Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

by David Sedaris

We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it.

Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It’s sort of like time travel. One minute you’re bending to unlace your shoes, and the next thing you know you’re paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here?

At first I worried what passersby might think, but then my truer nature kicked in, and I became obsessed.

Both have the word “day” at their root, but a journal, in my opinion, is a repository of ideas—your brain on the page. A diary, by contrast, is your heart.

It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”

We were in the formal gardens when I took a wrong step and fell down before a great number of people, one of whom shouted—making me feel not just stupid but stupid and old—“Don’t move him!”