I just

I just wasted a day, dithering around rather than making decisions.

I just watched Richard Dawkins’ TED talk. You should go watch it too.

We are evolved to guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it’s a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions. Guilt, blameworthiness. Personification, and the imputing of intentional purpose, is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans it’s hardly surprising, the same modeling software often seizes control when we’re trying to think about entities for which it’s not appropriate. Like millions of deluded people with the Universe as a whole.”

I just went out to dinner with friends.

I just skipped out on socializing with other friends, because I was too lazy to drive to Boston.

I just played Halo.

I just watched watched the two Evangelion movies.

I just read the cover matter for Cormac McCarthy’s new book, The Road:

A father and his son walk alone through burned North America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food, and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, bit in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.”

The book is inscribed by my father.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all these things hang together for me.