Odds without ends

Quote of the day:

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."
-- Edith Sitwell

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Today's hypothesis:

Food and drink taste better after a good night's sleep. The coffee had been bitter the last few days. It tastes great this morning.

Ancillary hypothesis:

Many people who ordinarily sleep quite well are not getting enough sleep now - due to stress from what's happening in the market or overwork on the job or the disheartening politics in Washington.

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The freshman moved into the dorms yesterday. My son is moving in today. Things are less overwhelming when you've been through them before.

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Am enjoying Marion Milner's On Not Being Able To Paint. The operating idea in the entire book is that in painting there is an ongoing tension between what the hand that hold's the brush wants to do - objectively acting to interface with the external world - with where the mind wants to wander - the subjective self as influencing if not completely determining what it sees. In the last bit I read, she talks about self-consciousness in a way I hadn't thought about before. Since my late teens I've always thought I was happiest when I got so engrossed in something that I would completely lose my sense of self. On the contrary, Milner who has been fighting the "I" for several chapters until this point says she had a kind of epiphany from deliberately inviting it in and letting it hang around. A new perspective emerged.