My friend’s back from her vacation, and we’re having a blast. Me and Pamela Lee go way back (that’s her real name). Friends from college, I used to attend her rock concerts and she used to lecture me on my dyed hair. But now we look normal, and totally well-adjusted:
While she was at work today, I passed the time with her boyfriend, Noah, a physicist and a total nerd (and I mean it in a good way). We biked along Venice beach, stopped in an Indian fast-food restaurant, and made plans to go the the museum. We never made it to the museum.
You see, Noah is a self-described intellectual, and I am a self-described intellectual, and we both love more than to discuss inane things no one cares about. So we spent the whole day in the Indian fast-food joint. To prove it, here’s Noah with the daily newspaper:
We discussed my fascination with grammatical rules, how you can’t divide an angle into thirds using only a compass, why fifth-level equations are unstable, and everything you don’t care about. Bu what I love more than anything is that we argued philosophy.
I love to argue about morality, or rather suss out new ways of looking at the world. And I don’t always take a stance in the argument I agree with, just to help the discussion for its own sake.
Noah postulated that as intellectuals, we owed it to society to work to improve it, especially our own country, even if it caused us to sacrifice our own happiness. I said that while it is nice to help society, I’m not sure “owe” is a necessary construction. And why our own country? Can’t a country be seen as an arbitrary delineation? Why not focus on my state or city? Or even my block?
Then Noah thought he could shut me down. “You’ve got to speak truth to power,” he said, invoking an old Quaker saying.
“Do you know what that even means?” I asked. He didn’t, and I won. (Is this posting interesting to anyone but me?)
Anyhow, if you care, speaking truth to power refers to the old Quaker tradition of referring to people with “thee” and “thou.” In the old days, “you” was reserved for royalty and people of high social status, and “thou” was for everyone else. Quakers, believing that everyone was equal in God’s eyes, refused to use “you,” and got into a lot of trouble for it, often being jailed, fined, and beaten. Quakers used “thou” into the twentieth century, but then abandoned it, for it no longer served its purpose, and only seemed strange.
Anyhow, to end this with another bit of randomness, here’s a cool pharmacy we passed in Santa Monica:
