Holidays

Taking Stock: Nostalgia

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Widen the screen just a little, in fact, and a particularly prominent and disturbing lost self can be seen as merely one guest in a room full of permutations, good and bad. And each of those selves must have an idealized doppelgänger of its own. (Benedict Cary’s Times article)

Today we take stock. And here’s a (not always reliable but interesting) social studies take:

A 2003 study at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, Irvine, for instance, suggested that young adults who scored high on measures of psychological well-being tended to think of regretted decisions as all their own — perhaps because they still had time to change course. By contrast, older people who scored highly tended to share blame for their regretted decisions. “I tried to reach out to him, but the effort wasn’t returned.”

In New Year’s Cocktail, Benedict Cary discusses the role of regret – at times useful but at others corrosive.

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2008

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All the best to my fellow Chicagoboyz contributors and readers! I hope that the coming year leaves you healthy and happy or at least prosperous and contented. Feliz año nuevo, as they say in Japan.

Christmas 4: War Toys

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One of life’s many disappointments is that my son has no interest in war toys. So, I did not get to relive my childhood vicariously, with green tanks assaulting lincoln-log forts and swarms of plastic green army men pushing the grey plastic Germans back all the way to their doomed last stand in front of the fireplace. Nope.

Hence I had no one to buy these incredibly cool toy gurkhas for.

Oscar Wilde said youth is wasted on the young. Toys are similarly, to a great extent, wasted on children.

(I recently read this awesome book about the real gurkhas, which I heartily recommend.)