Hopeful Things, May Edition

prizes, exercises & assorted other optimisms

I don’t know how you were raised, but I was raised by two people who, in different ways, taught me that serious people and people who wanted to be taken seriously should be unhappy. To be dour was to be respectable. My father, particularly, had a maladapted verve for what I came to refer to as “one-downsmanship.” In any conversation, he could be reli…