Recurring bad habits…

I dropped my mascara in the toilet yesterday. Again, there was no pee in the toilet, but still. Gross-ey. I have butter fingers as of late.

In other news, my five year high school reunion is this Saturday. So that should be fun. Saturday is also the birthday of my favorite women to love/hate: Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen. I really can’t make up my mind about those two. Right now, I’m leaning more towards love. Sigh.

(Horribly tranny and horribly fabulous.)

Oh, and it’s also my brother’s birthday. He’s going to be twenty-five. That’s a quarter of a century. I would write more about Alex, but weeks have gone by without a respone to my email, and so I am black mailing him . Yep, this is blog blackmail Alex. He probably doesn’t even read my blog anymore, come to think of it. ASSHOLE. I mean, are you alive? Are you training for the next opening ceremonies of the Chinese Olympics? Stop making out with your girlfriend and eating dumplings and call me IN AMERICA.

Lastly, I love this piece in the Times by David Brooks and Gail Collins. It’s about graduation speeches/living the good life in general. Here’s an excerpt. And yes, I know the font is all craaaazy. My apologies. I’m bad at techonology and can’t figure out how to fix the font thingy. I’d ask my BROTHER because he’s my go to TECHIE guy, but, like I said, we’re not really speaking right now. SO TAKE THAT ALEX.

(This is D. Brooks speaking.)

Gail, 30 years ago this week, I graduated from Radnor High School in Pennsylvania. Today, I’m giving some remarks to the students of this year’s graduating class.

This honor has sparked a condition that is unacceptable to people in our profession: writer’s block. I have been trying to think of some wisdom I have acquired over the past three decades, and I’m drawing a blank.

I used to believe life got better as you got older, but now I realize this is untrue. I could mention to them that high school mediocrity is no impediment to leading a happy life. I was an extraordinarily 

 

mediocre student. I did not graduate in the top third of my high school class. I submitted nine pieces to my high school literary magazine during the course of my years there and they were all rightly rejected. But I don’t think this message would go over well with the current faculty, or with the younger brothers and sisters in the audience — or at least their parents.

At the moment, I’m thinking of talking about the chief way our society is messed up. That is to say, it is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.

The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.

The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.

The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.

These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. There are business schools offering lavish career placement services. There is a vast media apparatus offering minute advice on how to furnish your home or expand your deck.