On Infatuation

Experienced an immediate (although brief) infatuation with the coffee shop guy today because I admired the enthusiasm and élan he showed in taking my latte order. I used to be embarrassed about the ease and alacrity with which I develop crushes, but I've found that all forms of love (even silly infatuations) are doors to spiritual growth, since they represent a sudden seeking for something we deeply desire but didn't even realize we were missing. Like an artist obsessed with a beautiful (or ugly) face glimpsed for a moment on the subway, the fixation lasts until we identify and internalize whatever unique quality caught our mind's eye. Once the artist has successfully rendered his vision into art, made it tangible and therefore able to be possessed, the obsession lifts.

Except when it doesn't. Sometimes a face casually encountered takes on the character of a muse, propelling the artist along through sketch after sketch, each effort incomplete, capturing and possessing an aspect of the desired but never the entirety. Marriage may be the only solution for an artist or lover in this position, securing access to the beloved for eternity, which will still be an insufficient amount of time to process and absorb the many uniquenesses of the desired one.

Detritus of the American Dream

This is smart:

Maybe you think the American Dream is about getting a good job and earning more money than your parents. But the American Dream used to be about moving west and buying land, and now we see that as something for older generations that doesn’t apply to us. So maybe the idea of more money and better jobs is the new detritus of the American dream [...].

As I say, this is smart (even though PT isn't the first to say it) but I continue to be puzzled by her overall 'generationism' -- a word I didn't know existed until I went looking for an appropriate description of her view that Generation-Y has a fundamentally different, and better, sense of work-life balance than Generation-Boomer. I seem to know an awful lot of people my age and younger who are totally committed to working long and hard and sacrificing a personal life -- I think some of them have early retirement in mind, but this is stupid, because (1) life is not like dinnertime, where you have to eat your vegetables before you get dessert, and (2) retirement would be boring. On the other hand, everything I know about defining work success in a way that actually makes you happy, I learned from my mom. So I'm sympathetic to Penelope's vision of the future, where careers are complementary to -- not competitive with -- relationships, but I'm suspicious of the idea that all people born after 1980 have this intuition naturally built into their psyches.