This book sold by Urban Outfitters is almost as tasteless as their other coffee table book about the philosophy of poo, or what your poo says about you, which has a much less aesthetically pleasing cover.

Still we stood there in the basement floor of the big store on 72nd street, reading it like two eight year old kids who have just discovered their parents edition of The Joy of Sex: part of us really involved in what we were seeing, and partly ready at any second to be tapped on the shoulder and caught.

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Columbus Avenue walk.

It’s one thing I can’t stand about little kids, he said. Them ordering stuff and not touching it.

We walked from Morningside to the ”real” Upper West Side and brunched at Lansky’s, where we reflected on the children seated beside us. Their fluffy brioche with powdered sugar sat on their plates, perfectly cut on a diagonal, slowly wilting. The boy said to his mother when she prodded him to pick up his fork and eat, “But I want your French toast Mom.” The cool thing about kids is that they are afraid of the unfamiliar. This entitles them to the same power as adults who know what they want.

We walked forty blocks uptown towards home. Stories exchanged were about poodles, fire pits in Central Park (are there any?), Buenos Aires, and one homeless man who once chased a pigeon down the block saying “I love you, I love you” after it.

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prevention

All empirical evidence shows I am nowhere near the age of 60, but if you didn’t know me at all, and were to follow me around all day unable to see or hear me, but to be aware of what I was doing, you might guess 70.

Exhibit A. Going back and forth to the post office three times in a row, each time a little more vexed than the time before it, and a little less considerate of others.

Returning home, I decided to lock myself inside, devote myself to “real work,” by which I meant stretching out on my back for an hour or so to read. In her biography Hannah Arendt documented a similar hobby, of stretching out in her Manhattan apartment once a day, and spending one solid hour doing nothing but thinking. I like to imagine myself as Hannah Arendt sometimes. In all the games where you get to pick an alias (such as in competitive mini-golf), I always pick her.

The problem is that Hannah doesn’t always give good advice. Resting on one’s back, for instance, is not extremely conducive to prolonged reflective thinking, or to getting work done. And so even after I’ve had a good night’s sleep, resting on my back to get a solid hour of reading in around the afternoon always ends in a light doze which magically sweeps me into the evening.

I would like to avoid these naptimes, as I fear falling into them this soon in my life, and during graduate school, can only lead to squalor. So I put a stop to it today with remarkable ease. All one needs is an impulsive decision to get exercise to prevent the onset of early geriatric ennui.

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Now the question is, where did magicmolly get these?

Donuts Part II

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Basically, I realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It’s when you don’t know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

—Lorrie Moore, Anagrams (via tylercoates)

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High, fructose.

First thing in the morning is the perfect time for mind tricks. I would like breakfast, so I reach into the fridge, pour some eggs into a pan, muss them with a fork. As for the toast, my eyes and mind perceive that I am eating whole wheat bread slices lightly crusted by the heat of an essential kitchen appliance. My brain, stomach and pancreas, however, believe that I am eating frosted birthday cake.

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thingsiatethatilove:

Raffles continues to deepen his yoga practice. Pictured: Feedmeasana

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And by “Puritan” I mean “prude.”

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I understand the need to write truthfully.

If you aren’t truthful about yourself and your story, you won’t relate to the future.

This is based on the premise that human nature never changes and whatever you are experiencing now has already been experienced before, and someone will always experience it again.

So you must be truthful in order to help whoever it is in the future when they are looking for a story that resembles theirs, and which could give them solace or advice, or help them feel not alone.

Your worth is judged this way, by who needs you, and for how long, and for what.

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Election Day

We walked south along Central Park to a very nice bakery I really enjoy called the Silver Moon. It’s near the Yoga place I go to on the Upper West Side, or, the Yoga place I should go to but haven’t gone to in weeks and which now exists as part of my life purely through the fantasy of imagining being there again one day, on the day I work up the enthusiasm to go. At the bakery there was free coffee because of election day, and a woman with braces which I haven’t seen in a long time, and maybe never in New York on anything other than a kid.

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