I’m now envious of Bruce for two reasons:
He’s at 50/51 states, while I’m still at 37.
He’s spending the next three months riding across the country.
Tim Kreider’s take on how the singles perceive the lives of the married with kids and vice versa. We only get on take at this life and it’s easy to wistfully look at some parts, while being quite thankful about others.
Bill Hayes discusses his life-long insomnia in relation to his partner’s life and death.
"The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself."
— NYT article on depression and it’s creative/intellectual upside. (I still feel uncomfortable associating any part of depression with a positive slant.)
My mother would never let me watch or read The Thornbirds, even though she was quite the fan. I began this article expecting a similar story, but that’s not what I got.
Cases like this weren’t something that we heard about very often growing up, even though two of my parish priests left to be with women. Strangest part of it was that one of my elementary school classmate’s mother has having an affair with the priest, while her husband studied to be a deacon. When she filed for divorce and took one priest away from the church, her husband fled to Rome and became a priest.
"It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather."
— Tim Kreider writes in The New York Times of his surreally happy year after surviving a shooting.
