Second Balcony

When I go to sleep I do a lot of real bad metamathematics. Last night I dreamed the set of all the things that aren’t members of the same set isn’t empty and it fucking freaked me the fuck out.

Do people ever stop secretly feeling kinda badass about drinking alcohol?

Top 1 Thing I Hate in Life: Ritualustically iterated cultural criticism superimposed on arbitrary objects in the target milieu. I’d name names but then nobody will be friends with me.

“Taylor Swift is to urbane 20-something girls what T.S. Eliot is to experimental American poets in the 50s: hated by them for a good reason, but nevertheless great in a way that anyone outside the fray will see as congenial to their project.”

My dissertation’s gonna be about the phenomenon of getting attached to a concept, such that you’re more sure that you care about whatever it is that x will turn out to mean than you are about what x means. It’s going to be part intellectual history, part analysis of how this phenomenon is manifested in literature or reflected upon by literature. It could be good!

Heidegger holds that the “not” that you find in the “not-p” of logic is one and the same as the nothing you feel in the nothingness of the mood of objectless anxiety. Here are some further, original suggetions: “XOR” is the taste of a rare steak, the material conditional is the sensation of waking up with a dry mouth, “NAND” is the jazz-piano solo in ‘Aladdin Sane.’

“Continental philosophy is philosophy which takes things that “stand out” in human life to also “stand out” philosophically, and analytic philosophy is philosophy that doesn’t.”

I invented a new game. It’s called “hungry or nausea?” and I hate it.

An idea for the foundation of a systematic pragmatics: every utterance has the implicature that this situation is similar to other situations where the utterance is used. This is very helpful in explaining why synonyms can make a huge pragmatic difference.

It’s just so fucking tiring to spend my life trying to cater to some implicit unclear intuitive criterion of making or saying or doing things that are ‘genuinely interesting’ or ‘insightful.’ 

I’d sleep better if I had an audiobook of Terence Tao narrating bedtime stories.

I want either a MacArthur or a soda fountain.

The slow climb of domestic flights toward real painfulness over the years does make you think about the grade school science rumor that it’s possible to cook a frog without pertrubing it by heating the pot very gradually, doesn’t it?

Half the time it just means acting shocked that value judgements involve value judgements. “I will argue that our cultural sanctification of the individual reflects a hierarchy that privileges individuality…”

Can you name a philosophical tradition that’s not founded by a Nazi?

The success of Joan of Arc shows other women of the middle ages were just lazy.

It’s like ‘Entourage’ but misogynic.