📕 subnode [[@jakeisnt/2023 02 12]] in 📚 node [[2023-02-12]]

Sunday, 02/12/2023

20:10 from 1/31/23, 15:55: "wordlesslu"

man dressed in an incredible Italian suit with a hunched back appeared. without a weird he smiled to me. it felt like he was escorting me out of the building, but the place was beautiful

[Ed.: The title is a typo. I was struck by the beauty of Harvard Business School's Chapel of the Class of 1959, of the koi pond and the wonderful couple warming up in the sun under the humid, pyramidal roof on what was otherwise a miserable twenty degree afternoon on Harvard's North Allston campus. I saw the man leave soon after, walking towards a classroom - he could have been a professor, or student, or neighborhood resident, or anyone, with medditeranean olive skin and a wizened face and wonderfully patient mannerisms - and I wish I'd talk to him, as it took me a minute to realize that he was not judging me, but rather appreciating that I was appreciating the space as well as I photographed the pews of the chapel. The wrought-iron door had to be ten feet tall but was opened and closed by him seamlessly. There was some beautiful knowledge and strength hidden in his frailty. Or he used a button somewhere.]

20:16 from 1/30/23, 15:31: "we all deserve to be taken on walks"

A woman walked by me in Allston's Ringer Park, walking her small dog (or puppy?) as she said this over the phone. She either nodded or revealed a curt smile - I can't recall which - in that dispassionate Boston act of acknowledgement, one I still don't entirely understand, not even after having lived in the place for four years. Anywhere else, the gesture would be an acknowledgement of some kind of shared misery; the Boston acknowledgement feels almost as if tension with strangers isn't flirtatious, but painful and depressing. My roommate is a New England native. He tells me that people are just in their own worlds, living their own lives, doing their own thing. Other transplants from west to east coast have told me through a sort of social meme that Boston people are kind, but not nice, and that California is nice but not kind. I believe that San Francisco's cutthroat private high schools or Los Angeles' theater drama is that cutthroat, full of the backhand compliments we all grew up watching on Disney channel or Flubber or Mean Girls that have been assimilated by our culture one way or another. My own upbringing, though, was modest and quiet and shy and kind - truly kind - so I worry about others from the west who weren't truly loved and whether the east coast mirrors that discomfort. Strangers to me today are friends I have yet to meet, so to discomfort and distrust so publicly scares me. My roommate is one of the kindest and most welcoming people to strangers I have ever met; this trait has made his life so beautiful, now that he's surrounded by this cornocopia of skate kids and rejects and music culture and personality that seems to revolve around him with trust and empathy. He's been around for me for five years. Thanks, Arman.

21:21 how to defeat an idea [16:17 today]

  • our brains have a lot of ideas
  • we have to try to kill as many as we can to get them out of our brains
  • the ones that survive we should have the conviction to realize
📖 stoas
⥱ context