amalex5

$.getJSON( sheetURL, function( data ) {
	data.feed.entry
		.filter(function(e){if (e['gsx$render']['$t'] !== 'n'){return e} }) // labels we don't want to render
		.reduce(function(acc,e,i){
			return (
			   acc
				.append( 
			 		(i % 30 == 0) ?  $('<div class="half-inch-padding"></div>') : '' // 30 labels per page
					)
				.append(

amalex5

delhi

6 december 2014

delhi is great!

1. the SMELL---i smelled it the moment i stepped out of the airport, and i can still smell it outside the YMCA. not the smell of trash or excrement or anything bad---but the same smell i associate with late-summer japan. i've smelled this smell only one other time---driving across northern new mexico in june 2011. there was a huge fire near raton, and the entire northern horizon was black---and i realized that this smell, the smell i associate with late-summer japan, is actually the smell of brush fires. maybe the arid climate has something to do with it. that's the other thing i noticed---how similar (physically and geographically, if not anthropologically) delhi is to japan. the arid climate. the dry warmth. the lack of wet, dark-colored earth---all the exposed dirt is dry and light brown and dusty. (san francisco is like this, too.) the flora. even a lot of the architecture: the poorly-maintained, midcentury white concrete-block-and-stucco buildings. the new d

amalex5

C.S. Lewis on excitement as immaturity

South Lake Tahoe. 13 August 2020

I've been thinking about my dilettantism, which I've struggled with since I was a teenager, and its consequences for my career.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, writes about the fallacy of expecting the thrill of new love to persist in long-term marriages. It's not an original point, but it is an important one:

People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on 'being in love' for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change---not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last.