If, after enjoying double-digit leads in Monmouth University and Fairleigh Dickinson polls last week, Murphy loses the New Jersey gubernatorial race (which seems pretty likely right now), the pollsters deserve to be roundly criticized, once again, for relying on unrepresentative sampling or making incorrect assumptions in their production modeling. Campaigns rely on these polls to gauge the impact of their efforts, and voters see large leads in the polls as an excuse to stay home, as their votes are not needed for their candidate to win.

Barbara Sprunt reports for NPR today:

Sen. Joe Manchin has announced he cannot yet support the $1.75 trillion framework for President Biden’s social spending package that congressional Democrats were hoping to push through this week.

“I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact that it will have on our national debt, our economy and, most importantly, all of our American people," the West Virginia Democrat said in a statement Monday afternoon.

I feel like she could have written this article any day this year, since Joe Biden was inaugurated. Sen. Joe Manchin is destined to be the Joe Lieberman of 2021. Like Lieberman, who killed the ACA’s “public option” to protect his insurance company donors in Connecticut, Manchin will be responsible for neutering the most impactful legislation since the ACA, all because of a price tag that is (1) going to be spread out over a decade; (2) will represent a tiny percentage of GDP over that period; and (3) has been cut in half since this spring. Point 1 is just the standard Republican talking points about any kind of spending that isn’t a tax cut.

This rigamarole has gone so long that I don’t think the Democrats can reach him with any kind of progressive legislation. It is dangerous to anger him too much over this, too, because he could flip parties, and then the Democrats would lose the Senate. Overall, he is an untrustworthy person to negotiate with. As for the similarly “centrist” Kyrsten Sinema, she is at a whole other level of incomprehensibility, and could still be a spoiler to the Democrats even if Manchin eventually agrees to some bill. Neither one of them are fighting for anything of value for their constituents. I would be surprised if they remain in office after their next elections, no matter what they do from this point forward. It’s hyperbole, of course, but I want to say: “Never has so much been lost for so little gain.”

In America, we could all unite politically, but only if we all decided to be Republicans. That is what happened, briefly, after 9/11. It could never have gone the other way; there is no way we could all put down our differences and become Democrats for a while. That is by design. For as long as I have been alive, Republicans have defined what Democrats are. To them, Democrats are many horrible things, but they are primarily unpatriotic, ineffectual, and toxic. (To be honest, there are also racist and homophobic stereotypes thrown in, too.) Many Republicans would gladly vote for a dog over a Democrat, mainly because right-wing messaging has tarnished the party label completely and relentlessly in a large portion of the country for decades.

I have been a Democrat all my life. Even I find it incredibly hard to define what a Democrat is without relying on terms and caricatures invented my Republicans. I don’t think most people understand that they have the same blind spot. I see it all the time in news articles, opinion essays, blog posts and tweets. I see most people using the language of Republicans defining what Democrats are. I see some people who are disheartened with Republican politicians or policies refuse on principle to see Democrats as sensible alternatives. I want to say to those authors: You don’t really know what a Democrat is because it has been defined by the opposing party for its own benefit.

I think Democrats—even most Democratic politicians—believe in their own bad press, too, because it has been so pervasive over my lifetime that it is part of American culture and ideology. I want to say to these people: You are not how others perceive you; you are what you do.

One thing I certainly do not believe in is the divine right of kings. When considering why this is, I originally thought it was because I am American, and come from a country whose founders rejected the monarchy. But that can’t be it. Americans love monarchies, especially the British one. I realized that my feelings about it go deeper, and distract from my enjoyment of the fairy tale movies and stories my kids consume, which very frequently include princes and princesses whose right to wealth and power is never questioned.

People can accrue power in various ways: being strong, wise, skillful, or charismatic are just a few. However, I think that there is limit to how much power these positive traits would give a person. They could lead a clan, but not a kingdom. To exert power over a kingdom requires ruthlessness, egoism, and violence.

I believe that, at the dawn of history and before, ancient kings and pharaohs accrued their power over others through conquest. They didn’t earn their land. They took it. They didn’t earn their wealth. They stole it. They didn’t earn the subservience of their followers. They forced it.

This line of thought leads me to believe that all modern nations could trace themselves back to powerful people who stole their wealth from others. Furthermore, they used their power to invent religions and rules of thumb—such as hereditary monarchy and the divine right of kings—to justify and perpetuate their position at the top of society.

To this day, these ideas still have appeal and currency. We don’t question them, even those of us who live in democratic republics. To believe someone is a prince, you have to believe in princes.

I don’t believe in princes anymore. Nor kings, nor queens, nor princesses. These are just people who, by chance of birth, benefitted from ancient theft and conquest, and perpetuate the myth that they deserve it.

The latest controversy in my area is another type of fight between conservative parent activist groups and school boards. This time it is not about mask requirements, but about sex education. Two things specifically rile the shouting class this time: (1) Masturbation exists, and (2) so do LGBTQ+ people.

Apparently, there are enough prudes out there to give the school superintendents hell about teaching about masturbation in schools (grade 3-5 specifically, in my case). I’m not talking about teaching how to masturbate, or about teaching that masturbation is a normal, natural thing for people to do, or even teaching that mutual masturbation can be an alternative to sexual intercourse that is far less likely to lead to pregnancy. I’m talking about even saying the word masturbation or writing it down.

The elementary school superintendent emailed everybody in town to clarify that masturbation is not included in my town’s 3rd-to-5th grade sex-ed at all, and proved it by excerpting parts of the curriculum. So all the bother over it, in my town at least, was just noise created by busybodies and crackpots. It is embarrassing to me that sex-ed can’t cover the one thing that the kids, by fifth grade, are probably already doing, and at least tell them it is OK. Instead, they will learn—from each other mostly—to feel ashamed about it.

LBGTQ+ material is also not part of the curriculum, which is terrible. LGBTQ+ people exist, which is not contingent on whether certain parents or people don’t like it or approve of it. Some of the students in every school are LGBTQ+, and they deserve to learn that they are not alone, not weird, have resources available to them if they need them, and deserve to be treated with respect. There was so much homophobia when I came of age (the late 1980s) that, if I had thought I was gay, it would have been devestating to me. And, at the time, I thought of myself as very progressive about homosexuality—I figured out myself that homosexuals must be born that way. If I came of age and discovered that I was gay, bi, or whatever, I would have needed some support from grown-ups and authority figures, and probably would have had no better place to get it than from school.

I would agree that grade 3 is too early to broach these topic and that grade 4 may be too early for most kids. However, grade 5 is the latest that these topics should be introduced, because that is when most of the kids will need help understanding them. Sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity are all things that teens and adults have to deal with all the time. To sweep some of it under the rug because prudish or religious people think they are improper just underserves our kids and perpetuates the persecution of non-cis, non-straight people.

You could argue that sex education should be handled at home, by parents, and that schools should keep out of it, or only focus on its biological aspects. That may sound reasonable, but it really isn’t. While I agree that parents should educate their children about sex—like my wife and I will—to arm them with information and to help them through puberty without developing unnecessary shame or body horror. The thing is, a lot of parents don’t—and those are the ones who are most vocal right now. We should not let them dictate how much or how little will be taught to all of our kids about the facts of life.

I have thought so many Big Thoughts about the InsurTech presentation I am working on that I have come full circle. I realized today that what I have built thus far contains pretty much the same information and ideas as my prior presentations on the topic, going back four or five years.

I think my current presentations slides and speaker notes are much better, and that the talk will be have better focus and clarity, but I am surprised at how much I want to say seems to be recycled from what I already had thought about the topic.

I started off trying to say something new. I hope that saying something old, but saying it better, counts for more than I think.

This video from University of California Television hit close to home (literally) for me:

Follow a team of UCLA anthropologists as they venture into the stuffed-to-capacity homes of dual income, middle-class American families in order to truly understand the food, toys, and clutter…

Watching this video was like watching a newsmagazine segment about my own house.

My house is a mess, my kids won’t pick up their toys and have taken over the entire house, and I spend so much tome tidying the same few messes every day that I can’t seem to move forward on any projects that would actually make my home better.

It turns out that I am not alone, and that the problems I have with my living space are uniquely American and uniquely modern. My wife and I are trying to crack this problem, and talked about it at length tonight. We are going to try a couple new things to crack it, though I am not sure they will work.

I learned about something new today from three separate podcasts I listened to, and a New York Times article I stumbled upon: popularism. It’s an idea that David Shor wrote about that apparently boils down to this: To win voters, Democrats should talk about what is popular rather than focus on racial tensions, identity politics, and calls to dramatically alter government and social systems (“defund the police,” for example, would be out).

What I wondered about this idea is this: Who determines what is popular? What if what is popular is not good? Plenty of popular ideas are amoral and destructive. Isn’t having principles, and now bowing to public pressure, valued in American politics, too? Or is that just posturing?

My wife and I have been watching Sex Education season three. True to its title, the show actually does weave sex education into its stories and strives to impart sensible information to its audience.

In one of the episodes, a trans student acts completely confused about which of the two sex–specific (boys and girls) sex education classes that the school’s new, conservative principal set up that they should attend. Because the trans character is new to the show, this scene seemed like a zeitgeisty political statement that the show’s writers crammed in, rather than a story beat that grew organically out of the characters and themes of the show.

In this scene, I thought that the trans character was being obtuse. After all, gender isn’t sex. Bodily organs are not identities. I would imagine a transgender person would understand that better than I would. I thought that the character should just go to one class or the other without making a political statement about it. I’m sure the character could just blow off the class without coming to any harm.

My wife and I discussed this scene after the episode was over. I was annoyed by the scene’s apparent politicism, but came to a conclusion about it that probably aligns with the trans character’s thoughts: Segregated boy/girl sex-ed is pointlessly gendered. Bodies have sexual organs, both external and internal. It would be good to know how they work, whichever ones you have. In fact, because of this, it makes sense to teach everybody, all together, how everybody’s sexual organs work and how reproduction works, too (pregnancy, childbirth, the whole thing). Perhaps that isn’t done because kids are too immature to handle it. I bet, though, that it isn’t done because adults are too embarrassed to do it.

One of the more memorable books I read in college was assigned to me in comparative literature class: Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. It is an exploration of human folly, written during the Renaissance by Erasmus, who was a philosopher and theologian, as an elaborate inside joke for his friend, Sir Thomas More. Folly is personified as a particularly vain goddess who praises herself (which is itself folly) for all of the great joys and accidental discoveries that folly brings to our lives.

It was memorable to me because, while folly is ubiquitous, it was something that was almost never well explored in my English-major coursework. (It was discussed in my Shakespeare courses when it came to Bottom and Fallstaff, but that is about it.) Little did I know when I was a twenty-year-old college student that understanding and appreciating that I, too, would be capable or folly, succumb to folly, and see folly in others on a daily basis. Life experience, far more than schooling, has taught me that folly is inevitable and inescapable in life, for both good and for ill. As Erasmus’s essay cheekily suggests, if folly is inevitable, you might as well find something to enjoy in it.

My folly, as a very young adult reading Erasmus for the first time, was thinking that adult life, which I was heading into apace, was going to make sense once I got there.

I never knew there was an ISO standard for numbering document sections. I kind of love it and kind of hate it.

I am the sort of person who developed a deep preference for the ISO 8601 date format, so it may be inevitable that I end up adopting it.

One of my favorite subreddit names is “a boring dystopia”. It is certainly not one of my favorite subreddits to browse—it is too depressing for that honor—but its name perfectly catches the zeitgeist. So many bad things happening right now are so dreadfully mundane that we don’t even want to think about them.

One aspect of our boring dystopia lately has been the failure of global supply chains to keep up with demand. Derek Thompson wrote about this in The Atlantic this week:

The U.S. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is the Everything Shortage.

The Everything Shortage is not the result of one big bottleneck in, say, Vietnamese factories or the American trucking industry. We are running low on supplies of all kinds due to a veritable hydra of bottlenecks.

There is a shortage in the labor market, resource shortages, shipping problems, and all other sorts of problems due to the COVID pandemic and to climate change. It seems as if all the just-in-time logistics I learned in business school stopped working all at once. People still want to buy things, which is a silver lining economically speaking, but we are all having trouble getting a bunch of different things. The global supply system is no longer working.

I can’t get certain products for my family on a daily basis. I am thankful I don’t need a car or a refrigerator because the wait times in them are very long right now. It is yet another terribly boring way that it feels absolutely insane to be alive today. Due to climate change, I think supply line shortages and delays are going to get worse before they get better.

This morning, I just had to click on a news story about somebody’s kid who tragically died of COVID. This evening I just had to listen to a podcast about the Supreme Court’s capricious behavior and what lies ahead in its term. These things didn’t teach me anything, or give me any insights I didn’t already had. Instead they leached me of energy.

Now, when I read an article or listen to a podcast that I know, going in will make me upset, or sad, or depressed, and inevitably does make me upset, or sad, or depressed, I find myself asking myself, automatically, “Why did I let that in?” The emphasis in my internal self-admonishment has recently moved from that to in, and I don’t really know why. I suppose that I have conceded to myself that I cannot avoid the daily torrent of news, gossip, hot takes, and both-sides-isms that pervades the internet. Even if I did avoid them myself, my family members bring them to me eventually, because we are all tapped into it. The trick I want to learn is to be able to observe all the frightful noise of each day’s media storm, but not dwell on it and let it bother me. Whether it bounces off me or passes through me, I don’t want to let it in anymore.

My daughter learned about slavery and the Civil War today in school. We talked about both—mostly slavery—over dinner. Needless to say, it was a heavy conversation—the first of many about race, racism, and the cracks in the foundation of our country. My daughter was, rightly, very shaken up about what we told her.

It made me think of when I first learned about slavery in detail, when I was in high school. I had two American history teachers who covered slavery. One taught us that slavery was wrong, but also taught us that slaves were not beaten and tortured like popular culture had taught us, because—and this is gross—slaves were expensive and slaveowners wouldn’t want to destroy their investment in them. He would have us believe that most slaves were treated fairly well for economic reasons. I don’t think my teacher was a racist, but he drank the racist Kool-Aid: The Lost Cause apologists’ dismissal, “Sure, slavery was bad, but that was in the past. We fixed it. It wasn’t even that bad if you really think about it. Anyway, it’s over now. We don’t have to feel bad about it anymore.”

I remember discussing slavery in his class in the context of moral relativism. (Moral realism was a huge school of thought in the nineties.) We debated how to judge people, like the Founding Fathers, who expressed high ideals about the dignity of humanity while, at the same time, they owned slaves. Is it fair to judge historical figures by today’s standards? These are important discussions to have in a history class. Back then I wanted to believe that these historical figures should be judged only by the standards of their time, both because I wanted them to remain my heroes, and because it seemed unfair to hold them to a standard that they might not have been even aware of.

My other American history teacher stated to the class that slavery is morally wrong, across all time and across all cultures. He minced no words about it: there is no moral relativism when it came to slavery. It’s always wrong to subjugate others. Some things are simply verboten; it doesn’t matter what the society accepts or believes, or what the reasons are behind it. Even if we believe that most slaves were not subjected to frequent physical violence, as the other history teacher claimed, and even if we somehow believe slaver were treated very well, it does not forgive their subjugation, for that is psychological torture and is simply wrong. It doesn’t matter even if society deems such a thing acceptable; people should know innately that certain things are wrong.

His simple lesson was the one that stuck with me. It has colored my thoughts about justice ever since. Moral relativism has certain clear limits. From him I learned that we could judge historical figures by their standards and our own. We don’t have to choose, and it doesn’t even make sense to choose. There are people who created my country who did great and terrible things. To understand them, you have to scrutinize them fully as humans, warts and all.

My parents never talked cogently to me about race when I was growing up. I picked up what they, and everyone else, thought about race slowly and organically. It didn’t help that I grew up in a preponderously white and Catholic area of Connecticut. We, as a region, had some kind of race panic over school desegregation (Scheff v. O’Niell) while I was in high school. I thought then that people’s concern was mostly about differences in class between the cities and the suburbs. Now I know I was naive. White people didn’t want their kids to mix with black kids, just like in Boston. I remember everybody being angry about the issue, but nothing ever happened that affected me or my town’s schools, as far as I know.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I lived and worked in multi-racial settings. I learned a lot about how similar we all are.

Don’t mistake domain-specific knowledge for intellect.

While you’re at it, don’t compare yourself to other people.

Today, to thank my in-laws for all the help they give to my family (which is a lot), I cooked them a nice dinner—chili and cornbread, which they love—and my daughter wrote them a thank-you note for the various nice things they do for her. I am trying to teach my children to express gratitude. I’m not sure that part was completely successful, but we all had a great time.

I have two seemingly conflicting ideas in my mind right now:

• You are what you do.
• You are not your job.

You are what you do.

Annie Dillard wrote, “how you spend your days is how you spend your lives.” That thought has guided me since I read that, in an A.P. English class my senior year of high school.

Action defines who you really are, but I have learned that it does not always inform who you think you are.

You are not your job.

When meeting somebody new, It have always hated the question, “What do you do?” The question really means, “What is your job?” The answer leads to value judgments about the other person: wealth, intelligence, privilege, and so on. It is unfair and reductive. I am not my job. Knowing what I do for a living doesn’t say that much about what I do in life.

Today I listened to a lecture that Stephen Fry gave to Nokia Bell Labs a few years ago. He told stories about Pandora’s Box, about the invention of chess, about how doubling grains of rice on each square of a chessboard will eventually lead to counts of rice grains larger than the number of atoms in the known universe, about the founding of Intel, and so on. Stephen Fry’s stories were old, familiar, and, many of them, not literally true—but he connected them together to his ideas about technology and its effect on humanity in ways that were central to his thesis. The overall effect was very compelling to me.

One of the greatest things in life is to hear or read a good story, well told. When a storyteller tells multiple stories, makes connections between them, and links them to new stories and new ideas in an entirely new context, then something new and extraordinary can result from it: One can share new ideas, new ways of thinking, and easier ways for people to remember these ideas and ways of thinking. The stories can be fun and memorable. The connections between them can be intellectually or emotionally exciting.

There are far fewer good stories in the world than ways to tell them. Rather than worry about retelling a familiar tale, find an effective way to tell it, and mine it for ideas and themes that can connect to the story that you want to tell, or to the topic you want to speak about. Narratives are important because they are entertaining and memorable. Facts, when contextualized by being included in or linked to a narrative, are far more memorable than dry recitations of data. Connections between different stories and ideas are the most valuable thing you can communicate, because they are the hardest to come up with, and not everybody makes them on their own. The power of connection is to recontextualize something—or everything—in the audience’s mind.

One reason I decided to publish something (even something short, as long as it is creative) to a blog every day was to help me get over the perfectionism that has limited my creative output so much over the years.

I don’t publish because my writing or even my thoughts are “done”. I publish because it is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. That’s what I do. I do this every day.

I write for myself. I am gladdened that a few people on Micro.blog read what I write sometimes. I don’t expect it. It is a bonus. I don’t have an agenda, and therefore am not seeking out an audience. However, if I didn’t publish my little essays as blog posts, they would always be drafts, and would never be done.

Moreover, they wouldn’t be out there on the vast internet for some curious person to discover someday. My words, mundane as they may be sometimes, might help somebody out of a tough emotional spot, or get them to understand something a little bit better. They are my small, insignificant gifts to the world. I don’t care if the world accepts them or not; it’s what I have to give.

This blog post is probably not my best one. I’m not the first person to think that writing every day, with the necessary element of publishing it, is a worthwhile and rewarding exercise for the mind. I’m sure that, if I searched the web, one could find hundreds or thousands more posts just like it. That does not diminish its value to me. This is my blog post. These are my immediate thoughts—today. And if I have not expressed them perfectly, well, tomorrow is another chance to do so.

Every year, when the air starts to get chilly, I flash back to this sense memory:

I am four years old, sitting atop a hay bale in front of a farm stand with my kindergarten class, drinking apple cider and eating a white powdered donut.

I can still taste the apple cider—sharp, sweet, with a distinctive bite because, as I would later figure out, it was turning hard. I can still see the bright white of the sugar on the donut and smell the hay that scratched my skin when I kicked my legs over the side of the bale. These foods, and the whole experience, were new to me. Every bit of it was surprising and delightful.

To this day, the taste of that cider is especially vivid in my mind. Nothing I have tasted since has ever matched that first sip of cider.

I have two collections that I love but cannot justify: high-end headphones (each is sub-$500, but still really expensive and good) and mechanical keyboards (each is $240 or less). It took ten years to build up these collections, so the embarrassing amount of money I have spent is spread out over a long, long period. I was wondering today if people who spend a lot more than I do on vacations do so because they forego (and don’t care about) material objects like pricy headphones and keyboards.

Getting into these “hobbies” (if buying stuff can be called a hobby) was entirely accidental. I’m part of a product review program where I can occasionally select products I like for no money up front, and then only pay taxes on their value months later. I got my first taste of better headphones and better keyboards through that program, essentially through the luck of the draw. (I’m not in charge of which products become available for me to review.) If not for that, I probably would have no other headphones other than my AirPods, and would probably have a $100 Microsoft or Logitech keyboard that I would have to replace (because of wear) every year or two.

I think I am finally nearing “endgame” in both of these categories. I have fantastic headphones of nearly every type (dynamic and planar magnetic, open-back and closed-back, Bluetooth and wired), and they cover every situation, that I need. Similarly, I have mechanical keyboards for all of my computers, have tried a bunch of different key switches (clicky, tactile, and linear), and have even bought a “weird” ortholinear board that I never thought I would ever want until a couple months ago. Any new keyboard purchases are going to be about fixing something that is broken (my wonderful and unacceptably buggy Durgod tenkeyless) or trying out a different type of keyswitch on my new, hot-swappable ortholinear board. At least I hope that will be the case. Collecting more and more of these objects sometimes feels like an obsession, and is not something I want to keep doing forever.

I have worked from home for more than half of my career. I’m no stranger to working in an office, but I find myself wondering what people actually do at work all day. I always imagine that my coworkers are more focused on their tasks than I am, or more driven to earn a promotion, or more highly structured in their approach to managing their work than I am.

I’m pretty sure, though, that that can’t be, because no one I have ever worked with in person was much more focused that I was, with the exception of one or two workaholic bosses I’ve had. Those guys loved their job in ways I couldn’t replicate—at least that’s what I thought—and that drove them to work well into the evenings every day, after I was ready to go home.

My last office-job experience was mostly great, but there was a lot of gossip, walking around, waiting for elevators, waiting for meetings to begin, going out to grab a coffee, and so on. Half of my day was spent on actual work, even though I spent almost the entire day with my team, doing the same things they were doing. When I worked from home on that job, I got a lot more done, even though I would take break to make my coffee or put a load of laundry in the washing machine.

My job today is different than any of the office-based ones. It is more fluid and unpredictable in nature; every day is different than the last, and some of my projects are vastly different from others. The sands are always shifting beneath my feet. I would prefer my job to be more predictable, for my mental health, more than anything. I think that it is probably anxiety more than anything else that makes me think, pretty frequently, that I’m not working hard enough, or as hard as my peers, or that it took me too much time to do a certain task I was asked to do.

I am nearing 2,000 posts on my micro.blog, which is about 1,950 more posts than I have made on any other blog I started in the past. Do any micro.bloggers know how I could generate any stats, like word count, about my blog?

I have been fascinated by this anonymously published paper/series of articles about the obesity epidemic. Part I, covering mysteries about obesity that I did and did not know about, drew me in. The authors’ thesis, which isn’t presented until Part III, is that chemical contaminants are the primary cause of the epidemic (not why individuals gain weight, but why obesity in entire populations increased dramatically since 1980). I’m not sure I buy that, but it is an interesting argument to consider that I had not previously given any weight to.

I was interested this that work because I am struggling with my weight again due to the pandemic. Since January 2020, when reading the news from Wuhan caused me to have a a panic attack about the coming pandemic (I was right, unfortunately). When COVID panic hit the US, and the store shelves were bare, businesses and sports leagues were shutting down, and we were afraid to leave our houses, I started to eat sweets or drink beer (just one a day) as a way to cope with the uncertainty and stress.

I gave up the beer last September, but giving up sweets entirely has been impossible for me thus far. Sugar is a habit I have given up several times in my life, but I always go back to it when I am feeling very bad, like if I get sick or if stressful situations last too long. The pandemic has basically never stopped being stressful for me or my family. Dealing with that stress takes a ton of energy away from me, and I end up eating extra food—sweet food—for the boost of energy it gives me. I feel a chemical dependence on it now that is stronger than I recall it being at any point in my life. I want to give it up, and am trying to find the mental resolve to do so this week.

Today I did too many chores, then did way too little of anything, and ended up eating too much ice cream this evening.

I should give myself a break because our plans for today were canceled at the last minute. Still, I wish I could wake up on the weekend and just have fun, or at the very least take up the unstructured time I sometimes have on a Saturday or Sunday and do something productive with it. I have tons of writing projects on my hands, and did not work on any of it today.

I did bake bread and cook chicken noodle soup for my family, so the day wasn’t a total loss. Hopefully I use tomorrow in a more worthwhile way.