“Hey, Gerrit, you’re a knob!” I’m in high school. The person calling me a knob is Mark. We’re friends. He’s walking to class. I feign indignation and decide to retaliate. I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that I need to make my retort larger than life. In a 100th of a second I go through my…
A perfect, despicable Sunday
Sundays can be despicable. You wake up. The sun streams through your window at you. It’s as if the day is standing just outside your bedroom, screaming; “It’s a beautiful day, do something exceptional, make the most of it, seize it, do it, make it worthwhile, live, live, live!” Ugh. Funny how seize and cease…
I admire some pretty horrible people
People will let you down. Especially people you admire. I know because I admire some pretty horrible people. I am re-reading With Love and Irony by Lin Yutang. The first and last time I read the book was when I was 13 and I remembered it fondly. So much so that I included it in…
Why I won’t watch the Doomsday Clock Announcement this week
The Doomsday Clock Announcement is happening on the 20th January. And, while I’m desperately curious to know how close to our demise we are, I’m going to give the announcement a miss. We’re collecting world ending disasters I find it impossible to get a grip on how fucked the world is. There isn’t an anchor…
Dishonest Writing
I cringe when people compliment me on an essay I’ve published on this site, or on the fact that I have a blog at all. And this isn’t because I’m bad at accepting compliments. Instead, the compliments remind me of my dishonesty, my duplicitousness and that is what makes me wince. You see, I’ve been…
6 things I learnt after buying a typewriter
I never considered buying a typewriter. Typewriters simply didn’t appear in my version of reality. And now I have one. My mother was a prolific letter writer and I witnessed her writing machine evolution as I grew up. Her first typewriter was a teal Olivetti. I listened to the clacking of the typebars (the arms…
Why gyms are awesome
I’ve just come back from the gym. It’s Sunday, so I didn’t do any weight training today. Instead, I swam 48 laps in the pool. Yesterday I did a strength class and earlier in the week I did weights. I’m three weeks into my membership and I honestly didn’t know that going to the gym…
Books that changed me
I believe all books change us. But some books have a very immediate and profound way of changing how we think and see the world. I have read many other people’s ‘top X number of books’ lists. And for each list, there’s a theme or a genre which dictate what can be included and what…
The secret power of reading fiction
Fiction writers are philosophers and dreamers. While most non-fiction writers are people who have discovered something they deem important about the world that they think everyone should know. And then there are the non-fiction writers who author books so they can use them as business cards. They write books that they hope make them sound…
What we want from work
Added up, work will take up a full 14 years of our lives – that’s 14 years of 24/7 work. And during those 14 years our employers and clients expect us to occupy ourselves with whatever they deem important or necessary. And considering the amount of time we’re expected to do work, it stands to…