I didn’t sleep well last night (not unusual), and I expected today to be kind of lousy, as they so often are, for some inexplicable reason, when I’m half asleep all the time.

But it was a good day.

First, deep background. I spent most of last Saturday tinkering with my snowblower, because we’d gotten about 10 inches of dense, heavy snow overnight. I’d planned to do housecleaning that day, to prepare for the upcoming holidays, but clearing the driveway took priority.

I never did get the driveway cleared (fortunately mild weather since then has melted most of it off now). I’m new to snowblowing, and wasn’t aware of the arcane things you have to do to get one of those suckers running again after its summer vacation.

I finally gave up, and decided I’d take it back to Sears for service one night this week. But this was the first night I’d had clear to do that. Continue reading Multiple hooplas, plus a likely historical exaggeration →

Your cultural taste may, in fact, be conditioned by your education, profession, father’s profession, and aspirations to a certain social class. Mark Greif writes about unmasking hipsters and what taste really says about us.

“Bourdieu set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how ‘superior’ taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals,” states Greif.

This is a tough subject. How do we define ourselves? How can we live content with our place in life while aspiring to something better? What does an authentic, unpretentious person look like? Or to put it another way, does anything really matter? (Thanks to Mark Bertrand for linking to this.)