Category Archives: Autobiographical

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A Window

A Window
Clinging to the intense heat of her whispers, her breasts to my chest in a familiar nest where waft the colored vapors of subjectivity.
I pity the lonely dark shadow moving past my frosted window.

Cycling through the intense cold of drizzle in a night long dark and road unknown, birthing puzzles of rigor for gray games of objectivity.
I pity the figures lying still inside yet another passing window.

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Unlucky November

Most of 2010 was exceptionally fun and productive. Then came November.The trauma began but a few minutes into the month and didn’t let up until the last few minutes of the 30th. Allow me to wallow in self-pity and enumerate.

  • At a Halloween party at 12:30am November 1st, I noticed that my wallet containing a significant amount of cash was missing from my bag. It has not yet returned.

  • I had 2 fillings fall out of my teeth.
  • I suffered a knee injury while cycling that bothered me all month.
  • A younger friend died of a brain aneurysm while playing tennis. He was a great guy, lived life very vigorously, and died the way that he probably would have wanted.
  • I had to replace my iPod which died suddenly.
  • My computer started to refuse to connect to monitors, significantly affecting my work.
  • My bicycle’s rear wheel broke 4 spokes within 2 weeks. I finally purchased a new wheel. The next week I had a puncture. The following week my rack snapped in two. The last day of November, my chain caught and snapped my shifter in two. While pushing my bicycle the nearly 4 kilometers home, I had several people staring and smirking at me. I reached home about an hour before the end of November, looked in a mirror, and realized that all the smirks were due to a large streak of bicycle grease across my face.

If I believed in Santa, and months were exams, I’d ask him for a retake of November…or at least a phenomenal December.

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Over-Projecting

This post is devoid of opinion, and simply relates 4 personal anecdotes. Feel free to respond with relevant opinions.

  1. A few years ago, a friend suddenly accused me of hitting on his girlfriend. A few days after assuring him I had no romantic interest in his girlfriend, my girlfriend informs me he had hit on her.
  2. Last summer I was in pretty good shape for a 49-year-old. A team of rugby players asked me about my “regimen”. I told them about my short, systematic workout every morning. They replied “riiiiiight”, then winked. Only later did I realize they thought I was taking steroids as many of them might have been.
  3. A decade or so ago, my girlfriend asked me whether I ever thought about leaving her. I thought she simply needed reassurance, and I told her honestly that I had never considered leaving her. She left me a few weeks later.
  4. When I was an innocent 19-year-old virgin, I was in love with a very lovely girl whose father pulled me aside, smirked, then informed me he knew what I was really after. A year later it was revealed that he had been molesting her.
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Apply Scientific Reasoning To Everything

itemThis post is an elaboration of #4 from a list of things I’ve learned late in life.

When I was young, I believed to a great degree that truth would feel “truthful”. The underlying assumption I failed to recognize is the assumption that my mind was well-equipped without training to intuit truth accurately. I was certain god existed, because the concept was constantly being confirmed by this illegitimate intuition I had that god must exist, and the subsequent emotion of confidence in the mechanism of that intuition. Why would the concept of a personal god come to my mind if it were not real, and why would it feel so correct? I completely neglected to assess the reliability of my mind to assess claims. I simply assumed it was, by default, calibrated to process claims as they arrived.

Due to this erroneous assumption, Continue reading →

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Rather Than Learning A Few Things Perfectly, Learn Many Things Well

itemThis post is an elaboration of #4 from a list of things I learned early in life.

First a disclaimer. I have an eccentric personality to a notable degree. This post may not apply to you. It is my enjoyment of risk, my lack of envy, my passion to learn, and a yearning for change that all converge into the extreme dilettantism I am promoting here.

Take the number of different types of jobs you’ve work for more than a year. Multiply that by the number of real hobbies you’ve pursued for more than a year. Multiply that by the number of relationships you’ve been in more than a year. Multiply that by the number of residences you’ve lived in. Divide all this by your age.

This is your dilettantian score. © Phil Stilwell 2009 ;)

Here’s the simplified formula.
({job types > 1y} x {hobbies > 1y} x {relationships > 1y} x {residences}) / {age}

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Ignore Money

itemThis post is an elaboration of #3 from a list of things I learned early in life.

My small Tokyo apartment is quite boring compared to the Mexican house I lived in 5 months. No scorpions, tarantulas, snakes or rats ever visit me here. I don’t get to adjust the roof tiles every rainstorm to minimize the dripping. I don’t get to daily gather firewood just to cook the beans and potatoes. Here I actually have an indoor toilet, and don’t get to shoo off the pigs who are poking their noses in my business. My floor here is linoleum rather than packed clay and stone.

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