Kant

Maps are the best metaphors, literally.  The best maps are metaphors, metaphorically.

unenlightened self-interest

They they stand, in every rush-hour subway car, like sentries: commuters against the edges of the doors, forcing those exiting and entering to squeeze between them, single file, slowing everyone, even themseleves.  They are the totems of limited human intellegence, of the power of the lowest common denomenator of workaday, small scale, self-defeating greed.  I think of these people every day: they force their crummy little lesson upon me.  They tell me that we are greedy, stupid and boorish.

bdellium

The application of fragrance is an ancient thing.  I like to look at an ancient sculpture or Edwardian painting and imagine: she is perfumed with jasmine, or he smells of lavender, or myrrh.

provenance

That "1" and "2" marking classes on European train cars.  There they have been, and are.

thank you internet

Aha!  I was walking down the sidewalk, thinking to myself. "FTM drag queens: I bet there are."  And, of course there are.  Cool.

cay

I've slowed down - am slowing down.  Becalmed, perhaps.  I must find new wind and the right placement of sails.

sermonette

Bitterness is poison. The bitter die alone. 

El Paso

Among the snake oil salesman's greatest tricks has ever been to seat the new amongst the choir, turn, tell his own troubles, swallow the concoction himself and offer - you - the rest of the bottle.

couger talk

"Where did you find him?  Amber Alert?"

banality

At the moment, the Egyptian channel I am watching is running an endless string of commercials.  For potato chips, DVD players, baby diapers.  It is strangely terrifying.

from the kitchen table, children beside

Bach could not have written for the journey, yet he wrote to flight, by TGV, by jet. Let fields or clouds fly past the window as one hears what is baroque, as one sees what is sped up, yet calm, crowded with life and arrangement. Nature itself is baroque when passed by with attentive reality.

steel flight

Hoist points:

A mighty engine lifts

Or may be lifted.

Winglets:

A spreading wing holds firm

But more gently.

Life vests:

Secreted with their kin

Ever ready. 

Shoulders:

As real as Chicago

Hold me between.

Boeing:

Private yet national

Of me apart.

Above:

Home and Earth beneath me

While I'm soaring.

aboard, glories

Out from my seat, I see the great left wing of this triple seven, stretching at its tip upward, away from the Atlantic below. A secondary flap makes its slight movement, and we are kept level, aloft, and in good cheer, at mighty speed. My apartment would fit through the maw of either engine depending from these wings. The luxuries of the Zeppelein were not so great. Even here in economy. 

nullipara

Childlessness and the bearing of children alike carry a heavy burden of justification - seldom carried.

channels

Boston and Amsterdam. Commercial trade and highly rationalistic religious movements are the beginning and catalysts of tolerance.  The hardness of Calvinism and Puritainism eventually become the firm pavement to congregational, then democratic, then liberal belief. 

Snowden

Well yes, of course, systems administrators are latter-day switchboard operators.  Imagine if Sarah from the Andy Griffith show ever fled through Moscow!  Moscow, Tennessee, that is.

Tweed Courthouse

What does luxury do?  Many things, I'm sure.

Sometimes luxury glows: Tut's golden funeral mask really would be less beautiful without its precious materials and workmanship, indeed without its pharonic coiffure and false beard - that is, shorn of its branding.  But it takes centuries to entomb the cultural ugliness of the artifact and centuries more for the patina of patrimony to develop. 

Contemporary luxury glows best when it is, actually, popular.  The British royal wedding was luxurious in a way that designed for masses to luxuriate in it, and was thus a distant and effective cousin to well-appointed public parks, which were meant to be, in the old fashioned phrase, elevating.  But all this must be done carefully and, forgive me, by the right people.  Misappointed luxury is a mess, enjoyable only as a shtick: Dame Edna.  A showman's luxury is for a simpler, sometimes dirtier, cultural phase: Frédérick Lemaître (as portrayed), with his dandified cane and coat, Liberace, drug pushers with their diamond-capped teeth.

So, often, luxury sickens: little need be said here, except that sickening luxury is a winking, syphilitic thing, beguiling even as it pustulates.  A crust of jewels is often a social crime that almost as often half-hides, half-advertises the actual crimes leading to acquisition.  The manicured, coiffed, neurotic, primped and pimped dog - a symbol of personal, social and moral disorder - Trouble.

Usually, luxury asserts: it is a kind of boldness, or big-toothed smile, or warning.  And that is half of why luxury sells: it promises to sell you.  The nicest paper we buy is to print our resumes on.

Sometimes luxury coddles: sensitivities - real or imagined, natural or acquired, rational or affected - are recognized and dealt with.  The incredibly soft scarf occasionally adorns an incredibly sensitive neck, like a dressing of gauze.  More often, such scarves eventually render the neck more sensitive.  In either case, luxury is a thing to be consumed, to cozy up in, to hold and squeeze as a child does a teddy bear.  That is the other half of why luxury sells: it is a little ball of ownable comfort, occasionally excused as an investment.  Luxury in this very common form is a teddy bear, and usually as infantile.  Lotions.

And thus, luxury often teaches: the needs and tastes implied by luxury are taught deliciously, because indirectly.  Why should there be swans in the lake? Why shouldn't there be steak sauce on the table?  Why are courtrooms expensively appointed?  What is the blindness that necessitates revolution?  There is much to be learned in art musuems, and an important minority of the lessons on offer from art - especially the applied arts - are the lessons of luxury.

Always, luxury signals: any of the foregoing.

sightings

In the subway, the old man who seems to be wearing a suit because it is the only thing he has to wear outside the house.

pivot

My mind knows its needs.  I find myself slowing, now and then, and it is frustrating.  I have so much to do.  But something is being considered, cooked up, within.  Some unseen timer's bell rings and there, enabled by the pause, is a new understanding, well worth the temporary dip in productivity.

March

From my perch at the shoe shine shop, I see the morning's latter commuters pass. Soldiers of many armies. Some their own sole troop: an army of one. Others, like me, of the great professional guilds, phalanxed. Most of two loyalties, officers of the family brigade, making their daily expedition to reinforce some corporate redoubt. 

day by day, trench to trench.

Fight.  It is wisdom.

fear

If I were to wish evil on a society, I could do it no greater harm than to see much of its male youth unemployed. I feel like Francis Urquhart to say it, but some sort of public service conscription is preferable to that.

ask Mr. Malaprop

And there he was, nervous, shaking, perspiring audibly.

empty rooms

A nightmare: my head empties of loved ones and self and only work and pleasure remain.

Manhattan Island

People live and thrive in different particular habitats.  Each person is compatible with a few at most, and that uncomfortably.  Some of us are riverine, others live in the forest canopy.  None of us are truly global.  The things I know how to do - some of which are, in fact, impressive - would be naught in most settings.

Saugerties Lighthouse

We're born to work, after all? Yes, but  peace and beauty and nothing to do are a fine alternative. 

Gorgias

Philosophy distances when it does not debilitate.

after Nash

In city apartments
The best dog breed is that
Better known as a cat.

gulp.

Unless your roots are blessed with location and sunk deep enough to tap water, you must engage, you must run, you must race, you must win your water.

shepherd thyself

The memory of possibly repeatable happiness is the whip that drives the great human herd from within.

on the take

Man is another of the grasping animals.

go

In New York City, stamina is a kind of intellegence.

eulogies

Children are life after death.  The childless fear a final scene like Dirk Diggler's.

spooky juices

Lived faith is not, generally, belief, but a social undertaking that yields belief.  The non-social adjunct to faith is not belief but spiritual wonder.

Radok Blocks

The screen itself may be manipulated in a presentation.  Ordinarily this is not done, or if done, to create a buzz, rather like the ripple of blank verse across a play's dialogue or the expression effect of an organ with a true swell division.  If heightened, it becomes more than a finish: a marquetry and physical poem.

Llewellyn

In business, practice is a second law.

now

I look out to the dawn sky, familiar strips of rose and pink, mauve and blue grey, and up through the foreground, a dragonfly, more carried by the rising draft than flying.

rippling

Good writing flows in a clear, cold stream of lucid concision past shoots of flowering style.

dawdling

The silent cry of young people in developed countries these days, unheard even by themselves, is: Oh, for a seizing purpose!  I know plenty of quack purposes, some of which would convince most of them.  But I don't know one that, really and firmly, touches bottom.

malaprop

I was telling a friend of mine about an inconsiderate thing a group of kids did the other day and he replies: "You should have read them the fifth!"

not helpless

One of the great lessons of childhood is how to cope with one's own incompetence.  To learn to manage dependence, conditional trust, and the dance of pressing forward with letting it be.  Taken into adulthood, we apply these lessons in obvious ways (with doctors, police) and subtler ways (showing willingness to play along while maximizing the chance one does not have to play undesirable games at all).

to have and to hold

What is the ultimate toy for a child?  Not in any esoteric sense, nor in terms of cherished individual memories, but in at large, for ordinary fun and development?  Candidates that come to mind for me: a sandbox; blocks; stuffed animals.

connections

Was there ever so delicious a queen as Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia?  Rains gets as much out of his knuckles, physically, as he gets out of his arch intonation of lines.

But what is going on between him and Lawrence?  Lawrence does seem to be a little more than a promising personel dossier to Dryden - perhaps a protege?

That strange first scene alone together, in which Dryden conspicuously unlocks his office's doors, with their panels of frosted glass, yet Lawrence immediately notices a sculpture and says that's new!  Has he been inside before?  Often before?  Or is it just that he is so aware of archeological finds that he can recognize recent additions to the British catalogue on first sight?

homogenized

How strange to think there was milk in 1947.  It lasted a week or so in the icebox.

an obscure one

"Paris is burning.  There is enough space on the floor to do all that you intend to.  We're not going to be shady, just fierce."

at ease

A gear is made to spin,
But wants to sit on its pin.

A spade has a taste for the garden bed,
But leans against the shed instead.

A box of tools is a happy crew,
Dreaming of nails and bolts
and Phillips-head screws.

pleasures

Aha!  A sentence in a brief I'm writing works better as a chiasm.  Late night made more fun:

The Supreme Court declared that “[a]n elementary and fundamental requirement of due process in any proceeding which is to be accorded finality is notice reasonably calculated, under all the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the pendency of the action and afford them an opportunity to be heard.”  Mullane, 339 U.S. at 314.  The Supreme Court recognized, however, that actual notice is not always possible.  It therefore held that due process requires actual notice to known parties but that for unknown parties, reasonable publication notice is sufficient.

layering

Truly, life is confection.  But being so, is the more real.

His eye is on

Work began early for me so I stepped out to get coffee and a pastry.  Rounding the sidewalk corner from the coffee stand, fiddling with the lid of my disposable cup, I stepped onto an unwary little house sparrow.  I felt the bird before I saw it, sensed the queasy pressure of its little body underfoot, and could only slow my landing stride a bit.  The sparrow was fast and strong and spread its wings against the sidewalk and pulled against the grippy vise of rubber sole and rough concrete that clamped it.  It escaped!  It all happened in a fraction of a second and left both of us a little stunned.  I stared down at the bird; for a moment it staggered.  The sparrow flew unsteadily away; as unsteadily to work trod back the lawyer.

perspective

There's another risk besides a reputation for exaggeration to making a mountain out of a mole hill.  It's that others will conclude you're small.

wagons get hitched, too

New bosses mean new workers.

colors

We pull out of my station for the morning's subway ride to the office.  The conductor: "This is an important messages from the MTA, New York City Transit.  Please do not hold the doors open by sticking your blue backpack in the rear of the train into the doors.  Thank you for riding, and have a good morning."

I exit onto the midtown sidewalks behind a prosperous mother with her little boy's hand in hers, walking beside her.  He's perhaps 4 and she is pointing out basic building features to him as they walk along: "That's a sliding door.  That's a column.  Those are stairs.  That's a drain."  He seems half interested, but then stops and points his fingers, "Oh, Mommy, look at that!"  She looks in the shop window and says, bringing him back to pace, "Oh, that's just a design."  They go on.  A second later I pass and look in to see a boldly patterned rug, crimson and canary yellow, hanging in display.  For those who care to see it: bright above the drain.

pasties

A good writer knows how to shove the eels into the pot and hold the lid down firmly until the water boils.  So says someone struggling to write.

now

Familiarity also breeds contemptibility.

as if Bea Arthur were your spokesperson

A distinct New York City voice is found in advertising and commercial tag lines that lay flat and heavy as the thick steel plates that cover street excavation.  Ess-A-Bagel: "EVERYTHING ON A BAGEL."  A local home furnishing chain called BETTER YOUR HOME.  Papaya King: OUR FRANKFURTERS ARE TASTIER THAN FILET MIGNON.  Fairway Market: LIKE NO OTHER MARKET.  The flat absence of lilt; the nearness to threat: the heavy charm of words meant to be read not heard in the mind.

wages

Some adult lives amount to the funding of bad habits.

folk Freud

When a suckling babe bites the nipple, the flow of milk stops.  And this is the ideal in punishment: there is correspondence and proportion. 

The correspondence is to what the babe wants: milk is wanted, and it is the supply of milk that is interrupted.  The correspondence is not to what the mother suffered.

The proportion is to motivation.  A young babe had little or no motive to bite and the interruption in suckling is for only a few seconds.  An older baby, perhaps, is motivated by temper, and the interruption is longer.

This ideal applies throughout human punishment: when possible, the punishment should correspond to the desire connected to the crime and should be proportioned to counter the bad motivation, with a margin sufficient to public safety (this is why fines and imprisonment should, in my view, be indexed to wealth as well as sized to harm).  Practically, this is often a sharp, sudden, sizable interruption to the flow of what is desired: power over others, money, pleasure, and so forth.

Now, the ideal may not be possible.  And when it isn't, aim for correspondence in time, that is, immediacy, and for limited cost, that is, avoiding excess trouble, resistance, and risk of resentful learning of the wrong lesson.  It is in this light that corporal punishment, never ideal, may be the least bad option.

crime on tv

We Americans came together this week to watch a lot of live porn.  And when it was over, we stood up and cheered.

folk anthropology

I think we have a faculty for alertness to threats to the group we perceive ourselves as belonging to.  The same thing that makes herds circle and flocks of birds fly in unison at the sight by one of a cat, while the squirrel they surround is unperturbed.  We know, but this faculty within us does not know that what is on the other side of a computer or television screen is not here unless there are visual cues that mark the situation as other.  That is why we respond to violence in foreign locales with prayers and sympathy, but with nothing like the riveted alertness an American news watcher presently feels, watching news in Boston.  And it is interesting and important and sad - so there is nothing to push back against the instinct to alertness that rivets the viewer.  Add that it is visual and violent and has villans (unlike a fertilizer plant explosion that was objectively much worse and at least as deserving of attention) and that this is going down in locations that anyone can feel they know (Cambridge, MIT, etc.), and finally that it is one of those landmark shared experiences (I remember where I was when...), and you have a very powerful package.  Of course, for someone who actually lived for years in Cambridge, I can't help the silly, self centered thoughts: that was my 7-Eleven!; that was my Target parking lot!; can you imagine shutting down the whole T?!

formation

What I am saying is: don't give children the vote, precisely because they will be voting citizens.

nursery

The groundsoil of a healthy democracy is not itself democratic: generally happy homes, a civic disposition to neutral sympathy and open public space, usually bought at the (heavy) price of fierce protection of the literal and figurative perimeter.  But democracy itself drops unhealthy leaves - tricks and traps, stunts and Huey Longs - onto that soil, that must either be swept away or outweighed.

JFK

Absence makes the heart see farther.

confounded contraption

Electronic devices deserve more of that word's Victorian connotations.

sayings

Some day I'm going to tell him how the cow ate the cabbage.

party time

Marriage is for others than the couple, first and foremost.  Even the couples' benefits of marriage are chiefly benefits from others, including via the state.

curmudgeonly

Nothing gets lost in translation.  I might as well say my furniture gets lost every time I leave my apartment.  What's awry is the overburdened idea of translation itself - which we somehow set up as Calvin and Hobbes style transmogrification or, worse, as nearly the same as translation in its theological meaning.

spiritual gloves

A certain steady, impermeable incomprehension is how human goodness usually best approaches certain evil.  No explanation, no reformation, no easy sympathetic self-identification, nor even investigation beyond establishing the fact of evil: only capture. 

glories

Fargo's ending, actually better than many of Shakespeare's denouments: Marge Gunderson looks back at the killer she's captured, through the rear view mirror of her sherriff's car.  "So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."  She turns the keys in her car's ignition, shakes her head softly, and drives towards town, joined eventually and silently by cars called in for reinforcement, their red squad lights turning against the white winter, in slow procession.

plectrum

Sightings:  On the carpeted floor of a Manhattan law firm ("high atop the Acme Buiding"), in fact, right outside my office door: a guitar pick.  Stranger still: inspection reveals that it was well used.  I accuse: Col. Mustard, in the Library, with the candlestick!

N Train

As sand through an hourglass do we exit a crowded subway car.

baubles

Childhood memories:

• The crabapple tree in the side yard, and crabapple drink.
• Magnolia cones dropped from the magnolia tree, and their red seeds, with little strands of sticky silk behind.
• Waiting for the red flag on the mailbox to go down so that I could run check the mail.
• The "room" back in the woods made out of briars and bramble.
• The little red building behind our house, and inside, the wave of white painted on the wall.
• Riding bikes to the gas station for hot dogs.
• Pine rosin on our hands from climbing the trees.
• The scales for weighing vegetables at our aunt's farm stand and poking our uncle's tractors under the shed.
• Watching Dad crank open our camper trailer at the state park campground, brushing our teeth in the little camper sink and sleeping on the childen's side of the camper, vinyl curtain drawn, listening to Mom and Dad on the other side, talking quietly to one another in the night.

Thatcher

For better and worse, there are those who make the world their theater, with a kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene.  Where they find the strength to stride so, God only knows.  Some are monsters, none are angels, Thatcher was neither.  And those that are neither, despite our qualms, make the world - and indeed ordinary living - more of the beautiful adventure that living ought to be.

chilling

"In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time."

broken

The horse pulls the wagon because he cannot see a way out from habit.

neighbor's wife

Social norms of monogamy are partly - and importantly - a matter of civil peacekeeping.

like units

Money makes a poor story.  Money eludes our sense of time.  Money is a numeric abstraction and we are concrete innumerates by nature.  Money is important.

good clean fun

Ooh, the tourists sitting next to us walked out of "The Nance" because they were offended.  Didn't take them long either: just a quick escalation in body language communicating disgust and repulsion, then glances to one another and departure.  That made the show much more fun.  And, to be fair, we weren't expecting a minute long baring of freshly bathed, hairy ass either, nor the glint of stagelit testicles dripping with bathwater, nor some believably acted horny anonymous-sex fueled kissing.  It's ok to walk out if you don't like that.  We and the rest of the New Yorkers and Nathan Lane-loving tourists stuck around.  And - oh yes - the elderly lesbian couple sitting on the other side of us up in the balcony were doing some discreet petting by the time intermission snuck up on us.

No, "The Nance" wasn't great writing - just good writing with a few bits of new and solidly written pathos and, mostly, the good grace to get out of the way now and then and let us enjoy a good twenty minutes, combined, of beautifully resurrected genuine old burlesque chestnuts.  That you won't find anywhere else.

Robert Bringhurst

I had it all under control.  Less furtive calligraphy when alone at home.  No more guilty amazon.com purchaces of old books on letterforms, page composition and poster script.  But now it all gets out of hand: letterpress books of essays on the physical act of reading; old used copies in German of theories of stroke width in written and printed lettering; a survey of Soviet typefaces.

This is what happens when I don't have enough work to do.

flags and eagles and tanks

"James J. DiFidele, Esq., Attorney at Law", reads the small billboard in Queens.  The visual is basically unsuprising: a bald eagle, a waving American flag, the attorney himself, nicely coiffed, smiling and confident, photo cropped at mid-chest.  All perfectly normal.  But, but - he is wearing a tank top.

Carnegie

Certainly Bach's St. Matthew Passion is the greater of his surviving passions - taken as whole works.  But the St. John Passion is mostly greater minute for minute.  Although greatness, at this level, is nearly absurd: it is as if I said that, taken as a whole, Earth's landmass had greater beauty than its oceans.  But that, by the square meter, the ocean is often more exciting.

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying: that Bach's Matthew is land; his John is sea.

thank you Karl Llewellyn

What the Uniform Commerical Code does in basic situations, it does very well.  How long do I have to deliver goods?  There's an answer for that.  It is a thing of beauty, rivalling, perhaps excelling, the Bankruptcy Code for its cohesion and beauty of purpose.

windows and arms

One of the useful things I carry from philosophical reading is attentiveness to unit selection.  The mind selects units automatically in most contexts, usually correctly.  Awareness of unit selection permits both correction of the occasional error and sometimes the opportunity to shift the perspective of others to our advantage.  And it illuminates the occasional disorientation that comes from lapses in automatic unit selection.  One stares sometimes, and a written word becomes letters, or a spoken word becomes mere sounds.  On my walk to work this morning, I saw a construction worker carefully carrying a large iron pipe.  I thought: Why so careful?  And then I saw that he was protecting the relatively delicate threads at either end of the pipe from scraping against the scaffolding above or concrete sidewalk beneath.  The threads and not the pipe were at issue.  So far, so good.  But when I looked up, not at all attentively, there was a moment when the commuter in front of me was not a commuter, but only an arm floating in a sea of background.  My mind had abstracted the threads of the pipe from the pipe and then, momentarily, done the same to the commuter: disembodied his arm.  To clear this, I looked up at the buildings.  My mind persisted: floating windows, abstracted from the buildings to which they belonged.  And then, the buildings come back, the commuters come back whole, all is back.  This all occurred in less than a second.  Units.

folk biology

Somehow it doesn't suprise me that a mammal's mouth is both for eating and vocalizing: it is easy to imagine the vocal capacity as layered on.  Nor that my mouth can be used as an alternative to the nose for breathing: redundancy for meeting the most immediate need through double purpose makes perfect sense.  Nor that smell is co-located in the nose.  I could go on.

But I suppose I am suprised that ingestion and respiration converge in the throat, and that liquid elimination and reproduction converge in the same organs.  After all, each of both pairs of functions are basic - and they don't seem to do anything for one another but potentially interfere.  (We have all had the experience of nearly choking on a swallow of water that goes down wrong.)  The idea that this is a matter of merely efficient doubling up doesn't satisfy.

But it does make for an elegant double-wye symmetry.  One imagines a shape like this: >--<  ; and that is, after all, an anthropomorphic configuration.

named galleries

Art museums are inverse cemeteries.  When some rich men die, their treasures are unburied.

illiberal

Harems were, of course, an expression of someone's freedom.

401k

We are all, in some ways, refugees - did we but know it.  Full freedom is not an option.  The question is: what will I surrender to?  What I will to be is smartly in thrall.

"Look up, Hannah!"

That is how Chaplain begins the great melodramatic coda to his famous speech at the end of The Great Dictator.  Somehow I have matured into an appreciation of great melodramatic efforts.  Bach's, Chaplain's, others'.  Something in me says - for the great artists, it is nothing to be afraid of.  Only a mountain to climb.

aq!

I have what I hope is a permanent suspicion of the feelings of consumption and the corresponding determination never to identify as a consumer.  But I do understand that it is one of life's simple pleasures, and good, to enjoy buying a coffee, a rug or a ticket to see a show.

at the next turn

But then, really, what did you expect life to be.  Those who bend life to their will are served more by the blind curves than by the purpose.  Did they but know it.

the museum of lost idioms

Would you like me to place the call?  Place.

glories

The Carter family, from station XET, Monterey, down Mexico way.

of course

It is important not to show relief when things are going your way in a difficult negotiation - win almost with a yawn.

rhetoric lesson

Robert Moses, inveighing against the rigid elitism of the board of the Metropolitain Museum of Art in the early 1940s, called them:

"snooty trustees who do not know and care what the public is thinking."

The lawyer in me wants to amend this to "snooty trustees who do not know or care..."  But then read these in alternative and see why Moses had it right: the and points to the public, while the or reaches back to the trustees.  The forward-leaning emphasis is more effective: it is still cutting, but more prescriptive - there is a stronger hint of constructive principles.  My alternative is merely cutting. 

It is a small word that makes a small but perceptible difference.

loaded

It is strange to hear an investment banker tell you how much he loves gambling at casinos.

Hubble

We see color and cloud,
As we saw chalise and wafer,
Bearing the transmuted.

after Blake

Prefer wise errors to foolish perfection.

mirror

I have poor gaydar, but relatively strong ltr-dar.  If a guy - particularly a gay guy - is in a long relationship, I can see it.  There's a sort of sweet ripeness to him, just going soft.

sightings

Today in the office elevator: a well dressed woman carrying a hatbox!

and then I ran out of P words

Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Presence is nine-tenths of possession.
Persistence is nine-tenths of presence.
Preparation is nine-tenths of persistence.
Purpose is nine-tenths of preparation.

Carousel

What I had missed - somehow - in Carousel, was the elegant symmetry of the two couples.  One afraid to begin loving but tragically loyal once in love.  The other rationally and happily ready to love, but resolutely able to walk apart when the other doesn't suit.  If I loved you versus had I loved you.