I can't compulsively gchat people. Ideas come and I can't blog. Blogging is also a compulsion, it is not really writing, but something else. It is fulfilling the need to vomit your thoughts into a space and move on with your life. I tell myself no interwebs for a short period is a good thing. Before the interwebs, people talked and sat around campfires and read books. I read books, but only after checking the interwebs every morning first. I need to wean myself off my virtual connections. It's like a Vipassana silent meditation retreat. Without the hours of silent meditation. This is a chance to tame my compulsion(s). I tell myself that this is an opportunity to grow and learn about myself.

This is the conclusion I have reached two weeks in: myself sucks. I am sick of myself. I don't know how or why people deal with me. I can hardly deal with myself without access to the interwebs. Don't get me wrong. I made a collage and several stews, including a Mediterranean collard and mustard greens stew which was a big hit. I've done an unreasonable amount of baking. I finished the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. I went to Tar Pit (twice) and Lazy Ox, two birthday parties and an exhibit at MOCA. And I've been writing in a journal which I only do a couple of times a week. The title of my collage is "Life without the Interwebs." It is a happy collage of people doing fun things, like sitting on a beach in Italy and eating clams around a fire pit. In reality, my life looks nothing like this right now. I am lying to myself about what Life Without the Interwebs looks like.

I need the fucking interwebs. This is not like when I am in India and don't want to even look at the interwebs. I am in Los Angeles, and I need to read the NYT online edition. And the Atlantic. I need to check in on friend-blogs. I start getting paranoid. Maybe Time Warner Cable is just trying to fuck with my head. They're assholes. They would try to fuck with my head, all the way from The Ukraine. Granted, this thought pops into my head after the joint and before Avatar which I didn't really want to see, but I also didn't want to be the only person on Earth who hasn't seen it. God, Earth. I am so sick of your peer pressure. Besides, the internet was down, and Time Warner Cable can't come for another week so I figured it was a good time to see the movie.

I realize that this state, this trying to manage Without-Interwebs state is actually an attempt at suppression. Some people suppress practically everything. My mind if built like a west coast residence. There is no basement to throw things into. As a result, I start losing my shit. I experience bouts of unreasonable rage.

1) Seeing George W. Bush on TV is like experiencing post traumatic stress disorder. Make him go away. I am offended when he expresses sympathy for the people of Haiti. "He's lying!" I scream into the TV. I want to stab him with a steak knife. I am stunned sick by my anger. I go lie down for an hour.

2) Also, Judgment.

MIA tweets "Fuck the NYT" when they talk about Sri Lanka as a tourist destination. Using Twitter as a venue to display rage strikes me as prosaic and pointless. An example of misdirected rage. I recognize this because misdirected rage is something I am familiar with. I want her to write an op-ed or something in response but then realize that every time I've heard her talking about Sri Lanka it is a series of anecdotes strung together in gibberish. If she wants people to care about Sri Lanka, she should just not talk. She's a talented musician, but not a particularly good spokesperson for her cause. I voice my opinion unapologetically and realize what a bitch I sound like. But I can't take it back. Also, I have low tolerance for people who speak about important issues in anecdotes. Seriously, it's like a whole country of Thomas Friedmans.

I attempt to reason with my internet router. "Please work?" I ask it. I pet it softly on the head, "Please?" It is erratic but within an hour it starts working on its own. I am convinced that cajoling unreasonable electronics into working is the solution for nearly all technical malfunction.

It works for two days, then conks out again. Cajoling is clearly not the answer.

I am at a fucking Coffee Bean right now. On Hillhurst. I actually hauled my ass out in the RAIN. Who the fuck even does that in LA? People don't DRIVE when it rains here. The library is closed because it is MLK Day. It is loud, and Animal Collective is not drowning out the noise. Two bearded men have set up camp across from me and are talking about their screenplay. It is upside down, but I can read this:

DONNIE: I just don't want to get lost again.

STEFF: You won't. I won't let you.

DONNIE: I know you won't.

My soul just cringed. Ick. I want to go home. I want to be in my pajamas. I want to sit at my computer and write. And have access to my beloved addictive interwebs.

I know. It could be worse. This is what pent-up melodrama sounds like.

Haiti Disaster Relief: How to Contribute

Mrs. Clinton told NBC's TODAY show that three million people — about a third of Haiti’s population — had been affected by the quake and that “there will be tens of thousands of casualties — we don’t have any exact numbers.”

Donate to Partners in Health to help with Haiti relief efforts

Little asian PC girl vs. MAC parody - watch more funny videos

This Afternoon

I took myself out to lunch. To a sushi place off San Vicente. When I take myself on a lunch date, it is because I want to be alone. I want to be in my own head. I do not want to talk to anyone else. Also, if there are key opportunities, I want to people-watch. I want to eavesdrop on others' conversations. Across from me are two men. I call them Creepy Producer and Creepy Actor. Creepy Producer is wearing a fuschia silk shirt. He has lots of bling. Creepy Actor refuses to take off his sunglasses, even though we are indoors. I am across from them, but behind a plant. They cannot see me. Or so I think. I eat my salmon. I listen to their conversation.

Creepy Producer: Emil's almost done with the script. I think you're really going to like it.

Creepy Actor: Emil's a pretty talented guy.

Creepy Producer: You'll love the story. It's like, about the Freemasons. So, the Freemasons are actually - get this - vampires. And they founded the country, and the first few Presidents and the people who drafted the Constitution - all vampires.

Creepy Actor: That's great, that's great. I'm liking what I'm hearing.

Creepy Producer: And so, they've kind of become really low-key - they run the world, the stock exchange, everything. So they don't need to be, you know, flashy or out there. They don't have anything to prove anymore.

Creepy Actor: Great, great. I like it.

Creepy Producer: But then, the founder of the Freemasons, the Vampire King, so to speak, he's like 600 years old.

Creepy Actor: Great.

Creepy Producer: And he's about to die. So it's like - who is going to run this show now, you know?

Creepy Actor: I love it.

My lunch break is over, but I kind of want to hear the end of this thing when Creepy Producer leans over the fucking plant and turns to me. Shit.

Creepy Producer: Oh, hi. We met at that party last month.

Me: No, I don't think so.

Creepy Producer: Yeah, yeah, we did. You're June's friend.

Me: No. I'm not.

Creepy Producer: Are you sure? We talked for a while. You're an actress, right?

At this, I don't know whether to scoff or raise an eyebrow.

Me: (emphatically) No. Definitely not.

Creepy Producer: Well, I'm Evan.

Me: Aditi.

Creepy Producer: Are you sure you're not an actress?

I pay my check. I walk out. Un-fucking-belivable.

The moment I get outside I have a hankering for a Diet Coke. I swore that I would not adopt my mother's caffeine addiction, which is placated daily by numerous cups of chai, but something happened when I turned 30. All of a sudden, I need the mild boost that it gives me. Yes, this is called an addiction. Yes, I know it is cancer in a can. I practically coined that term and probably even said it to people years ago. Or maybe I just thought it, I can't imagine being that kind of outwardly righteous. Internally righteous, definitely.

I pick up a can at a corner liquor store called Beverly Hills Liquors. It is run by an Egyptian man. At the counter I realize I have no cash and I don't think I can put 35 cents on my credit card. Why am I always so cash-poor? My father would be disappointed. On the other hand, my father came to this country when people got monthly paychecks and ATMs didn't exist, and there were probably only two banks in all of New York and you had to take four buses to get to one of them and also, he had holes in his shoes.

The Egyptian man tells me to take the Coke. I continue to dig through my purse. I have procured a quarter, a nickel, two pennies. This rifling through my purse makes me feel self-conscious and poor. I saw a homeless man do this at a Rite-Aid in San Francisco. "I have enough money," he kept saying. And the line behind him kept on getting longer and people behind him were sighing loudly. I wanted to smack them. "Be polite!" I wanted to scream. "Didn't your fucking useless parents teach you anything?" And I wanted to give him the money but he seemed prideful and you can sense this characteristic in people and you know they won't like it, accepting help.

"Take the Coke, pay me back next time," the man at Beverly Hills Liquors says. I am embarrassed by how often shop keepers or vendors tell me to just take something, encourage me to abscond without paying. This happens at India Sweets and Spices, at bagel places in Boston. I open up bags at home and find things I never bought. At Epicurean, a man hands me a baguette and a bar of chocolate, "take it," he says. The Palestinian vendor at the Los Feliz Farmers Market forces pickles and labneh and feta on me. I used to think this was just people being nice. That the world was full of nice people. Another thing happened when I turned 30. I became cynical. But this man actually does seem nice. Perhaps this is because he stands as a foil to Creepy Producer. Am I in the midst of a psychological experiment? Is normalcy in regular storekeepers amplified if you encounter them right after an encounter with Creepy Producer? I find the extra three cents. I pay for the Diet Coke. "Thank you, though, I appreciate it," I say to him and walk out.

On the way out, I step on something pink and fleshy, like an internal organ, and it sticks to the heel of my boot. Squirrel organs. Possum intestine. I immediately feel like I am going to vomit. I fight off a wave of nausea. When was the last time I puked? Maybe three years ago, when I got food poisoning from Gingergrass. Yes, you read right. Hipster-fusion Vietnamese food had me vomiting for days. No, it was on the flight back from London. Airplane sickness is the worst. They don't even give you those barf-bags anymore. Where are you supposed to puke if the seat belt sign is on? Into British Airways Quarterly or whatever magazine they give you? Into the safety instruction card?

Puking in a place that is not my own bathroom poses a problem: I only vomit into sinks. I refuse to throw up in a toilet. There is something disconcerting about having your face that close to a place that is the receptacle of so many ass-generated foul gales and foul matter. In college, my roommates found it absurd that I threw up into a sink. So it is.

On the drive back, I think about the vampire movie. Sitting in a theater, we are engaged in a collective dream. How sad that our dream life has atrophied into this: Freemason/Vampires packaged for us by Creepy Producer in a fuschia silk shirt. We are consuming something produced by a man who looks like Color Me Badd, well over the hill.

What will the collective dream be when I am old, when the internet is streamed directly into our brains, like an IV of information and visuals that we never even needed or wanted? There are movements for justice, for peace. Why not a movement for the preservation of imagination or dream? I know it is a long road from movies about Freemason-vampires to the end of imagination, of dream, and to spiritual bankruptcy, but in my car, at this moment, it feels like a distinct and sure path and I am sad about this. And so I return to work, with a stomach full of sushi, a Diet Coke in my hand, fleshy squirrel remnants on my shoe and an abstractly broken heart.

oldmanonthemountain:

tumblangeles:

crookedindifference: los angeles.

Illuminated Kurpark in Oberhof, Germany, January, 2010

Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.) The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group. These Western ideas of the mind are proving as seductive to the rest of the world as fast food and rap music, and we are spreading them with speed and vigor.

After cleaning and before dinner and a Velvet Underground listening and a glass of wine, I took myself on a drive by the Reservoir. I do this sometimes; I need to be near bodies of water at sunset, however artificial they might be. Maybe this is because for years, on Sunday afternoons, my family would get into a car and drive to Tod's point to watch the sunset. We'd say hello to Bluemoon on the way, and we'd park the car at the overhang near the yacht club and wait till the sun disappeared behind Belle Haven. We still do this when I'm home. They still do this when I'm not home. I miss my family on Sunday afternoons. And these things stick.

Edie Sedgwick, screen test at Andy Warhol's Silver Factory, 1965

The day after

one of those really good parties. The kind of party where everyone had fun and got along, and friends from different spheres made friends with one another and people made connections and hooked up and talked.

Today, the living room is strewn with empty plastic glasses and beer bottles, leftovers of ratatouille squares and rice balls and chips and tangerine peels and blackberries.

I used to be OCD about cleaning up after a party right after everyone left, but now I am a lax hostess. I don't drive myself crazy baking three dozen cupcakes anymore or make my own canapes. Well, sometimes I still do. But I think I needed to get over myself and realize that it is not about the food. Or the music. Or even the space. It's about your people. And I love my people.

New Love

Watching two people falling in love at a party: it is as though someone has placed a glass lid over a cheese plate. You can see them within this transparent enclosure, but they exist in a separate world, they breathe separate air: each others'.

Years later you see them at another party and the glass lid has lifted, they now breathe everyone else's air. They have become common.

And as you watch them as they mingle with others, pour themselves drinks, laugh, sometimes even on other sides of the room from one another, you realize that the glass lid wasn't lifted, it was probably smashed. People can suffocate inside glass enclosures.

This made her think about common spaces, her own shared air. How once, for a moment, she had found herself within the glass bubble, unaware even, of its presence until someone pointed it out to her.

There is no appropriate end to this story because the ideal end would be neutral, and not sentimental, and not cynical and not laden with all sorts of editorializing and commentary. It happens time and time again, all over the place. It is happening in simultaneous places and to countless people right now.

And the people who were within that bubble are somehow changed, as though that experience has become part of their DNA. Like catching a virus that will forever show up positive on a blood screen.

What to do with some of the things that you simply know about yourself? Like this: I have a strong reaction to bitter faces, an even stronger reaction to kind ones.

Things are happening all the time, simultaneously: a V of birds circles around a theater marquee, their underbellies lit up by the fluorescent light of the billboards, a bright syncopated swoosh. It makes her think of the Olympics, specifically: the Los Angeles Olympics, which she never attended, but for years there was a mug sitting in the kitchen cabinet with an Eagle in an Uncle Sam suit holding the Olympic rings in his hand.

Perhaps it is even still there.

Novelty mugs, who invented these and why? There is one with a drab-looking woman saying, "When's Friday?"

There should be a tax on things that memorialize ennui.

The other day, from the top of a hill in Silverlake, there was a view of an immodest sunset. People stopped to look, pointed, showed their children. It was the kind of flush that saturated the sky, and then your lungs, taking your breath away.

Today, it is 80 degrees and sunny. Yoga instructors say things like, "Have a fucking great 2010."

I send out an email about propriety. How there should be none because it was refreshing hearing this. And yet, when there isn't any, I don't know how to react. I am alternately a study in propriety and then the opposite. I am ruled by my own contradictions.

Jo is in the malaise. Alessandro is glum. I met them both in Carmichael, in September 1997. None of us really wanted to be there at first. Now we are where we want to be, and sometimes don't want to be here either. Perhaps there is a meaning to this finding.

I am eating a mini-eclair someone handed me on the street. Not just someone, a baker, outside his bakery. What if someone just handed me an eclair on the street? Would I eat it? No. I don't even have to think about it really.

He played me a song once.

This is the excavation you were talking about, he said.

Excavation, unearthing. I am forever on my hands and knees trying to remove things from the ground in one piece, fingernails full of dirt.

Don't add, don't think, don't paint over the truth. When you see something that has been excavated, painstakingly, you know that it is not a counterfeit, a knock-off. This is rare, though.

But still.

Some people's words you read thirstily, as though you are parched.

She imagined him through his words. She saw him in her mind as slender, with long fingers and pushed-back cuticles, but when they met he was nothing of the sort.

Isn't it strange how rarely writers are this kind of physical person and how often others are? The world is cast all wrong.

He told her that her words were precise, clean, but not without sentimentality.

This was all right. It is what she would have said to him, only she would have exchanged the word sentimentality with pretension.

But this is the way some men decorate empty spaces.

Just as in the cold, her sentimentality kept her warm.

Why does this story never end well? he asked her once. It ends, again and again and again, but never well, never right.

It does, she thought.

Stories know their own ends, they drive themselves to their own conclusions. This is perhaps the only thing they know how to do. They are heading home, like those birds in a V, their underbellies lit by the neon lights of our city. Perhaps if we took the time to follow them, we would understand this, but we catch only a glimpse, a piece, and wonder about the rest.

Walls

In the movies, frustrated men punch holes into walls. This doesn't just happen in movies, I actually know at least four men (many of whom are extremely calm and non-violent) who have punched holes into walls at some point of their lives. One man I know did it because he didn't get a job that he desperately wanted. My friend P got a terrible review on his book which caused him to punch a hole in his wall. Two men I know did this in the aftermath of failed relationships. This seems to be a very effective way of recovering from heartbreak: punch a hole in a wall, get on with your life. Women never punch holes into walls, at least as far as I know. I am willing to go as far as to generalize on this. I don't think there would be an actual payoff to this activity for us. First of all, who would fix the wall? And how would we explain the damage to our landlords? And what would it really accomplish? Also, I think I would break my hand in the process of punching a hole in a wall and then I wouldn't be able to type or write and I have to take this into consideration. Because then I would have to tape my voice into a tape recorder and have someone transcribe the tape and have you ever heard your voice on a recording device? I am always startled by how remarkably vapid my voice sounds when I hear a recorded version of it. It is the voice of an intellectually inferior human being. It is upsetting, let's not talk about it. And, moreover, every time we walked past the wall with the hole in it we would think about whatever caused us to punch the hole in the first place and then we'd be back to square one. Complaining and bitching about our problems seems to be a much more effective route to deal with a troubling situation.

Which is why we just talk behind people's backs or send whiney emails to our friends.

Alessandro told me last night that I fall into another category though. He used the following metaphor:

"Most people, when they are burned by a pot on the stove, whether they are men or women, don't want to think about the pot ever again. They don't want to go near the pot. You, on the other hand, bring a chair up to the pot and then you stand on the chair and inspect the pot from different angles and take notes, and ask yourself what would happen if you turned the heat down or touched it from another side, and you start researching brands of pots and brands of stoves, and then you move your chair to the other side and invite all your friends and family into the kitchen to investigate the pot and offer their ideas and conclusions about the pot and then it becomes a communal brainstorming session about how not to get burned by the pot this time."

I thought this is how everyone did things? Also, I thought we were all having fun in the kitchen? I was. I laughed and then felt more and more troubled as the night went on and then brooded and considered calling Alessandro back but he is in DC and finally I just threw my hands up and accepted the fact that I am a phenomenal community-oriented problem solver.

Then this morning I got up early and drafted a troubled five-page email to Alessandro.

This is my version of punching a hole into a wall.

READING LIST

BY MIRANDA JULY

Fascinating

Marriage is an anachronism. It is a relic from a time when we needed an arrangement to manage property and reproduction and, crucially, to establish kinships for purposes of defense: safety in numbers. A web of families connected through marriage produced a clan of people who were less likely to kill you than everybody else was. Such was the life style in the Fertile Crescent, and, not coincidentally, the Old Testament is fixated on genealogy. Sexual reproduction within marriage was a way of creating more of God’s chosen people. Originally, Jewish holy men were required to be married.

With the advent of Jesus Christ and the New Testament, marriage fell from grace. The early Christian ideal was a utopian human family, an earthly mirror of Heaven above, unafflicted by the rivalries and allegiances of bloodlines. Jesus was not the marrying kind. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters,” Jesus taught, “he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). St. Paul decreed, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” and said he wished “that all men were even as I myself”—celibate. “If they cannot contain,” Paul conceded, “let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” This is, as Gilbert notes, “perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history.”

For contemporary political purposes, marriage is often depicted as a timeless and unchanging institution; actually, it has been enormously elastic throughout history and across cultures. In nineteenth-century China, it was perfectly acceptable for a young woman to marry a dead man, an arrangement called a “ghost marriage,” which enabled families to consolidate their wealth and power and allowed enterprising young women to pursue their ambitions without the interference of a living husband or children. (Such husbands were very popular. “It was not so easy to find an unmarried dead man to marry,” a ghost bride is quoted as saying in Janice Stockard’s “Daughters of the Canton Delta.”) Among Eskimo in northern Alaska, there was a tradition of creating co-spousal arrangements in which a quartet swapped husbands and wives. Shiites and Babylonian Jews recognized mut‘a: temporary marriages. If a man was granted a “wife for a day,” the couple could be seen in public together and even have sex. “The man and woman had no obligation toward each other once the contract was over,” Stephanie Coontz writes in “Marriage, a History.” “But if the woman bore a child as a result of the relationship, that child was legitimate and was entitled to share in the father’s inheritance.” Couples in modern revolutionary Iran can still petition mullahs for a similar marital day pass.

For all the variability in the meaning of marriage, one fairly consistent element over time and place was that it had nothing to do with love. “For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage,” Coontz writes. In fact, loving one’s spouse too much was considered a threat to social and religious order, and was discouraged in societies as disparate as ancient Greece, medieval Islam, and contemporary Cameroon. The modern Western ideal of marriage as both romantic and companionate is an anomaly and a gamble. As soon as people in any culture start selecting spouses based on emotion, the rates of broken marriages shoot up. “By unnerving definition,” Gilbert writes, “anything that the heart has chosen for its own, mysterious reasons it can always unchoose.”

That most alarming New Year’s morning question — “Uh-oh, what did I do last night?” — can seem benign compared with those that may come later, like “Uh, what exactly did I do with the last year?”

Or, “Hold on — did a decade just go by?”

It did. Somewhere between trigonometry and colonoscopy, someone must have hit the fast-forward button. Time may march, or ebb, or sift, or creep, but in early January it feels as if it has bolted like an angry dinner guest, leaving conversations unfinished, relationships still stuck, bad habits unbroken, goals unachieved.

“I think for many people, we think about our goals, and if nothing much has happened with those then suddenly it seems like it was just yesterday that we set them,” said Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business.

Yet the sensation of passing time can be very different, Dr. Zauberman said, “depending on what you think about, and how.”

In fact, scientists are not sure how the brain tracks time. One theory holds that it has a cluster of cells specialized to count off intervals of time; another that a wide array of neural processes act as an internal clock.

Either way, studies find, this biological pacemaker has a poor grasp of longer intervals. Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work. Stimulants, including caffeine, tend to make people feel as if time is passing faster; complex jobs, like doing taxes, can seem to drag on longer than they actually do.

And emotional events — a breakup, a promotion, a transformative trip abroad — tend to be perceived as more recent than they actually are, by months or even years.

But there are two very different kinds of innateness. Chomsky proposed that we are born with specific, genetically determined neural and cognitive structures, structures that go far beyond a few general learning mechanisms. This kind of innateness has become the established wisdom in cognitive science. The brain is not a blank slate.

However, the other, more significant, kind of innateness concerns not the history of the mind but its future. Chomsky also argued that innate structure places very strong constraints on the human mind. Evolutionary psychologists who echo Chomsky say we are stuck with the same brains as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, with just a little tinkering around the edges.

Neil Genzlinger, I think I'm in Love with You

3. YOUNG PEOPLE NEED BAD EXAMPLES. Too many children today are reaching their teenage years armed only with a Disney definition of “bad person”: it’s someone who talks cattily about your wardrobe behind your back, maybe copies a few answers off your math quiz.

They have no idea how much ignorance, narcissism, predatory sexism and hair-gel abuse lurk out there in the real world. Unless they watch “Jersey Shore.” From that perspective the show is a sort of public service.

4. THE ENABLERS CAN NOW BE UNMASKED. Vileness and incompetence love the darkness; the light of day exposes them for what they are. Putting the spotlight on the “Jersey Shore” eight gives us the opportunity to root out all the influences that formed them.

The schools, if any, where they were educated can now be located and shut down. The teachers who so abysmally failed to impart to them the rudiments of civilized life can be fired. The gyms and style salons that seduced them with the lie that physical appearance is more important than personality can be picketed and boycotted. With vigilance we can ensure that no more of our young people turn out the way these ones did.

Charlotte Gainsbourg "Heaven Can Wait"
Uploaded by charlottegainsbourg. - Explore more music videos.

This is my dad, sleeping in a chair, when he was a baby. Isn't it strange looking at pictures of your parents when they were little?

thanks for this, M

I can't stand Elizabeth Gilbert

A disclaimer: I thought Eat, Pray Love was the biggest piece of shit ever published and I don't ever say that about books. I was particularly dismayed by her Americanized interpretation of Eastern religion and culture, the whole India-Ashram-tourism thing. Also, I have a low tolerance for pathetic women and the whole book seemed like a whine-fest. Ugh, my life is so terrible, I'm hanging out in Bali and Italy and India. Maybe my problem with the book is that it represented everything that is wrong with America and American culture and then my belief that American culture is in the shitter was reinforced by the hoardes of women who like, cried over that inauthentic piece of shit. And even though I read it, it was like some force was holding it in front of my face and flipping the pages for me and I just had to read it. So yes, I finished it, okay? And then felt mildly violated afterwards. And even though my hands are twitching as I post this (with enormous hesitation), I think this interview is relevant and interesting and quite well-articulated, albeit with a sufficient amount of Gilbert-esque jokey palsy-talk to make you cringe a little. So, okay, Elizabeth Gilbert, I will probably read your new book. But don't expect me to buy that shit, okay? I'll get it at the Los Feliz Library.

In The WSJ a couple of days ago:

AP: But then what's the point of marriage? Wouldn't it be more honorable, and more honest, to embrace the Northern European path and say, hey, we're going to do our best to stay together for the family, even if we're unmarried? What is marriage if it isn't forever? What then separates us from Britney Spears?

EG: Oh, Ann, Ann, Ann. Please don't force me to make a list of what separates me from Britney Spears. Marriage is a strange combination of dream and reality, and we spend our lives as couples trying to negotiate that divide. I will say this, because I think it is the single most important piece of information in the whole story: Marriage is not a game for the young. One lesson that Britney can teach us is: Don't get married when you're 20 years old, for reasons I am certain I do not need to explain. Maturity brings—among other things—the ability to sustain and survive enormous contradictions and disappointments. Marriage is—among other things—a study in contradiction and disappointment, and inside that reality there is space for us to truly learn how to love. But it is wise to check at least a few of our most idealistic youthful dreams at the door before entering.

i am out of sorts

I keep spilling things, ginger tea on myself this morning, yogurt on my sleeve, coffee on my collar. I also keep having this recurring dream that my feet are being amputated and wake up terrified. I looked in N's dream book to figure out what this dream means and it said this:

Amputation

To dream that your limbs are amputated represents a loss of an ability or skill that can never be regained.

shit. also:

It may also be indicative of a certain matter or circumstance that you should have paid more attention to; it may have escalated to a dangerous point. In particular, to dream that your arms are amputated, suggests that don’t possess the desire or drive to accomplish a task. Dreaming that your legs are amputated may imply that you feel restricted and are unable to reach your goals in a satisfactory manner.

According to N's dream book, I have serious issues.

Also, blogger appears to be broken. Seriously, blogger. If you don't get it together soon I might have to go join my friends on tumblr.

and there it is again...

At Trails this morning, a lone humming bird. There are tables of people, and me, alone at mine, in my glasses and with my journal. I watch it quietly for moments, afraid to breathe. It is greenish and orange and hovers, close to my nose for some time. And then it leaves.

Something is happening, I tell myself. Something is about to happen.

Then I go back to writing and tell myself to snap out of it. Focus on what is real, please, I say to myself. Two hours of yoga. Burmese dinner with my beloved food nerds in Whittier.

Is it okay to spend this much time in your own head and actually be okay with it, okay with yourself? Because most of the time I am in my own head, with my own language. And truthfully, I am pretty okay with it. For a time there were others who maybe spoke this language, I don't know anymore. Maybe I just imagined it, willed it into being. Maybe it was never even real, just a story I invented. I am good at this, inventing stories.

Lately, I feel like that story about the Eskimo woman who was over a hundred. The lone speaker of a language that was about to go extinct. No one cared about the woman dying. Anthropologists cared about the language. There was such sentimentality in the NYT article, about the death of a language. And I am forever a sucker for misplaced sentimentality.

Why am I so unnecessarily dramatic about everything? Everything recedes, gets washed away with the tide. This is just a process. And I need to stop brooding about it.

But it is winter in LA, 65 degrees and sunny. Isn't this at least a reason to smile? And they have even rebuilt the library. I spend my Friday afternoons here, wandering the glass rooms I had only seen from outside in the bright summer light (which is different from the bright winter light here). And there are even some moments where just this is enough, when I ask myself, what, really could be better? I will send you a postcard, and love of course.

And try not to think about how far away real life sometimes feels.

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

-Henri Matisse

Overheard

Woman: I thought the BART was only for the city of San Francisco.

Man: No, it's B-A-R-T. Bay Area Rapid Transit.

Woman: Oh.

Man: If it was just for San Francisco, it would be SFART.