Hubris:
Excessive pride, presumption or arrogance (originally toward the gods).
“It now appears that the world is filled with people who believe that everyone should be interested in everything they have to say about anything – people who tweet, you might call them. I find this so astonishing, my own hubris pales in comparison.”
– Alice McDermott.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room, shall we?
65 is one of those round-but-not-round numbers when applied to age. I’m going to use it as an artificial milestone, and as an excuse kick off my little thought exercise.
65 thoughts exercise, actually. The first one, tomorrow. (Not that this isn’t a thought, but … you know.)
Fair warning, my personal blog is about to get busy. Beginning July 6 there’ll be a daily post, and a daily email for those subscribed to the notifications, at least through September 10.
Here’s what’s going on…
To my foreign family and friends.
No, I can’t explain it.
The US was once the land of opportunity and freedom. Now it seems the home for hypocrisy and hate.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the most important skills I got from my education was the ability to find answers.
I wish education in general was more focused on that skill. Rather than accumulating (and, gak, testing for) knowledge, teach the skill set required to acquire knowledge as needed; a kind of “just in time” skill. When you need to know something, you know how to find it.
I wanted to give you a heads-up about some changes I’m making to my personal blog.
Email subscribers: you get to hear about it first.
Polina Pompliano’s The Profile just celebrated five years of publishing consistently.
… 263 Sunday emails, 100 Profile Dossiers, and thousands of longform profiles.
Quite the achievement.
Coincidentally, I also celebrated a five-year anniversary with one of my publications, Not All News is Bad.
I realized if I had a super-power, it might be consistency.
Over the last few years I’ve found myself not just subscribing to an assortment of news and other publications, but actually paying for the privilege.
In the spirit of full transparency for my own publications influenced by these choices, here’s a list of everything I’m actually paying cold hard cash for.
As you might imagine I read, skim, and scan (let’s just call that all “consume”, shall we?) a lot of content as I pull together 7 Takeaways each week. I do the same for Not All News is Bad, for that matter. (I do it for Ask Leo! as well, but that’s different for the purposes of this discussion.)
Some items call to me, and I’ve never been quite sure why. If you’d asked me my criteria I would have said I have no idea, but, like porn, I just know it when I see it.
As I was meditating this morning one of the reasons made itself known.
(Once again, sorry for the delays between postings. Life. If interested and if you’re not already there I have been sending out 7 Takeaways every week. Generally not my writing, but I do share some thoughts on each takeaway I collect.)
A friend is dealing with one of life’s issues, to put it vaguely. It’s led me to notice our friends and acquaintances often fall into two categories. It’s important to acknowledge them.
It’s funny how we assign meaning and even sentimentality to inanimate objects.
Consider the mug shown above: it’s actually quite meaningful to me. So much so that at one point I actually stopped using it for fear of breaking it. As a result, I never saw it and it remained in a relatively obscure location.
Last year I came to the conclusion that that was kinda silly, and placed it back into service.
This morning I realized that it’s not just the mug we set aside for some odd perception of safety and desired permanence.
My mother passed in 2003.
In slowly cleaning out the accumulation of things collecting in our basement today I stumbled into the letter pictured above. It’s a draft, undated, and I’m not even sure who it’s to.
But it touched me.
In 1981 we purchased our first house. 740 square feet of education lay ahead of us.
So. Much. Education.
Starting with the day we took possession.
In 2014 I lost 56 pounds. I went on to lose 10 more beyond my goal after that.
It was intentional and methodical.
After reaching that goal, occasional lapses (Hello, Thanksgiving) would be met with “oh well, I know how to do this”, and the holiday weight would eventually come off.
And then: pandemic.
One of the best books on my infinite reading list is Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: Why That Is And What You Can Do About It by Steven Pressfield.
The title says it all.
Most writers want to fix it. Most desperately want their work to be read. Some build a business or life around it.
I’m no different, I guess. But I have an additional constraint I find myself fighting: there are certain people I’d love to know are “reading my sh*t”.
Yet I know they’re not.
This has happened too many times to count: I get a great, or not-so-great, idea I want to act on later.
The problem is I’m not in a position to write it down or save it in some way.
Let’s face it, “I’ll remember it later” is not a valid answer.
Especially as I age.
Back in the days BM (Before Microsoft), I worked for a small company in Seattle called International Entry Systems, Inc, or IESI. They manufactured Z-80 (8-bit) based data entry terminals consisting of a single line display, a keyboard, and a cassette data recorder (hence the product name: “DataCorder”). All software was loaded from tape. (This was 1980, after all.)
One of the software packages they had available was a copy of Microsoft Basic. I won’t go into the machinations needed to have a working Basic interpreter using a single 40 character line display and a single cassette deck for all storage, but they did.
It was in place, though underutilized, when I showed up.
Being able to see both sides of an argument is a curse.
People want black and white. If you’re cursed with an ability to articulate shades of grey, it’ll be taken as blanket disagreement no matter what your actual opinion.
Anything seen as less than 100% agreement is disagreement.
If we are to survive, that must change.
Earlier today I posted a eulogy for one of our Corgis who passed away last night.
Wrote, posted, and shared on social media.
I started to think it might be useful to consider why, why, and why.
