Twenty years ago, my brother invented something he called Retired Guy Syndrome. Our stepfather had retired, and my brother watched him spend a day like this: One morning, Cliff decided it was time to replace a defective cabinet hinge. He went to the hardware store, looked around, bought something plausible, came home. The hinge turned … Read More
At 9:30 this morning, we moved from summer into fall. The shift has made me think about one of Vonnegut’s great inventions, the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse Five. This race of space-aliens teaches the novel’s traumatized protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, to understand time very differently than humans usually do. For the Tralfamadorians—who look like toilet plungers with … Read More
You’ve already heard two of my Rules for Life. As a reminder, Rule #2 is that everybody gets to whine sometimes—with the corollary that no one gets to whine all the time. Rule # 3 is that everybody gets to make mistakes, with the corollary that you might as well learn to be gentle with … Read More
Things are tough in the United States right now. According to the kind of motivational slogans people wear on t-shirts, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. They don’t falter. They don’t whine. They put on their game-face and rise to the challenge. Good for them. But what about the rest of us? … Read More
Medieval monks fought acedia, or sloth, while they chanted psalms for hours. Later, nineteenth-century philosophers sneered at ordinary people who found daily life boring. According to Nietzsche, “Is not life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?” According to Kierkegaard, “Boredom is the root of all evil—the despairing refusal to be … Read More
Most of the time (the times when I’m not fretting), I’m happily embedded in the mundane. I set the table, enjoying the tulips in a vase and the way they pick up the colors in the place mats and the posters on the walls. Then I walk back into the kitchen to see my husband … Read More