Current Obsession Quotes

When does real love begin? At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity. At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love? At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession.

Van Houten, I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invented anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

The current phone obsession is a disease,” Chance said. “Everyone’s gone mad, typing to themselves all day long like mindless robots.

Here's the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. ... We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it's silly and useless--epically useless in my current state--but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either. People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox. ... But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. ... What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

Everything already in place: the retired hit man currently sleeping with Maura; his supernatural-obsessed ex-boss currently sleeping in Boston; the creepy entity buried in rocks beneath the ley line; the unfamiliar creatures crawling out of a cave mouth behind an abandoned farmhouse; the ley line's growing power; the magical sentient forest on the ley line; one boy's bargain with the magical forest; one boy's ability to dream things to life; one dead boy who refused to be laid to rest; one girl who supernaturally amplified 90 percent of the aforementioned list.

American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?

It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an obsession. And for those who have been socialized female, that pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It’s a way to say, ‘I love and accept myself.

After all, we're currently living in a Bizarro society where teenagers are technology-obsessed, where the biggest sellers in every bookstores are fantasy novels about a boy wizard, and the blockbuster hit movies are all full of hobbits and elves or 1960s spandex superheroes. You don't have to go to a Star Trek convention to find geeks anymore. Today, almost everyone is an obsessive, well-informed aficionado of something. Pick your cult: there are food geeks and fashion geeks and Desperate Housewives geeks and David Mamet geeks and fantasy sports geeks. The list is endless. And since everyone today is some kind of trivia geek or other, there's not even a stigma anymore. Trivia is mainstream. "Nerd" is the new "cool.

For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I'm writing - an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts.

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went off to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director, I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm – hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

For some, like me, writing comes at a price. My best creations were written while I was emotionally ripped open. I've spent some scenes so mentally self-exposed that I could barely see what I was writing. And as I sit here-my heart pounding, heaviness threatening to pull my heart down to my stomach, I ask myself this question...are you ready to bleed some more? I smile and without pause, I pull up my current WIP.

In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. In this way of thinking, there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfaction—perhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software company—while all others are soulless and bland. The philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps. The craftsmen they cite don’t have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work.

She’s mine. That’s what plays on repeat, underneath the current of how I can keep her bound to me.

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.

Perhaps the same labeling obsession caused cartographers to split this body of water into two oceans, even though it is impossible to touch an exact point at which their currents begin to differ. Splitting. Labeling. Seeking out otherness. Some things don’t change.

Increasingly, life seems fractured, as if his past had been lived by someone else. It isn't just that the place he now resides in and the people around him are poles apart, it's like he himself is an entirely different person. The overriding obsessions and foibles of the man he'd once been now feel utterly ludicrous to the current resident of his mind and body. The only bridge is rage; when angered he can taste his old self. But in California, the way he is currently living his life, few things can vex him to that extent. But that's over there.

my father obsesses over everything current and cool to the point he can karaoke to Gaga,

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert. But Henry was himself and no one else, and judging by

The only man who is truly happy is a man who has an idée fixe. It takes up his every minute, fills any empty spaces in his thought, sneaks unexpected pleasures into his boredom, gives direction to his idle hours, again and again enlivens the stagnant waters of existence with a surging current.

Above all else, he loves trilogies. There has never been a trilogy he didn't like, and if you don't understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about "moral choices the Transformers are forced to make." At no point did I interrupt him to say, "But Dad, they're cars." This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.

A Note From the Beach Hello. I am the beach. I am created by waves and currents. I am made of eroded rocks. I exist next to the sea. I have been around for millions of years. I was around at the dawn of life itself. And I have to tell you something. I don’t care about your body. I am a beach. I literally don’t give a fuck. I am entirely indifferent to your body mass index. I am not impressed that your abdominal muscles are visible to the naked eye. I am oblivious. You are one of 200,000 generations of human beings. I have seen them all. I will see all the generations that come after you, too. It won’t be as many. I’m sorry. I hear the whispers the sea tells me. (The sea hates you. The poisoners. That’s what it calls you. A bit melodramatic, I know. But that’s the sea for you. All drama.) And I have to tell you something else. Even the other people on the beach don’t care about your body. They don’t. They are staring at the sea, or they are obsessed with their own appearance. And if they are thinking about you, why do you care? Why do you humans worry so much about a stranger’s opinion? Why don’t you do what I do? Let it wash all over you. Allow yourself just to be as you are. Just be. Just beach.

The current understanding of happiness identifies it as a pleasurable feeling. Pleasant feelings are surely better than unpleasant ones, but the problem today is that people are obsessively concerned with feeling happiness; people are slaves to their feelings. Feelings are wonderful servants but terrible masters. When people make happiness their goal, they do not find it and, as a result, start living their lives vicariously through identification with celebrities.

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.

I decide to hate him for as long as I can for his unshakable faith in me—along with sharing his current obsession—while firmly sticking to the belief that labels are for weak-minded, insecure men. That a woman’s affection and loyalty should be freely given, never demanded.

Bolshevik intellectuals did not confine their reading to Marxist works. They knew Russian and European literature and philosophy and kept up with current trends in art and thoughts. Aspects of Nietzsche’s thought were either surprisingly compatible with Marxism or treated issues that Marx and Engels had neglected. Nietzsche sensitized Bolsheviks committed to reason and science to the importance of the nonrational aspects of the human psyche and to the psychpolitical utility of symbol, myth, and cult. His visions of “great politics” (grosse Politik) colored their imaginations. Politik, like the Russian word politika, means both “politics” and “policy”; grosse has also been translated as “grand” or “large scale.” The Soviet obsession with creating a new culture stemmed primarily from Nietzsche, Wagner, and their Russian popularizers. Marx and Engels never developed a detailed theory of culture because they considered it part of the superstructure that would change to follow changes in the economic base.

robust intelligence may be a liability—especially if by “intelligence” we mean our peculiar self-awareness, all our frantic loops of introspection and messy currents of self-consciousness. We want our self-driving car to be inhumanly focused on the road, not obsessing over an argument it had with the garage.

[Robert] Jensen calls for an end to our current understanding of masculinity. He says, "We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings." What's funny is that that statement essentially echoes the same hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves, and encourage men to see us, as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities.

Hitler’s one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohlweltlehre.

People have read so much hype about passion that they feel they are missing something because they do not jump out of bed champing at the bit to get to work. They are afraid that if they are not completely engaged, then they must be dull and uninteresting at best, spiritually bankrupt at worst. The reality is that not everyone needs to feel passionate in their work. Lifestylers, for example, want to have a general sense of professional accomplishment, but they derive their sense of personal fulfillment from activities outside their workplace, whether sports, hobbies, charity work, or family. Many people fulfill vital functions in out society without loving their work, yet they are content in their lives. Perhaps it is only the current obsession with passion that leads some to worry that something is missing.

the current expectations, concerns, obsessions, and worries of the victim will lead to framing questions or hypotheses whose content is guaranteed to reflect those interests, and so a “story” will unfold in the perceptual system without an author.

It seems improbable to Tom that such endless space could exist in the same lifetime as the ground that was fought over a foot at a time only a handful of years ago, where men lost their lives for the sake of labeling a few muddy yards as “ours” instead of “theirs,” only to have them snatched back a day later. Perhaps the same labeling obsession caused cartographers to split this body of water into two oceans, even though it is impossible to touch an exact point at which their currents begin to differ. Splitting. Labeling. Seeking out otherness. Some things don’t change.

This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home.

That does not mean there’s a way for an elf to pass from one to another,” Nubiti insisted. Stina rolled her eyes. “Well, there should be. Seriously, this is the most ridiculous arrangement I’ve ever heard of!” “Hey, we make everyone slide down a giant whirlpool to get to Atlantis,” Biana reminded her, sounding surprisingly chipper for a girl who usually obsessed about her hair and makeup and was currently thigh-deep in poop-colored muck. “Fitz still talks about how freaked out Sophie was the first time she had to try it. He said he was about three seconds away from having to push her over the edge because she was frozen in place.

I can never understand people's obsession with being seen as normal rather than as themselves, whoever that is. After all, normal is nothing more than an ever-changing ideological dream created by ever-changing current trends that exist solely to make people buy things. If you don't know what that means, it means, politicians and salesmen dictate what normal looks like. Take that however you want.

Over the years, I've moved through alternating cycles of personal neglect and nourishment. Sometimes it's just easier to give in and allow my life to become utterly consumed by the menial and trivial than to justify or assert my individual needs. Then, disgusted with my malaise, I rise up, spurred to action by a resurgence of energy, determined to find new ways of incorporating creative expression into my life without upsetting the domestic applecart. Like a salmon's impulse to swim upstream, the urge to improve my mind and keep my brain stimulated with fresh experiences and challenges seems innate, almost primal. Struggling for my inner life, I know I must keep oxygen flowing through my intellectual gills or I will die. Pushing against stagnation and opposing currents, I swim for mental survival, obsessed with reaching some instinctual goal and preserving my sanity.

A number of popular and misinformed nutritional “experts” promote a fantasy they call “bio-individuality,” meaning that we’re all different and need to eat based on our body’s own inner wisdom. That’s fine in theory, but in practice it usually means choosing the foods we crave over the ones that can heal us. Imagine telling a cocaine addict to listen to his body. He’d be bent over a mirror with a glass straw up his nose as soon as his current high started to fade.

Five of cups. Whoever she is, she's a bit of an Eeyore. More than a little pitiful─glass half-empty type. Yearning for something better but prevented from achieving it by circumstances and/or poor decisions. The Tower card next to it signifies how a tumultuous past or catastrophic event has shaped both her personality and current reality. No taste for life and few prospects for betterment. Consumed by her issues and obsessed with negative thoughts. In short? Bitter with baggage.

I thought of all the people I had met who wanted a full vision for a new life and then to move from where they were straight into it. I thought of all the people who had told me that when they knew exactly what they wanted to do, they would leave the soul-destroying thing that they were currently involved with. Obsessed with perfection and doing it right, we want to go straight to the “lion.” We don’t realize the significance of the path of first tracks and how to be invested in a discovery rather than an outcome.

I managed to have such a mediocre time at a place that is pretty much custom designed for delivering the best years of your life. I’d like to say that I wasn’t the same person back then that I later became and now am. But the truth is that I was the exact same person. I was more myself then than at any other time in my life. I was an extreme version of myself. Everything I’ve always felt I felt more intensely. Everything I’ve always wanted, I wanted more. Everything I currently dislike, I downright hated back then. People who think I’m judgmental, impatient, and obsessed with real estate now should have seen me in college. I was bored by many of my classmates and irked by the contrived mischief and floundering sexual intrigues of dormitory life. I couldn’t wait to get out and rent my own apartment, preferably one in a grand Edwardian building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In that sense, I guess my college experience was just as intense as my husband’s. I just view that intensity negatively rather than nostalgically, which perhaps is its own form of nostalgia.

The “masters” of our current servant class have no leisure either. The slave is a slave of a slave, and these days at the top of heap of the slaves there is not even an exploitative gentleman farmer—writing essays, dissecting animals, and speculating on the nature of the political—but another slave at a higher social rank. The wealthier in the chain impose such burdens on themselves, just as many of us in positions of privilege willingly put ourselves under electronic surveillance as constant as the Amazon warehouse, posting to social media even our time at the gym or our obsessions with our pets.

Have I told you I can’t read contemporary novels anymore? I think it’s because I know too many of the people who write them.The truth is they know nothing about ordinary life. Most of them haven’t so much as glanced up against the real world in decades. I just don’t care what they think about ordinary life or ordinary people. As far as I’m concerned they’re speaking from a false position. Why don’t they write about the kind of lives they really lead, and the kind of things that really obsess them? Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism—when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times? They’re not all children of the bourgeoisie. The point is just that they stepped right out of ordinary life and now when they look behind them, trying to remember what ordinary life used to be like, it’s so far away they have to squint. If novelists wrote honestly about their own lives, no one would read novels—and quite rightly! Maybe then we would finally have to confront how wrong, how deeply philosophically wrong, the current system of literary production really is—how it takes writers away from normal life, shuts the door behind them, and tells them again and again how special they are and how important their opinions must be.

Later, the talk turned to all the other guys/girls who were currently hot for the two of them. 'There's this total dweeb named Robert who's always calling me, and I feel bad because he's really nice, but I'm totally not interested,' Phoebe told Pablo. 'Believe me, I know what that's like,' Pablo told Phoebe. 'There's this girl at Hunter who's, like, obsessed with me. She's, like, this big fat girl. Ass like a truck. She's always writing me these love letters. Maybe I should fuck her. You know, just to be nice.' (Smile, smile.) 'You're so bad.' (Phoebe shaking her head; Pablo loving it; Phoebe loving it, too. What was more ego-enhancing than making dumb jokes at the expense of ugly women? Phoebe could never decide whom she hated more--other people or herself.)

Scrolling through the rest of the 3,500 documents in Michelle’s hard drive, one comes upon a file titled “RecentDNAresults,” which features the EAR’s Y-STR markers (short tandem repeats on the Y chromosome that establish male-line ancestry), including the elusive rare PGM marker. Having the Golden State Killer’s DNA was always the one ace up this investigation’s sleeve. But a killer’s DNA is only as good as the databases we can compare it to. There was no match in CODIS. And there was no match in the California penal system’s Y-STR database. If the killer’s father, brothers, or uncles had been convicted of a felony in the past sixteen years, an alert would have gone to Paul Holes or Erika Hutchcraft (the current lead investigator in Orange County). They would have looked into the man’s family, zeroed in on a member who was in the area of the crimes, and launched an investigation. But they had nothing. There are public databases that the DNA profile could be used to match, filled not with convicted criminals but with genealogical buffs. You can enter the STR markers on the Y chromosome of the killer into these public databases and try to find a match, or at least a surname that could help you with the search.

The lack of distinction between the real and the virtual is the obsession of our age. Everything in our current affairs attests to this, not to mention the big cinematic productions: The Truman Show, Total Recall, Existenz, Matrix, etc. This question has always been there behind literature and philosophy, but it has been present metaphorically, as it were, implicitly, through the filter of discourse. The 'encoding/decoding' of reality was done by discourse, that is to say, by a highly complex medium, never leaving room for a head-on truth. The encoding/decoding of our reality is done by technology. Only what is produced by this technical effect acquires visible reality. And it does so at the cost of a simplification that no longer has anything to do with language or with the slightest ambivalence and which, therefore, puts an end to this subtle lack of distinction between the real and the virtual, as subtle as the lack of distinction between good and evil. Through special effects, everything acquires an operational self-evidence, a spectacular reality that is, properly speaking, the reign of simulation. What the directors of these films have not realized (any more than the simulationist artists of New York in the eighties) is that simulation is a hypothesis, a game that turns reality itself into one eventuality among others.

After more than twenty years as a transactional trader and businessman in what I called the “strange profession,” I tried what one calls an academic career. And I have something to report—actually that was the driver behind this idea of antifragility in life and the dichotomy between the natural and the alienation of the unnatural. Commerce is fun, thrilling, lively, and natural; academia as currently professionalized is none of these. And for those who think that academia is “quieter” and an emotionally relaxing transition after the volatile and risk-taking business life, a surprise: when in action, new problems and scares emerge every day to displace and eliminate the previous day’s headaches, resentments, and conflicts. A nail displaces another nail, with astonishing variety. But academics (particularly in social science) seem to distrust each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and icy-cold hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen and the immutability of their environment. Not to mention a level of envy I have almost never seen in business. … My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and “credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people greedy for credentials nauseating, repulsive, and untrustworthy.

As the Princess performs the impossible balancing act which her life requires, she drifts inexorably into obsession, continually discussing her problems. Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew argues it is difficult not to be self-absorbed when the world watches everything she does. “How can you not be self-obsessed when half the world is watching everything you do; the high-pitched laugh when someone is talking to somebody famous must make you very very cynical.” She endlessly debates the problems she faces in dealing with her husband, the royal family, and their system. They remain tantalizingly unresolved, the gulf between thought and action achingly great. Whether she stays or goes, the example of the Duchess of York is a potent source of instability. James Gilbey sums up Diana’s dilemma: “She can never be happy unless she breaks away but she won’t break away unless Prince Charles does it. He won’t do it because of his mother so they are never going to be happy. They will continue under the farcical umbrella of the royal family yet they will both lead completely separate lives.” Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, a sensible sounding-board throughout Diana’s adult life, sees how that fundamental issue has clouded her character. “She is kind, generous, sad and in some ways rather desperate. Yet she has maintained her self-deprecating sense of humour. A very shrewd but immensely sorrowful lady.” Her royal future is by no means well-defined. If she could write her own script the Princess would like to see her husband go off with his Highgrove friends and attempt to discover the happiness he has not found with her, leaving Diana free to groom Prince William for his eventual destiny as the Sovereign. It is an idle pipe-dream as impossible as Prince Charles’s wish to relinquish his regal position and run a farm in Italy. She has other more modest ambitions; to spend a weekend in Paris, take a course in psychology, learn the piano to concert grade and to start painting again. The current pace of her life makes even these hopes seem grandiose, never mind her oft-repeated vision of the future where she see herself one day settling abroad, probably in Italy or France. A more likely avenue is the unfolding vista of charity, community and social work which has given her a sense of self-worth and fulfillment. As her brother says: “She has got a strong character. She does know what she wants and I think that after ten years she has got to a plateau now which she will continue to occupy for many years.” As a child she sensed her special destiny, as an adult she has remained true to her instincts. Diana has continued to carry the burden of public expectations while enduring considerable personal problems. Her achievement has been to find her true self in the face of overwhelming odds. She will continue to tread a different path from her husband, the royal family and their system and yet still conform to their traditions. As she says: “When I go home and turn my light off at night, I know I did my best.

TWO YEARS AGO I FOUND AN IMAGE OF A KID WITH HER HANDS COVERING HER FACE. A SEATBELT REACHED ACROSS HER TORSO, RIDING UP HER NECK AND A MOP OF BLONDE HAIR STAYED SWEPT, FOR THE MOMENT, BEHIND HER EARS. HER EYES SEEMED CLEAR AND CALM BUT NOT BLANK, THE ROAD BEHIND HER SEEMED THE SAME, I PUT MYSELF IN HER SEAT THEN I PLAYED IT ALL OUT IN MY HEAD. THE CLAUSTROPHOBIA HITS AS THE SEATBELT TIGHTENS, PREVENTING ME FROM EVEN LEANING FORWARD IN MY SEAT, THE PRESSING ON INTERNAL ORGANS. I LEAN BACK AND FORWARD TO RELEASE IT, THEN BACKWARDS AND FORWARD AGAIN. THERE IT IS I GOT FREE. HOW MUCH OF MY LIFE HAS HAPPENED INSIDE OF A CAR? I WONDER IF THE ODDS ARE THAT I'LL DIE IN ONE, KNOCK ON WOOD-GRAIN. SHOULDN'T SPEAK LIKE THAT. WE LIVE IN CARS IN SOME CITIES, COMMUTING ACROSS SPACE EITHER FOR OUR LIVELIHOOD, OR DEVOURING FOSSIL FUELS FOR JOY. IT'S CLOSE TO AS MUCH TIME AS WE SPEND IN OUR BEDS, MORE FOR SOME. THE FIRST TIME I DID SHROOMS, MY MANAGER HAD TO COME RESCUE ME FROM CALTECH'S 'TRIP DAY. AS I GOT INTO HER CAR, I SWEAR TO GOD THE ALUMINUM CENTER CONSOLE IN HER PORSCHE TRUCK LOOKED LIKE IT WAS BREATHING, LIKE THE THROAT OF SOMETHING. ON THE FREEWAY, LEAVING PASADENA, WE SPOKE AND I LOOKED AWAY, OUTSIDE, AT THE WHEELS AND TIRES OF CARS DOING THAT OPTICAL ILLUSION THING THEY DO WHERE IT LOOKS LIKE THEY'RE SPINNING BACKWARDS, WHICH, ACCORDING TO GOOGLE, HAPPENS BECAUSE OUR BRAINS ARE ASSUMING SOMETHING COMPLETELY WRONG AND SHOWING IT TO US. STARING, I WAS TRANSFIXED BY ALL THE INDICATOR LIGHTS OSCILLATING AND THROBBING AGAINST THE WIND. WE DROVE THRU DOWNTOWN LA HEADED WEST, FLYING ON THE SAME FREEWAYS I USED TO RUN OUTTA GAS ON. WELCOMED IN BY THE PERENNIAL CREATURES, IMPERIAL PALM TREES AND CLIMBING VINES LIVING THEIR LIVES OUT JUST OFF THE SHOULDER. THE FEELING OF FAMILIAR ENHANCED, ON THE 10. I USED TO RIDE AROUND IN MY SINEWY CROSSOVER SUV, SMOKE AND LISTEN TO ROUGH MIXES OF MY OLD SHIT BEFORE IT CAME OUT, OR WHATEVER SOMEONE WANTED TO PLAY WHEN THEY HOOKED UP THEIR IPHONE TO THE AUX CORD A FEW YEARS AND A FEW DAILY-DRIVERS LATER I'M NOT DRIVING MUCH ANYMORE, IT'S BEEN A YEAR SINCE I MOVED TO LONDON, AT THE TIME OF WRITING THIS, AND THERE'S NO PRACTICAL REASON TO DRIVE IN THIS CITY. I ORDERED A GT3 RS AND IT'LL KEEP LOW MILES OUT HERE BUT I GUESS IT'S GOOD TO HAVE IN CASE OF EMERGENCY :) RAF SIMONS ONCE TOLD ME IT WAS CLICHE, MY WHOLE CAR OBSESSION MAYBE IT LINKS TO A DEEP SUBCONSCIOUS STRAIGHT BOY FANTASY. CONSCIOUSLY THOUGH, I DON'T WANT STRAIGHT A LITTLE BENT IS GOOD. I FOUND IT ROMANTIC, SOMETIMES, EDITING THIS PROJECT. THE WHOLE TIME I FELT AS THOUGH I WAS IN THE PRESENCE OF A $16M MCLAREN F1 ARMED WITH A DISPOSABLE CAMERA. MY MEMORIES ARE IN THESE PAGES, PLACES CLOSEBY AND LONG ASS-NUMBING FLIGHTS AWAY. CRUISING THE SUBURBS OF TOKYO IN RWB PORSCHES. THROWING PARTIES AROUND ENGLAND AND MOBBING FREEWAYS IN FOUR PROJECT M3S THAT I BUILT WITH SOME FRIENDS. GOING TO MISSISSIPPI AND PLAYING IN THE MUD WITH AMPHIBIOUS QUADS. STREET-CASTING MODELS AT A RANDOM KUNG FU DOJO OUT IN SENEGAL. COMMISSIONING LIFE-SIZE TOY BOXES FOR THE FUCK OF IT SHOOTING A MUSIC VIDEO FOR FUN WITH TYRONE LEBON, THE GENIUS GIANT. TAKING A BREAK-SLASH-RECONNAISSANCE MISSION TO TULUM, MEXICO, ENJOYING SOME STAR VISIBILITY FOR A CHANGE. RECORDING IN TOKYO, NYC, MIAMI, LA, LONDON, PARIS. STOPPING IN BERLIN TO WITNESS BERGHAIN FOR MYSELF, TRADING JEWELS AND SOAKING IN PARABLES WITH THE MANY-HEADED BRANDON AKA BASEDGOD IN CONVERSATION, I WROTE A STORY IN THE MIDDLE-IT'S CALLED 'GODSPEED', IT'S BASICALLY A REIMAGINED PART OF MY BOYHOOD. BOYS DO CRY, BUT I DON'T THINK I SHED A TEAR FOR A GOOD CHUNK OF MY TEENAGE YEARS. IT'S SURPRISINGLY MY FAVORITE PART OF LIFE SO FAR. SURPRISING, TO ME, BECAUSE THE CURRENT PHASE IS WHAT I WAS ASKING THE COSMOS FOR WHEN I WAS A KID. MAYBE THAT PART HAD IT'S ROUGH STRETCHES TOO, BUT IN MY REARVIEW MIRROR IT'S GETTING SMALL ENOUGH TO CONVINCE MYSELF IT WAS ALL GOOD. AND REALLY THOUGH... IT'S STILL ALL GOOD.

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care—about time? If so, I can’t imagine why We’ve all got time enough to cry.” —Chicago, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? “For those who think the world is obsessed with ‘time,’ the Oxford dictionary added support to the theory Thursday when they announced that the word time is the most often used noun in the English language.” —NBCNEWS.com (6/22/2016)—based on an analysis of almost three billion words culled from the Internet. With respect to knowing what time it is, or caring, the currently accepted worldwide definition of one second is: “The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.” This is measured by atomic clocks that are accurate to within one second over a period of fifteen billion years—roughly the age of the universe.

in words things he should have kept to himself. Now, though, I have to reach the final sentence - and I do. When I used to read biographies of writers, I always thought they were simply trying to make their profession seem more interesting when they said that 'the book writes itself, the writer is just the typist. Now I know that this is absolutely true, no one knows why the current took them to that particular island and not to the one they wanted to reach. The obsessive re-drafting and editing begins, and when I can no longer bear to re-read the same words one more time, I send it to my publisher, where it is edited again, and then published. And it is a constant source of surprise to me to discov- er that other people were also in search of that very island and that they find it in my book. One person tells anoth- er person about it, the mysterious chain grows, and what the writer thought of as a solitary exercise becomes a bridge, a boat, a means by which souls can travel and communicate.

Yokely had carried out missions for every American President since Reagan, except the current Twitter-obsessed incumbent, who could not be trusted, as the Senator himself said, ‘To keep his fool mouth shut about anything.

Someday your current life will become another past life. That is why it makes much more karmic sense to focus on the here and now, instead of obsessing over what happened centuries ago.

So long as I understand the direction of the current, I can go with the flow.

Walsh knew,’ Stuart Lancaster, the current England rugby coach, told rugby writer Mark Reason, ‘that if you established a culture higher than that of your opposition, you would win. So rather than obsessing about the results, you focus on the team.

Walsh knew,’ Stuart Lancaster, the current England rugby coach, told rugby writer Mark Reason, ‘that if you established a culture higher than that of your opposition, you would win. So rather than obsessing about the results, you focus on the team.’ ‘The challenge of every team is to build a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another,’ said Vince Lombardi. ‘Because the question is usually not how well each person performs, but how well they work together.’ Collective character is vital to success. Focus on getting the culture right; the results will follow.

At nineteen, I needed more than confidence; I needed permission to break free from the only values system I'd ever known, a value system shared by so many in my social universe... I was probably the billionth eighteen-year-old to feel that way, the billionth bewildered teenager who left home for school, only to be shocked that the wider world didn't operate the same way as Anytown, USA. But being the billionth didn't make it any easier... to swing against the current--even if that current was nothing but a lazy river compared to what others have to face.

You can safely assume that if you are consciously obsessed with something right now, you’re going to have trouble writing about it well. Why? Because its full significance has not yet become clear to you. And because you yourself, as you currently exist, are not yet clear to you. Didion’s essay is an elegant compendium of moments from her New York years, the moments she has been unable to forget. These are not the expected landmarks—her first big break, or heartbreak—but quieter episodes that have come to symbolize the experience: the exaltation of eating a peach on Lexington Avenue at twilight; the dejection of watching “the long panels of transparent golden silk” hung in her window become “tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms.” I am constantly imploring students to pay special attention to anything they can’t forget. If an image, or interaction, or sensation, or snatch of dialogue snags in your consciousness, it bears investigation.

In my limited time conversing with the convict, literally now lying on his death bed, he obsessively spoke about his soul and its current state of being entrapped in this body—this life. He wanted to die. To be set free. But he didn’t believe he was going to face God or a final judgment of sorts. He didn’t believe he would be damned to some Hell or blessed to some Heaven—not for this life, at least.

Frankly, I'm a recent convert to the delights of pure plantation chocolate. I adore chocolate in all its many forms, but my current passion is couture chocolates made with the selected beans from single plantations all around the world-- Trinidad, Tobago, Ecuador, Venezuela, New Guinea. Exotic locations, all of them. They are--out and out--the best type of chocolate. In my humble opinion. The Jimmy Choos of the chocolate world. Though truffles are a fierce competitor. (Strictly speaking, truffles are confectionary as opposed to chocolates, but I feel that's making me sound like a chocolate anorak.) Another obsession of mine is Green & Black's chocolate bars. Absolute heaven. I've turned Autumn on to the rich, creamy bars, which she can eat without any guilt, because they're made from organic chocolate and the company practices fair trade with the bean growers. Can't say I'm not a caring, sharing human being, right? When my friend eats the Maya Gold bar, she doesn't have to toss and turn all night thinking about the fate of the poor cocoa bean farmers. I care about Mayan bean pickers, too, but frankly I care more about the blend of dark chocolate with the refreshing twist of orange, perfectly balanced by the warmth of cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla. Those Mayan blokes certainly know what they're doing. Divine. I hope they have happy lives knowing that so many women depend on them. So as not to appear a chocolate snob, I also shove in Mars Bars, Snickers and Double Deckers as if they're going out of fashion. Like the best, I was brought up on a diet of Cadbury and Nestlé, with Milky Bars and Curly Wurlys being particular favorites---and both of which I'm sure have grown considerably smaller with the passing of the years. Walnut Whips are a bit of a disappointment these days too. They're not like they used to be. Doesn't stop me from eating them, of course---call it product research.

of control over emotions in a host body. The solution for all of us to improve is staying with the process of continuing evolution to become better than we are. Our spirit guides were once just like us before they attained their current status. We are given many host bodies and all of them are imperfect. Rather than being obsessive about a body which will only last one lifetime, concentrate on the evolution of your soul Self and rely on your spiritual power. As we do this our capability for connecting with others will evolve and eventually cut through the dilemma of moral distinctions

If he was going to flirt with anyone, he realised with a start, he wanted it to be with the focused, obsessively organised, outwardly ball-bustingly confident yet inwardly surprisingly insecure woman currently slaying her inner dragons in the kitchen.

Contrary to popular belief, an “overnight success” has often been years in the making. In the same way that we’re only able to see the tip of the iceberg that’s above water, the general public really only gets to see the “overnight” part of a success story. A truly successful project generally takes years to build and involves a series of smaller successes punctuated by a few failures. Eventually, a critical mass of attention is reached, and the project gets launched into the mainstream, where it circulates widely, and its identity is cemented in its current form—a form that, intentionally or otherwise, rarely pays obvious homage to the years of blood, sweat, tears, and more rudimentary sounds that engendered it.

The main reason why these values have become . . . the official values of our society is that they are useful to the industrial system. Violence is discouraged because it disrupts the functioning of the system. Racism is discouraged because ethnic conflicts also disrupt the system, and discrimination wastes the talents of minority-group members who could be useful to the system. Poverty must be ‘cured’ because the underclass causes problems for the system and contact with the underclass lowers the morale of the other classes. Women are encouraged to have careers because their talents are useful to the system and, more importantly, because by having regular jobs women become integrated into the system and tied directly to it rather than to their families. This helps to weaken family solidarity [which is also useful to the system.][285] Obviously, this is not at all to say that arguing for the opposite of these values should be preferred. The entire point is, rather, that obsessions over the currently-accepted linguistic labels by which to formulate racial, gender, and “queer” definitions (or, what amounts to the same thing, to use these terms to argue against the existence of their essences) is simply an abstract game that leaves the underlying essence of the System untouched.

the most common issue for which couples seek sex therapy: low desire. Low desire is, by definition, a relationship issue. The partner with “low” desire is the one who wants sex too infrequently for the other partner’s satisfaction. It’s not that one person’s desire for sex is somehow inherently “too low” or the other’s is “too high.” They’re just different—at least in the current context. But it’s not the differential itself that causes the issue; it’s how the couple manages it. Problematic dynamics emerge when partners have different levels of desire and they believe that one person’s level of desire is “better” than the other person’s. For example, let’s say Partner A has more spontaneous desire and Partner B is more responsive. In this scenario, Partner A may feel rejected and undesirable because they almost always do the initiating, and then Partner B may start to feel pushed and judged and so will resist more. Partner A asks and asks and asks and feels rejected and hurt and resentful because Partner B keeps saying no, no, no; and Partner B feels defensive but also guilty and hurt because just being asked makes Partner B feel like there must be something wrong with them. Meanwhile Partner A may even start to wonder, “Am I broken? Do I want sex too much? Am I sexually obsessed or compulsive?” It’s a mess. I call it “the chasing dynamic.” And

For the next few years, an often nervous and distraught Webster kept track of a wide range of data, including demographic information, temperature readings, wind currents and voting records.

Intoxicated by my Master’s vampire guise, shocks of electric currents vibrated down my arching spine; I willingly offered my bacchá innocence to this erotic aristocrat for his inerrant enjoyment. French kisses filled my urgent provocation as his desires rendered me helpless, and Andy’s tantalizing riposte replaced my bidder’s sweet attraction. Laying me on the loveseat, P’s obsessive glare stirred my uninhibited longing for my lover’s unbridled manhood. Willingly I surrendered to my lover’s sensuality before his consecrated erection encased me in a cocoon of sacramental love. Our glowing auras merged into a halo of sexual unity, bonding our sacred Eucharist, igniting a fiery passion of unimaginable bliss and filling our bodies with flowing essence of milky love. P the voyeur, sat enamored, watching a love story unfold that was as old as the creation of man.

I have been reminded that back in the day, eating was to provide fuel for work, a necessity of life as mundane as bathing or sleeping. Pleasurable, sure, but when did it become such an obsession?   We are bombarded daily with adverts, images, ideas and offers, all urging us to eat more, eat better, eat different, eat cheaply, and then ironically the list of diets available to us to help balance the overconsumption are so varied and many that they are too numerous to list.   Here’s an exercise: try to name six members of the current cabinet. Most people struggle after three. Now try naming me six diets. Easy, huh?   As a food lover and writer, I can say that the eating, preparation and sourcing of food has been a lifelong pleasure. I believe that one of the greatest expressions of love is to cook for someone.   For

The most recent writers on genius, creativity’s greatest manifestation, agree that it can appear at any point in the life cycle, not just in childhood. They reject the nineteenth-century romantic belief that it exists only in a small set of heroic people. They find three factors key to what they see as a more general phenomenon. First is a grandiose and mystical sense of the world, what Einstein called “cosmic religiosity.” Such an elevated mood can appear in the hypomanic phase of the up-down cycle of someone with a bipolar disorder, as depression lifts and elation appears. The second element of genius is an ability to concentrate obsessively on a goal and to strive for perfection in reaching it. The third element is a resonance to one’s historical era, being in sync with current ideals, living when one’s gift or invention can be appreciated.5

There has never been a trilogy he didn’t like, and if you don’t understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about “moral choices the Transformers are forced to make.” At no point did I interrupt him to say, “But Dad, they’re cars.” This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.

some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job’s subject is much too mundane. But this is flawed thinking that our consideration of traditional craftsmanship can help correct. In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose.

These trans are driven, I thought, like the mind, by electric current, and at once I was imagining all the pylons and the wires running down the valley, creating a path, a network, that was separate from the landscape so that we could pass through it at great speed, as thoughts also hurtle by so fast but are rarely in contact with reality. The mind likes to move on rails, I decided after a couple of days in Maroggia, always the same old reflections and anxieties and obsessions, one leading to the other with great predictability. The same switches, the same buffers and terminuses that you never get beyond.

Unlike some of the Arabs of antiquity who learned to make a living as farmers or merchants, the mark of manhood for the Arab nomads who followed Muhammad was the possession of arms, obsession with honor, and claim to pastures, camels, and women. Robbery and murder outside the protective confines of one’s clan were simply the means to an end.” 125 It was upon the ethos of the ruthless raid that Muhammad founded Islam.

The side effects of a dominant left-brain hemisphere occur when the energy of the left-brain hemisphere is too out of balance. In extreme cases, people who have this brain disorder are often psychopaths and they are very obsessed with power and control. Many of the current leaders of the Roman Catholic Church are great examples of chronic left-brain dominant people.

For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me. Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure, shape, and temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin. The thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense even tiny subsurface eddies and water currents. After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi-kid, or for that matter anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body. I was one with the water, and it was one with me.

Edison himself once said, “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this—you haven’t.” Often criticized for being a re-inventor: someone who rode on the coattails of others, Edison had his own peculiar talent for seeing flaws and working obsessively to improve and refine concepts and designs to make them functional and to develop streamlined and inexpensive means of manufacture for the inventions that were most in demand.

But this time, if and when discontented Americans like Amy and Sarah do reengage with democracy, it’s by no means clear that they will vote to stick with the capitalism part of the American model. The 1970s represented the first protracted stumble after the recovery from the Great Depression, with two oil-price shocks and a nasty recession mid-decade. Had recovery from those challenges been as strong as that in the late 1930s and 1940s, no doubt faith in the system would once again have been vindicated. Instead, as the data shows, the post-1970s decades have been, for Americans like Amy and Sarah, a slow drip feed of disappointment and frustration. In this environment, a more sinister narrative about capitalism has been taking root. Capitalism is no longer unambiguously about everybody working hard and getting ahead—it is about the benefit of overall economic growth flowing so disproportionately to rich people that there just isn’t enough left for average Americans to consistently advance. If the little that does trickle down isn’t enough to keep Amy and Sarah afloat, then sooner or later they will wonder why they trust the management of the economy to Wall Street CEOs and Beltway politicians and policy wonks. And then they will surely reengage with the democratic part of the US system—probably with dramatic and potentially harmful results. To be sure, it is always tempting to look for a clear, easily identified whipping boy—a bad president, an atrocious piece of legislation, callous Wall Street, venal hedge funds, the unfettered internet, runaway globalization, or self-absorbed millennials. While no one of these can be held responsible for the yawning inequality of the US economy and the alienation that it engenders, many actors have played a role. It has taken almost half a century of both Democratic and Republican presidents and houses of Congress to get us to the current point. And if numerous actors are in part responsible, then we have to ask—given all that the data shows—whether there may be a fundamental structural problem with democratic capitalism. If so, can we fix it?

Probably the worst thing you can do is to be over-cautious and restrict your diet to a few ‘safe’ foods, as restrictive diets low in diversity and fibre can permanently harm your gut health, especially during pregnancy, potentially worsening your allergies and symptoms.9 This is a particular problem for children with atopic eczema, where avoidance diets are often harmful.10 Our obsessions with hygiene, food safety and restrictive diets may have caused many of our current problems, and if we are not careful, our current trends could cause even greater health problems in the future.

Before, he had not realized what he actually wanted. Until today, when he saw how Cheng Yujin bade him farewell so easily, and how she began to talk happily about her and her future husband, Cheng Yuanjing finally understood what kind of answer he actually wanted to hear. He was not her uncle, nor was she his niece. What he wanted was for Cheng Yujin to see him as a man. He wanted her to give him an embroidery, make him pastries, and came to see him — as a man. Cheng Yuanjing had witnessed how Cheng Yujin very attentively cared for other men. Truly tasteless. Lin Qingyuan’s martial and literary skills weren’t as good as him. Her cousin brother was nothing more than a half-grown child. Why did Cheng Yujin so obsessed with them? Upon this inexplicable feeling, he deliberately revealed his identity. Later, Cheng Yujin’s attitude towards him indeed changed. Unfortunately, she still didn’t see him as a man. Since she knew his identity, Cheng Yujin always regarded him as a symbol, a tool that could promote her future husband and son’s position. Sometimes Cheng Yuanjing wanted to knock Cheng Yujin’s head and pried it open to have a look. Since she wanted to marry a wealthy and powerful husband, how could she put her sight on Xu Zhixian and Lin Qingyuan? As a crown prince, he had no shortage of money, property, power, and status. Moreover, he also currently occupied the identity of the Cheng family’s ninth son, which enabled her to get closer with him easily. Such conveniences, such good conditions, yet Cheng Yujin didn’t use it and still dared to talk about her future husband in front of him. For Cheng Yuanjing, Cheng Yujin was an oddity, truly the only one. The more he got closer to her, the more joyful and possessive Cheng Yuanjing became, and the more he couldn’t bear to hear about another man from her mouth.

This coquettishness is charming indeed, Miss Bennet, but I believe that we may dispense with it in light of the current situation.

Ginny told me that, like Dr. Wisner's patients, her problem was not so much that she had an urge to kill her grandchildren, but rather a fear that she might somehow lose control of her senses. She put it this way: "The fear is not that in my current state I could do these things, but that I might slip into a state where I could do it. Right now, when I am thinking about it, I know it won't happen. But still it festers, it festers and lingers, and it keeps beating on you and beating on - like it's the villain, the enemy, the monster, the demon - it's a faceless devil." With my encouragement, Ginny told her husband about the thoughts. She was relieved that his reaction was "he just couldn't even believe what he was hearing - he knew I'd never do these things, they were just bad thoughts." When I asked Ginny why she thought he has so much faith in her, she replied, "Because he sees me with people daily. He said he fell in love with me because I am kind. For example, he reminded me of a time when we were together in a cabin, and I noticed a bee trapped behind a screen and I told him I didn't want the bee to die, so he spent the first hour of our first weekend together undoing the screen to free the bee. He asked me, does that sound like someone who would kill her grandchildren? He also reminded me that I am soft and warm and very loving, and he would never worry about me doing the awful things I was thinking of." Needless to say, Ginny was relieved by her husband's reaction, since she had feared he would think she was crazy.

Some common compulsions in ROCD are: ●        Checking for arousal when around one’s partner or checking for arousal when around people other than one’s partner, in order to see if one is “more attracted” to one’s partner ● Comparing one’s current relationship to past relationships to try and determine which one “felt more right” ● Checking to see if one feels “in love” with a partner at a given moment ●        Trying to remember times when one was happiest in the relationship, in order to be reassured that the relationship is “right

Granted, employees are a very different type of customer, one that falls outside of the traditional definition. After all, instead of them paying you, you’re paying them. Yet regardless of the direction the money flows, one thing is clear: employees, just like other types of customers, want to derive value from their relationship with the organization. Not just monetary value, but experiential value, too: skill augmentation, career development, camaraderie, meaningful work, a sense of purpose, and so on. If a company or an individual leader fails to deliver the requisite value to an employee, then—just like a customer, they’ll defect. They’ll quit, driving up turnover, inflating recruiting/training expenses, undermining product/service quality, and creating a whole lot of unnecessary stress on the organization. So even though a company pays its employees, it should still provide them with a value-rich employment experience that cultivates loyalty. And that’s why it’s prudent to view both current and prospective employees as a type of customer. The argument goes beyond employee engagement, though. There’s a whole other reason why organizational leaders have a lot to gain by viewing their staff as a type of customer. That’s because, by doing so, they can personally model the customer-oriented behaviors that they seek to encourage among their workforce. How better to demonstrate what a great customer experience looks like than to deliver it to your own team? After all, how a leader serves their staff influences how the staff serves their customers. Want your team to be super-responsive to the people they serve? Show them what that looks like by being super-responsive to your team. Want them to communicate clearly with customers? Show them what that looks like by being crystal clear in your own written and verbal communications. There are innumerable ways for organizational leaders to model the customer experience behaviors they seek to promote among their staff. It has to start, however, by viewing those in your charge as a type of customer you’re trying to serve. Of course, viewing staff as customers doesn’t mean that leaders should cater to every employee whim or that they should consent to do whatever employees want. Leaders sometimes have to make tough decisions for the greater good. In those situations, effectively serving employees means showing respect for their concerns and interests, and thoughtfully explaining the rationale behind what might be an unpopular decision. The key point is simply this: with every interaction in the workplace, leaders have an opportunity to show their staff what a great customer experience looks like. Whether you’re a C-suite executive or a frontline supervisor, that opportunity must not be squandered.

Nor is it wise to entrust our schools to inexperienced teachers, principals, and superintendents. Education is too important to relinquish to the vagaries of the market and the good intentions of amateurs. American education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it is threatening to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?

Alongside the self-obsession they display and the victimhood they claim, current-day students often shout down speakers whose views they don’t approve,

A questionnaire! Such an obvious solution. A purpose-built, scientifically valid instrument incorporating current best practice to filter out the time wasters, the disorganized, the ice-cream discriminators, the visual-harassment complainers, the crystal gazers, the horoscope readers, the fashion obsessives, the religious fanatics, the vegans, the sports watchers, the creationists, the smokers, the scientifically illiterate, the homeopaths, leaving, ideally, the perfect partner or, realistically, a manageable short list of candidates.

Jesse seemed to be the only one having a good time. He’d stopped at every gelato stand in the city. He took a bite of his current obsession before he talked. “I got to beat the shit out of a guy.” Ian nodded. “And he didn’t even flip out. That’s why he got gelato. I’m trying this whole new ‘positive reinforcement’ training with the puppy. So far it’s working.

You will be obsessed with the past and future and will not just let the current moment be. This happens because the past offers you an identity and the future encompasses the prospect of fulfillment and salvation. This is a mirage.

There is a fear of catching AIDS , but a fear also of simply catching sex. There is a fear of catching anything whatever which might seem like a passion, a seduction, a responsibility. And, in this sense, it is once again the male who has most deeply fallen victim to the negative obsession with sex. To the point of withdrawing from the sexual game, exhausted by having to bear such a risk, and no doubt also wearied by having historically assumed the role of sexual power for so long. Of which feminism and female liberation have divested him, at least dejure (and, to a large extent, de facto). But things are more complicated than this, because th e male who has been emasculated in this way and stripped of his power, has taken advantage of this situation to fade from the scene, to disappear — doffing th e phallic mask of a power which has, in any event, become increasingly dangerous. This is the paradoxical victory of the movement for feminine emancipation. That movement has succeeded too well and now leaves the female faced with the (more or less tactical and defensive) defaulting of the male. A strange situation ensues, in which women no longer protest against male power, but are resentful of the 'powerlessness' of the male . The defaulting of the male now fuels a deep dissatisfaction generated by disappointment with a sexual liberation which is going wrong for everyone. And this dissatisfaction finds expression, contradictorily, in the phantasm of sexual harassment. This is, then, a very different scenario from traditional feminism. Women are no longer alienated by men, but dispossessed of the masculine, dispossessed of the vital illusion of the other and hence also of their own illusion, their desire and privilege as women. It is this same effect which causes children secretly to hate their parents, who no longer wish to assume the role of parent and seize the opportunity of children's emancipation to liberate themselves as parents and relinquish their role. What we have, then, is no longer violence on the part of children in rebellion against the parental order, but hatred on the part of children dispossessed of their status and illusion as children. The person who liberates himself is never who you though the was. This defaulting o f the male has knock-on effects which extend into the biological order. Recent studies have found a fall in the rate of sperm in the seminal fluid, but, most importantly, a decline of their will to power: they no longer compete to go and fertilize the ovum. There is no competition any more. Are they, too , afraid of responsibility? Should we see this as a phenomenon analogous to what is going on in the visible sexual world, where a reticence to fulfil roles and a dissuasive terror exerted by the female sex currently prevail? Is this an unintended side-effect of the battle against harassment - the assault of sperm being the most elementary form of sexual harassment?

Development of brain growth, timing, and coordination in childhood are critical to proper function throughout life. If there is developmental delay in brain function in childhood, such as ADHD, autism, Tourette’s Syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, tics, dyslexia, learning or processing disorders, or even more subtle symptoms, it is best to aggressively rehabilitate function before adulthood. Unfortunately, the current model of health care tells parents to wait for the child to grow out of it. However, many children do not grow out of it and miss key windows of time for ideal brain development. Unrelated to developmental delays, early symptoms of brain degeneration such as poor mental endurance, poor memory, and inability to learn new things are also serious issues when timing matters. The longer a person waits to manage their brain degeneration or developmental delay the less potential they have to make a difference. Datis Kharrazian, DHSc, DC, MS

What are you typing?” Livia did not share Kyle’s obsession with electronic contraptions. “Currently, I’m texting Debbi, Michelle, Karen, and Sam. This incident boosts my street cred.” Kyle’s text was in all caps. “Oh, pardon me. I didn’t realize you were straight-up gangsta,” Livia mocked. “Whatever. I had some bastard’s finger in my mouth tonight. I’m milking this story for all it’s worth.” Kyle hit send.

In treating their employees… companies must understand their implied long-term commitment. If employees promise to work harder to achieve an important deadline… they must get something similar in return. Something like support when they are sick or a chance to hold on to their jobs when the market moves… The current obsession with short-term profits, outsourcing and draconian cost-cutting threatens to undermine it all. Companies cannot have it both ways. The cuts to employee’s benefits… are likely to come at the expense of the social exchange, and thus effect workers’ productivity. As companies tilt the board and employees slide from social norms to market norms, can we blame them for jumping ship when a better offer appears?

It’s here that some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job’s subject is much too mundane. But this is flawed thinking that our consideration of traditional craftsmanship can help correct. In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. In this way of thinking, there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfaction—perhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software company—while all others are soulless and bland. The philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps. The craftsmen they cite don’t have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

Kant’s ideas, as the contemporary philosopher Gordon Marino points out, fly in the face of the current cultural imperative, often heard during graduation season, to “do what you love.” To Kant, the question is not what makes you happy. The question is how to do your duty, how to best contribute—or, as the theologian Frederick Buechner put it, your vocation lies “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

My particular favorite was the David Bowie–led masterpiece Labyrinth. I can say that it is without a doubt one of the best children’s films to come out of the 1980s, which is saying something as that particular decade was full of really dark, really twisted films aimed at children, and I was obsessed with each and every one. Upon reflection, that probably speaks to my current personality more than any other possible pop culture influence I had growing up.

Some of us fixate on physical improvement and a so-called healthy lifestyle because eating a restrictive diet and maintaining a rigid exercise regimen are easier than addressing our anxieties and shortcomings or admitting our soul purpose continues to elude us. We hunger for control, and so we manifest that control. I cannot talk about psychics without talking about orthorexia. From the Greek ortho, which means “correct,” and orexia, which means “appetite,” orthorexia is the concept of a “correct diet” or of “perfect eating.” (Anorexia, also from the Greek, translates as “without appetite.”) Orthorexia is not a clinical diagnosis and is not currently recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, but the National Eating Disorders Association defines it as “an obsession with proper or ‘healthful’ eating” and elaborates that “while being aware of and concerned with the nutritional quality of the food you eat isn’t a problem in and of itself, people with orthorexia become so fixated on so-called ‘healthy eating’ that they actually damage their own well-being.” Paging irony! My hyperawareness of nutritional health, physical well-being, and environmental protection (because, no, evidently, I could not pick just one obsession) began with wanting to lessen my carbon footprint by going vegetarian. It seemed innocuous at the time. For

Attachment resembles a flood; we are powerlessly swept along by its current. When our mind is attached to something, it has no space for anything else. We are obsessed with the object of our attachment; we worry about not getting it and fear losing it once we do. Drowning in the flood of attachment, we cannot breathe the fresh air of satisfaction and peace. We may want to get to dry land, but not seeing a life raft, we continue to be swept along uncontrollably. The Dharma is our life raft. Let’s make sure we hold on to it and not let it float past us.

If we get sick and there’s no easy cure, we may be stuck with chronic pain. When we’re hurt by unkind words, we may feel an anger that lingers. Perhaps we find ourselves obsessing about what we should do, or why our current strategies aren’t working. We step up our focus on the pain or anger, and how to be rid of it. Or maybe we tell ourselves there’s nothing we can do, and instead get frustrated with our thoughts and sensations, which don’t seem to listen to reason. We get stressed about getting stressed, turning the fight in on ourselves. So what can be done? Of course, the best result would be not to experience the misfiring mechanism, but as the actor’s tale shows, the fight or flight reaction can’t be shut off easily. However, we can choose to practise staying present to thoughts and sensations, by noticing how automatic stress reactions arise in our bodies, and how we tend to resist or identify with them. This might not make them go away, but it significantly alters how we experience them: the meaning we ascribe them, the degree to which they control us, our way of relating to them, and our response. Instead of running round screaming, ‘I’ve got to get rid of this anxiety – now!’, we might bring a friendly interest to sensations of stomach churning, and the thoughts that come along with it. Staying present to thoughts, sensations and automatic reactions, we shift our relationship to stress.

A questionnaire! Such an obvious solution. A purpose-built, scientifically valid instrument incorporating current best practice to filter out the time wasters, the disorganised, the ice-cream discriminators, the visual-harassment complainers, the crystal gazers, the horoscope readers, the fashion obsessives, the religious fanatics, the vegans, the sports watchers, the creationists, the smokers, the scientifically illiterate, the homeopaths, leaving, ideally, the perfect partner, or realistically, a manageable shortlist of candidates.

For a field that’s ostensibly all about pleasure, the current generation of sommeliers, or “somms,” puts themselves through an astonishing amount of pain. They work

Maybe it’s a good time to ask the question again: How is our meat-rich, carb-poor diet working for us? We are currently experiencing a diabetes epidemic, and the affected people are eating more meat and cutting out fruit. Are they doing any better? From what I see in my office, absolutely not.

There is a common denominator to much of what we struggle with. It’s a big, messy puzzle. Sorting through all the components of your pain requires putting all the pieces of the puzzle on the table. Then we’ll begin the process of putting them together so the problem has a face and a name. Do the following words fit anywhere in your childhood or even a current relationship in which you struggle? Addiction Abuse Shame Trauma Guilt Anxiety Low self esteem Obsessive behavior Sexual issues History of dysfunctional relationships Anger issues Care-taking/rescuer personality Overly responsible or controlling Depression