Cool Story Bro.

Here’s some true stuff and then some opinions

I don’t know if other people do this but I do it obsessively.

Whenever I find out about some new success or new talent in pretty much any area of expertise, I immediately look up their age. If they’re younger than me, I’ve “failed.”

The most recent example was breezing through the Wikipedia entry for an author named Zadie Smith and finding out she’d written her first (highly acclaimed) novel at 22. I’m over 5 years behind her, great.

Recently I read (without greater context than the full quote, ashamedly) a passage by John Steinbeck: “…the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” I think that this applies in areas other than financial ones (at least to me it does).

I know that the solution to both my science and artistic trepidations is the same: do a little, every day, but I still clump my work in weird ways.

Minor movie update (for the last approximately 2 months, abridged):

(In my opinion,) Red State was great, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was not, Survivorman is pretty interesting (apparently traps never work), The Girlfriend Experience was confusing and seemed kind of lazy (unlike the fantastic Bubble), Insidious was half good, half terrible (chronologically), I Capture the Castle (I had a Rose Byrne Netflix double header) was uncomfortably resonant, A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas was not as good as Guantanamo Bay (but to be fair I was sick and feeling bad), Winnebago Man was interesting but had almost no depth, Take Me Home Tonight was okay but forgettable, Pontypool was extremely (and sometimes off-puttingly) weird but I kind of liked things about it, Elizabethtown was good for an hour and then became the worst movie ever, The Trip was rambling but nicely sad, and Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop was revelatory.

The disturbing thing about the above is that for everything but Red State (and H&K), Netflix totally called it for me. Now I’m worrying about causation so I might stop looking at the predicted rating.

Also, I might (if I can muster the willpower) try giving up Reddit for a while (a month or so?). With Facebook usage having completely successfully stagnated over the past eighteen months, I should introduce Reddit to the same alienation.