Something for Nothing

One of my friends once told me a story about going to a party, getting quite un-sober, and (as one tends to do at social gatherings) picking up a copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness . "Suddenly," she said, "I thought, wait, why IS there something rather than nothing? My mind was blown for at least the next ten minutes."

Over the last several months, I have come to realize that there is something so that there can be nothing. And I came to this realization without going to India, or even to a weekend yoga retreat. I simply asked myself why I no longer felt like writing out the witterings of my mind on the wall of the Internet. It was clearly because I no longer had something I wanted to avoid doing, something pressing that I could ignore in order to do nothing. It turns out that in order to want to do nothing--in order to enjoy, however furtively, wasting time writing blog posts--there needs to be something you should be doing, but are not. Once I no longer had something to do, I didn't want to do nothing, either.

Finally, some Serious Somethings have caught up with me at last, so I am sure that I will now feel a deep need to respond to a Salon article about wingnuts, or a NYT article about Williamsburg.

(In truth, I can never read past the second paragraph of any article in the NYT about Brooklyn, because I inevitably break out in Hipster Hives--a symptom of my tragic allergy to hipster-hood. Also, 85% of the articles are about Hipsters Having Children ("My, What Big Strollers You Have!") and the thought of all the chunky-glassed, tattooed, Pendleton-wearing locavores wheeling their Concept Children around makes me wish I still enjoyed drinking, because chewing on my desk is so hard on the teeth.)