"What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?"

~Lin Yutang

Turns out a good all-you-can-eat international diner in every town would go a good length towards solving some problems.

"Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon."

~The 14th Dalai Lama

Put cinnamon in your chili and look stupid repeatedly! Make peanut butter and pickle sandwiches and cry when you love somebody! Empty the contents of your spice cabinet into one pot and do the same with compliments!

Buckle! Swash!

"We all ended up somewhere with our various uncertain lives flapping about us in tatters and our pockets full of foreign coins."

~K. E. Gordon - The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Eager, the Innocent and the Doomed

Perhaps the best part of the quote is that the value of having "uncertain lives flapping about us in tatters" is beautifully muddled. Is the tattering bad? If so, did the tatters make the life uncertain? Or if they're good, does tattering uncertainty release or create some new idea? It reminds me of the concept of Negative Capability, an idea John Keats proposed in some of his letters. It basically says that an enlightened person should be "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

It is not necessarily a comfortable feeling. But the times when I have been stranded with foreign coins in my pockets have a hold on me. The tatters, I think, occur along seams that needed to be burst, and I am filled with a wonderful excitement for the flappings of my uncertain life. One does not necessarily expect to find poetic lines in grammar manuals. But there you are.

Unpopular Protest Signs:

"Things are pretty ok!"

"The end is not for awhile!"

"Anyone for scrabble later?"

~xkcd

Happiness as emotional warfare. Let the tactical smile-nuking begin!

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field
I'll meet you there
When the soul lies down in the grass
the world is too full to talk about

~Rumi

Somewhere in that poem is the Main Point--the Main Point being all that is important about friendship and connection and the ineffable stuff of human relationships. Joy. Lightness of being. Occasional forays into the silly and truly absurd. The simple day-in, day-out random Tuesdays when we are unabashedly and unironically human—full of hope and potential and impropriety and moments where we become unapologetic extensions of one another.

If you're reading this, you've probably been a big part of helping me understand that. My deep thanks to you.