Some Wurtzel quotes.

Until tonight, I had never read anything by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Is that crazy? Is it bad? Should I be embarrassed? I feel like it is, and I should be.

I read this article in New York Magazine, and my evening went from a little listless to a tornado of underlining and ripping pages out and taping them together elsewhere. Assorteds --

Meanwhile, most people who think they are practicing law are actually making binders, and my guess is that most people who think they are doing whatever important thing they are doing are making binders. The binders from law firms go to a locker in a warehouse in a parking lot in an office park off an exit of a turnpike off a highway off an interstate in New Jersey, never to be looked at again. No one ever read them in the first place. But some client was billed for the hourly work.

The best lesson I have learned from David Boies is patience. He deposed Bill Gates for twenty hours to get the answer he needed, so David believes in time.

Even when you are picking out a dog, it has to be true love and not a list of pluses and minuses or a bunch of desirable traits you would describe on OkCupid. There is no substitute for magic. I have only ever known love at first sight, and I know it when I see it.

I am Potter Stewart wandering through an overwhelming emotional life that only makes sense on contact. It’s all pornography to me, all of life is so visually rich and it all hits me absolutely like flat sheets of hard rain so that the only feeling I trust is the one that comes down in a devastating way. When I meet people who tell me that they are immune to the power of beauty or that they don’t get overwhelmed by plain old lust, I don’t think they are lucky; I think they are missing all the fun. And all the pain, of course.

We would have coffee and paprika biscuits in bed on Wednesday mornings.

The list of things I can’t be bothered with goes on forever. The list of things that bother me goes on forever.

Now, in a whole long day of croissants in the morning and multiple dog walks and stops at the bodega for yogurt and jam, I may speak with people I care about only in type.

I already know that the article will make some people roll their eyes, and, reading the first dozen or so comments, have seen even more - disgust, contempt, offense, and all out wars between commenters. As I read, I was in some inner part of my brain, and was only reading the words and visualizing it all. When I wake up and pull myself outward a little, it does seem to be a paradoxical blend of consciously describing being in the moment and all the way at the F extreme of the F/T continuum, and being at a high enough perspective to also consciously point out the shortcomings of a life led with intention, planning, and within a social construct of sorts. ANYWAY.

More cognitive easter eggs

This week's NY Magazine is making me bounce all over the streets. And I'm not even halfway through it yet! The part that I want to particularly share is in the main feature, In Defense of Distraction. It talks about the dozens of things that divide our attention these days; whether or not they are terrible for us; whether or not the great minds of history would have been able to accomplish what they did in today's world ("If Einstein were alive today, [world multitasking expert David Meyer] says, he’d probably be forced to multitask so relentlessly in the Swiss patent office that he’d never get a chance to work out the theory of relativity."); etc.

Here is a little portion from the last quarter of the piece:

...The most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls “voluntary memory”—the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness—in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.

If that isn't a lovelier and better thought-out articulation of cognitive easter eggs than I could ever write, I will mistake my wife for a hat. Isn't that nice? I loved reading Sam Anderson's take on things.

I recommend reading the entire article, actually. A lot of interesting pieces of history and research come into it, and as serious a consideration this whole thing is, Anderson balances it with a great amount of humor and optimism for our future. Also, he endorses reading about the Boston Molasses Disaster two or three times ("The world is a stranger place than we will ever know"), and I wholeheartedly agree! I wrote about it last June, check it out. It's the oddest historical disaster you'll read about all week, I bet.