Something or other

1.
It's a strange thing to hear your downstairs neighbor throwing up at 12:50 am in the morning - late nights are ammunition for reflection unto themselves without that thrown into the mix - and but I don't want to think about the probable sequence of events that led her to the porcelain and led me to be sitting up in bed, pouring over page 388 of a novel that I began at 7 and that I suspect I will not sleep until it is read all the way, right down to the last sentence. And so, wonder of wonders, I hit a key on the minimalist white computer, the screen flashes, and I bear this little snippet, a single word in the vast self-sustaining manuscript of sensations and perceptions that make up the last minute or so of my life, out into the public domain.


2.
In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights.

I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.