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 got back to practicing Colemak-DH typing this evening. I am still not great at it, but I didn’t lose a step during my break from it, either.

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.

I have temporarily stopped practicing on, or changing to, the ColeMak-DH keyboard layout. I haven’t been using my new Planck-EZ keyboard at all. I am still too slow with that layout to use it for “real” writing, and I have been writing and writing and writing for the past couple weeks.

I think I am still very excited about moving to the Planck and to a non-QWERTY layout. But I am more excited about my writing projects right now.

I plan to pick up Colemak-DH and the Planck keyboard again in a couple weeks, which is around my birthday, because I believe that my need for fast typing will abate by then. The Planck keyboard was supposed to be a birthday present, anyway.

Yesterday at work I was asked to give a status update on my team’s status call, which is a Webex. I decided to create a slideshow and make a good presentation out of it. I have decided to take every opportunity, even the little ones, to improve my presentation skills.

I played too much Scott Pilgrim vs. the World this week, and have been rewarded with wrist pain in my left hand. I should have known I was overdoing it because my typing became more and more inaccurate as the week progressed.

The tree service my wife and I hired accidentally severed the internet connection cable outside my house. Did I mention that I work from home and my kid has Google Classroom-based homework?

On a whim this weekend I purchased the beat ‘em up game Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World for the Nintendo Switch. It was an impulse purchase of a game I had not heard of and didn’t know was any good. I have been wanting to play a brawler for a while, but it is a genre I have not played since I was a kid, so I was not sure I would still enjoy it. I have been eyeing, but have been reluctant to spend $30 of $25 on, River City Girls and Streets of Rage 4 for weeks now. I haven’t played a game in that genre since I was a kid, and as an adult I am terrible at a lot of the games I used to excel at (I’m looking at you, Mario!) so I was not sure if I could button-mash fast enough to play such games. $25 or more is too much to spend on a game that is too hard for me to play. While I dithered about a purchase, I spent some time playing NES versions of the Double Dragon games and River City Ransom, but found those games are too primitive to be much fun for me anymore.

The Scott Pilgrim game was on sale for a stupidly low price ($7.49 or something), so I picked it up. To my surprise and delight, it is awesome. It has a colorful pixel art style that mimics the Scott Pilgrim comics. Its level design, character design, and animations show a lot of humor and attention to the source material. The chiptune soundtrack is really catchy. Play controls are easy to pick up. It starts out really hard, but you can replay levels to level up your character (i.e., lean new moves), and earn money to upgrade your character’s stats (strength, defense, etc.), which makes the game easier. It is kind of grind-y, at least for a conservative, low-skilled player like me, but the grind is fun.

Basically, everything about the video game does justice to the source material. Playing it caused me to want to reread the graphic novels, which I started to do yesterday. Scott Pilgrim, in comics form, is weird, surreal, and a real mess—you know, a perfect reflection of the early twenties and late teens lives of its characters. The characters, plot, and themes of the book, are complex, messy, flawed, and not fully formed. Nobody is a role model. Nobody is mature. Reality itself is warped for them. It makes no sense that Scott goes into video game mode and kills his girlfriend’s exes. Is that a metaphor? Only kind of. You’re just not expected to take it seriously. It’s all problematic—like life, I guess. I don’t really think it is deep (maybe you would if you were much younger than me), but it is really good at stirring up complicated thoughts and emotions in me about how messy life is. During this re-read, I have thought about how I might judge people who haven’t figured their lives out yet, or overlook the good qualities in someone like that. My feelings about those things are different now than they were when I first read the series about ten years ago.

I also watched a couple clips of the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World movie on YouTube, too, and am trying to find a new respect for it. I saw the movie only once, after I had read all the graphic novels, and absolutely_hated_ it because my favorite parts of the graphic novels—the ones involving character growth—are mostly not depicted in the movie. It does have a stunning cast, though; it’s unbelievable that all those young actors who became so big later on are in the same movie.

I have been busily writing a bunch of stuff for other people this week. First there were work papers for my day job. Yesterday and today I wrote three long product reviews for Amazon. Since late last week (and for hours last night) I have drafting a white paper that covers a topic at work that I am an expert in—that’s going to be a rather long project. I was just drafted into a presentation team on Friday, and I spent last evening brainstorming and I spent this evening writing an 800-word outline for it. I am teeming with ideas all of a sudden. It’s wild. But ironically I wonder what to write for myself, in my blog posts, as if I don’t have anything to say.

Two of my wife’s students went home today because they came to school with COVID. We’re doing great. 😅

“He who buys what he does not need steals from himself."—Swedish proverb.

I characterize the mindset of American conservatives—specifically the ones who are blasé or antipathetic toward anti-COVID measures such as vaccines and face-masks—thusly:

Bad things happen to other people. That is, until they happen to me.

Oddly enough, that is also my progressive-but-not-lunatic-fringe-liberal mindset. I figure that it is more healthy to assume I will probably be all right, given the precautions I take, rather than to expect the worst and be anxious about it all the time. (I’ve already done that about COVID for a solid year or more.) I prepare for the worst, so that I can protect myself and my family as best I can, but I assume the worst won’t happen to me.

I admit that new information, such as learning that breakthrough infections are a thing and that the are new COVID cases in my daughter’s school and my wife’s school every day or so, shakes this mindset quite a bit sometimes. COVID is like a specter that is constantly moving closer.

Based on the COVID-related stress I am still dealing with on a daily basis, this healthy-when-I-apply-it attitude is all I have to keep me going. I know I am whistling past the graveyard. I know the Angel of Death will not pass over my house forever. I know I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. But for now, the thought that “bad things happen to other people” is getting me from mini-crisis to mini-crisis without completely losing my mind.

I have been emotionally exhausted from all the deep conversations I’ve been having with my daughter this weekend—mostly on account of dealing with bad behavior rather than with her wanting to sit and learn at her father’s knee.

I am not upset about these talks—I think I am good at this stuff, and firmly believe that it is my responsibility as a parent to shape my children into good, well-adjusted people—but it does take a lot of energy out of me by the end of the day. Whoever claims parenting shouldn’t be a verb is either not a parent, a lousy one, or a damn liar.

On Thursday I embarked on an ambitious project related to my job. I am writing a white paper based on the presentation I wrote earlier this year, with the goal to publish it—or articles based on it—in an industry journal. It’s about how to do a certain type of project that I specialize in at work. That’s a topic I know a lot about, but have lacked the confidence to understand that it really is something valuable. By communicating my ideas to others in my presentation, I have realized that I really am knowledgeable about the area I work in, and that I have valuable ideas that I can share.

I am writing and editing somewhat furiously now (for me—I’m not an author) on my Mac and on my iPhone (thanks, Ulysses). I can’t stop. It is great to feel excited about and energized by a writing project again. I credit my daily writing habit on my blog for giving me the confidence to tackle a bigger writing project again. Writing something like this is no sweat for me. After all, I write for publication every day.

📺 I, for one, thought that yesterday’s divisive Coach Beard dark-night-of-the-soul episode of Ted Lasso was great. It wasn’t perfect, but I admired its ambition and loved every minute of it.

Viewing this wonderful lecture on the importance of a classical education made me wonder if I had, or did not have, a classical education. I read a lot of great works, struggled a lot with deep reading, philosophy, and trying to understand the human condition, but I have many, many gaps in my reading and education, too. Reading Ulysses for the first time lately has truly impressed these shortcomings on me. I miss many allusions to classic and Christian thought, not to mention Irish history and geography.

For much of my life, my cynical mind has been more interested in the lies that make the world than in the truths that make the world. I am trying to reverse that balance now. Earlier this year, I made a decision to return to reading classic literature almost exclusively—even at a snail’s pace, and even if I struggle to understand it—to improve both my education and my outlook on life. I think it has been a worthwhile journey thus far, but I have far, far to go. It is a journey that ends only when I do.

Move slow and fix things.

Grace is accepting others’ limitations. Humility is accepting your own.

I think all the products Apple announced this week are great. I am tired of hearing that some people are disappointed that they are only incremental improvements on the previous models, or that Apple isn’t exciting anymore. That’s true of every product that isn’t a new invention. And how exciting could the umpteenth smartphone be?

The steady ratchet of incremental improvement is one of humankind’s greatest achievements. The entire modern world is built on it. It’s how you get from good to great. Complaining about it is nonsensical.