{"id":1728,"date":"2009-02-03T11:25:51","date_gmt":"2009-02-03T10:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geoffjones.com\/2009\/02\/03\/life-lessons\/"},"modified":"2009-02-03T11:25:51","modified_gmt":"2009-02-03T10:25:51","slug":"life-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/?p=1728","title":{"rendered":"Life Lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here are some interesting comments on life that <a href=\"http:\/\/ben.casnocha.com\/2009\/02\/infinite-jest-excerpts.html\">Ben Casnocha<\/a> made after reading<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Infinite_Jest\"> Infinite Jest<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/David_Foster_Wallace\">David Foster Wallace<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>On what you learn from a substance recovery clinic:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>That there&#8217;s a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their wallet.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That (both a relief and a kind of an odd let-down) black penises<br \/>\ntend to be the same general size as white penises, on the whole.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you<br \/>\ndo. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed<br \/>\nand accepted this fact, often rather early on.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him\/her\/it.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That loneliness is not a function of solitude.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than it is to be pissed off.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That 99% of compulsive thinkers&#8217; thinking is about themselves. That<br \/>\nmost Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning<br \/>\nthey have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own<br \/>\nthinking.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That you don&#8217;t have to hit somebody even if you really really want to.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That pretty much everybody masturbates.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That everybody&#8217;s sneeze sounds different.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The shopworn &#8220;Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure&#8221; would seem to have been custom-designed for the case of tattoos.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That &#8220;acceptance&#8221; is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously,<br \/>\nwithout letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody<br \/>\nelse know what it was you did or in any way shape or form trying to get<br \/>\ncredit for it, it&#8217;s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That AA and NA does not apparently require that you believe in Him\/Her\/It before He\/She\/It will help you.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, <em>hurt<\/em>.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ben is a totally fascinating guy to me, this is his <a href=\"http:\/\/ben.casnocha.com\/2009\/01\/2008-personal-executive-summary.html\">personal summary<\/a> of last year and yep he has just turned 20! I&#8217;m hoping to do two weeks in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.interculturacostarica.com\/\">language school<\/a> he went to in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Costa Rica\" rel=\"geolocation\" href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps?ll=9.91666666667,-84.0666666667&amp;spn=10.0,10.0&amp;q=9.91666666667,-84.0666666667%20%28Costa%20Rica%29&amp;t=h\">Costa Rica<\/a> on my big trip \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p class=\"scribefire-powered\">Powered by ScribeFire.<\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are some interesting comments on life that Ben Casnocha made after reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. On what you learn from a substance recovery clinic: That there&#8217;s a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their wallet. That (both a relief and a kind of an odd [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[82,140],"class_list":["post-1728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-ben-casnocha","tag-david-foster-wallace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}