The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

A cross between a text message thread and a blog post about inter-generational conflicts, Boomer as a state of mind, cultural differences between Zoomers and Millennials, and what it feels like to grow up Very Online.

The act of donut-eating has actually helped me feel like I’m accomplishing my career goals. […] I found that it resonated with others, especially young career-driven women who are routinely achieving goals and furthering their career but don’t take the time to note their own success.

Think about blogging for a second: the fact that a list of posts is ordered chronologically by publication date, by default, is a bug in our incrementally-correct worldview. Blogging tools don't create any incentive to go back and edit previous ideas or posts. Or, at the very least, the default ordering has a de facto side effect of fewer people being aware of revisions or reversals to previously-published ideas.

Revision requires you to have faith in your own ability to improve your work. ​ Try something else. What if you give yourself that reward immediately, as a way to coddle your writer brain and help it along? If I let myself go sit outside with a seltzer and a book for 20 minutes (so decadent), it helps me feel like a functioning, healthy person who can sit down and read her terrible draft. ​ If I can forgive myself for being imperfect,

cabinets of my will. On such legs as are left me, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love.

marked it up like a book, underlining, highlighting, writing in the margins, I was _here_.

fans responded to most viscerally, perhaps, was the fact that it’s a book about becoming, both mentally and physically—about what it takes to shape a self, in all its completeness and disarray.

A crystal sheet Below, an enormous secret lake, like gladness. and worn by thousands and thousands of other women reminds you of yourself when you are not even sure what that is Mesh of thunder above. Soon I won’t be at arm’s length.

If I had The Sads, I could pull up this list and sink down into the sensory details of, say, that strong hit of pine scent you randomly get on a hiking trail.

And the cat went back to being our pet. ​ and cats and books were my best friends when I was growing up. ​ These questions—along with that of how the cat beat us home—are still unanswered. Another memory of my father is this: ​ I should explain a little about my father’s background. ​ Things he never could have written in his letters, or they wouldn’t have made it past the censors, he put into the form of haiku—expressing himself in a symbolic code, as it were—where he was able to honestly bare his true feelings. ​ Yet he must have felt a compelling need to relate the story to his son, his own flesh and blood, even if this meant that it would remain an open wound for both of us. ​ is breathe the air of the period we live in, ​ I understand all the more now why he closed his eyes and devoutly recited the sutras every morning of his life. ​ Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it’s absorbed into a larger, collective entity.

And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

微风☁️🌱 pic.twitter.com/jT6VJty99v— 邦乔彦 (@bangjoy1992) March 12, 2019

and the flavors are so muted that drinking, say, LaCroix’s “muré pepino” is more like having someone gently whisper “blackberries and cucumber” in your ear than tasting either a blackberry or a cucumber. What differentiates seltzer from plain old water are the ephemeral qualities of smell and texture, and they begin to dissipate as soon as you pop the tab. Like Swiss cheese, it’s a product that’s defined as much by what’s not there than what is: Seltzer is nothingness, bottled and branded. This isn’t a story about death, not really. I just have to tell you about death so I can tell you about seltzer, because that’s how I can tell you that everyone you love is going to live forever. ​ It wasn’t just nothing, it was a placeless nothing, so LaCroix was free to be anything to anyone, anywhere. In an age of personal branding, online self-realization, and individualized versions of truth, LaCroix could take on any qualities of its consumer. It became a mirror. ​ To use freshman-year Marxist terms, social media replaces interaction between people with interaction between objects. All content, from a selfie to my mom’s last words to this article, is nothing; it only becomes something when it’s seen by someone else. ​ The fact that you never know who a hashtag is going to hook makes it something more than a way to interact with brands — a hashtag is a seance, mediating the space between constructed identities. It’s a way of reaching out, in hope and longing, into the ether. In this way, it performs the same function as art or prayer, linking tangible worlds to transcendent ones, an invisible line cast out with the hope of connection and of becoming whole, if only for a moment, right before the bubble bursts. ​ Content may be nothing, but nothing has two faces, emptiness and infinite potential, facts and ephemera. ​ I don’t remember much of what I said at my mother’s service. I know I tried to say that she was still a part of me, that she was alive where we all keep the people we love alive inside ourselves, but wasn’t able to get much of that out. This piece is how I finally said what I wanted to say. Maybe once it’s shot into the ether of the internet, it’ll take its place there with all the ads and memes and YouTube comments and every other bit of flotsam that’s thrust out with desperate apathy and the unspoken prayer that someone, anyone will notice. It, too, will be nothing, but by being nothing, it can be a point of momentary connection, a ghost that fades from view when it’s no longer in the corner of your eye. Like memories of the people you love, the act of willing these points of connection into being can exist long after the tangible things that put them into the world have disappeared.