Why is there no intersection between libraries and bookstores?

I mean, if the metaphorical essence of a library is the gentle rubbing of one’s soul against primarily textual bundles of information, doesn’t a bookstore also achieve the same essence?

Couldn’t there be, like, a Barnes & Noble & Hoi Polloi Too But Only In LIP* Areas?

Is the next thing I am going to ask related to me starting a charter library slash bibliodiscotheque?

Run by prisoners? 

* Less important person

I read an article in one of the Daily Newses that keeps appearing on the tile in front of my door each morning.

Some guy named Edwin Austin, 32, ran out of a house he was trying to burglarize and ran into an elementary school “while wildly waving a loaded .380 handgun.”

Everything was fine, no one was hurt, but later in the article, they grab a line from his mother, who is 46.

Okay, so that makes her 14 when she had him.

Police said Austin had been paroled in February after serving eight years for robbery [meaning he went in at age 24] and previously did four years for attempted robbery [so the oldest in for that would have been 20].

This guy has spent 12 years of his life behind bars. 12/32 = 38%. (A .380 handgun!)

So now I am going to think too much for a moment (indulge me, Ari):

• Let j sub n = set of people who have been incarcerated n times
• Let k sub m = set of people who were born to a mother age m
• Let l sub p = set of people who have spent p% of their life behind bars

I wonder:

1. What is the correlation between j sub n and k sub m?
2. Does m decrease as n increases?
3. As p increases, does the likelihood of an n+1th event increase?
4. What is the correlation between l sub p and k sub m?
5. Does m decrease as p increases?
6. What can we as a society do once we have answers to these questions?
7. How much of my tax dollars have already funded his 12 years in prison?
8. Can we use predictive modeling to determine how many of my future tax dollars are likely to continue paying for his jail time?
9. Why can’t our prisons be more effective and be incented to not churn out career criminals?
10. How many of you noticed the assumptions bundled into the previous question?
11. Why can’t we have free-market prisons?
12. What’s up with Edwin?
13. How much of question eleven is really related to my desire to want to get paid with gubmint cheese to fix people?
14. What’s up with my Jesus complex?

“I always wanted to go into movies but I never thought it was possible,” shared Jeremy Garelick, co-Pres of TwinPadres and writer / producer of “The Break-Up“, on a panel during last week’s ten year reunion for Y’98.

He then told an anecdote of a car ride with his old man while an undergrad. He told his dad what he wanted to do — i.e., not claim the throne to the family biz — and while Jeremy bounced around in the backseat, his dad from the drivers’ seat replied, “Go follow your dream.”

Props to permission slip-granting fathers.

And, not sure where the dash should go on the preceding sentence.

To address the URLs-only posts that have arrived as a function of my hobnobbing with mid-tier-wigs at Y98’s ten year reunion this past weekend, here’s something I thought of between the restroom and my desk, which is currently overlooking the Goodyear blimp and a cloud chasing one another over Midtown Manhattan:

I’m inclined to believe that unions are a big pain:

• They create market inefficiencies which equals overhead which generally gets passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.  So, as a consumer, I’m pissed off!  I’m subsidizing this crap.
• They force workers with ambition, talent, and drive — workers who are able to otherwise move freely within the employment markets — to pay a surcharge and essentially subsidize their fellow co-workers who lack an equal amount of ambition, talent, and drive.  So, as a potential employee at a unionized shop, I’m pissed off!  I’m subsidizing employment security for slackers who can’t otherwise attain employment as easily as I can. Related: union membership is a motivational disincentive; if your ambition is not aligned with the mini-state of the union, you can eat it.
• They act as lobbyists and prevent bills that protect individuals from passing into law.  They are more interested in their own interests than in the individual rights and interests of actual real live individual humans.  Union > human.  Example 1 (of n):  unionized workers at nursing homes are vehemently opposed to vouchers for those with disabilities who actually want to live in their own home with home health aides.

I remember working custodial at Yale for just north of eight bucks an hour back in the day.  The unionized workers made nearly twenty and spent vast swaths of their day chilling and looking for empty dorm rooms in which to nap.  Meanwhile I attached giant straws directly to my nostrils and sucked up dust out of many a stairwell all day long.

How, exactly, does the welfare mini-state of a unionized labor force align with American ideals?

How, exactly, are unions good for the America of today?

How, exactly, are unions good for individual Americans?

Are my thinking ways errored?  If so, help me to see why.

Now that I am no longer mesmerized by the rock concert of neurosis thrumming loudly in my brain, it’s easier to appreciate the nuances, to spend the time that used to luxuriate in a deep pocket of imagineering and instead notice the way the setting sun hits the underside of a plant in my writing instructor’s Upper East Side apartment.  The quality of life has shifted, and here I am, present and accounted for, in my real-live waking life.

Yesterday I ran around Prospect Park and while dashing to the final water fountain found my nose being softly pet by the scent of a flower, possibly lavender, possibly heaven. It was so dericious I had to close my eyes for a second, feeling the crunch of organic non-asphalt under my shoe, and make a tiny humming noise to myself at the cottony way this flower bathed my nostrils. So much better than the way that the air in Williamsburg makes my little nose-holes feel.

And then at dinner, I was chomping away on some gnocchi when my tongue began to float through the food. I smooshed it around, pushed my tongue through the textures and flavors, closed my eyes and breathed in the aroma of good food, opened my eyes and really looked at my dinner companion and thought, This is all so wonderful.

These little things, little ways the universe treats us kindly with its surprise gifts, like quarters in sofa cushions, little ways in which we can treat ourselves kindly, little gestures of kindness from other people, strangers or close friends or anywhere in between. Like leaving stuff out curbside with a note, “I still work!” Or making eye contact and smiling encouragingly to the huffing, puffing woman who is running the other direction. Or plopping a nice big orange right where you know it will be seen.

“Don’t forget to eat,” says that juicy orange, and as I feel its juices exploding out of each section, swirling against the insides of my cheeks, I listen to the birdies chirping, and feel the cool air against my skin, and this symphony of actual real life — sigma, little things, zero to infinity –

I’m grateful.

… if you are to attain liberation, you must understand and fully experience how your life is entwined and defined by dukkha, meaning your mental experiences of discomfort, pain, stress, instability, inadequacy, failure, and disappointment, each of which is felt as suffering in your mind…

The first kind of dukkha is the obvious suffering caused by physical discomfort, from the minor pain of stubbing a toe, hunger, and lack of sleep, to the agony of chronic disease. It is also the emotional suffering that arises when you become frustrated that things don’t go your way, or upset about life’s injustices, or worried about money or meetings other’ expectations…

… a second type of dukkha … is the suffering caused by the fact that life is constantly changing…

… an underlying unease about the future … is a manifestation of the third type of suffering the Buddha identified — life’s inherent unsatisfactoriness due to its intrinsic instability…

How often in your adult life have you experienced the queasiness and unease that come from a sense of meaninglessness in your life? Think of all those occasions when you felt as though you were wasting your life, or sleepwalking through it, or not living from your deepest, most heartfelt sense of your self. Remember the times when you felt as though there is little you do each day that has any real, lasting significance. We’ve all fallen prey at some point in our lives to such constricted, dreaded, almost unbearable dark times of self-doubt and existential angst.

[ANP note written above the above paragraph: DECONSTRUCT. Except I no longer have any idea to what I might’ve been referring.]

What Buddha is pointing to is that suffering is an experience of the mind. He’s not offering you relief from pain; he’s offering you relief from the extra mental reactivity that causes your misery… Our ancient wisdom-bearers knew life was hard, and they too discovered that there was a difference between the pain of life and your reaction to it.

[ANP note: Victor Frankl; Soren Kierkegaard]

• Phillip Moffitt
• Shambhala Sun

Dept. of Breadcrumbs:

Bright kids are used to fending for themselves in America. Dweeb, dork, brainiac, nerd: to be young and brilliant here is almost always to be a figure of some derision, to accept isolation as a condition of existence…

“Teaching them [gifted students] is like driving a Mercedes.” [says Georgetown graduate student Bill McGeehan] …

“Intelligence is less about knowing than about methods of thought,” a thirteen-year old Egyptian named Amine told me, his fingertips tracing the beginnings of a beard. “Descartes said that others had greater minds than his, but that they accomplished less because their method was not as good.” …

“I used to think that I.Q. almost guaranteed success,” Stanley [”Julian Stanley founded the Center for Talented Youth” … “eighty-six” … “Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard”] told me. “But I found with bitter experience that it’s not true. It can almost be a burden to you.” …

If society really wants to find the next Einstein, teachers should stop asking which students are the brightest and start asking which are the most eccentric and single-minded. “Who is the oddest ball here?” [suggests “Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist who originated the theory of multiple intelligences.”] …

“Part of the point of acceleration is to get you into a warmer environment, where people can appreciate you,” he [”Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at Caltech” … “forty-four” … “one of the oldest alumni of the Johns Hopkins program”] says. “Geeks are more comfortable being geeks in college.” By the time he was in his early twenties, Camerer had earned an M.B.A. and then a Ph.D. in economics…

Hunter [”Andrew Hunter” … “fifteen … an avid programmer”] was so quick and bracingly blunt that he was often taken for rude.

“It’s not like I’m beaten up for ostracized or anything,” Hunter said, when I asked him about the public school he attended… “But I often feel like I don’t belong.“…

“The I.Q. test was designed to find mid-level bureaucrats to administer an empire,” Howard Gardner told me …

This “rage to learn,” as one psychologist puts it, is what really distinguishes the gifted from other students. Their minds may be no sharper at birth than anyone else’s, but they spend their lives continually, compulsively honing them. “We start with little differences, but they snowball over time,” Robert Plomin [”a psychologist at King’s College, London who is studying the genetics of intelligence”] told me.

Asterisk ODubz for putting this article on Radar_ANP.

• Burkhard Bilger
• The New Yorker

… when we are unable to find composure in the face of impermanence, we suffer.

…

Anything you base your security on may fail. How do you feel as you walk around? Do you feel secure? Do you feel that you have stability? And what is it based on? What is real security based on? …

In the word “composure,” the root -com, from the Latin, means “together, being with, being connected.” The -posure part comes from a Greek root that means “pause,” or “stop.” Remember to pause together, to stop together, and to awaken in this pause with many beings, the myriad things. Don’t doubt the value of the contribution that you make just by being willing to find composure, even by simply recalling the thought, “How can I find composure in this challenging situation?” And also to help each other to do this. This is maturity of mind. This is actually the manifestation of what we call the vow of the bodhisattva, to help beings mature, to help beings be fully present in themselves.

Thought_ANP: we are human beings, not human doings. So why is it so challenging to simply feel the joy of being?

… even a “happy” moment is tinged by dukkha. That is because neither the moment nor the experience is stable. Since the quality of happiness arises in dependence on external factors, it fades away as those factors disassemble. And in that gap is felt the trace, however subtle, of underlying dukkha. Since, furthermore, our lives are successions of such moments, dukkha is said to be “pervasive”…

… Our English term would have to have the following colorings (on an increasing scale of intensity):

faint unsettledness, irritation, impatience, annoyance, frustration, disappointment, dissatisfaction, aggravation, tension, stress, anxiety, vexation, pain, desperation, sorrow, sadness, suffering, misery, agony, anguish

… It is obvious that each of these qualities involves some degree of unease, so “unease” is how I translate the term for general usage.

• Shambhala Sun
• Glenn Wallis

… Buddhism teaches us that if we cultivate the right attitude and are able to look simply into ourselves and our perspectives, predilection, and habit patterns, we can reduce and ultimately eliminate the avoidable forms of suffering.

… The sufferings we inflict on ourselves due to our undisciplined mind are avoidable, but other forms of suffering, such as old age, sickness and death, are unavoidable.

Once we have accepted that we are subject to forms of dukkha that can be avoided, there are two parts to the solution: (1) looking at the causes of dukkha and (2) finding the means of reducing or stopping it. When we look into the causes of dukkha … must look closely at the mental states, habits, and attitudes that produce what we consider to be our moments of joy, happiness, or satisfaction. One of the profound insights offered by Buddhism is that we cannot rely on our own immediate experiences to tell us whether we are experiencing well-being or misery. Just because on the surface we feel we are happy or satisfied, or just because everything seems to lead to doom and gloom, these impressions may not necessarily reflect the true state or affairs. We need to look deeper.

We may discover, as the Buddha tells us, that the lack of substantiality or permanence in all that surrounds us gives rise to unhappiness and pain…

… our mind has been conditioned by ignorance into thinking that eternal happiness can be obtained through things that are ephemeral and transient…

… We can continue to wallow in our own suffering and misery or take some initiative, such as making the practice of dharma, which enables us to see the true nature of our experience, part of our everyday life.

… When we feel loss and we grieve, we can do so without the emotions overwhelming us, opening the door to despair and depression. We can also learn how not to generate further suffering by accepting the unavoidable suffering of old age, sickness, and death… Pretending one’s illness is not serious does not make the illness go away… There are conditions that are beyond our control. Trying to control them leads to suffering.

…

Even though we suffer as human beings, we do not have to suffer without purpose or meaning… Painful experiences can teach us a lot. Buddhism treats life as a school where we learn from our painful experiences… It is about utilizing our painful experiences, the truth of suffering, with fortitude and dignity, and thereby making ourselves stronger and more mature.

• Shambhala Sun
• Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche