Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. – Oscar Wilde

I've been in enough "is this a date?" situations. Before you think this is countless amounts, a couple is more than enough. I hope I never have to sit through it again, whether I'm sitting in a café or at my laptop, cringing away from a person or a Messenger screen. A (male) friend postulated that…

In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone; but sometimes it is a great relief. – John Barrymore

An episode of Netflix's "Love" shows a mess of a woman struggling to spend an evening alone without getting drunk or high; an addict the show may portray her to be, but the cliché perpetuates that us young 'uns (anyone under 40) just don't know how to be alone. Or is it that we're so…

But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. – Lemony Snicket

I read a few books in the A Series of Unfortunate Events volumes when I was younger, and I'm sorry to have only completed them now. Daniel Handler, a.k.a Lemony Snicket, treats the children as adults and the adults as children; a frustrating, refreshing, and frustratingly refreshingly realistic view. The three Baudelaire children journey through turmoils and…

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. – L. P. Hartley

Rereading the previous posts is a bit of strange visit to the past: the first, to an old job, the second, to a paper I wrote three years ago during my Bachelor's, and the third, to a book I picked up travelling in India and read on holiday in Spain. In the space since the…

After the ecstasy, the laundry. – Jack Kornfield

I've recently finished a book on spirituality, mainly centred around Buddhism and Buddhist experiences, but including many other Jewish, Christian, Sufi, and Hindu accounts. The book is supposed to be an insight into what happens after you have worked hard to achieve enlightenment: more hard work. And then more hard work. A mystic's striving is…

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest. – Anatole France

I am going to make a sweeping generalisation about Christianity: it is commonly assumed that Jesus was celibate and single. This is rarely discussed and even more rarely doubted except amongst a select few who choose to question the perpetuation of this assumption. Le Donne claims that the quest for Jesus’s wife only reveals our…

I can resist everything except temptation. – Oscar Wilde

I, an atheist, was talking to a Catholic colleague about philosophy. I will admit that this could proceed onto rocky ground. She asked why I was interested in philosophy and theology as an atheist. Generally my answer to this question varies depending on who’s asking it and how I’m feeling at the time, so given…