GO IN PEACE. WE WERE BLESSED TO KNOW YOU.

I don't know, I have been hearing these sorts of things too much of late. 2013 was supposed to be the Year of Less Death but someone's not holding up their end of the bargain.

I was preparing to leave when I spotted an album with a wonderful title: "More Songs About Buildings and Food." You will probably already know who it was by--I didn't. The Talking Heads. As I stopped to admire it, I was gripped by melancholy, similar perhaps to the feeling a certain kind of man gets while sitting with his wife on a train platform as a beautiful girl--different in all aspects from his wife--walks by. There goes my other life. Is it too late to get into the Talking Heads? Do I have the time? What kind of person would I be if I knew this album at all, or well?

--Zadie Smith, My Epiphany About Joni Mitchell

THEY'RE JUST GOING TO BE GOOD

DAVIES: ...Do you have a sense of yourself over the next 20 years? I mean, you've certainly got an active career now.

EPHRON: You absolutely don't know. The next 20 years, we're talking about 85. This is just a crapshoot. This is a lottery. Who knows? So I feel - I don't think about the next 20 years. I think about today. So today, I have already been to a bakery. This is the thing that I'm obsessed with, is carbohydrates.

I feel that I'm now living in an age where there's the best bread we have ever had in the history of the world. There has never been more bread that is good out there. So it seems to me a shame not to eat some of it, even if - and this is one of the terrible dilemmas of old age. You know, do you save all your money as if you're going to live till you're 90, or do you spend it all because you might die tomorrow?

Do you diet like a fanatic in the hopes that it's going to buy you a couple of extra years, or is it going to have nothing to do - are you going to be hit by a bus, and your last thought will be: I should have had that donut?

And it's very confusing to know what to do, but I'm coming down on the donut side.

DAVIES: Yeah.

EPHRON: So I feel that, you know, that's one of the things - I'm not so into 20 years. I'm kind of into: Is this meal I'm having something I really want to have? And if someone says to me let's go somewhere and it's not good, I say let's not. Let's not, because I have a finite number of meals ahead of me, and they are all going to be good.

DAVIES: You're going to make them count.

EPHRON: They're just going to be good. That's the truth.

--Dave Davies interviews Nora Ephron

DAVEY SIMON GETS IT

"It's so fucked up," he says. "You know what I'm saying? Does everybody else see how fucked up it is? Does anyone else see that? Do normal people see something like this and get pissed off?"

--David Simon, Homicide

See also.

“It’s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have,” Mr. Obama said, according to prepared remarks. “It’s an economic issue when eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade. It’s an economic issue when we know countries that outeducate us today will outcompete us tomorrow.”

--Jackie Calmes, Obama Takes on Critics of Education Plan

Check it out: 3,400 students dropped out of high school last year in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, and the graduation rate at West Charlotte High School is 51%.

I think I've made my decision.

I think.

My daddy is a smart man, he says that whatever I choose will be good because I will make it good for me. He also says that whatever I choose, I should make that decision and never look back. But ahhh, my brain isn't so great at never looking back.

It will be nice to decide and then refocus on the important thing--the important thing being fixing the world.

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana.

--Don DeLillio, White Noise