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If you don’t have anything nice to say, pay a little kid a dollar and have him yell it out to everyone for you.

Overheard in the hall:

Someone: “Hey, Carol, when is your Halloween party going to be?”
Carol: “On Halloween. Isn’t that clever?”

October 19th was my 33rd birthday and I’ve been pretty good about not feeling old. Or at least not acting old. The number on my driver’s license may show that I’m 33, but maturity-wise, I usually hover in the low to mid-teens. I’m good enough not to engage in contact sports during a funeral, but I once started getting really excited about playing dodgeball in physics. (When I found out the balls were just for a class demonstration, I was really disappointed… I think you get my drift.)

Conversely, I’m not overly concerned about my appearance and have few qualms about not shaving for days at a time. Showering… well, as long as no flowers are wilting… but my clothes tend to be very generic. Plain white t-shirt and jeans and I’m happy. No Hollister, no Aeropostale, no Abercrombie and/or Fitch—nothing like that. In a way, I’ve been happy to have leapt off the fashion train and watched it head off into the distance, but that also led to an unfortunate incident a few weeks ago that made me feel ancient. (more…)

I was in the bookstore a while back looking through the Philosophy section because an old professor of mine, Andrew Pessin, wrote a book that he recommended to me (an author who thinks his book is worth reading… go figure…). It wasn’t on the shelf there, so I had them order it for me—in the meantime, there was another of his sitting there, begging for my attention (and if you’ve never seen a book beg before, you’ve been missing out).

The title? “The 60-Second Philosopher.” The release date? Apparently, a month after I bought it. I guess that book was begging really hard for my attention. Anyway, since AP wrote it, I wanted to take a look. He has a fun lecturing style (take a look at the AP quotes in this post to see what I’m talking about), so I wanted to know what his teachings were like on paper. I was not disappointed. Admittedly, I kept my expectations low to improve his odds, but I think he would have exceeded higher expectations as well. (more…)