of today and tomorrow lies the transcendental notion of becoming, the infinitive form, “to be.” This is the most terrifying moment (in the mathematical sense) of force, pivot, or being known to man. To be is to risk. To risk is to (eventually) lose. Losses are the mark of time. Successes are immortal, but losses are simply ticks round the face of the mortality stopwatch.

—

Put yourself out there. Otherwise you won’t have.

—

I wish retrospective wisdom could be had prospectively.

—

Ever get the feeling that some people spend their whole lives running away from themselves without ever once managing to get any distance from their own shadow?

what I’m posting or what I want to say. I guess I’m just typing to be communicating. I’ve been reading McLuhan all night because I’m supposed to say something about him to a class full of people on Tuesday. Honestly I think his one correct point is fairly simple and the rest is nonsense from a drug-stricken consciousness, so why bother?

I don’t know.

—

It has been a trying day and an exercise in trying to understand enunciative action, which has a unique power all its own.

—

There are friends that I really miss but that I have lost contact with and no have no idea how to reach.

—

My personality may not work well in the context of interpersonal interaction. I tend to acquiesce right up until I reach my tolerance threshold, and then I absolutely dominate. There is no in between. This is the model represented by my father: try to be understanding, don’t rock the boat, let things happen, gently discuss at most… and then once things reach a kind of climax of criticality, take the bull by the horns and murder it and re-establish sovereignty.

This is not something that I think people are accustomed to dealing with in the West. The impulse toward harmony can only work if it is shared; the dialogical impulse functions in a similar way.

—

I used to be a writer. Now I am an academic.

—

The world can be a very lonely place, despite it all.

—

Interpersonal relationships are the bane of modern man. We are designed to interact, but under much different circumstances in which relatedness is a critical facet of survival and thus implies its own reward.

Now it is a kind of luxury or even a commity-like good; we can take it or leave it; it has to be a good deal; one applies to it a cost-benefit analysis.

Not good.

—

Memory does not exist; it’s a fable.

So I’m going back to I-House for the first time since I moved to collect some mail that’s apparently arrived for me. It feels weird to even think about going back there… it’s such a different place, a different lifestyle with ultimately very different purposes. When I was leaving I-House, I wondered whether I would miss living that way. Now a few short months lter I almost feel as if I wonder how I did it.

—

I haven’t been into “the office” yet this week. In my cornucopia of jobs, this one has clearly fallen to last place in terms of importance and focus. It’s a kind of object lesson in why fostering good employee morale is key to success in any institution.

—

It’s raining off and on today and the leaves are everywhere, filling the streets in their annual migration into memory. This city is absolutely magic. Good day or bad day, up on luck or down, there is something about this place that makes one feel awake and alive, not simply boredly and absent-mindedlydreaming, like life so often feels in other places.

—

Time these days is flying.

So I’m going back to I-House for the first time since I moved to collect some mail that’s apparently arrived for me. It feels weird to even think about going back there… it’s such a different place, a different lifestyle with ultimately very different purposes. When I was leaving I-House, I wondered whether I would miss living that way. Now a few short months lter I almost feel as if I wonder how I did it.

—

I haven’t been into “the office” yet this week. In my cornucopia of jobs, this one has clearly fallen to last place in terms of importance and focus. It’s a kind of object lesson in why fostering good employee morale is key to success in any institution.

—

It’s raining off and on today and the leaves are everywhere, filling the streets in their annual migration into memory. This city is absolutely magic. Good day or bad day, up on luck or down, there is something about this place that makes one feel awake and alive, not simply boredly and absent-mindedlydreaming, like life so often feels in other places.

—

Time these days is flying.

I said I would be in bed in 20 minutes. That was two hours ago. 😛

Life right now is so amazingly busy I don’t have time to catch my breath. I have four jobs. One writing, one private sector research, two academic. I am also still (somewhere scattered betwixt and between it all) a full-on graduate student in a fairly tough and theoretically-oriented Ph.D. program.

Life has never been better.

—

It is a beautiful thing to be loved for who you are, without having to argue for your position or justify yourself all the time. I feel as though I never really had that before.

Everything for so many years was about diplomacy, as though life was the freaking United Nations and I was a member state in a well-pressed suit. Always life was about compromise and dialogue and discussion and congeniality and fostering conviviality and blah, blah, blah.

And it never worked precisely because you cannot compromise forever and still be happy, despite best attempts at some sort of pragmatic habitus.

Now life no longer feels like a compromise that is always in danger of breaking apart. Instead it feels like a kind of gentle ecstasy, a sentimental ride toward a foreordained future that makes the twinkle of the stars seem to be meaningful.

—

The world has opened up for me this last year. I have found the person that makes me all that I can be and (thank god) managed to get her to agree to be my equal partner in life. I am a suddenly and for the first time well-known to be a top student in my department. I am working interesting jobs in the social sciences. I have a dog. I have my own furniture. I have plans and goals and hobbies and damn near anything anyone could ask for.

I feel as though I went from infant to adult in the space of nine months. It is an amazing feeling and I still don’t quite know how it all happened. It is enough, I think, that it did.

—

If I die tomorrow I will die happy. It is an honor to be able to continue to do what I do. It is an honor and a boon and a joy. Everything from here on out is more than I could ever have hoped for.

Dammit life is good.

Dear World,

I have taken the morning off. It’s not that I’m not feeling well, but rather that I have been putting in a heavy schedule lately and just need some time to spend with family while I clear my head.

I’ll be in this afternoon and will catch up then. In the meantime, I hope all goes well during the first half of today and that my absence this morning doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s work or schedule.

See you soon!

Best,

Aron

…have it wrong. Peace does not come from love. Peace comes from discipline, universal self-denial, profound moral relativism, and the wisdom to be able to deploy all of them pragmatically with respect to the largest picture perceptible. Love has absolutely nothing to do with peace.

I don’t trust humans in general; all of history tells us that they are essentially gutless and untrustworthy, an ugly race in general.

Conventional wisdom tells us never to order from any Chinese restaurant that circulates full-color delivery menus, taking such extravagance to be a sure sign that a proprietor doesn’t know how to run a business. It’s an overreach for a cut-rate noodle shop at best. At worst, it can be out-and-out fraud.

But I thought I’d give it a try nonetheless, and so at 11.15 am I ordered a lunch combo and some wontons on the side (to meet the delivery minimum) from a place in Astoria with an exceptionally nice full-color delivery menu, after which I immediately returned to reading and grading the pile of paper of various kinds that currently lives on my desk.

At 12.55, having completely forgotten about my order and feeling vaguely hungry for no reason that I could explain, I walked Shandy for a few minutes before having to go to Manhattan for a pedagogy seminar. At 1.10 as Shandy and I returned, my phone immediately rang. I answered.

“Hello?”
“Open the door! Open the door!”
“Who is this?” I asked.
“You order food?” asked an annoyed-sounding voice on the other end.
A light bulb went on over my head.
“Chinese food?”
“You order?”
“Yes I did,” I said, “at 11.15! It’s almost 1.15 now!”
“So why you walk your dog now?” asked the annoyed voice on the other end of the line.
“I walked him because I totally forgot about you coming—like I said, I ordered at 11.15!”
“Well I here now so why you walk your dog, make me wait?”

It took several moments and a truly heroic suspension of incredulity for me to realize that he was actually scolding me for making him wait five minutes to deliver a two-hour-late order totaling only two items and eight dollars. I told him I’d buzz him in and then I hung up.

He presented at the door with an annoyed look on his face. When I paid for the order in exact change with no tip, the annoyed look gave way to malice—full-on ill-will.

I shut the door and began to tie my shoes before leaving forthe subway.

—

Fall will be here any moment, but for now it’s 80+ heat with 80+ humidity. :-/

without my being fully aware of it. I need to slow down and notice where I am and get ahold of what is happening, or this semester will be over and fully played out before I get a chance to ensure that it all goes well.

ONE

Now running Fedora 7 on a T30. Seems stable and about the same as six. A few updates (Thunderbird, most visibly to me) but nothing new to write home about. Had to assign labels to all partitions to get Anaconda to do the upgrade.

One issue: EXA acceleration on Radeon Mobility really sucks. Had to revert to XAA for the time being to get decent performance.

—

TWO

Have two crazy neighbors, one who gets passively-aggressively pissed off every time anything (ANYTHING) is in front of our door—box, stool, etc., and one who gets literally pissed off anytime she hears a noise (like, say, people walking down the hall in their socks). Both make a habit of talking to the super about things that are totally normal.

I like this place a lot but it does look like we have princesses for neighbors.

—

THREE

I’m a bit overwhelmed, time-wise.

—

FOUR

It’s damn hard to get ahold of a bed in New York if you don’t want to spend $5,999. Showrooms are all full of very expensive stuff and they don’t want to sell you anything cheaper. Delivery is a problem. Brooklyn, which is where all of the cheap furniture stores are, is Brooklyn, and you can’t manage to actually buy anything there to save your life.

Ergo, no bed.

Yet.

—

FIVE

Got papers to grade.

To anyone who has ever scolded me or who may do so in the future:

Before you try to offer me your opinion, be sure you are as wise as you think you are. I don’t need your help. Have you written six books? Hold three degrees? Lived in every major city in the US? Worked as a computer scientist, an investigator, a writer, a managing editor, a university instructor, a researcher, and a union laborer? Are you competent at virtually _everything_?

I am. I have. I do.

Sooner or later you will probably need my advice. If I choose to give it to you, it will _work_, if you can take the time to listen.

I, on the other hand, do not in all likelihood need _your_ advice.

Just bear it in mind.

To anyone who has ever scolded me or who may do so in the future:

Before you try to offer me your opinion, be sure you are as wise as you think you are. I don’t need your help. Have you written six books? Hold three degrees? Lived in every major city in the US? Worked as a computer scientist, an investigator, a writer, a managing editor, a university instructor, a researcher, and a union laborer? Are you competent at virtually _everything_?

I am. I have. I do.

Sooner or later you will probably need my advice. If I choose to give it to you, it will _work_, if you can take the time to listen.

I, on the other hand, do not in all likelihood need _your_ advice.

Just bear it in mind.

The semester is disorganized. Maybe even a mess, so far. But that’s okay, it seems to be working. Shandy is getting walked on average three or four times a day. I am enjoying teaching. I am enjoying class. I am writing (although not quite as much as I could). The house looks great. And I have enough time somewhere in it all to sit here and write this. There is lovely ’80s artwork from the eastern (i.e. communist) bloc hanging on my walls. I am not totally broke. Things are working.

Things are f’king working. 😀

—

I am sitting here listening to old music and thinking about life and liking it and maybe misting up a bit. Life is so short it’s alarming. I can’t believe I’m this old. I can remember when my parents were the age I am now because I had already been born long enough to have things like age explained to me. I am well behind where they were at at my age and I’m still nowhere near that level of living.

—

The living room is beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Shiny hardwood floors, a 500-pound sold wood coffee table, a green suede papasan chair, a Polish film poster featuring a lovely woman, and some bamboo. Life could not get better, I think. I just need to be sure not to take anything for granted—to remember that it cannot get much better than

– Large apartment in New York
– Right against the Hudson river
– Alongside a park and underneath a scenic bridge
– Getting paid to get a Ph.D. at a famous research university
– Teaching social theory at the university level
– Writing for a New York Times company
– Earning money on the side from photography
– Engaged to a beautiful, amazing, spectacularly intelligent Polish woman
– Walking an absolutely handsome, tremendously fit, loving puppy every few hours
– Working at an international research institute
– With great friends that are still talking to me even though I am stupid busy

Damn life is good. And it’s true, I am busy. Busier than I’ve ever been before in my life. Everything—literally everything—is going on… life is opening up to me, becoming mine in a way that I never thought would happen. All I have to do is ride the wave and keep my head.

—

I haven’t listened to The Verve’s “Lucky Man” since December 31st, 1999. If there’s a moment to do it, this is it.

—

Yeah, okay, she’s right, I’m a mythomaniac. The mythologies of the self, however, are those that turn the world on its head, that make servants out of kings, that bring walls tumbling down and keep the possibilities flowing.

Life is short. There is nothing to do but build legend in time to become one, because otherwise… you won’t.

It can’t be like this, I won’t last the semester. Gotta get organized, and fast. Gotta manage time better starting yesterday…