“Marry the Night,” Lady Gaga

“Bad Company,” Bad Company

“Slam,” Onyx

“Moonlight in Glory,” Brian Eno and David Byrne

“You Belong to the City,” Glenn Frey

This is in my top five ever, I think. I love this song.

Here is how to make broccoli, fast, in a way that tastes delicious. The mother of my child taught me. You will want to do this, because broccoli is very good for you. Using this method, you can easily, quickly, and cheaply cook broccoli and eat it as a side dish with your lunch or dinner. Or breakfast; I don’t care. Anyway, do it.

1. Buy a bag of frozen broccoli. Get this right. The other week, I made the mistake of buying an off-brand, and I got mostly stems and few florets. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you; it matters to my one-year-old, who LOVES BROCCOLI.
2. Put some of the frozen broccoli in a microwavable container. If you are feeding the broccoli to a child, use a BPA-free container. If you are old like me, IT’S TOO LATE FOR YOU, so Gladware or whatever is fine.
3. Drizzle the broccoli with olive oil and sprinkle it with salt. I wouldn’t say be liberal with either, but don’t be stingy exactly either. Remember that if you add too little, you can always add more; but if you add too much, you’re screwed.
4. Put the lid on the container and shake it up to disseminate the olive oil and salt. What, you didn’t know you needed a container with a lid? What, you just jumped ahead without reading the instructions all the way through once first? This is on you, not me.
5. With the lid resting on top of the container, microwave it all for, like, two minutes. Do not actually fasten or close the lid, or everything will explode. And it’s not a bad idea to stop things halfway through and give everything a good shake again (do fasten the lid for that, or hold it down tightly), to get the olive oil and salt better distributed. Finally, it might take longer than two minutes; possibly it will take less, though I doubt it. Anyway, this isn’t beef Wellington — just give the broccoli a try and see if it needs more time.

All right. Now you have perfect broccoli, and it’s pretty healthy, and it’s tasty, and it took like no time at all. That was easy. Don’t you feel dumb for not knowing? I did. You have no excuses now. Eat more vegetables.

Someone reminded me what a great song this is. His second single. I remember hearing it on the radio — the first time I would experience that faint, foreboding sense that something I liked was just not going to catch on with the mainstream.

Therefore the Master concerns himself
with the depths and not the surface,
with the fruit and not the flower.
He has no will of his own.
He dwells in reality,
and lets all illusions go.

—Lao-tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell

(via Alan Jacobs)

Star Trek, like Law & Order (which, by the way: I have compared the two franchises in an number of blog comments scattered around the internet, and I am of the belief that they are largely the same show, and I am right), is something I like to turn on, on basic cable, and sort of fall into. It doesn’t really matter to me which particular episode I’m watching. I mean, I have preferences—I would rather see anything where the main plotline is about Picard or Data; I tend to roll my eyes at the ones dealing with Worf’s Klingon heritage—but the point is mostly just to spend time on the Enterprise, and beyond that, there’s something delightful and serendipitous about the possibility that, hey, maybe it will be a good one where they get caught in a freaky time-travel paradox, or maybe, even better, it will be one I haven’t seen twelve times already.

Having to choose diminishes something; it’s far more akin to picking a DVD off the shelf and loading it into the player, which I have no interest in doing with TNG, not even to do like a critical study of the show (there are already plenty of those out there, I think). And I realize Netflix is supposed to replicate the picking-a-DVD process, but it doesn’t have to. It would be super simple (I assume?) for them to add a shuffle function that let you watch randomly chosen episodes either from a single season of a show or from all its seasons. And that would neatly replicate the genuine TV-watching experience. People who wanted to choose their own episodes could still do so, of course. Nobody loses anything. And this strikes me as one of those weird, intuitive things where the company thinks, “Nobody would ever want that,” but it would turn out that, actually, there is a sizable group of folks just like me who do want it, and who would use it all the time.

I read something recently about how mildly depressed people tend to have a more accurate picture of reality. Now, I imagine that level of accuracy declines with more serious depression; I’m not an expert, but my own, occasionally intense, bouts with depression have involved me having a really distorted view of things—I become heartbroken or furious over solvable problems, I convince myself that I’m an irredeemable mess over some relatively minor failure. But those times are nonetheless the exception. Most of the time, I would say I’m closer to mildly depressed, and I think, after years of ruminating on it (seriously), that my grasp on reality is pretty accurate. There are some glaring exceptions, as I think there are with everyone, but if they’re pointed out, I generally acknowledge them.

So I think a knee-jerk reaction to my having said that (besides, “Wow, you sure think highly of yourself”) would be to sympathize and tell me to get help or something, because I shouldn’t go through life being mildly depressed. (I’m pretty sure, in fact, that would be the reaction, since that’s what I got last time I blogged about being depressed.) And my reply to that would be that I appreciate the sentiment and the goodwill, but please fuck off, because I am quite happy being mildly depressed. And what I mean by that is: I cannot imagine going through life in this place and time in a manner that is intellectually honest and true without being a little depressed.

Our high school philosophy teacher, Larry Holzer, said something slightly different but along the same lines: People who are happy all the time are insane.* I thought he was right twenty years ago, and I still think so.

Listen, things are bad. Some things are very good, too, I will readily allow. Certainly in my own life, I am muchly blessed. I have a loving family, many close and amazing friends, all my basic needs are more than met, and I just spent today with the most delightful person on the entire planet, who happens to be eighteen months old. But I know how good I have it, and I am also constantly, almost viscerally aware of how bad things are for many of the people I share the planet with. I don’t want to turn that off; I don’t think the answer is to shrug mentally and ignore it. But it is depressing.

And so are so many other things. I’m not talking about the shooting, or other such events, although of course they are awful tragedies, and my brain buckles when I try to put myself in the place of one of the victims’ parents. But I mean far more mundane stuff: The extending of the school year, so that our kids have less leisure time, so that they can make more money than kids from other countries, ostensibly so that they’ll have…more leisure time. Our increasing, and increasingly literal, addiction to technology, grounded in a belief that what’s new is automatically worthwhile, and that as long as we can somehow avoid feeling bad, we must be feeling good. Our simultaneous obsession with sex and only-very-slowly eroding insistence on treating it like a major taboo. The ruination we’re wreaking on this planet, and my persistent suspicion that we have less time to halt or fix it than we think (a suspicion, incidentally, I’ve had for years now, and that keeps getting borne out by the latest findings).

I could go on, but I will spare you. To bring this back around to my original point, what I am saying is that there are sound reasons for feeling sad or horribly frustrated or hopeless if you are a person in our society. Of course there are also people who simply (“simply,” ha) suffer from genuine chemical imbalances or genetic issues or pathologies. But even in those cases, I wonder how much those problems are exacerbated by cultural factors. So I really think that any serious discussion of treating mental illness in our society—in pretty much any society, as best I can tell, right now—has to take into account that this place is enough to make anyone at least a little nuts, and maybe we need to address some of those structural issues at some point too, rather than just deciding that “sanity” is best measured by how well you’ve adjusted to what are, objectively speaking, some pretty insane times.

*There are actually a couple different ways to read that Holzer line; it doesn’t have to relate to the point I’m making. You could just read it as: You’re screwed-up if you don’t experience the full range of human emotions.