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life of a romantic - by Spencer Chang - spencer's paradoxes

spencerchang.substack.com · 1,454 words · saved by 1 readers

If you grabbed me by the nape and started rolling me up, the way one folds a collapsible picnic blanket. That is to say, with difficulty getting the right angles, tucking in stray bits, and eliminating air pockets so that it fits into a neat shape that fits reasonably into a bag for taking home. But if you managed to do it successfully at some point, and distilled my rolled-up form into a single word, I imagine you’d fine “romantic” after the dust of the operation settles.

a still from The Wind Rises, a Miyazaki film about a romantic engineer If you grabbed me by the nape and started rolling me up, the way one folds a collapsible picnic blanket. That is to say, with difficulty getting the right angles, tucking in stray bits, and eliminating air pockets so that it fits into a neat shape that fits reasonably into a bag for taking home. But if you managed to do it successfully at some point, and distilled my rolled-up form into a single word, I imagine you’d fine “romantic” after the dust of the operation settles. I’m a romantic at heart, in every sense of the…

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