I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
"When you lie down with the National Review"
Rosen says the book is written with “scholarly care and memoirist’s flair,” and that it’s “a brisk, lively read, a concise and shrewdly observed portrait of an unlikely political alliance” … but by far the most remarkable part of his review came under the noxious book reviewer humble-bragging tag of “full disclosure,” where the reviewer usually confesses to having had a friendly chat with the author once years ago at the country club they once shared until they both quit when the place started admitting black people (what can I say? As the old saying goes, when you lie down with the National Review, you wake up in a gated community with alcoholic children and a wife who hates you).
If you want to learn to use implementation intentions, I recommend you set this goal intention and meta-implementation intention right now:
Goal intention: I intend to use implementation intentions to reach my goals!
Implementation intention: If I set a goal intention, I will also think of a specific implementation intention that specifies the where, when, and how I will act to achieve my goal!
Goodbyes: Irish and Serbian
This is something I used to do more in my 20s but never knew there was a name for: the "Irish goodbye," said of someone who leaves a party without saying their farewells to the host, the other guests, etc. Also referred to, says the Slate article, as "ghosting." A young woman in our office, who married a Serbian gent and visits the country regularly, contrasts this with what she calls the "Serbian goodbye." In this instance, you have to say goodbye to everyone at the party before you can leave. She says it can take an hour and half to leave a party.
Movie: "Wild"
I've not read Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild, on which the movie is based. And I've seen only a few Reese Witherspoon movies (I liked "Election" the best). So most everything here was new to me. "Wild" tells two stories simultaneously: Cheryl's punishing hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, starting at the Mexican border and finishing hundreds of miles later at the Oregon-Washington border, and the circumstances that drove her there.
