Sitting in the coffeeshop, I more than somewhat unintentionally caught a girl's eye as she was walking by, I think because besides the obvious me looking at her part, it was a good look, somehow.

And I thought, I wish I knew how to do that (since I seem to do it only rarely and then by accident).

And I thought, jesus, of all the things to not know how to do.

And also, I thought, it is obviously not something that you can figure out how to do if you're the kind of person who's gotten it into your head that you need to learn how to do it.

Always, there may be something in it that we can't see.

Why on earth would one not think that Bob and Charlotte were depressed?

And: Ray notes the 'voice-of-authority encouraging the protagonist to keep on writing, she'll be great someday'. But how much hope is Bob supposed to provide there, exactly?

An article about John Larroquette's book collecting.

Over the weekend I met and ate with Josephine, a long-time reader whose generosity of feeling always takes me by surprise: take, for example, the reason for her trip here by plane, a plan to show up by surprise at another down friend's door and help pick her up a little. We had Japanese at a small and strangely busy place in St. Paul's deserted downtown.

Josephine asked if I felt that working on papers for my courses and exam wastes time and effort that could have gone toward projects that I want to do for myself. The answer is a sad one.

'Can I be said to have observed that I and other people can go around with our eyes open and not bump into things and that we can't do this with our eyes closed?'

Often my attempts to write are overwhelmed by my compulsions to write: driven by the latter to sit down for the former, I end up thinking so much more about having to write, needing to write, that every thought but that of the outstanding (as in a debt) work to be done is drowned out.

'On the one hand, the beginning of the Logic does not establish anything particularly controversial: it shows that our judgments about "being" and "nothing" require us to speak of something as coming-to-be or passing-away, assertions that even Hegel himself admits are only "superficial." On the other hand, the beginning sections of the "Doctrine of Being" serve to bring out Hegel's main point: what might look like a "reflective judgment," in the sense of being a comparison between two items, turns out to be not a comparison of things at all but a normative ascription of entitlement, and, for that entitlement to work, it turns out that something else must be brought normatively into play (or must be revealed to be already normatively in play in it). In some ways, this is the point of the Logic as a whole: to say that we know something is not to compare two "things" at all (as we seemingly do when we match up, for example, a photograph with what it is about); it is rather to make a normative ascription, to say that the person making the claim is entitled to the claim. That is, our ascriptions of knowledge are not comparisons of any kind of subjective state with something non-subjective but instead are moves within a social space structured by responsibilities, entitlements, attributions, and the undertakings of commitments.'

'Brass Monkey' is a lot better.