Do you have any unwed female cousins?  Let’s make this happen.

Joanna Newsom has a… unique singing voice and presence, and plays the harp.  So she’s an acquired taste that some are unable to acquire.  (Their loss.)  Her two real albums are The Milk-Eyed Mender (shorter songs, mostly just voice and harp) and Ys (really long songs with complicated orchestral arrangements).  Both albums are magical.

I don’t want to talk about the Religious Right in a public forum, because I am afraid they will lock me in a torture dungeon.

halphillips:

Morgan Phillips, you are my favorite person and I wish we were cousins.

It’s not that meditation isn’t simple… it’s that it’s time-consuming and doesn’t work immediately.  At least, not in my limited experience.  All it did was sort of highlight how much trouble I have concentrating, while eating up half an hour or so of my day.  I probably did it wrong.

Reading every Marvel comic would take a long time, but I think it’d be fun to try, given the resources.  As long as you could keep pace with the new ones, you’d finish eventually, and even before finishing, it’d be cool to feel like each comic was part of the same giant ongoing story.  I kind of want to do it.

Conservatives pay lip service to limited government, sure— but don’t social conservatives support a ton of government intervention?  Prayer in public schools, censorship, “law and order” at the expense of civil rights, etc.  Isn’t the religious right non-libertarian by definition?

What’s some good Joanna Newsom stuff I should check out?

morgantrsp:

halphillips:

Pick your favorites and respond!

• Would I enjoy being a music critic (or a critic in general)?  I seem to like sharing my thoughts about music, TV shows, etc.  I love immersing myself and having encyclopedic knowledge, and when I feel like I’ve nailed my thoughts on something, that brings me a lot of joy.  Do I only enjoy it when I feel like I have something to say?  Would it be a burden if I had to write about specific stuff instead of whatever strikes me?  If I decided to pursue that, how would I go about it?
  
  
• I keep trying to find ways to calm my mind down.  When I’m filled with anxiety, my thoughts are cluttered and I can’t focus.  When I’m in a good mood, my mind feels clear and still, and I’m in the moment.  How do I trigger the latter state?  Meditation would probably do it, but I don’t have the time or patience.  Weed does it, but that has its own problems.
  
  
• I think it would be cool to read every Marvel comic ever published, in order.  Is there a list of the complete Marvel bibliography?  I don’t think there is, but there should be.  I’m sure the internet will take care of it.
  
  
• It sucks that problems like depression and anxiety are still stigmatized to a point where you can’t talk about them without sounding insane.  I admired Michael Ian Black for blogging about his depression here and here, but when I talk about stuff like that, the reactions aren’t “you’re so brave for openly discussing problems so many of us share” so much as “wow, you’re a fucking weirdo who should be ‘in therapy’ and ‘on medication’, both of which I mean in as condescending a way as possible”.  Maybe I’m doing it wrong.
  
  
• How come people think of libertarianism as right-wing (and even use the term “civil libertarian” to distinguish left-leaning libertarians from “plain” libertarians)?  I think of libertarianism as hippie politics: do whatever you want, don’t do whatever you don’t want, it’s all good.  Libertarians are a notch away from anarchists, so I think it’s weird when people think of anarchists as radical leftists, but think of libertarians as an offshoot of conservatives.
  
  
• I hate when people criticize the Yankees for spending a lot of money and winning too much.  I get rooting for the underdog, but not if you take it to such an extreme that winning becomes a bad thing while fucking up is celebrated.  And I get looking down on big spenders who can have anything they want, but a) not in this context, wherein even the “poor” teams spend tens of millions of dollars, and b) part of why the Yankees spend a lot more is because they want to do well.  George Steinbrenner runs that team like it’s a hobby as well as a business.  Are we really going to applaud team owners for fielding shitty teams so they can hang on to their profits, and excoriate the Yankees for putting that money back into the team?  Aren’t all the teams that DON’T do that being greedier?  See how I flipped that?  Yeah.
  
  
• Say you like marijuana, but you don’t like smoking it, and do not have easy access to baked goods containing marijuana.  What’s the next best way?  This is hypothetical.
  
  
• What does it say about me that my sense of humor is so fundamentally immature?  Why do I love dick jokes?  Is it because I didn’t curse until I was about 12 years old and am still making up for lost time?  Is it because I’m subconsciously ashamed of intelligence and have unintentionally taken on the persona of a simpleton?  Are dicks just funny?
  
  
• Can you recommend books, poems, songs, etc. that are awesome because of the aesthetic value of their words more so than the actual meaning?  Soul Coughing songs are good for that.  They’re just words that are fun to say and hear.

I suspect that “paid critic” is an endangered job description; meditation might be simpler than you think (probably a zen joke in there, somewhere); even just reading every Marvel Comic to feature Wolverine would take 1000 years; people who criticize someone for talking about depression are assholes; libertarians are closer to conservatives on the question of “how much power should the government have,” and some people see that as the fundamental difference between liberal and conservative viewpoints; baseball is a deeply silly sport, and baseball fans enjoy making up controversies to justify their passion; a vaporizer; conditioned response; Joanna Newsom.