a game of chess

I have always been good at at giving people advise on difficult situation. I'm not just good at it, I'm awesome at it. But when I'm faced with my own personal problems. I suck at it. It's like when you're playing chess: as an observer, you see all the openings, but as a player, all moves are impossible. I need to find someone who's going to be my JL.

Free Lunch

The French moralist Joseph Joubert said that "misery is almost always the result of thinking." But does it follow that when you're happy, you you are foregoing "thinking?" We are taught in economics the concept of opportunity cost. There is no free lunch. Everything has an underlying cost. Everything. If we take that statement as fact, it would mean that happiness too has an underlying cost. When we're happy, it is likely that our delight is at the expense of other people's potential happiness.

The Return

"Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptous infantilism of sleepiness: this is the moment for telling stories, the moment of the voice which takes me, siderates me, this is the return to the mother ("in the loving calm of your arms," says a poem set to music by Duparc). In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled. Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality. (The lover might be defined as a child getting an erection: such was the young Eros.)"
— Roland Barthes (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments)