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Comforting.

There is a scene in High Fidelity where one of the characters finds John Cusack sitting on the floor of his apartment surrounded by LP records, in the midst of reorganizing his music collection. The friend tries to figure out how it is being organized… “Chronological? No… Not alphabetical…” “Autobiographical.” Cusack says, explaining that he remembers when and where he got each record. “That sounds…” “Comforting?” Cusack says. “Yeah.”   A year ago or so, I started keeping a spreadsheet on my work computer entitled “My Top 100 Albums” and began adding titles as they came to mind. As I neared the target number, I started adding columns to track what year each album was released, the genre, and other bits of data that I found interesting. It started as a way to analyze my influences. Which musical decade created the most of my influences? 2000-2009. Which year was the most fruitful for musical discovery? 2005. What gender makes up the majority of my favorite artists? 74% male. How did...
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Baby Book

A silent evening but for the whistle of the wind blowing outside, a reminder that a year has come and gone since two became three. I hand my wife a cup of tea while she sits in our tiny living room, writing in Martha's baby book. From time to time she stops her pen to think, asks me to recollect this or that, nods, and moves her pen once more. Slowly the pages fill with details and memories kept for Martha to read when she is grown. How strange that she should need a book to learn all about a year that revolved around her. 
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Improvise

We've never been too big on Valentines in our relationship. Seems silly to allow the world to tell you when to buy flowers or go on a date so that they can jack the prices up for both. Since we've prioritized family over moolah this year, we sometimes have had to improvise in other areas. Jessica dropped me off at Barnes and Noble by myself for 2 hours so that I could read comic books. That's true love right there folks.
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Language Limits

The limitation of language has been bothering me for years now. If language is what we use to convey and process knowledge, but language is imperfect, how can anything truly be known? But this week I have been trying to reevaluate that imperfection, that limitation.  The admittance or certainty that language is limited somehow confirms that there are experiences that lie outside of the realm of our utterance.  Frustrations with finitude seem comforting in some way, validating the sublime somehow, regardless of whether we will ever be able to truly know it. 
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Facing In

Ever since freshman year of college, I have practiced the lenten practice of self-denial, of fasting.  There are many reasons that people keep this tradition, but for me, I find that the it is practice that forces me out of my comfort zone and makes me be a bit more intentional about the way I live. It is ritual that is, oddly, both self-centered and selfless, one that requires me to look inward at myself in self examination in hopes that I live more purposefully facing out.  This year, I am giving up the hours of podcasts and audiobooks that I use to pass the time while I travel on public transit.  Over the past few years I have found that my creative output and ability to experience life poetically has shriveled up. I think I live anesthetized by a constant stream of "input." I think that forcing my brain to rest, process, and "be" is a crucial practice that I have slowly lost over the course of the past 5 years.
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Covered

We can try  as hard as we want,  but our sins of concrete and human design will never be as pure  as after they are  covered and smoothed  by a fresh blanket of snow. 
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Babbling

She speaks with all the inflections of meaning. "Uh huh..." I reply. Nodding seriously, she picks up a piece of lint. She inspects it in the sunlight and shows it to me, babbling all along. "That's a very good point Martha," I say. I stop her from putting it in her mouth. 
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Admissions

I have been sitting in on the admissions meetings for the architecture department all week. We go through all the materials that students submit for consideration: portfolios, transcripts, essays, and recommendations. Our faculty always take recommendations with a grain of salt. For one thing, students coming from Europe always have worse recommendations and we always have to think of their ratings has being a few points higher than stated because European instructors have a much harder time giving out praise than their American counterparts. Having studied in Europe and in the U.S., I can vouch that this is true; Americans are much more comfortable celebrating the successes of others and prefer to motivate via carrot than via stick. 
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Freshmen

We got two new student workers in the office.  One is slightly smelly.  The other one can't start working until his mom mails him his passport. They may be Harvard College students, the cream of America's crop. But they are still 18 year old freshmen. 
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Saturday: 6:00 AM

Saturday morning and my usual alarm clock goes off and runs through her litany: "Dada, Mama, Agua, Duck..." It doesn't matter who comes to her rescue as long as it gets her out of her cage. Feeling sorry for the little one and guilty as the non-nursing spouse, I drag myself out of bed. The baby is up for good, which means I am too. I pick her out of the crib, and carry her to the living room where we will hold our usual Saturday morning vigil and wait for the dawn, just as we have for the past 12 months. 
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