In religious terms, the human narrative — birth, life, death and rebirth — has for millennia been relatively straightforward in the West. You were born. You lived. You died. After a judgment you went to heaven (or hell) forever and ever. Eternity was the end: no appeals allowed.

But nearly a billion Hindus and a half-billion Buddhists — not to mention the ancient Greeks, certain Jews and a few Christians — have for thousands of years believed something entirely different. Theirs is, as the theologians say, a cyclical view. You are born. You live. You die. And because nobody’s perfect, your soul is born again — not in another location or sphere, and not in any metaphorical sense, but right here on earth.

I liked Buddy Cianci's brand of entertainment better...

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

Amazing

Help my friend Jo edit her documentary on asexuality!

Kanye West's tweets are egocentric, whiny, and use a lot of exclamation points. They also make great captions for New Yorker cartoons.

Let’s say you see a kitten. Fine, make it two kittens. Let’s say you see two kittens. One’s nimble and fast and cute. The other one is dead. My experience is that people—and by people I mean children—by nature go for the live kitten. They see strength in the live kitten. Also, who wants a dead kitten?

To say that I haven't been writing wouldn't be the truth, because I have been. Just not blogging.

The truth is, I have been in a metaphorical cave, investigating the dark, and silence. This is initially not a pleasant place to be, when you first get here; but after some time the dark isn't so bad anymore.

Words can be a terrible compulsion to live with; the worst kind of addiction. In caves, you don't have to narrativize anything, particularly your own experiences. You don't have to investigate various characters and their motivations. You don't feel compelled to draw out the map of your life, and everyone elses, in order to construct a whole. You can nap in caves, become a part of some sort of organic whole. In the English Patient, Katharine Clifton died in a cave. And if you haven't read that book, you really should because it's far better than the movie. I think about Katharine Clifton a lot. Also about death. Sometimes when I am in my cave, I fear that I will die there, that I will be engulfed in silence. But after a while, even this isn't so bad, the idea of being forgotten in a cave. Even hyper-awareness of your own mortality can become exhausting.

I grew up reading an absurd amount of new age-y self-help books. I did this as a child, which I now understand was somewhat precocious, but not necessarily in a good way. I was interested in dreams and analyzing them, in Buddhism, in mediation, in the middle way, in cause and effect, in excavating layer after layer to find some sort of truth. These ideologies still frame my way of thinking, of narrativizing. But sometimes I wish I was free of even all of this, unfettered, unimprinted, unmarked.

This alchemy of personality with environment - I understand that there is something perfect and whole about it. It is a process that unfolds and continues, ad infinitum. So I don't have anything new to say. I am still (unfortunately) the same person I always was. Maybe this isn't so bad. And ultimately, it doesn't really matter.

oh Radiolab, I can't get enough of your cheesy promo videos

‎Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

-Hippocrates

The girls of my generation were raised to be perfect. Our high-achieving baby-boomer mothers had labored mightily to raise us in a world where our potential would be unfettered. We were supposed to grow up to be physicists and judges and CEOs. Failing grades, ill-advised sexual encounters, or as, I did, running penniless to Europe for two years to get away from an expectation of success no less restrictive than one of Betty Draper’s iron girdles (not to mention falling into a painful and destructive relationship with a man who already had a girlfriend): these were more than simply personal failings. These were an affront to the sisterhood, all the battles that had been waged a generation ago in our name. If we screwed up, we were letting the team down.