Grave Error

My friend and former Accounting Professor, Scott Eriksen, once told me “Eric, you can’t un-ring the bell.”

Once the bell has rung, no matter how hard you try, how much time you let pass, there really is nothing you can do to unring it.

Last night as I was walking home, I crossed paths with a couple kissing on the street corner. Two things struck me about their act of affection. First, they were both very unattractive, noticeably unattractive as it were. Next, although they both seemed to be making their best efforts, the kiss seemed really bad. I was then immediately reminded of one of the more confusing points of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. If only the fittest of the fittest survive, shouldn’t the population be getting more and more attractive? Why then so many ugly people? And in particular, why so many ugly couples? The easy answer is that the drive for procreation, love, affection, and belonging outweighs pride and selectivity.

“When I was 17, it was a very good year . . .” 

Here is another of the poems from when I was 17. I had just studied “lucid dreams” in a psychology class. My basic idea was that if you could really have lucid dreams, meaning dreams where you were conscious of what was happening and could actually control and manuipulate these dreams, then sleeping became a creative and god-like experience. What I find most interesting about my poetry at the age of 17 is not how bad it was, but how, like today, I was very obsessed with getting more sleep.

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“When I was 17, it was a very good year . . .”

My mother just sent me a package from home. Inside I found two interesting documents (plus a beautiful photo of a daffodil from her garden). One was a book of Haiku poetry that I wrote when I was 6 years old and in first grade (apparently, I really liked the words “a lot” a lot). The other one was my high school literary magazine where, of course at 17, I thought I was pretty intellectual, and wrote a few poems. Here is one of the poems which I happened to write after reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. Continue reading →

Everyone loves a good meal. People think of food with nostalgia for home or for better times. But, sometimes I wish we could live witout food. It often just gets in the way. Especially on a day like today when my stomach hurts, I feel no homesickness for food, just a desire to avoid eating and to roll myself into my bed like a Mexican fajita.

A few weeks back, my friend Laura (who has a degree in Physical Education and Physiotherapy, is very borde, and who I generally refer to as primer plato) was educating me on the relationship between stress and the digestive system. While it is generally accepted that stress creates stomach discomfort and alignments, the reverse is just as prevelant. Stomach pains cause stress. What’s more stressful than having nausea on a crowded public bus or stuffy metro? Worse of all, it’s lunch time. What am I going to eat?