philadelphia has used up its last warm days for this year, but i'll be flying south tomorrow for a conference in atlanta, so it's a few more days of late summery goodness for me. i'll try to be outside at least a little bit so i can enjoy it.

and finally:

#39 - Related to #38, those moments you have with certain people where you realise that neither of you is wearing a mask, or saying what is "appropriate", where all the bullshit everyday falseness falls away, and you get to know two people a little better: the other person, and yourself.

and

#40 - From Howard's End - E.M. Forster

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

(Final notes: I did this as a personal exercise to see what I would come up if forced to think of 40 things that do make me happy. I wanted to see how many of them would be trivial, and how difficult it would be. And I wanted to be grateful for, and pay a little more attention to some of these things (the non-trivial ones, anyway, eggplant parm probably has more rapidly-declining marginal utility than a lot of the other stuff), and not take them for granted.)