Flakes, bookshops and Camus

Visited a great little used bookstore in Harvard Square the other day. One of my friends opened Camus' "The Plague" and found a tax return check for $475. She takes it to the counter and the man there breaks out laughing. "She works here," he says. "She's such a flake!"

I thought about it. That is ridiculous, but exactly the kind of thing I would do. She placed her check -probably as a bookmark - into the book, and somehow, without remembering, shelved it in the bookstore and then - responsibly - filed for a new check, but still...

That woman, is me . I love her, with all her flaws.

Lessons from The Fountainhead, part 2

It seems that this book is still haunting my existence. I am playing with ads by google and one of them popped up about ayn rand. So it seems I should return to my little reflection on The Fountainhead.


My other posts on it are under the 'literature' tab. So here's another installment.

"It was not malice. It was not judgement passed upon his merit. They did not think he was worthless. They simply did not care to find out whether he was good. Sometimes, he was asked to show his sketches; he extended them across a desk, feeling a contraction of shame in the muscles of his hand; it was like having the clothes torn off his body, and the shame was not that his body was exposed, but that it was exposed to indifferent eyes." page 99.

So many things come to mind. The most immediate is the art of blogging. You always have the choice of making these thing public. What is worse than people hating you... people not caring. Almost makes me want to shut down on those privacy setting and make it for my eyes only. But then, how would I ever discover if I was good. How would you?

But on a larger note... It's true that people usually don't give you the chance to show that you are good. Many people usually dont care. Few people are willing to take a chance on a stranger. Thats why, in my PSCI class on Social Capital, I thought that sometimes, social capital is a bad thing. It encourages nepotism and closed-mindedness.

Why dont we all take a chance on someone and something new today.