80% of the email I get is from the flower website I used to get my mom flowers for Mother’s Day six years ago.

This is going to be hard to answer well. Lots of different ways to think about it.

I think the majority of the answer has to do with the fact that our weaknesses give us important opportunities to figure out stuff about ourselves. Why aren’t we getting the results we want? What is it that we really care about? What aren’t we admitting to ourselves? I think if you can get real with yourself about your weaknesses that’s really empowering.

But at the same time, I also think that my strengths and my weaknesses are often two sides of the same coin. They’re related. I don’t want to just fix my weaknesses. I want to learn how to see them in context and figure out how to rearrange my habits and patterns to get myself more comfortable and feeling better about what happens to me as a result of the way I’m interacting with the world. Most of the time I’m just trying to see things in a more helpful way.

I don’t know if that makes any sense.

Like, this is a weird example, but I’m gonna go with it. Do you know who Harmony Korine is? Weird as shit writer/director who just came out with the movie Spring Breakers. I don’t even really like his stuff but I think about him sometimes. Because when he was 19 years old he wanted to be a screenwriter and I just imagine him sitting around saying to himself like fuck no one is going to take a 19 year old seriously, no one will want to see a movie written by a 19 year old because what the fuck does a 19 year old know? What do you know better than the adults who would make or see the movie you write? They aren’t going to take you seriously. And you could just think about it like that. And if you had been Harmony Korine and thought about it like that, you don’t end up doing anything. Instead Harmony Korine somehow flipped that weakness around. He wrote Kids which was about the thing he knew better than all the adults who would have to decide about the movie. All of the sudden that weakness is a strength. People start saying it was written by a 19 year old as a way of suggesting that it had some authenticity to it. The idea of that flip is so interesting to me. It’s actually way more interesting that any of Korine’s movies.

It’s weird that yahoo can buy tumblr, isn’t it? Like tumblr is a website I use every single day. I use it all the time. I haven’t been to yahoo since the days of dial-up.

It’s like finding out that Crystal Pepsi just bought Coke. The fuck?

You shouldn’t just have people in your life that you really really like, you should have people in your life that you like so much that you’re always being like, I can’t fucking believe how much I like this motherfucker!

I didn’t even know this existed. Amy Poehler giving a speech at Harvard in 2011.

So many white people are moving into our neighborhood in DC, and I don’t like it.

I just feel like these new white people don’t belong here. I’m all the white people this neighborhood needs. These new white people are all walking dogs and waving at me. Fuck you, new white people!

Ever since I stopped taking adderall a year ago, I have been reading much less and much less well. However I think this is a book I would read. It’s about my favorite subject and I would learn new things. The crazy part is when I got to the part in the book where I was reading the book. That shit would be fucking crazy. Then I’d start reading into the future!

This cab driver honks at any pedestrian even near the road. It’s like his loud crazy preventative move. He honks at everyone. He seems nuts. I’m ready for him to announce we can’t stop here—this is bat country.

I feel like all the frustration I ever feel is just this bullshit way of responding to the fact that I’ve been raising my standards for everyone else at the exact moment I needed to be raising them for myself. Like an uncaught murderer who keeps thinking about how shitty juries are nowadays.

I wish my brain would even consider the possibility of becoming inspiring rather than looking around for inspiration and then trying to figure out how to be articulate about how disappointed I am by my inspiration options.

What a clever coward my default mode is.

Sometimes it’s like a bunch of eggs talking about how unbreakable they are, sitting in that little carton telling stories of eggs they know who ended up in omelets, you know?

I wish I had the discipline to try this experiment:

Act like everyone is smarter than you and you can never fool them.

How do your results compare to your normal results?

I don’t know much about books but don’t Charlie and I, since we’re under an umbrella and wearing shaded spectacles, look exactly like we’re in The Big Gatsby or whatever?

I thought I was smiling but this is what the picture looked like.

For a tree to make a new tree, the baby tree has to be delivered through the mother tree’s vagina.

This is one of the grossest fact about nature.

Nothing comes into the world except through its mother’s pussy.

The grossest is seagulls.

You can’t even get a baby seagull out of its mom’s pussy unless you put an unguarded sandwich right outside it.

That’s just science.