Listening to music in the living room, and suddenly grief did a run in, walloping me with a steel chair, and a thousand sobbings wrestled up. The only thought in my head: “what if Gus the cat is the reincarnation of dead trans women, and i have to give him a good life so they can have a good death?”
Today is my first official “she’s not in training but actually working” day at work. I’m nervous, but ready. But first: Sunday bagels.
The school year has started, and Im setting intentions. This year I will be the Private Universal Friend. More quiet. More living in words. Less living in the discourse, and more simple gifts.
you don’t worry about the size of something for the sake of worrying about the size of something
a 2012 entry from the late Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter: “So people are going to the movies less frequently. Really, things have been dying and changing since forever. People don’t buy Big Little Books anymore; people don’t walk on the promenade anymore; people don’t go to roller derby. Actually, they do all of those things; they just don’t do them in great numbers. One of the wonderful things about treating art as an art rather than as a public commodity is that you focus on the quality of the experience and benefiting the artists directly; you don’t worry about the size of something for the sake of worrying about the size of something.
your judgments, your desires, and your decisions
“Epictetus focused on three things: your judgments, your desires, and your decisions; in particular, he emphasized choosing what to pursue, what to turn down, what to keep, and what to cut out completely.
Everything outside that circle is neither your circus nor your monkeys.
Everyone else’s actions, opinions, ideas, annoyances, traumas, outrages, and emotional dysregulation don’t actually need to concern you at all. Neither do the various algorithms you can’t reshape or the markets you can neither predict nor control, or the emails someone else marked urgent based on their needs and their deadlines. None of these things belong to you, and it’s not your job to try to own them.
The Stoics called this the dichotomy of control; the YouTube philosopher squad might call it a lifehack. I call it a damn good way to avoid going insane while still getting through a to-do list.”
Fwd: Epictetus Ran a Better Productivity System Than Any App You’ve Bought www.instapaper.com/read/2034… via Instapaper
very small refusals make a path for bigger ones
These are very small refusals, tiny ways to act in the city of man as a citizen of the City of God. But very small refusals make a path for bigger ones, and in the very long run can make Babylon system a falling empire. It’s important to remember, as James Scott says, that “A great deal of the symbolic work of official power is precisely to obscure the confusion, disorder, spontaneity, error, and improvisation of political power as it is in fact exercised, beneath a billiard-ball-smooth surface of order, deliberation, rationality, and control.” The Principalities and Powers are not as mighty as they contrive to appear; and resistance to them is never futile.
Alan Jacobs
