Necessary Evils and Unnecessary Goods

All reality is a blender where hopes and dreams are mixed with fear and despair.

― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

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The daisies and buttercups nodded in the breeze, like skinny-necked old ladies listening to dance music.

What if necessary evil had an opposite? This is what it would be. This unnecessary good.

For the first time in days, Mo smiled.

― Tricia Springstubb, What Happened on Fox Street

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"Friends look out for each other's welfare, and I am concerned for yours. I wish only to protect you."

"It is I who must protect you!" she exclaimed, although she did not understand why she felt this so strongly. "You need protecting. I can look after myself."

"None of us can look after ourselves," he said after a moment. "We all have to look after each other."

― Cassandra Golds, The Museum of Mary Child

How To Waste Time Properly

Wasting time, [psychologists and neuroscientists] say, can make you more creative. Even seemingly meaningless activities such as watching cat videos on YouTube may help you solve math problems.

Brent Coker, who studies online behavior at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found that people who engage in “workplace Internet leisure browsing” are about 9 percent more productive than those who don’t. Last year, Jonathan Schooler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara published with his doctoral student Benjamin Baird a study called Inspired by Distraction. It concluded that “engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving.” . . .

So what kinds of distractions, exactly, are best? “You want a distractor that’s pretty far away from what you want to process unconsciously,” Bursley says. If you want your brain to unconsciously process a math problem, it would be better to have the distractor be something totally different, like playing tennis, he says, rather than something similar, like a spatial puzzle. . . .

“It’s exactly the kind of intervention that our research suggests would benefit creativity for two reasons,” says Schooler, who is helping SelfEcho develop the software. “One is that it enhances mood, and it’s a very well-established fact that things that are mood uplifting lead to enhanced creativity. And two, it provides a non-demanding break.”

Habra says that images which encourage you to think about the future or inspire a sense of exploration are also good distractors. So do images that are “ego-less”—that do not involve the specifics of your life.

In any case," she added, "as you ought to know by now, happiness is a Waste of Time. Let me hear no more about it."

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For this - this - was love! This closeness, this affection, this protectiveness, this respect, this cherishing, this friendship, this joy between Maria and herself was not charity but love. And this fear of losing her, and the sadness and loneliness that would come if ever she did - that too was love. Love was joy and love was pain. Love was allowing someone to matter to you. Not for their usefulness to you, or even for your usefulness to them, but for no reason, except that they were they and you were you. Love was everything, all that mattered. And yet, in a strange way, her godmother had been right. for love was a kind of folly, a losing game. The greatest of all Wastes of Time.

But then, that depended on what you thought time was for.

― Cassandra Golds, The Museum of Mary Child