Money

People who want to be rich tend to think that everybody wants to be rich. I don't want to be rich. It literally wouldn't mean anything to me. As long as you can afford food, clothes, medication, a home and other important stuff, money is pointless. Buying a boat doesn't make anyone happy. Happiness is other things. People that are sincerely interested in money are people who have nothing else.

When people start talking about money I get so bored that I fall asleep. It's as silly as talking about air and how to get more and more of it. Too much air and you're dead. The same goes for money.

A school is a place that turns everything it teaches into something that people hate.

I love you and your daughters

I love you, you, you, you, and you

I love your whole gang. Such cute, intelligent, strange people

Our gang's pretty good too

Feeling nervous

"Happiness" can't be the only thing that matters, other deeper things like wisdom have to matter too; because a society where everybody's feeling good but ignorant and indifferent is a society that will perish. Very quickly.

Disturbingly sexy lips

I'd already started thinking that I was unable to get what the big deal about Hemingway is, but surprisingly, A Moveable Feast is a pretty good book. The best part is where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald for the first time. (I think that they are both hilarious, mostly unintentionally. I often find serious historical people unintentionally hilarious. They also have great names, "Hemingway" and "Fitzgerald".)

Scott has such sexy lips that Hemingway finds his company disturbing. (What?) Hemingway can't concentrate on what Fitzgerald is saying because he can't stop staring at Fitzgerald's oddly short legs. (What?) Fitzgerald drinks something and starts looking dead (what?), and later he says that it wasn't the drink that made him look dead, he just felt annoyed by some other customers (what?). I don't know, it's so absurd and nonsensical that it's good.

What's interesting is that Fitzgerald suffered from the same tragic condition that I personally know too well: the one that makes you look either super sexy or really horrible in pictures:

Well hello there handsome

Dude, what's going on with your hair?

If I taught a course on literature, it would be fucking ridiculous. But entertaining.

Why am I always commenting on America and American things and American people? I keep doing this so much that my friends think that I'm American. I don't know. Because for someone who watches television, America is everywhere? Morrissey has a song called "America is not the world". Strangely, I've listened to it only once.

"Just be yourself"

Suddenly, hating Nickelback became something that 'cool' people 'have' to do. Suddenly, thousands of people who previously had no particular opinion whatsoever on Nickelback 'hated' Nickelback. People who are hysterically trying to be cool or normal are scary because they are such idiots. Together they are capable of horrifying things.

I'm afraid that the great majority of humans are like this: not thinking, just imitating.

I just saw a headline The Bravest Thing You Can Do, According to Shailene Woodley (a short article about what actor Shailene Woodley said at the 'Teen Choice Awards'). If it's not "Just be yourself", then I am a walrus, I thought. I clicked on the headline. Yeah, it was "Just be yourself". I am still a walrus, though.

Just be yourself has become one of the most popular phrases in Western culture, but what the hell does it really mean? I think that the idea is beautiful in itself, when you truly and deeply understand it. But is the fact that everybody's repeating "Just be yourself" all the time making people actually "be themselves"?

How many people are capable of "being themselves", not caring at all about the opinions of other people? Maybe 2 or 3 in a thousand? The modern ideal is to be "individualistic", but how many of us actually are individualistic? 5 percent at best?

I don't know, but we are socially dependent animals and "Just be yourself!" is not going to change that. Most people saying "Just be yourself" are extremely unoriginal and insecure. They've heard "Just be yourself" thousands of times, but they haven't thought about what being yourself really means. They just think that it's something kinda good or whatever.

Modern individualism is an illusion. "Just be yourself" isn't making us more independent; for some reason it's just one of those things that sound good in a culture where narcissism has become acceptable. People post pictures saying "Just be yourself" on their Instagrams, and the next fucking picture is a picture of sushi, identical to all the pictures of sushi that their friends are posting all the time. People see other people do and say stuff, and then they repeat that same stuff almost automatically, and never ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing. If everybody's just being themselves, then everybody must be very closely related to each other.