Lulz

All these e-mails---it feels like a denial-of-service attack against my brain.

Micah M. White 

Death has become him

Fun fact of the day: De'Ath is an actual surname.

Foundationlessness

Ne me demandez pas qui je suis et ne me dites pas de rester le même

(L'archéologie du savoir, Michel Foucault) 

This is not new

Not at all. At least you deal with it a little better now, I do think.

But the advice you gave yourself then holds every bit as true. And maybe I should add: be nimble. Learn to embrace your lightness. To count your blessings and treasure them, but also to let go. Because you will probably have to do a lot of that in the years to come ...

Protip #1566

While it is probably true that you should stop over-analysing the living daylight out of all your thoughts and impulses, those instincts in moderation also serve you pretty well in general. You should listen to them and stop freaking out.

Protip #5772

When in excessive doubt, you're probably just being a coward.

Meh

You aren't just free to dispose of your time as you want to.
Well, at the moment, I am. Maybe I won't be in the future. But that's simply not true now. Yes to some extent I'm being "childish" and "irresponsible". But really more than anything I'm hearing this. Have you never heard of the concept of a graduation trip? Jeez.
There is so little structure!
Yes, and I'm comfortable with that. You should be too. At the end of the day I have anchor points, and that's all that's needed.
You're wasting your time.
The time is mine to waste. Don't you worry about it. (Also I do actually plan to do stuff in between. I just haven't told you about it yet ... I guess I should.)
I guess at the end of the day it boils down to this: my life is not yours to direct. Don't try. I don't know how sharply I'll react if you push. 

Things I Realized Today

PricewaterhouseCoopers is a privately-held company. So is Koch Industries. So are many firearms manufacturers. Any number of the interesting firms lobbying Congress are privately-held and so don't (aren't oblige to) disclose very much information about themselves. At which point the study of money politics goes back squarely into the shadows of murk, estimation and guesswork. Or maybe there's a way to scrape all that information off the massive hairball of information that is the Internet. That would be one hell of a scrape though.

Yet Another Sign of Creeping Senioritis

Echo Chamber

Not in the sense of killing out competing views, but certainly in the sense of being potentially somewhat enclosed and amplifying anything that might come up into huge, unhealthy feedback loops. Probably something Not Terribly Good that you should try to change.  

Cryptic Reminder of the Day

The operative question at the moment is, how?

Beware.

Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about---and pays off on---what you can do with what you know (and it doesn't care how you learned it.) And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills---leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

Paz, esperanza y alegria

Absolutely the same thing as peace, hope, and joy. Except not. Except yes. Except not. Except ...

The Merry Month of February

For the next two weeks you will not worry about the future. The future will be a distant mirage and you will engage fully with the present, front and center. Until such time as good news comes crashing to shore and makes the mirage real again. Or, if not, till March arrives. 

Almost two years now but no less true

When more and more people around you start learning your language---just out of interest, or because they feel "they'll need it" in the future---; when whole provinces of neighboring countries start making it compulsory in schools ... you know something is afoot.
About time, you could almost hear so many say.
But even as we bask in the newly-(re?)found glow of attention, we should take care not to become arrogant and short-sighted once again. We should be careful not to repeat the mistakes of times past, and shrink back into a conceited cocoon. 

The Manchineel tree

Sounds like something in the Hunger Games arena.

 ... if you stay under its foliage while it's raining, the water will cause instant blistering wherever it touches you. ... You can't burn the Manchineel's wood because the smoke will cause temporary and even permanent blindness ... Ingestion [of the fruit] may produce severe gastroenteritis with bleeding, shock, bacterial superinfection, and the potential for airway compromise due to edema.

时势造英雄

Aitzaz Hasan is a brave man. I have nothing but respect for him.
More than once I've wished I could be like him ... but then I'm ashamed I could make such a perverse wish. For it would imply putting everyone else around in grave danger, and creating much disruption and grief ...

Probably the best riposte to L'Académie française

'English may be a shifty whore, but she's our shifty whore.' 

--Kory Stamper

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

A second chance! That’s the delusion.

“There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”