2.01am
Monday
25 April 2005

It's a well-established principle that if you take somebody who's doing something for her or his own pleasure and offer some kind of outside reward for doing it—and let the person become accustomed to performing the task for that reward—then take the reward away, the individual will stop that activity. You can even train nursery school youngsters who love to draw pictures to stop drawing them, simply by giving them gold stars or some other little bonus for a couple of months... and then removing that artificial "motivation."

In fact, I think that our society expects schools to get students to the point where they do things only for outside rewards. People who perform tasks for their internal reasons are hard to control. Now, I don't think that teachers get up in the morning and say to themselves, "I'm going to go to school today and take away all those young people's internal motivations" ...but that's exactly what often happens.

—John Holt

My self-satisfying answers from a conversation this past week:

What makes you happy?

The world. And the people in it.

What do makes you angry? Or sad?

Same answer.

• × • × • × •

I've eaten an extreme amount of strawberries within the past week. They make me happy because they taste more like redness than anything I can think of, except maybe blood. I wonder if I'm allowed to change my favorite color? I'm goddamn sick to death of pink. I might have to give away my pink stilettos. I might have to do something more dramatic and unexpected. I'm not sure if I have the motivation anymore, but I still have the vague impetus to think of something to do that not only I have never done before, but something... no one... has ever done before. Cranky bits of logistics and wankery don't count, of course. I am talking of something grand and sweeping.

• × • × • × •

Laptop batteries shall soon die. As shall we all. Don't you wish you had that sort of gothically abismal poetry leaking out of your ears like I apparently do?

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