Claire Conger

When I saw Steve Martin on the cover of Parade Magazine with the caption “Even in tough times you can afford to laugh,” I thought He’s a millionaire, what could he know about hard times?

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Last night I watched Ellen Degeneres here and now. Ellen talks about procrastination. Just what I needed to hear. Such serendipity!

I’ve been procrastinating like crazy lately. I’m busy busy busy. Too busy to get to what I really want to do—work on my websites! Why why why?

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The “God” Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God . . . and a Personal Journey (2006, originally published 1996) by Matthew Alper is an essay, really, and it’s hardly scientific. Rather the book is a general and incomplete survey of religious practice and persecution undertaken by the author ostensibly to discover for himself whether there is a God, a subject of interest to him because he knows that he will, one day, die.

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I happened to be halfway through Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion when I went to a dinner party. I was sitting happily on a bench in some cool people’s garden and getting pine sap on my $98 silk skirt, while trying to make conversation like I know what I’m saying. I offered “I think people who believe in God are idiots.”

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Shine (1996) turns out to be a rather romantic movie. It’s the story of a young prodigy pianist who loses it at music college, turns into a pleasure-seeking adult without proper social constraints, an idiot-savant, if you will, and ends up getting lucky in middle age.

The movie is a loose adaption of the life of David Helfgott, an Australian concert pianist.

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