Essays on becoming Chris Barclay
I am a huge fan of HBO’s The Wire, and like The Sopranos before it, I was sad to see it end. While The Sopranos reminded me of a Greek tragedy, The Wire unfolded like a sprawling Dickens novel set in present day Baltimore, portraying its broken social, political and economic institutions with artful precision […]
Continue ReadingIn recent weeks, I’ve noticed unprecedented public outrage directed at insurer AIG. I get that people are angry about how a group of morally bankrupt executives are rewarding themselves at taxpayer expense after selling the world economy down the river. AIG was just one participant in this race to the bottom, but I think there […]
Continue ReadingI recently came across an essay on The Good Life by Jim Rohn, who calls himself “the world’s leading motivational speaker, philosopher and entrepreneur.” I watched some of his videos on YouTube, including one in which he exhorts an audience not to be “broke, stupid and ugly”. Talk about the power of positive thinking! I […]
Continue ReadingFrom previous posts, you’ve probably come across my interest in the virtual world. This is not the computer/cyber world, though we’ve built computers to mimic the processes of our own brains. The virtual world I’m interested in is one constructed from our own mental projections. It’s the waking lucid dream we refer to as reality.
Continue ReadingThe other day I watched a 4-D ultrasound of our soon-to-be born baby girl. If you’ve never seen one of these video scans, they are way beyond the grainy black & white images of last decade’s techology. During the exam, I could see her yawn, smile and suck her thumb in blocky, slow-mo, baby claymation. […]
Continue ReadingOne day around sunset, Zhuangzi dozed off and dreamed that he became a butterfly. He flapped his wings and sure enough he was a butterfly. What a joyful feeling as he fluttered about, he completely forgot that he was Zhuangzi. Soon though, he wondered if the butterfly was really Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a […]
Continue ReadingIn my recet post, “How to be an expert“, I talked about passion as being key to finding fulfillment in what we do. Yet so often we invest our passion into a hobby, because we can’t fully express it through our work. As hobbies rarely pay for themselves, we learn to live with spending the […]
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