For the past six months I’ve had a hankering to write a post about death every day in October leading up to Halloween.

I’m not entirely sure why I want to do it. I haven’t gone emo. I don’t feel morbid. I still don’t care much for Tim Burton movies. So…

All I know is that two ideas have been rattling around my mind for some time. The first idea is from Steve Jobs’s Stanford graduation speech. It’s the famous excerpt wherein he talks about how death itself compels us to be moral.

Jobs says:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of...

For the past six months I’ve had a hankering to write a post about death everyday in October. This is a test to see if I can do it on svbtle, or if my account has expired.

This might be a good option:

source

Admittedly, it doesn’t address the racial problems at play — but it does show why the police force in the United States needs dramatic revamping.

I can’t remember the last time a film affected me as much as Richard Linklater’s Boyhood did. The movie stirred emotions I’d put aside or forgotten about for years, and toward the end of the movie I knew it was going to permanently change my life for the better.

As you probably know, Boyhood was filmed over 12 years with the same cast. Basically, you just watch a boy named Mason grow up. That’s it. There are no major plot twists — very few surprises.

Instead, the movie shows a series of authentic and generally mundane moments that are made all the more real by the fact that the cast remains consistent throughout the film. Because the moments aren’t heightened for dramatic effect, they conjured feelings from my own boyhood and I realized that in some ways I have wandered very far from that self. Watching Boyhood awakened parts of me I didn’t know still existed.

A few additional...

This morning I stumbled on this arrangement of Paul Simon’s Graceland, and it conjured all sorts of emotions.

The young musician captures the complexities of Simon’s rhythms and melodies perfectly, all in a single instrument. You can tell he’s also aware of the complexities in the lyrics — the heartache and allusions.

There’s power in these lyrics. Graceland is a song that becomes more meaningful to me each year. I’ve been listening to it since was released in 1986. It’s a song that shows us how to love and how to forgive.

Here’s a line-by-line look at why the lyrics are so wonderful.

The song starts with a simile:

The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar.

On the surface, Simon is just saying that the Mississippi river looks like a National guitar (pictured below).

But there’s something more here.

National guitars were originally made in the 1930s and...

Five years ago, my eyesight went fuzzy. I was a college teacher, and the back of the classroom was a blur.

So I visited an optometrist. He said I needed glasses, and he told me which frames would look great on my face. Impulsively, I chose a pair that didn’t really look great at all — probably not on anyone’s face — and I forked over $300 for them.

Why did I do this? Part of it was my aversion to shopping, and part of it was that I didn’t know better. I’d never paid attention to the price range of glasses, and I didn’t understand that paying $300 for a pair of glasses is a rip off.

It should have been obvious. $300 is a lot of money for wire and plastic, right? The frame was plastic and the lenses were plastic, and together they cost $300. When I was a tween I bought Star Wars action figures that had more plastic on them and were 1/50th the price, so I should have known better, but I...