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THINGS I LIKE
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Tokyo eclipse (via @tamegoeswild)
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“My question about all this is: given this state of affairs, can it be claimed with integrity that conservative Christians’ criteria for voting in a...”
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“Throngs of girls waiting outside the hotel for someone from Glee to walk by. One small male voice says politely, “You dumped Paul Rudd in 40-Year-Old...”
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10 Things You Never Have to Deal with Again After College
Unless you choose a career that involves math, the only math you’ll ever encounter...
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STEVE. SERIOUSLY. I DIDN’T USE YOUR TOOTHPASTE, OKAY? I HAVE MY OWN. IN A FLAVOR I ENJOY. I DON’T CARE WHICH WAY YOU SQUEEZE THE TUBE. THE FACT THAT...
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Kickass Parent of the Day: From Redditor Dittidot:
My son is away at college now, but for 13 years we were faithful to the “first day of...
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ELSEWHERE
sly impulse
For the last couple of years I’ve been fighting this restlessness in myself — I strongly suspect it’s this bug the McCombs School of Business implanted in me years ago. It’s nurtured by my active imagination/optimism and my immigrant childhood of wanting to do well, to make my family proud.
These following excerpts from C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory have been grounding for me. I hope it’s helpful for any of you other restless souls out there.
Often the desire [to be part of the Inner Ring] conceals itself so well that we hardly recognise the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore…ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons, but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.
My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent main springs, then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.
