endearing when you're young

Traveling back home, my mom and I sat next to a stranger on the plane.
He asked me: "What motivates you? What drives you? What causes you to get up in the morning and go to work?"

I didn't know. I still don't know.

I am still burnt out from my Oral Exam. I go to work and fiddle around the lab. I am even fixing our water purification system, but my heart isn't in it. At the end of the day I cannot wait to leave. I daydream about reading philosophy and history and behavioral psychology. I daydream about blogging.

I have been thinking about intimacy lately. Novella mentioned that singing is intimate. I started to explore in my mind other intimate but non-sexual things. When I used to babysit I was always amazed at how ready for intimacy the kids are. They would just curl up in my lap ready for a story to be read to them. So lap-sitting and story-reading can be intimate things, although I can imagine situations where they are not so intimate.

So what does it take for something to be intimate? Is it any less intimate when a rock star sings than when I sing? I think so. The rock star has already whored himself out to the world. Maybe doing something for money removes the intimate element.

Looking at someones music collection can be intimate. It can show you pieces of the person that you did not know existed. Maybe intimacy is about knowing and allowing yourself to be known without any ulterior motives. Is intimacy about feeling?

And finally, some nice quotes:

Being a fuck-up with a good heart is endearing when you're young; if you've not changed by the time you hit your late twenties, well, you're probably just pretty much a fuck-up, and eventually, you become annoying.
-Mark Richardson in a review of The Replacements

Sure, religion saves lives. So does tobacco -- ask those GIs for whom tobacco was an even greater comfort than religion during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.
-Daniel C. Dennett in Breaking the Spell