Quote of the day: What's Hard

From an interview in May 2008, "Tom Waits True Confessions":

Q: What’s hard for you?

A: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.

Being tHere Now

Andrew Sullivan on whether to photograph or not photograph an experience:

... why is remembering an event the key to experiencing it fully? Sometimes, being there, without mediation, without worrying about whether one day it will be forgotten, just being there is what matters. Life is now; and when we obsess about storing it for the future, we forget to experience it in the only way we truly can: in the present.

Amen! I love taking and looking at photos, mind you, but love even more simply having experiences that I am not attempting simultaneously to document. Either you have the experience, OR you document it through a "how will this look on paper?" lens.

When you die, you can't take your photo -- or anything you can see or think you "have" -- along with you. We have nothing. Including other people, even our own children. But when I watched my mother die it became clear, it is exactly our experience that does continue, on both sides of the veil.