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This book is a dialogue on Alfred Adler’s philosophy. He rejects the idea that the past determines our behavior.

The reclusive friend example is pointed. Freud would dig into childhood. But if you break your leg, the doctor focuses on fixing it, not how it broke.

Adler would say the recluse’s anxiety serves the purpose of avoiding people. The fix is recognizing that goal, questioning it, and changing it.

She takes mushrooms in the forest and just… falls asleep?

Then, after all that buildup, she wakes up and sees a deer.

I see deer sober.

🙄

If I ever become a novelist and write “I blinked,” somebody slap me.

Why narrate an involuntary bodily function? Why not “I inhaled” or “I passed gas”?

Jane Austen conveyed psychological depth through observation without reporting what everyone’s eyelids were doing.

I get that the writers use it to convey a moment of mental recalibration. But blinking doesn't inherently communicate that. Pet peeve.

Much like Jessica, this year I have made an effort to extrovert, to platonically ask friends out, so that almost every weekend day, I'm out of the house on a hike or a brunch or bopping around town.

I've deepened friendships and created new ones. But, I do not feel aa refreshed when it comes to Monday morning.

Jessica doesn’t talk about that.

Social fulfillment can come at the expense of personal restoration.

Your mind is a prism.

My reading for enjoyment has been slow lately due to work. I miss my self-imposed extracurricular graduate seminar in Literature. 😭

Doesn't it seem weird that Tibetan Buddhist culture is so deeply into this past lives thing, considering consciousness as continuous and vast, but that our Western culture just doesn't believe it or engage it at all. If anybody suspects it, they're thought to be kooky crazy.

I’ve only made the latkes 😟. I even let my beautiful beets go bad before I could purée them. But I did text a photo of that recipe to my mom and she probably made it.

The book is lovely though. I enjoyed the photography and the stories. I feel guilty saying I finished it if I only made one recipe, so I’m going to give it one more month or until I return it to my friend, whichever comes first.

Let’s talk about Thelma, who at 62, banged her hot 30 year-old therapist and still thinks about it eight years later while married to a shriveled-up 70-year old asshole. And we think something wrong with her.

To be fair she’s a clingy whack job. But why hasn’t he pursued a restraining order? .

Nobody’s asking her how did it feel to be wanted again at age 62? You’re not a monster for wanting to be wanted.

The way the reader says multivitamins…I just love it.

I didn’t want to like Bob Dylan. I’m only reading this because my daughter did. But dammit, now I don’t dislike him anymore.

He resented being cast as the voice of a generation. As a child of the 70s & 80s, I never knew.

He writes brilliant metaphors. Not the ones he probably thought about too much, but the ones that seem natural, like breath.

Still…no musician will ever win my heart like Jim Morrison.

My teen finished the book already. I asked her what she thought of it. “Honestly, it’s not that good.” So far, I agree. Her complaint was that he mentions a lot of artists she’s never heard of. Same. Although sometimes i pause the audiobook to listen to a song or an artist he names.

The man loves lists. Lists of artists, news headlines, products he used.

I do enjoy Sean Penn’s voice.

Part 6 is jarring, disjointed, as if the author was coerced to accelerate the timeline and change the trajectory. Or waited a year to finish it and was in a different headspace.

Also AFs shouldn’t be so naive. It feels a bit silly. Why have an AI that doesn’t understand basic things?

I wish I wouldn’’t have watched the trailer to the upcoming movie before finishing this.

Halfway in and now it gets intriguing. 🤔

Borrowed this from my friend Ben yesterday, he bookmarked pureed beets and butternut squash & tahini spread (among other things), and recommended them. So of course I have to try them. Now I’ve got to talk my cookbook club into choosing this chef for an upcoming month.

Conscience does make cowards of us all.

This book keeps explaining that arguments are really just two people asking ‘do I matter to you?’ in the least effective way possible.

❤️

Johnson notes that children who don’t do their homework put tremendous creativity into excuses. They don’t lack energy; they lack tolerance for discomfort.

She extends that to adults. Some people expend enormous energy not to connect, but to cut off the emotional current to stay emotionally safe. They keep busy, withdraw, or intellectualize.

Adults, like children, use evasion to protect themselves.

Webb noticed that the words emotion and neglect often appear in scientific literature together, but in the form of “emotional abuse and neglect,” an emotional act of commission and a physical act of omission. She chose to study emotional neglect, an emotional act of omission.

She likens an adult who was emotionally neglected to a dry sponge, unable to take anything in or let anything out.

Apparently psychology has a word for a trait I’ve spent decades cultivating: counterdependence.

Signs you too might be counterdependent:

You think nobody should need anything. Food, water, other people: embarrassing, all of it.

You’re reluctant to seek help the way other people are reluctant to touch a hot stove.

Your brain when someone gets vulnerable: “Error 404: Empathy not found. Detach immediately.”

The title of this book reminds me of Kathleen Hanna mocking-singing, “You get so emotional baby.”

What have I learned today?

The Diary of a Wimpy kid author Jeff Kinney opened a bookstore because he didn’t want to be designing wimpy kid pillowcases the rest of his life.

Elizabeth Gilbert basically hated writing. She said she had “a strong mantra of ‘this sucks’ running through my mind.”

Can relate.

She references this video about validating feelings that’s supposed to be funny. It’s supposedly making fun of the fix-it reflex that men (and I) have.

https://youtu.be/-4EDhdAHrOg?si=yyIwj...

I guess this is used in couples therapy. It basically teaches that wanting validation is irrational, exasperating, and ridiculous. The video is not just dumb. It is rhetorically self-defeating.

So far boring / common sense.

She tells a story about a woman whose dad regularly asked her at dinner, “How did you fail today?” Not to be mean. To get her thinking. I’m going go have to try that with my teen. She’s going to ice me out I bet.

We speak 16K words a day and think “thousands more.” This statistic I found incredibly disappointing; I thought she’d say we think a hundred thousand more.

The Cantonese Potstickers 🥟 are great!

I made Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce. Very delicious.

I’m reading this from the perspective of a parent of a teen whom I raised very deliberately using attachment parenting. I don’t think the author spells this out, but it includes sleeping close to your baby, wearing your baby, breastfeeding, responding quickly to crying, etc. From what my biased self can see, she’s developed healthy attachment tendencies. I know the author says there are other influences too.

How did I not know about GPT-4o's voice that randomly erupted into laughter and coughing fits? It would also take on the voice of the person talking to it without warning. If you go to the System Card (from 8/8/24), and then to the Unauthorized Voice Generation section, you can hear the recording of it outbursting "No!" in the middle of an exchange.

openai.com/index/gpt-4o-system-card

It's eerie.

oooohhhhh now - finally - it’s getting good. Chapter 16 is where we hear about actual, specific, devious and dirty lies. The Prologue - and all the chapters up til now - had me thinking Hao was going to stay vague where we knew it was actually juicy and continue to feed us obnoxious levels of detail where it wasn’t.

Enough about Annie already. Just why. I guess the point is, it’s potential proof Sam is heartless. But like why am I reading about ovarian cysts in a book about AI.

For anyone with Spotify who isn’t fascinated enough by AI lore to listen to 14+ hours, but still interested in how early gpt versions were trained, I’d recommend chapter 5 of Empire. Although when I tried to relay “the really good parts” to my 17yo while we were getting manicures today, she gave me that look that says, nobody cares. 🙄

I’m enjoying this, although I got sidetracked by the Claude Mythos System Card that dropped 4/7. It’s full of lore and reads like a tech bro gossip magazine. Lots of “who said what to whom.” A Grok-Opera, so to speak. 😆 Mira Murati comes across as a badass, and I didn't realize how central Shivon Zilis was. I’ve heard the names Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman enough times they’re etched in my brain.