An exchange between myself and my wife, about someone else we know:

Her: It’s hard to say no to her.

Me: No it’s not. It’s two letters. One syllable. Simple. Done.

It’s a uniquely American thing, I have read, to work while on vacation. I have had to, as recently as last year. Some of my coworkers were reading, reviewing, and revising work papers and memos while on vacation last week. My vacation this year hasn’t technically started yet, but I am now in my family’s summer-vacation spot, my in-law’s lake house, primed to report in for remote work in the morning.

Next week, for me, is planned full-time, remote work, while on vacation with my family. I hope to have no unplanned work time after next week, when my vacation-proper finally begins. That kind of thing has happened in the past, and it could happen again this year.

I feel guilty each year for taking off two weeks with my family and finagling a weeks’ worth of remote work to tack onto it. It seems near impossible and nigh immoral to take off such an extravagant length of time from work. The idea is coming entirely from my own head at this point; no one explicitly tells me I’m doing something wrong, but it certainly feels like I am. I also wonder if my vacations are taking away from my opportunities for promotions, raises, or bonuses. In the end, it is more important to me to spend vacation time with my family, even though it feels like I am stealing that time from work.

If there is one thing I would like my kids to learn from me, it is that one of the greatest, most impactful human inventions of all time is the double-entry bookkeeping system for accounting. If my son or daughter ever throws that term out in class when a teacher is writing a list of inventions on the board, there may be some “ums” and blank stares in the classroom, but I would be very proud.

Tim Harford reminds us of how important the double-entry system is, and of the system’s historical origin, in his essay “The Tyranny of Spreadsheets”:

In the late 1300s, the need for a solid system for accounts was evident in the outbursts of one man in particular, an Italian textile merchant named Francesco di Marco Datini. Poor Datini was surrounded by fools.

“You cannot see a crow in a bowlful of milk!” he berated one associate. “You could lose your way from your nose to your mouth!” he chided another.

Iris Origo’s vivid book The Merchant of Prato describes Datini’s everyday life and explains his problem: keeping track of everything in a complicated world.

Some of us have always needed to keep track of everything. The knock-on effect of accountancy, going back to antiquity, is that someone wrote down what people owned and traded, what was abundant and what was rare, and even what came from where. Because of that, we have been able to learn the languages and numeric systems people wrote with, and what people valued, how they traded, and much more, in cultures that have long since passed away. It isn’t all because of the double-entry system in particular, but I think it is pretty interesting nonetheless.

When I was a kid writing essays for school, I always peppered my writing with big, fancy words in places that small, simple words would do. In part, I was showing off my big vocabulary to my teachers. For the most part, though, I was afraid to use the small, simple words because I thought of them as childish. I figured that small, simple words would make my writing seem small (as in insignificant) and simple (as in simplistic) as well. Of course, now I see that as folly. An argument that is simply stated is easier to understand, and thus more convincing, than one delivered in showy, but less comprehensible, language. While there are some glorious, complex words that I would never want to do without—incarnadine, mellifluous, loquacious, raconteur, elixir, donnybrook—I would never want an argument I write to hinge upon them.

I read this quote years ago in a novel called The Gargoyle that fundamentally changed my life:

Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.

—Andrew Davidson

Love is an emotion that does not meaningfully exist unless it is expressed through action. Actions are governed by choice. Thus, to act with love is a choice you have to make every day, many times a day. It doesn’t matter how you feel: love is what you do.

You are the story you tell to yourself. Make it a good one.

It is popular now to lionize failure. Both fictional stories (thematically) and nonfictional accounts (explicitly) praise failure as a stepladder to greatness. It makes sense. Failure is a great teacher. It teaches us what does not work. It teaches us what we need to do better, and what we need to work harder on. It teaches us what our limitations are, and prods us into further developing our strengths.

While this is, in some way, timeless wisdom, the overt emphasis on it in the business book, personal productivity, and self-help space is relatively new. Our idols in business—wildly successful, and sometimes unimaginably wealthy, people—now regularly explain that they arrived at whatever monumental success they are famous for only after navigating a bumpy road potholed with failures all along the way. They tell stories about companies they started that went under, or products they developed that never found a market, or ideas they had that did not work with as much or more pride and excitement as when they talk about what actually did work for them. They talk about failure almost like it is success. They prod us to consider failure as the best learning opportunity—something to embrace rather than fear.

Well, sure, if you can handle it. For most people, it is a privilege to be able to fail. You have to be able to weather the storm. Not everyone can. It takes resources, like money and the right friends. It takes mental wherewithal, like good mental health (or, in some cases, psychopathy) provides. It takes opportunity, which for normal people often comes down to luck. Not everyone has those things. Not everyone who falls down can pick herself back up again. Sometimes a door closes and another one does not open up.

When serial entrepreneurs, angel investors, or CEOs wax on about their failures, be wary. Their discussion of past failures may be instructional, but it is also a showy way to appear humble. It disguises the privilege one often needs to survive failure without economic, emotional, or reputational humiliation.

Money and connections help some people fail upward. Their unsuccessful companies don’t liquidate; they get bought by other companies. They don’t go bankrupt when a business venture fails, but their employees lose their jobs and their investors take a hit. These exits are not failures; they are minor successes—at least for the owner or entrepreneur. The road to their success is not paved with failure. It actually is paved with minor success after minor success.

So don’t believe it when sometime tells you that experiencing failure is the only way to learn how to succeed. That simply is not true. Failure is a great teacher, but it is not the only teacher.

I think about education a lot, not only because I have kids, but also because my wife is a high school teacher, and I like to help her think up lessons. If I were a teacher, I would challenge my students to think really hard, to question what they have been told, and to go beyond the material and create new thoughts of their own based on what we discuss in class. My wife tells me that my level of instruction would suit some grad students, maybe, but not high school students, and presumably not undergrads either. That is dispiriting to me, but she would know better than I—she knows teens and young adults and intimately knows the educational system they are put through. Through her, I’m pretty aware that high school is not quite as I remembered it. Overall, it seems dumbed down compared to what I went through: loftier goals with lower expectations for achieving them.

I had figured that college was just the same as I remembered it—and thus would be very difficult for high school students to cope in, academically—but I am now not so sure about that. A few weeks ago, I read Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s Atlantic article “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It riled me up. I had seen Mr. Haidt sometime earlier discuss his thesis about the decline of thought on college campuses in favor of “safetyism” on Real Time with Bill Maher, and found it both compelling and dispiriting. I listened to one of his lectures on YouTube and thought about it quite for a while.

I went to Brandeis University—one of the schools mentioned in Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s article—in the 1990s. I remember that one of the main themes of my instruction there was that I should expect to be challenged and to confront new and potentially uncomfortable ideas. We, as a student body, we asked—explicitly—to learn about, discuss, and work through new ideas together. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be difficult. Difficulty was the whole point. Open debate was how it worked. That was liberal arts scholarship—and I’m pretty sure college campuses were thought to be politically-correct, liberal romper rooms even then, so maybe even I got the watered-down version. Is the academic culture I came up in gone now, in favor of a focus on comfort and mollify action at the expense of debate and rigor?

Lately, I have wondered how it really is on college campuses. How much of this worry, put in me by some of the things I read and see, is about someone else’s hysteria about changing cultural and social norms? Are the stories about wokeness, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and call-out culture that I have seen on the Internet and in The New York Times the norm, or exceptions to the norm? What kind of story would make it all the way to me? Only the exceptional ones, I think. Maybe freedom of thought at college campus isn’t as constrained as I have been led to believe. I suppose I will find out when I explore this issue further, or years down the line when my kids are ready to look for the colleges they will attend.

I enjoyed reading Morgan Housel’s blog post on the Collaborate Fund blog. The ideas in the post are some that I want to explore in my blog, too. All these items are direct quotations from the post:

• The ability to create complex stories makes it easy to fool people, including yourself.
• What’s boring is often important and the smartest people are the least interested in what’s boring.
• Intelligence can make it difficult to communicate with ordinary people, who may have the missing insight you’re looking for.

These are important ideas worth looking into and thinking about. An idea from another outside source—the Make Me Smart podcast—came to mind when I read the post: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” (I just learned that the Internet attributes that quote to Kenneth H. Blanchard.)

You Really Need to Quit Twitter

I saw this article by Caitlin Flanagan on Om Malik’s blog. It’s a fun read if, like me, you’ve been through the quitting Twitter part she goes through.

What you would prefer to do isn’t the same as what you would be willing to do. I think that distinction gets lost a lot if times in interpersonal relationships. If you ask for one and then ask for the other, don’t be surprised if the answer changes.

When I was in fourth grade, my family moved to the town across the river. The move was not traumatic, but it was socially isolating. We had to move out of our old house three months before our new house was finished being built. We ended up as the only tenants in an apartment complex across town from where we used to live. For the fall, I went to my old elementary school and saw my old neighborhood friends and familiar classmates during the day, but I saw no one my age outside of school during the week or on weekends. Besides my parents, I saw no one on nights and weekends.

As an only child, I could keep my own company. I watched a lot of TV that fall. I played a lot of Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. By Christmas, I was so bored that I actually mastered playing Gyromite with R.O.B. the Robot, which is a game that is both preposterously difficult (I mean, look at this) and equally unrewarding.

On New Year’s Day we moved into our new house, which was newly built in in a new, single-road housing development that was not yet completed. The house was both awesome—so big! so new!—and lonely. It inhabited the unfinished end of the street; half our neighbors were empty lots. We didn’t have streetlights or mailboxes. Our front yard had no trees, no grass, and no bushes; it was a sea of straw, strewn over frozen mud. My best friend for the first week was the little TV in my room that I watched while my parents unpacked their things.

Starting over at school, and making what friends I could in my new, very small neighborhood—especially after months of social isolation—was tough. I would ask my parents how to make new friends in my new town, where the kids all dressed differently, talked differently, and cared about different things than the kids I was friends with in my prior life. How do you start talking to someone you don’t know without coming across like an idiot?

They would say, wisely, “just be yourself.” That was pretty much the only advice I ever got growing up about how to act, how to fit in, and how to be comfortable in new social situations. It is terrible advice.

When I moved to a new town, I didn’t need to “be myself.” I needed to change myself: to become someone flexible enough to adapt to my new situation, to meet new people halfway, to be more open to taking chances, and to care less about every moment that didn’t go so well. It took me a long time to figure that out, but I did. I adjusted. I made friends. I found my people. It took a long time, and over that time I changed myself into a person far more comfortable with who I was and who I wasn’t.

“Just be yourself” doesn’t mean “just be yourself.” It means don’t hate yourself. Truly. For every inch of “don’t change yourself to fit in” in those words, there is a mile of “put yourself out there, and don’t let yourself feel destroyed if it doesn’t work out.” Try, and try again, but don’t hate yourself when you fail to make a connection or have to put your foot in your mouth. Don’t hate yourself when you don’t measure up, don’t fit in, and don’t succeed.

So, when you face a new challenge in life, don’t be yourself. Be better.

Life experience has a definite shape to it. Time isn’t a straight line.

It’s a funnel.

Well, really, it’s an hourglass.

The future is infinite. The past is infinite. The present, however, is really, really small.

Right now is the ultimate pinch point. You can only do so much. You have a tiny amount of time. You have a finite amount of attention. Now is the time. Now is your time.

I find myself thinking this, on the fifth of July, after enduring with fusillade after fusillade of illegal fireworks, and thrum of dance music blaring from several neighbors’ backyard parties, and the thump, thump, thump of basslines permeating every barrier between them and my family until almost midnight last night. (Let’s just say my kids don’t sleep on July 4th.)

What does America mean to me?

It is a promise to do better, to try harder, to fight for justice and freedom, and to stand up again after being knocked down. It is a promise that is very, very hard to keep—one most often observed in its breach.

What has America actually been to me? All this noise around me, for years and years and years, drowning out the voices and the actions of serious, thoughtful people. I am one of the privileged few, but I too am lost and bewildered in my own country, by my own country.

America needs to be better, and for that, Americans need to act better. To start, we must demand better of each other.

When the Micro.blog client apps were open-sourced, I reviewed the Github repos for the two I use most (the iOS app and the macOS app). I wondered if I could contribute something to the projects—probably something small, like more hardware keyboard shortcuts or an enhancement to how the post editor works. I wasn’t sure if that would be welcome, based on the brief “About the open source project…” verbiage in the REAMDE, and based on (1) the very old, but open, issues in the iOS repo, and (2) seeing no issues in the macOS repo.

I “know” Manton because I have been listening to his podcast with Daniel Jalkut for years (which is where I learned about Micro.blog), so I think of him as thoughtful, considerate, and certainly not as unfriendly. But I did not actually expect him to open source the apps when he did, and I figure that her has a business to run and may not be ready for a bunch of user requests on client apps that he may be happy enough with already. Manton saw my prior post about the apps and commented on it: “I wrote that README quickly and should expand on it…”

In true blogging fashion, I am responding to his comment with this blog post, with the aim to be helpful to Manton as he thinks about how to expand on the README he wrote.

What I look for in an open source project.

Two things, really. Can I report an issue? And, can I contribute?

Issues

Ideally the issues list will be kept current and will tie to development efforts (bug fixes and enhancements) going forward. Very old issues that the maintainer no longer wants worked on will be closed. Issues that the maintainer is interested in will be labeled “help wanted”, “good for beginners”, etc.

The maintainer should say in the README how user-reported issues will be addressed. It is OK to state that the maintainer does not plan to consider some or all feature requests from users. It is best to be open and realistic about how the project will operate.

Contributing

I always look for a CONTRIBUTING document or section in the README to learn whether or not the maintainer will accept pull requests, and if possible, how that process should work. Is opening an issue, then resolving it with a pull request later on, the right way or the wrong way to go about it? I have worked with maintainers who preferred that approach, to solicit conversation, and have worked with others who preferred the code change to come first and the discussion afterward.

Also, it is OK if the maintainer is not going to accept pull requests; I would rather know up front.

The future

I think it is perfectly OK if the way a project is maintained changes over time. Not every decision made on day one has to be carried out forever. As a potential contributor, I just like to know what I might expect if I approached the maintainer now.

On Thursday I configured NextDNS to block (for my personal devices only) news.google.com. Google News has been my Internet obsession since it debuted in 2002. It is not a healthy one. Whenever my mind gets lost for a second, I find myself opening a browser tab and checking Google News to see…what’s new, I guess. Sometimes I close Google News out of disgust or boredom and then, almost immediately, open it up again.

Why do I do this? What am I searching for? What is going on in my mind?

Reading the news seems like a worthwhile activity—something a thoughtful, intelligent person would do—but I am pretty sure that most of the time it isn’t. I think that news sites and cable networks exploit the part of our brains that are always scanning for threats and opportunities, as part of our survival instincts. In Paleolithic times, knowing if the tribe across the river is friendly or hostile, knowing where the good game is and where the predators are, and knowing what foods might kill you were all important to survival. All of that information is relevant and timely.

But that’s not what I get from Google News. I rarely learn about anything nearby that could possibly affect me. I usually learn about national affairs, faraway disasters, or (more recently) some else’s social media-published outrage about these things. It’s hard to say that provides me much benefit at all. So, for the time being, I’m turning it off. The news will still be there when I need it, but not packaged in such a way that hooks me and makes me feel virtuous for being hooked on it.

This week @manton open-sourced the iOS and macOS Micro.blog apps. I think that is a great move in general, but it is not one of the things I require in the software I use. I never felt that comfortable when, a while ago now, I read users’ blog posts expressing anger or dismay that the client apps were not open-sourced. (Let’s put aside, for now, that what makes Micro.blog work is the server-side code.)

As a paying customer, and as a developer myself, I don’t think Manton and his team are obligated to share their client source code with me. I don’t think anyone is. If they want to, that’s great—but it is no guarantee that the client app itself will be better, more secure, more feature-rich, or even have a future many years from now. Heck, it doesn’t even look likely that Micro.blog will accept pull requests, so it is unclear whether open-sourcing it will change its development direction or iteration time at all. I’m not complaining about that, though. Maintaining an open source project/community and running a successful blog hosting business are almost entirely orthogonal to each other. Open source doesn’t really give me added comfort that an app I love or depend on will be there for me forever, because nothing is forever, even open-source software projects.

As a computer user and enthusiast, I used to care a lot more that I do now about free, libre, and open-source software. My primary reason was that I thought I could trust it more than closed source software. It is harder to hide malware, tracking, and obvious security flaws when the code is publicly viewable. History has shown that not to be entirely true. Remember Heartbleed? That incident showed us that widely used libraries may be maintained by only one or two people, and their source code can contain bugs and security flaws that go unnoticed for years, because no one is actually looking at the source code.

My secondary reason for preferring open-source software was more theoretical, but larger in scope and more exciting to me: open-source software can be a more practical and a better use of humanity’s programming resources. That’s because one of the great, unfulfilled promises of computer science is the ability to solve a certain problem once and for all, for everybody. Open source utilities, like the Unix command line tools, and open-source libraries, like OpenSSL, theoretically could make this happen. But it didn’t happen, at least not fully. We spend a lot of time, collectively, solving the same software problems over and over again. We may approach these problems in new ways, with new languages, and on new platforms. But in the end, we are repeating ourselves. Imagine where we could be if we didn’t keep repeat ourselves!

I actually think that most of the repetition is the inevitable result of human nature. Humans are curious; we want to know how something works, and how to do it ourselves. Humans are also prideful: we think “I can do the same thing, but better.” Most importantly, humans need to learn; each of us is born knowing nothing, and must learn extensively from our forebears to push our collective knowledge out just a little further.

In the end, what is most useful to me about Micro.blog open-sourcing its codebase is that I can look at it and learn from it. That could be very helpful. Long ago, I was interested in creating a dead-simple iOS app (extension, widget, whatever) for Micropub posting. Eventually, well before this week, Micro.blog open-sourced its Snippets library, which would have made writing such an app much easier. Now, with the client app also open sourced, I could review its code to see (presumably) how to call, configure, and use the Snippets library in an iOS app. That is even more useful than the Snippets library alone.

Now that the Micro.blog client app source code is free and open, maybe I could use some of it to help me build that little utility app now. In the same vein, maybe someone else could use much more of that source code and build a better, more feature-rich client app based on it. Maybe the Micro.blog app is a solved problem, and no one has to solve it again (at least until Apple stops supporting the frameworks it is based on), and a hundred other Micropub-blogging-based small businesses could spring up, all using a common client app. Who knows? That possibility is a risk to Manton and Micro.blog, but it is also a gift to the greater world.

Thanks, @manton, @cheesemaker, and @jean (are there others at Micro.blog?) for all the work you do.

I often joke with people that I am not as nice as my wife is. It’s a self-deprecating remark, but I do mean it. I am a nice person, just not as nice as my wife is.

I’m not as nice because I was bullied for most of my childhood. I never got beaten up (though I did get into fights), and I was never afraid to go to school (though it was a gauntlet and a crucible), but I was picked on mercilessly, incessantly, and for everything—my name, my weight, my glasses, and most of all for being smart.

When I was a young adult, I would say that the bullying led me to develop character—and, man, I wish I didn’t have character! As a middle-aged adult, I find myself wondering what that bullying really taught me. I think, in a huge way, it taught me to distrust people—especially people my own age. It taught me not to take what people said to me at face value, because venomous words are often preceded by honeyed ones. It taught me that others may switch from allies to enemies when the social situation changes, like when the bullies enter the scene.

One of my triumphs in life was when I finally made the bullying stop. After years of trying different things—there is a lot of well-meaning advice for the bullied out there to follow—what finally made the bullying stop was a 30-second conversation I had with one of my bullies, in the back of a classroom on the first day of seventh grade. After being on the receiving end of some stupid taunt, I had had enough. I turned to the kid, looked him in the eye, and said to him: “You can say whatever you want to me. You can call me whatever names you want. But you can never hurt me. You can never change my mind about myself, no matter what you do.”

For some reason I still can’t figure out, the name calling, the taunting, and the scapegoating stopped overnight—not just from that one kid; from everybody. I didn’t become popular or anything, but I was mentally strong, and everyone knew it. The bullies just stopped bullying me. I was no longer a social pariah. I made a lot of new friends that year. Even some of the kids who picked on me even became my friends before the school year was through.

That single exchange, by itself, probably did not cause the bullying to stop. Asserting that I was mentally stronger than my bullies probably would not have worked unless it were really true. It was the last of a series of defenses I developed over the years. It was the strongest one, but I may not have developed it if I hadn’t developed others before it, like wit, determination, and resilience.

Bullying has shaped me to be someone who, as I have been told, does not suffer fools gladly. It has made me wary of people and likely to question others’ intentions, which is a great skill in political situations and in some professional situations, but it isn’t that useful for socializing at a picnic. It has also shaped me into someone who has tremendous sympathy for the downtrodden, quiet underdogs of the world. I can empathize with the pain of others. I know that true friends are rare and precious. I know that inner strength is hard won.

I also know that I am not as nice as other people, because other people were not as nice to me. So I try, really hard, to be nice, even when it is difficult, because people deserve better than I got when I was a kid.

I have recently finished crafting a slideshow, and writing a talk to go with it, that is the best one I have ever done, probably by a mile. I spent hundreds of hours this year watching talks on YouTube (both good and bad ones), watching instructional videos on speaking and on creating effective visual presentations, and trying new slide design techniques (and throwing out all the things I tried that didn’t work). I tried really hard to push myself out of my PowerPoint design rut. I thought I was good at presenting before, but now I think I have really leveled up. I have internalized a lot of the lessons I learned this year.

The most visually impressive, most engaging, most well written talk that I have ever created is due to my bosses tomorrow. It is complete. It would make for a great 80 minute talk. But it has to be cut, and maybe cut down by half. It was momentarily agonizing to learn this today, but I am trying to think positively about it, because I have learned the right way to cut (iteratively, though rehearsals and timing of sections) and I know how to not cut the meat out of the presentation (because I wrote down the main idea of each section, so it wouldn’t get lost in an edit). I can do it. I just wish I didn’t have to.

No matter what, though, I’m going to be proud of what I built, and I’m going to seek out more opportunities to present in the future. I am good at it. I put in the work to be even better at it. And maybe with enough practice I can be great at it.

My work week has overflowed with head-desk moments, turnarounds, and setbacks. It has been frustrating beyond belief. It’s not often that I experience big parts of my work projects blowing up in my face, especially for unexpected reasons. Fortunately, all the problems I am facing are technology-related, not interpersonal, and can, I think, be solved by doing something I, by nature, kind of hate doing: asking for help.

I am trying to change my mindset from “I can’t do this anymore” to “I can do this. I may need help. And it may take longer than expected.” It sounds simple, but it really isn’t. For whatever reason, whatever I picked up from the self-help and coaching industries over the years taught me a misleading lesson about personal achievement, which basically boils down to “it’s mind over matter.” But sometimes, the problem really is matter—the external roadblocks, rather than the internal ones. At least, that’s what I think about this week’s challenge. If I can’t remove those roadblocks myself, then maybe someone else can help me.

My wife teaches speech, debate, and dramatic arts to high school students. I love it when she asks me to help her with her lesson plans, because it gives me the chance to take a subject that she has to teach, however uninteresting it may seem (especially if you’ve taught it for 10+ years in a row), and blow it up into something that is the foundation of everything.

Here’s an exchange we had this spring:

Me: What’s the curriculum?

Her: Persuasive speech.

Me: All speech is persuasive speech.

Her: That’s not helpful.

Me: But it’s true!

I always encourage her to start new topics with audacious statements that demand defending. I’m not sure if she ever does, but I think it is important to tie everything you learn about writing and speaking with the fundamental forces that drive communication.

In another life, I would have ended up teaching English at some level, too. I think I would make an excellent high school teach for one or two very smart kids, and a potentially disastrous one for everyone else.

I write a lot of email at work. Almost every one I write starts with “Hi, <name>.” It seems perfectly normal, until you realize that every email client already includes that in the “To” field above the body of the message. The reader knows her own name, and it is written on the screen in the “To” field next to her email address. Why do I write it again in the body of the email? Why do I do this 50 times every workday? Why do I do this even though I think it is redundant?

Simple: Because I think that everyone’s favorite word is their own name. Everyone likes to see it. It’s subtle flattery to include it atop the body of every email message. Whenever I think I should just stop my habit of typing it, I remind myself of this and keep going with it, because I think in the end it is worthwhile.

One of the best lessons that literature has taught me is that the bad guy thinks he’s the good guy. In more abstract terms, the villain thinks she is the hero of her own story. That is what drives villains, and that is what makes them dangerous.

Sometimes, as in real life, the villain may in fact be the hero of his own story, because the story as we know it isn’t over, and it isn’t about what we thought it was about. Any narrative can have a counter narrative. Every comedy might be someone else’s tragedy.

All of this is true in life as it is in art.

There are real villains in the real world, and we need real heroes to face them. But there are a lot of false villains in our lives that we also face. These false villains may be people we are mad at momentarily, people we are close to who frustrate us, people who shun us, people who are indifferent to us, and so on. These false villains may also be ourselves—the fears and doubts that hold us back, the shames we keep secret from ourselves, and the pasts that we cannot change.

We must be careful not to think of these false villains as the real ones. Not all stories need a hero to resolve them. When we play the hero, we may unknowingly be playing the villain instead.

I am teaching my daughter how to solve problems. Math problems.

I find or think up challenging math problems for her (she is a third grader), and, to make them more fun, I rewrite them to include mention of her friends and family, favorite characters, and favorite things. We work through them together before bedtime. It’s fun, and we both get a lot out of it.

I always close our math session by asking her a question. The questions I ask are meant to spark introspection and, I hope, foster self-worth: What is something you like about yourself? What is something you like to do? What is something are you good at? What are some things people you like have in common?

The questions I want her to ask in life—when learning new things, when engaging with people, and when confronting political forces in the world—are the big, probing kind: What is this all about? Why is it important? What does that even mean? How do you know?

These are simple questions, but they carry a lot of weight when asked earnestly, and also when asked recursively to get to the bottom of something. They are at the forefront of my mind all the time (especially how do you know?) because I believe they are at the heart of thoughtful inquiry. (They may also be at the heart of skepticism or even a healthy distrust, but that is something for me to unpack later.)

As a father, I have no idea how to teach her to ask these questions. How do you teach someone to not be afraid to ask these questions? How do you teach someone to not get upset at the answers? How do you teach someone to deal with indifference, rejection, or even malice? I don’t know. I can only ask her big questions enough times for her to get used to them.

As she grows older and more confident, the other big questions I want her to ask are: What can I do? and Why not me? Those questions are even harder to ask, harder to answer, and I certainly don’t have the right answers to them. Part of the my journey through fatherhood is to try to figure them out.

Seth Godin says that everyone should have a blog. Moreover, everyone who has a blog should blog daily, primarily because it reinforces the idea that the important thing about it is to show up, every day, day after day, and actually do it. Well, this is showing up. I’m here.

I’m thinking about how I can be better at everything I do. I’m trying to build myself up, brick by brick, after whatever the heck happened to me during the COVID-19 pandemic. (One weird thing I noticed is that I have started to prefix the pandemic with a descriptor. It’s as if I imagine we will need to differentiate between several.) I am teaching myself new things. I am taking more chances. I am talking to more people. I am trying harder to focus on what is vital.

The effort has been paying off; at first slowly, and now more quickly every week. I think, as the weeks keep going by, I will seek out more opportunities to do good things, to grow, and to connect with the world again.