More delays (What a good boy/Smooth Operator)

It really is coming soon. Should have been now, but the distraction of gnat bites, plus the need to find 15 multiple choice questions on Child Language for a makeup midterm tomorrow morning, have combined to delay this effort for one or two more evenings. In the meantime, two trivial notices from a day spent taxiing children around Kobe:

Click to play
The first is that one insect bite may not be a bad thing—even if it's not John Donne's Flea—since the itch reminds you forcefully that you are human with a real body, and not a brain in a vat. (Or at least that you were human once—it's hard to exclude the possibility that you are now an envatted brain with a recollection of having been bitten. But then I realise that in my memory, I was much younger and fitter than this, and my flesh a good deal more perfect, so this itch must be real, for better or worse). The same principle as a hairshirt, I suppose, without the self-hatred. However, though one bite may be sobering, several—all performing a complex symphony of irritation—conspire to become a very bad thing indeed. Eeyyaaaa!

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Second is the observation that for as long as there is Starbucks, Sade (the 80s singer, not the 18th century aristocrat) will not want for a royalty check (cheque). I'm not sure how many times it is now that I have drunk a tall cappuccino—which is neither one nor the other—to the tune of Smooth Operator, as again today. And yet, how marvelously apt, for this is a marriage of souls 'as dreams are made on', the café and its song: both professional, innocuous, welcoming; both transcending national and cultural boundaries with ease and poise, pleasing to the senses, contemporary yet 'established', devoid of class, yet studiously bourgeois; both ultimately as unsatisfying as they are inauthentic—the places where we pass our lives while aspiring to something better...

Tot straks/à bientôt.

For German speakers looking for an antidote to Starbucks, click to play

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Reflections on Thought: Work in Progress

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Devenish

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