Real emotional labor is not about fragility, just humanity. It does not make us snowflakes; it keeps us resilient. It should not require a false self, only a considerate one that refrains from inflicting its internal dissatisfactions on others. And if more of us did emotional labor, that extra compassion and thoughtfulness would become a lovely habit.
Drunks and babies fall softly because they are not arrogant. The rest of us fall hard—in love, off the wagon, from glory—and fall so often, you would think we would learn how.
The fact that a composer such as Steve Hackman has folded Radiohead’s music into that of Brahms successfully enough to land in a performance hall is probably proof that time, alas, has at last caught up with Radiohead.
I go my own way, but my kids are back to school or off on an internship now, and with that, the season is officially over for me, and all for the best. It is time to get up off the couch, work, walk, be ambitious, and take in the sun. To transition from a Christmas-stocking diet back to apples, Napa cabbage, lean proteins, and water.
Jarvis tells that story with no glee. He loves the form as much as I do, and as he recounts the lively history of magazines, he finds the story of larger cultural shifts. The first magazines, he writes, were coffeehouses, curating—before the word came into vogue—the best writing, criticism, poetry, advice, and images. Even the word “magazine” was a French derivation from the Arabic word for storehouse. Those smooth pages collected and preserved treasures.
Eddie Balchowsky’s lifestyle had its romance. But it also meant periods of homelessness, nights curled up in a friend’s bathtub to sleep, periods of depression so deep he had to be hospitalized. None of that tore away his kindness.
The film’s strategic map already has commentators in conniptions. If Texas and California are not more disparate than cheese and chalk, what brand of politics even motivates this movie, let alone motivations for our second civil war?
After a time the bin contents blurred into a single substance the color of meat hash. I grew up with food insecurity and unlivable housing, and the deep misery of poverty is always accessible to me.
P.G. Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse, just to add a wrinkle) was one of a type I used to despise and now grudgingly admire: those who maintain their equilibrium by refusing to look at anything dark or glum. Sturdy as a hard rubber ball, he bounced along in near-total denial.
Are we taking revenge on The Mouse, or on ourselves?