2022 September❮❮prevnext❯❯

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A few weeks ago I realized that my body has a kind of fixed mindset; that I can demand almost total reliability from it, but in turn I have to not test the boundaries too often. So I can march with my tuba in a parade for as long as I need to (though I have to keep in mind not every bandmate will share this privilege) but in return I don't push limits too much; when I tried couch-to-5K my jog was barely faster than a quick walk.

And today I realized, I have the same fixed mindset financially! I've never had to budget carefully, and I never have to deprive myself of small luxuries (and some large ones) But I take care to make sure I'm not living extravagantly, drive an 18 year old Toyota, have a small condo. (Basically ridiculous tech salaries just about afford what used to be a middle class life.)

Fixed mindset, especially if the base it is protecting is fairly confident of some good abilities, is a mixed curse. It gives me an almost unshakable self-confidence, but I also don't take big swings where there's a significant risk of being shown up as not as capable (intellectually, physically, financially) as I assume I am.

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One of the hardest things in life to learn is which bridge to Cross and which Bridge to Burn.

	We're Stupid Say What?	Terrible Christian Rap from the 90s. My dormmate Chris could still quote it in recent correspondence, to my consternation ("We're stupid fresh, fly and def, funky hype homeboys")
	Rocket Queen Guns N' Roses	I don't have much G-N-F'N-R... some place I read that the passionate moans were actually semi-authentic? So I was curious how it worked within a song.
★ ★ ★ ★	These Are Days 10,000 Maniacs	Interesting paeon to youthful sensuality and motherhood, I think I only had that one MTV unplugged version.
	Expert in a Dying Field The Beths	I love VRTY's quote "As a librarian, I feel this song haha", though maybe it's more about losing love....
★ ★ ★ ★	Beer Run Todd Snider	Friends at PPLM weekend cited it as we made our own beer run... "Be -double E double are you-N-beer run / All we need is a ten and five-er, / Car and key and a sober driver" - catchy!
★ ★ ★ ★	Counteraction Cornershop	Sitar etc in this cool little number.
★ ★ ★ ★	All Summer Long Kid Rock	Kid Rock is reprehensible in a lot of ways, but this song (sampling Werewolves of London and Sweet Home) with its weird nostalgic tip is great, though I found out it from Cracked making fun of it for the rhyme "And we were trying different things / We were smoking funny things"
★ ★ ★ ★	Platinum Richard Jacques, henry parsley & Louis Edwards	used for the end credits of this Handspring documentary, it might be very studio but it sounds so good, great percussion and horns.
	Blues & The Abstract Truth Oliver Nelson	I don't love jazz, but I love this title, mentioned on "Strong Songs"
	Le téléfon Nino Ferrer	Goofy French comedy song, via this tumblr post
★ ★ ★ ★	Caught Up Usher	Really like the sound of this "Neo-Soul", playing at the Moxy Hotel in Boston
★ ★ ★ ★	Visions of Gideon Sufjan Stevens	from the movie "Call Me By Your Name", so lovely and sad.
	Sanctus Missa Luba	A Christian spiritual sung by Africans, from a book "The Works of His Hands: A Scientist's Journey from Atheism to Faith"
	Haus of Holbein SIX	Funny stage musical song, I think I like the accents, from this tiktok
	Prayer in C (Robin Schulz Radio Edit) Lilly Wood & The Prick & Robin Schulz	One of the most shazamed songs. Not bad recent pop.
	Copacabana Herb Alpert	Popped up as an earwig, I dig the big box percussion and crowd vocals in this one.
	Are You Washed In the Blood Alan Jackson	Sometimes old Salvation Army songs pop up for me as earwigs... I like this folksy version though it ends abruptly (and man, "washed in the blood of the lamb" is just a weird image, even if it's meant to be a like a super-duper soul detergent.)

So last week I had a few nice days "WFH"ing at my Mom and Aunt's, came back Friday evening.

Ok weekend with a few fun events but... man I'm in that weird time state of mind.

Trying to get tear through a few big things on my todo list especially inbox zero since it has totally crept up on me.

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Oh and I took a nap so time has an even weird feel.

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behold the wisdom toad

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so much of being an ok person is just 1) not panicking, 2) not taking things personally, and 3) not letting the vindictive gargoyle that lives in your head tell you what to do. this sucks because brains love doing those things

I feel bad responding to a very beautiful, poetically written ventpost with prosaic advice, but I'm going to say this:

Resilience is a *skill*. Being able to shrug things off is a *skill*. being able to curb your immediate emotional reaction to something, being able to process your feelings in a way that means you can *do* something with them rather than being consumed by them, and being able to soothe yourself til you can sit down and process those feelings? that's a *skill*.

It is a skill that you can learn, and it is a skill you can get better at.

unfortunately, like foreign languages, it is a skill that is easier to learn when you are a child. just like you learn a native language from the people around you, you learn from the people around you- usually your parents/guardians- how to react to things that hurt in the moment, how to soothe yourself until you can process them, and how to process them until they don't hurt anymore.

if you're highly reactive, the odds are good that, for whatever reason, you never learnt resilience as a kid. The people who were supposed to teach you how to handle the weight of the world didn't, or couldn't, or wouldn't.

if you try to learn this skill as an adult, you have to convince your brain to do things that it was never taught how to do, after it thinks it does not need to learn this anymore. in the same way that it's goddamn hard for a native adult English speaker to sit down and learn how to speak Russian like a native, if you never learnt how to be resilient when you were a kid? it's going to be a bitch to pick it up.

if you learnt "the world is scary and out to get you and there's nothing you can do about it, you WILL feel EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME" (or "showing your feelings in the moment will get you hurt, you need to bottle everything up until the bottle breaks and you get hurt with fifteen years of feelings at once", or "minor inconveniences are the prelude to The Adult In Your House Who Shouts coming down on you like a load of bricks, if things aren't going *perfectly* then you're about to suffer", or any number of other things), trying to learn that the world doesn't work like that any more is *hard* and it *hurts*. Unless you're *really* good at figuring out what you're thinking and why, you will probably need to get professional help.

You're not from the wrong planet. You just never learnt something that's as basic a part of being a human as talking or counting. You were failed, and it's cruel and unjust that no one helped you pick up the slack.

....But adults learn Russian every day. Adults *teach* themselves Russian every day.

You can learn how to do this. You can learn how to get better at dealing with the stuff that hurts you. You can become more resilient and less reactive.

you are not doomed to get hit by everything that happens to you like it's a truck forever.

I've been thinking a lot about "resilience". Stuck in my head is some repost about resilience being... I dunno, overrated? Or just an unfair to demand of people. And while we can't use "well you should just be resilient" as an excuse not to make changes... some resilience seems critical or at least extremely useful. Especially if you can believe that most people in a scene have reasonably good intentions, like even if they might not be willing to sacrifice many of their own preferences for you they won't go out of their way to hurt you either, which I think is often the case.

I know there's a risk I overdo it resilience wise, like my knack for a maintaining a pleasant equanimity comes along with the positive experiences having their corners rounded off too. But it seems like a good tradeoff, if any. I always thought the old Doors line should be recast "did you have a good world when you died? Enough to base a wikipedia page on?" By some counts there's like 610K people off of Wikipedia's "Category: Living People", so on a world of almost 8 billion, that's like .008% of folks. So now I don't feel so bad.

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20s: OMG deep down we all feel the same

30s: you have your own experience I won't presume to know how you feel

40s: to communicate anything accurately is a miracle

50s: chaos rules our bodies are dying hold me

60s: every good thing is precious

70s: what is that light

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Regular eye exam today - Gratitude to the Universe and the Powers That Be that my eyes are in pretty good health!

My model of the universe is so visual.... that I was tempted to use the word "view of the universe" for it. I guess if something bad happened to my eyes I'd adapt, but for now I'll just be thankful I only have to pop my glasses up to read close up stuff. Happy would-be 73rd Birthday to my dad....4 needleworks by him, up at my mom and aunt's house.

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SHOTS, SHOTS, SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS

(namely the 2022 FluLaval Quadrivalent vs Flu and the Pfizer-BioNTech Bivalent vs COVID-19)



So far I've dodged COVID, and haven't had anything flu like for a long while...

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happy birthday dad, I know this dilemma is why you named me Kirk



Atlantic Piece on Attachment Styles and their impact on making strong friendships. Secure, avoidant, and anxious. "Secure people assume that they are worthy of love, and that others can be trusted to give it to them." Trying to think how that blends with one of the other big explanatory models, fixed mindset vs growth mindset. Like, I think I'm fairly secure in my attachment outlook (though I can see elements of the other types) and that's rooted in the confidence fixed mindset provides for me - that what I am won't change much, but it's pretty good. (And for me, I think most of this is secondary to how I think Truth is emergent from connections with other people and not rooted in the individual, but that's a whole 'nother long-winded bag of worms.)

So I googled up the Black Horse Tavern and Samuel Adam's Committee of Safety - the worst first fighting of the Revolutionary War happened around here in Arlington (then Menotomy, before the nation got an enthusiasm for naming cities for the civil war cemetary).

Ok, it's bad enough that such an important piece of American Revolutionary history is a gas station, but a frickin' BP - BRITISH PETROLEUM? There's some frickin' irony.



Cherub decoration at the Colonial... I think one takeaway from these years of "is it COVID?" is the idea that I can be a range of different temperatures without it being a fever, something I was only dimly aware of prior. "COVID or just warm?" is right there with the endless rounds of "COVID or just allergies?".

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"American Flags to Half-Staff Honoring the Death of Queen Elizabeth II Until Sunset on the Day of Interment (currently unknown)"

Ugh? Really?? Like maybe one or two days outta respect but YEESH.
We fought against monarchy. And the UK was, shall we say, a bit problematic with that whole "definition of colonialism: see Britain" thing?

Maybe she was mostly a nice, "inspiring" person, but she lived a long and privileged life, and we are paying this WAY too much attention.

of all of the bizarre things I've seen while working in skilled nursing the one that's going to stick with me until I die is bug god

nothing can possibly prepare you for the moment you show up to give a man his apple juice and he says "Do you think bugs come from the same god as us? They're older than our god. They have their own."

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Somewhat thoughtful terf/trans argument on tumblr with attempts at science from both sides. (I think ultimately doomed with irreconcilable views of definitions and descriptivist vs prescriptivist "majority therefore THE WAY" thinking)

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When your last name is a country often going through conflict, idiotic custom shirts like these on offer hit a bit different.

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I had a fine time getting my bivalent COVID booster at CVS, but it has been tougher for Melissa - they were out when she showed up for her scheduled appointment (rumors of an ordering snafu on the initial batch), and now waiting on hold with the pharmacy to make sure they'll have it on hand this evening?

Well, 2 hours on hold and it starts to dawn "maybe they're not going to pick up".

Chainstore pharmacy folks are among the most exploited people in healthcare, I'd wager. The understaffing is pretty significant. One implication of my way of modeling the world is that I desperately wish people weren't so strongly attached to their opinions. For me there's a strong division between personal preferences - things we can like or dislike and it doesn't matter for anyone else - and how I wish things were in the shared space, where I am compelled to look for consensus among all the relevant players.

It's frustrating to me. A lot of people seem to be, "this is what I want, so this is the way it should be". My take is more... "based on what people want, this is the way it should be, and so that's what I want."

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Fireworks! Poor dog upstairs...
I've spent about 12 years of the last 18 living in Arlington, and have managed to get my act together and go see Town Day stuff (including the fireworks show) like...once, maybe twice? I gotta figure out where to pay more attention...

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Melissa just mentioned her niece playing a trading/bartering game for fidget toys...

Random thing for us Gen-Xers, especially who grew up as boys in the 80s... did we not have a "win stuff off your friends" game/toy/pastime ? Like generations before us had marbles, and after there were pogs, pokemon cards, maybe those battle spinning tops... like all we had was star wars, gi joe, and transformers, but no system for vying with friends for theirs and vice versa...

Im at the grasping at straws stage but by god my grip strength has improved.

Once upon a time I read a beautiful set of short stories "We Find Ourselves in Moontown" by Jay Gummerman. In one of them the main character is watching a rerun of "The Fugitive":

I turn the set back on and close my eyes. "I want to understand you," a woman is saying to The Fugitive. "You will in time," The Fugitive tells her. "May I use your car?"

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in class on middle egyptian language & literature i did a couple years ago, we translated a letter which began 'What does it mean that I have not heard from you? My heart wonders what you are doing 1000 times a day.' At end of lecture, professor reveals the letter was never sent

(On a tangentially related note, I reformatted the old K+R Carousel, this huge stock of love letters from back in the day.)

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Happy 40th Birthday of the Smiley!

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Related: I'm ok that emoji have become more popular than punctuation smilies, but bummed that the "laughing so hard I'm crying" ones are 2 of the top 5 spots in the USA- I use plenty 😃 to round off the edges of my casual writing, but the laugh-crying ones are trying to hard, like they seem dishonest, the LOL of the emoji world...

More on the history of the smiley at Lunduke

the best part of Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4" is how the horn part is really trying to be optimistic but then keeps making the sad trombone "womp womp" sound and has to come back up from that.

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Oh wow - myminimusical.com is a service that puts soundtracks to monologues (and maybe dialogs etc idk) - but this is AMAZING and I haven't even watched Better Call Saul but "lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips"!

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Whut? This from a search for "NY Jets"

Photo from last night's JP Honk practice, Eze backlit by Stony Brook station.

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Last Man Standing in the Floppy Disk Business -
Loved the guys attitude and knowledge. He mentioned about the complexities of Floppy Disk manufacture; I am half tempted to track down and confirm where we are wrt CRT manufacture, I'd heard rumors it's a lost art - there's a LOT of material process that went into those. For a while I've been wrestling with a paradox of dissatisfaction: Buddhism and other philosophies (Stoicism, Epicureanism) tell us that it's a fool's game to make our happiness contingent on the world being different than it is... but it seems like that's a critical way to get energy to change the world for the better. (George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.")

But the other day I posted a meme that started "Be a Kermit the Frog. Have a creative vision and no ego [...]" That seems like beautiful advice - but it seems like ego is another important driver? Much like it's easy to predict docile passivity if one were to consistently just accept the world as it is, it seems like without pride there would be fewer reasons for high standards. Ego is a hell of a stumbling block - stops me from taking risks that might damage it - but it also encourages me to do excellent things.

I worry I'm a little too ego-driven; you could see a lot of what I do, from art projects to romances, having inspiration that's a mix of "this pleases me" and "this impresses others". But I think my lived philosophy of truth as being an emergent property of groups (rather than a subjective thing known by individuals) means that my ego is tied into trying to see if what I'm doing is any good according to other people, since I don't trust - or even value - my own judgement. What a delightful surprise on Tumblr, I was in the NES game Rollerblade Racer. must've been during my brief time wearing contacts.

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The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.

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Lewis Hyde wonderfully illustrates this dissonance in his exploration of the "Indian giver." This expression, used negatively today as a pejorative for someone who gives something and then wants to have it back, actually derives from a fascinating cross-cultural misinterpretation between an indigenous culture operating in a gift economy and a colonial culture predicated on the concept of private property. When gifts were given to the settlers by the Native inhabitants, the recipients understood that they were valuable and were intended to be retained. Giving them away would have been an affront. But the indigenous people understood the value of the gift to be based in reciprocity and would be affronted if the gifts did not circulate back to them. Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again. [...] In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a "bundle of rights," whereas in a gift economy property has a "bundle of responsibilities" attached.

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English is a nounbased language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things.

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Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.

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Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It's what happens that matters. How can minutes and years, devices of our own creation, mean the same thing to gnats and to cedars? Two hundred years is young for the trees whose tops this morning are hung with mist. It's an eyeblink of time for the river and nothing at all for the rocks. The rocks and the river and these very same trees are likely to be here in another two hundred years, if we take good care.

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But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy.

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Oh, I just realized Barton Fink was the movie I was mixing up with Barry Lyndon. Not that I know much about either.

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Spock, McCoy, and Scotty waited with Kirk in the transporter room. McCoy was scowling. Kirk knew what McCoy thought of the transporter. For the doctor the room was filled with the ghosts of a thousand humans and aliens who had passed through this room to their fates: disintegration and analysis and materialization in a distant place. Bodies had come and gone, leaving their immaterial essences behind, and most of them had returned--though who can say that the same persons came back who left this room. Exact duplicates, certainly, but what of that which could not be measured or analyzed? What of the personality? What of the "I"? What of the soul, for those who still believed?

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Nothing outside makes you whole. That arrives only when you come to terms with what's inside, when you accept what you are and who you are and grant yourself the right to make mistakes and still keep your self-respect.

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Think! Happiness is not the only good. Humans value other things even more: love, friendship, accomplishment, discovery, and, most of all, knowledge. Given a free choice between happiness and knowledge, humanity will choose knowledge every time.

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(I've been on a Vonnegut kick, and I wanted to check out this novelization of a never-produced screenplay by Theodore Sturgeon, who is said to be the influence for Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout character)

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Ghost Town @ Roslindale Porchfest , with a few JP honkers cracked on the history of the contact lens I sort of can't believe contact lenses exist. I mean I tried some for a while in high school, but yikes. What a daring thing to be around

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Spiders are the only web developers who enjoy finding bugs

Judd: When we did *Undeclared*, the note from Fox was: You need more eye candy.
Amy: Do you think that's true? Do people really need more eye candy?
Judd: I have thought about that a lot. I don't know. But what if people do want it?
Amy: I'm not above that. I want to look at Jennifer Lawrence eating cereal.

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But you learn more from fucking up than you do from success, unfortunately. And failure, if you don't let it defeat you, is what fuels your future success.

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[Harold Ramis] once said to me, "Life is ridiculous, so why not be a good guy?" That may be the only religion I have to this day.

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As I said to someone recently, I'm trying to fuck my kids up *just* enough so they'll want to get a job.

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We just went in knowing that we might get canceled. And if you're going to go down, you have to go down doing what you like doing and what's fun for you, because I don't ever want to do something painful and then have everyone go, "Hey, that works. Keep doing that painful thing for years."

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I'm glad I didn't get [that shot on Letterman]. I'm glad for every single thing I didn't get.

His name is dropped frequently across many interviews in the book; when I think back to stuff like "shitty ankle"... it really suck that he was so abominable to women. (Later in the interview he says "I like to put myself into fucked-up situations and make mistakes and deal with it. I like to do that over and over again on the show, and maybe I like to do that in my life also."

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I know. The thrill is seeing it communally. Seeing it in a movie house on a big screen. And that's, you know, television is wonderful and DVDs, they're wonderful, but they are really a disservice to movies. I mean, you enjoy somebody cackling from the balcony. You enjoy people around you joining you in the laughter.

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I think all good plays are both. You can't be only funny. And God help any play that is never funny.

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Sarah: It's funny because sometimes I'll get c***y with [my sister the rabbi] and I'll be like, "Oh, so you believe there's a man in the sky?" I just can't get my head around it, you know. And she'll go, "Well, I like to live my life as though there is one." And I'm just like, "Oh, you're beautiful."

Judd: Why can't you get your head around it?

Sarah: I can be cynical. But I don't think of myself, at my core, as cynical. So much of it is location. Like, who is Muslim? Who is a Jew? Who is a Catholic? Who is a Christian? Who's Buddhist? Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of it is where you happen to be born. So how can one be right and another be wrong? It seems pretty clear to me that it's a coping mechanism for people who cannot handle the not knowing of things. I am okay knowing I will never be able to comprehend the world.

That was exactly the same turning point for my spiritual journey, when I was a teen.

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I also really like sleeping. My friends make fun of me because, you know, I love hanging out but I always hit a point in the night where I just want to get home and sleep. I have a very active dream life and I have to be there a lot.

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No tennis player or baseball player has ever directed a good movie. I mean, it is interesting when you think about how many filmmakers and artists come out of skateboard culture and zero come out of football, baseball, tennis, soccer. It's not part of any other sport.

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Judd: I think about my girlfriend from high school and all of our dreams at the time and I almost...You know, a lot of times I'm tempted to reach out to her but I don't because it's almost, it's so *present*. It doesn't feel old. It feels brand-new. I'm always afraid to see exes in front of my wife because I feel like she'll know in my face that I'm as devastated today as I was the day that girl broke up with me.

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Maria Bamford is my favorite comedian ever. Nobody makes me laugh harder. To all my friends who are comedians, I apologize for saying this. I hope it didn't hurt you. But it's just a fact. And deep down, you know I'm right.

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I think I heard someone say, "Nobody has a backup dream."

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But I always felt--I guess I felt like, *The joke's on you*. If somebody was being, like, a dick to me or whatever in school, I would always think, *Your family sucks*. I always felt confident that my family was better than other people's families. It wasn't money or class or anything like that. I just knew that theirs laughed at the wrong things.

Two photos by Seton L, JP Honk at Roslindale Porchfest, Adubbs then Me...

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Spiders are the only web developers who enjoy finding bugs

I still repeat myself too often. Ask my kids too many questions and forget the details. I forget to shut the screen door, and I occasionally leave the burner hot on the stove. I am no longer ashamed of what I can't remember, and I consider it an opportunity to remind others of my human frailty and their own.

With the future uncertain and the past fuzzy, I have developed my capacity to be wholly focused on the present--which I've learned has its own value in this world. I think more with my heart, now, than with my head. I am less concerned with appearing corny or woo-woo or sloppy in my thinking.

I've learned that I am not my thoughts--that *"I"* exist somewhere else, as something else. I am no longer an intellect. Perhaps I am a soul.

This is important to me.

I lived for three years as 40 Percent Martha and another three as 80 Percent Martha. There were times in my life where this was, and would have been, completely untenable--when I was caring for babies and elders, or building a career. I am grateful that my brain changed after those tasks were complete enough.

As it stands, I don't have any desire to go back to 100 Percent Martha. She could do too many things at once; she thought too fast to see all the beautiful things that you can only see when your thoughts are slow. She could get lost in a sea of facts and details and miss seeing the underlying eternals.

She didn't know she was more than all that she could think of

So, I'm not at the point where I'm as accepting as the "woo-woo"; it's good to not identify with your thoughts, but I think the "somewhere else" that we are is only metaphorically distant; emergent (and transcendent) from the base physical and neurological material we start as, but not separable.

Reading about Crawford's experience... I have never had a great mind for "unimportant" details - with a self-serving circular definition of "important", though I think I've isolated it to: does the detail reflect how this thing interacts with other things, or is it "merely" intrinsic. So I have hopes that I'm more adept at leaning on external aids - todo lists, notes, etc.

I do have to brace myself for being less adept at coding up projects. That could happen - I mean it might already be happening, sometimes I am very impressed with the scale of things I would take on just for funsies. And I never feel like I'm great at learning new things like languages - I suspect I'm hampered by "but I already know how to get these results with the system I already know, new way for the sake of new way is not worth it", but that's not a new trait.

From a UX perspective, it's interesting for us people who grew up as "the smart kid" that, frankly, you don't have to be that smart to get around ok in a lot of contexts. (Heh, actually I think about musicians who smoke a little weed before hand, get a little more loose, let things flow. I wouldn't do that just because I don't have experience/confidence in being a reliable bass player in altered states.)

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When looking for the purpose of existence, consider petting your dog.

Random linguistic thing... over the past year or so I've noticed the phrase "I appreciate you!" - usually in contexts where I would have expected "Thanks, I appreciate it!"

To my ear, appreciation of, like, a whole person is... big, kind of representing long term behaviors. I mean maybe that's the point, to express a general sense of long term gratitude about the holistic person? (And yes, I might well be overanalyzing it.)

But I don't know if the "appreciate you" form is regional (I first noticed it on/from Ted Lasso, so I associate it with his midwest courtesy and kindness) or newly growing in popularity, or if I've just never noticed it before...

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Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, 'What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.' Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.

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Ran into this tumblr post after reading the book "Braiding Sweetgrass". The agricultural finesse displayed by first peoples is astounding. Pádraig Ó Tuama's Poetry Unbound podcast recently began a new season. I was moved by the latest episode on Michael Kleber-Diggs' "Gloria Mundi" and had small cathartic cry during my noontime walk.

Pádraig underlines the humbleness of the poetic narrator's request in how to be remembered at his death; embracing the smallness, the transience.

I had a tangential thought about anyone who has ever been romantically left, dumped (and this is not foreboding or foreshadowing, just me being my usual foolish nostalgic self) - the most humble yet magnanimous stance I can think of is to sincerely wish the other person doesn't regret leaving you. I can barely even imagine putting aside one's ego and leaning into that.

I guess to really live that, you'd either have to be extremely satisfied with your life, or have absolutely extreme self-image problems. But Kleber-Diggs points to another way of framing such things, as accepting being a small, transient part of the grander narratives.

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I'm the best there is at what I do, but mostly what I do is gather nuts for winter.

2022 September❮❮prevnext❯❯