Watch Out! Everybody’s Trying to Help You

Lately I’ve noticed that a lot of my friends are getting kind of pronoid. Okay, more than a bit. To be honest, there’s an epidemic of pronoia among people I love. I’m even showing signs of it myself. I feel it’s important that you know about this condition, just in case it begins to affect you or someone you love.

Pronoia is the opposite of paranoia; it means believing that people and circumstances are secretly conspiring to help and benefit you. Insane, right? I know! Yet I find myself slipping into this frame of mind, especially when I hang out [...]

Lame Animal Totem: Turducken

Turducken is a dish consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, which is in turn stuffed into a deboned turkey. If turducken is your totem animal, you have multiple layers of limp energy with no solid internal structure whatsoever.  

Turducken energy is complicated, overstuffed, and excessive. When Turducken waddles onto your table, you can be sure your goose is cooked on many levels. For example,

you may be trapped in a terrible relationship, unrewarding job, or unsatisfying ménage a trois because you lack the backbone God gave your feathered brethren. Call on Turducken to help you absorb [...]

Turning Failure into Success

I spent at least half my childhood drawing. By the time I got to college and signed up for my first drawing class, I was pretty comfortable with a pencil. My teacher was a brilliant draftsman named Will Reimann. To impress him, I fired up all my best tricks: lots of varied lines, fade-outs, soft gradients. One day while I was drawing, something landed on my sketch pad. It was a mechanical drafting pen.

“Use that from now on,” said Mr. Reimann. And he smiled the smile of a man who has hatched an evil plot.

Oh, how I hated that [...]

Lame Animal Totem: Aardwolf

The Aardwolf, as I’m sure you know, is a stripy hyena-like creature from Africa that can excrete a full tenth of its body weight in one magnificent defecation. (How much would you excrete if you were an Aardwolf?  Would it be more or less than you can lift?)

A single Aardwolf can consume a quarter of a million termites in one night. Along the way, it slurps up a lot of sand and other assorted detritus, much like a child in Sunday school learning that God is infinitely compassionate, and will curse all who break certain dietary restrictions.

If you’ve inhaled [...]

The Benevolent Guide

A few days ago, my partner Karen’s beloved father passed away after a long illness. It was a very gradual departure; for weeks, everyone thought that each hour might be Charlie’s last. The days immediately following his passing were unthinkably grueling for Karen and her family, but I’ll say this for imminent death: it clearly differentiates the things that matter from the things that don’t. Being together matters; how we look doesn’t. Love matters; status doesn’t. Having a roof over our heads matters; having a mansion doesn’t. Peace matters so much that by comparison, literally nothing else does.

A few [...]

How to Track Your Perfect Career

At first I trusted my car’s global positioning system—why not?—but soon its smooth voice began sounding like the homicidal computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Turn left now,” the GPS would command as I drove along a freeway, with concrete barriers to my left. “You have reached your destination,” it would assure me after leading me to a warehouse full of prostitutes and crack dealers. Once my kids programmed it to speak French, the GPS abandoned all pretense of helpfulness and began directing me southward in any and all circumstances. Presumably it was heading for Mexico to escape fraud charges.

These [...]

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