It’s amazing how important titles are to my work. I have almost never written a post for this blog without knowing the title in advance of laying down a single word. One of the very few counterexamples was my last…
Category: But the Past Isn’t Done with Us
My Life with Soccer
I first discovered the game of soccer when I discovered most of my other contact with sports – in third grade in Oregon. Soccer was the recess game of choice and almost everyone played it. I really loved it for…
Farewell, Kid
Ken Griffey Jr. reacts to his 616th home run, against the Giants on May 24, 2009. It was the last of his homers I’d see in person. I moved to Oregon in 1988 and discovered Major League Baseball on a…
The Goal of Humanity
I have long discussed the fact that the goal of humanity, both collectively and individually, is to overcome human nature. That basically everything we consider to be harmful and undesirable is derived from the baser instincts of human beings and…
2010 Summer Tour Announcement: The Best of this Possible World
I am a pretty lucky guy. It’s nice to get reminders of this, lest I begin to give in to consternation with any given personal quest or quandary at any given time. Though the below-announced “tour” is not a book-signing…
Ghost of Christmas Past
Who would’ve thought that a day in, I’d be almost missing April? Since writing my last post, I have: Had a migraine, making April’s total fourteen. Developed some strange but persistent non-migrainous pain and possibly swelling in the soft tissue…
How Far We’ve Come
I keep a lot of old papers. A LOT. When our moving van rolled over in an accident outside Los Angeles last summer, some people speculated that I didn’t have enough possessions to make this matter that much. The answer…
13 Migraines (or: A Pretty Bad Month)
Used to be that I would get some pretty epic migraines. This was back in high school, before I started drinking coffee regularly, when I was out there in daily life with all the fluorescent lights and loud noise you…
Perverse Incentives
In the past few years, Emily and I have never quite managed to get our taxes paid in full via check withholding. For a long time, the culprit was the division of her paycheck into two sources of income –…
Ten Years Gone
It’s recently come to my attention that dreams about losing teeth are extremely common and this reminded me that the very first Introspection post ever was about a dream about teeth. Predictably, of course, the dream was actually about gaining…