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opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comIt’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Estimated reading time: 1 min
We Found Our Son in the Subway
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comDanny called me that day, frantic. “I found a baby!” he shouted. “I called 911, but I don’t think they believed me. No one’s coming. I don’t want to leave the baby alone. Get down here and flag down a police car or something.” By nature Danny is a remarkably calm person, so when I felt his heart pounding through the phone line, I knew I had to run.
Estimated reading time: 5 min
How to Live Without Irony
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comWhat would it take to overcome the cultural pull of irony? Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values. It might also consist of an honest self-inventory.
Estimated reading time: 8 min
How to Live Without Irony
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comIrony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.
Estimated reading time: 8 min
The Point of Exclamation
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comHabitual e-mailers, texters and posters convey quite precise nuances through punctuation, which is after all one of the points of punctuation. A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, “Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.”
Estimated reading time: 1 min
The Anxious Idiot
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com“I’m anxious — again! I’m anxious day and night. I wake up anxious and I go to bed anxious. I’m a total wreck. And I’m not doing anything to help myself! I know what helps and I’m not doing it! What’s wrong with me? Why am I not doing the things I know full well will make me feel better?” “Oh,” Scott said. “That’s an easy one. It’s because you’re an idiot.” Then he said he’d call me after work.
Estimated reading time: 1 min
Where Do Sentences Come From?
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comBefore you learn to write well, to trust yourself as a writer, you will have to learn to be patient in the presence of your own thoughts. You’ll learn that making sentences in your head will elicit thoughts you didn’t know you could have. Thinking patiently will yield far better sentences than you thought you could make.
The ‘Busy’ Trap
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comwhat those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Estimated reading time: 1 min
Back When I Was Packing
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comOne of the worst things said in the awful succeeding days — though it wasn’t nearly at Mike Huckabee-level inanity — came, surprisingly, straight from the White House. I was appalled to see the president ruin a movingly delivered statement about the shooting of the kids by closing with, “God has called them all home.” Talk about not blaming the shooter. So it was God who did it. It’s not hard to imagine a kid hearing the president’s words and asking, “Mommy, is God going to call me home?”
Estimated reading time: 5 min
The Brain on Love
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comWhen two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun “I,” a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we’re not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her.
Estimated reading time: 5 min
Surviving the Pain at the Roots
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comMedicated smiles, robotic responses, whole lifetimes that pass under the guise of “fine” when all we really want is for someone to ask and care. We want nourishment, not only for our bodies but for our souls. That is what we need to flourish, to feel less anxious. Environments that are safe, loving, relationships that are honest and nurturing. Nobody wants to fight, not really. We are taught to fight ourselves and others, we are taught to be defensive and aggressive, so that we may survive another day. But it seems it should be different.
Estimated reading time: 1 min
Act Like a Writer
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comThere is that moment when you realize the limitations of what you are doing and it shines a light on other creative possibilities.
Estimated reading time: 1 min
Erik recommended this story.
Tattoos for the Terrified
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comA heart with “Mom” written inside, beneath the words “In case of emergency, contact.”
Estimated reading time: 2 min
sojus recommended this story.
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