Random Thoughts 2

 A few weeks ago I blogged about joygiving (as opposed to painstaking) and today there's an article in the New York Times about Freudenfreude. It's the opposite of Schadenfreude in that you take joy in the joy of others. I like that. I want more of it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Italian Sub Reviews (No. 1)

Image
(Hy-Vee Party Sub) My favorite sandwich is The Italian Sub. An Italian sub has several cured meats (e.g., ham, salami, capicola, or mortadella) and provolone cheese. The variation I prefer, and which I often made for myself when employed at Brivi's Deli in Springfield, New Jersey, includes lettuce, tomato, onions, and oil and vinegar. Other people like adding hot peppers, pickles, or maybe mayo (I've heard).  There are probably other standard sandwich toppings that get invoked, but the toppings aren't the main event: how each ingredient is prepared matters the most. For example, the lettuce needs to be shredded, not ripped, or the whole leaf. Delis shred the lettuce by running it through the meat slicer. It only takes a second. The tomatoes should get cut by the slicer too so that they are thin, but not too thin, and uniform in width. The same goes for the onion, and it's almost always a red onion. The meats should be cut very thin. In fact, the right term is "shav...
Read more

What is the Revenge of Scobie?

  I started this blog for no other reason than I cannot remember the login information for my old blog  St. Scobie's Mock Whiskey . I've got other blogs (one on Medium, one for work) but none scratch the writing itch quite the way St. Scobie does. The other blogs have so many rules - some written, some internal - and I missed having someplace to say whatever I want. Not that my posts are all that radical. It's more likely that they are too silly or unprofessional for my other blogs. The writer part of me wants to stop being so self-critical, to stop pre-editing before I even say anything. I guess this blog is an effort to avenge myself. You can read about the origin of St. Scobie here .
Read more

Random Thoughts

I used my blog for my random thoughts. Somehow, Facebook took that away, imploring me to post an update every time I opened the website. This was before there was an app, and indeed, it was before I knew apps existed. I still had a Blackberry at the time. I might be out of practice with my random thinking but I'm going to give it the old college try. Today I was ironing very tiny folds on my quilt seams, and I thought of the word painstaking, which is what it was. And it occurred to me that painstaking is not a combination of pain and staking, it's a combination of pains and taking. One is taking pains to do something in a particular way, usually the right way, or the hard way. This is a corny extension of my thinking: the opposite of taking is giving and the opposite of pain is joy, so something which is painstaking is also really joygiving, but we don't talk about endeavors that are joygiving. Ironing the tiny folds of my quilt square seams is both painstaking and joygivi...
Read more