Colleen Taylor

As everyone around me is coming down with a cold, I am so hoping that Helen Gurley Brown is correct when she wrote in her aforementioned book, Having It All:

"If you sleep enough, exercise a lot, take multivitamins, have work you adore and no secret need to be sick, you very likely never will be-- not even a cold."

Crossing my fingers and taking Emergen-C!

Just came across this Kurt Vonnegut interview from 1995.  I kind of love his take on technology, although he can of course afford to have someone else do his typing for him:

I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, "Are you still doing typing?" Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, "OK, I'll send you the pages."

...So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it's my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I'm secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it.

Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I've had a hell of a good time.

And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.

A bit from a recent blog post by Emily Gould:

“They don’t have any information I need,” someone recently told me while explaining why he wasn’t about to strike up a friendship with a group of perfectly niceish people he’d met. You get to a certain age and you become more selective about what information you need.

Her friend's sentiment bugged me, mostly because it reminds me of an attitude I recognize in myself, but have actively tried for several years not to indulge. One of the best lessons I learned in my first real reporting gig was to make an effort to engage with practically everybody I came across while going about my business, not just the "important" people-- on the way to the conference, to chat with the cab driver, for example.

It may be more comfortable to send text messages to your established circle of friends when you're "off the clock" and not expecting to have a valuable conversation-- but often the most unlikely of people can provide you with just the information you need, or at least with interesting information that will really help get you much closer to what you need.

And, how do you really know what you *need* anyway?  Truly varied interactions are things that we often don't seek out-- but I think we'd all be way better off if we did more often. I'm reminded of what Moe Tkacik recently wrote in her blog post in New York Magazine of the economic crisis: "If rich white dudes had spent much time talking to anyone other than other rich white dudes, it would not have happened." 

At a dinner party last night, I was having a great conversation over some wine with the hostess' sister, when it came up incidentally that she's-- ahem-- a good five years younger than I.  It was a weird moment, because she was so lovely, bright, and mature-- it was one of the first times (of many more to inevitably come) where it really hit home that I can no longer expect to be the baby in every "grown-up" situation.

This is, I know, I know, ridiculous to lament at the ripe old age of 24. But a funny feeling, nonetheless.

For perspective, tonight seemed like a good time to revisit a poem by Kenneth Koch I found a year or so ago: