I have been working at a more measured pace to increase accuracy at work. Hope no one notices in a bad way that I am spending more time on some tasks, because I am double-checking more thoroughly than before.

Wisdom is neither quickness nor intellect. It is seeing the world how it really is.

According to the superintendent of schools, some parents in my town are sending their children to school wearing “fake” masks that superficially satisfy mask wearing requirements while being completely ineffectual. These masks do not protect the wearer or anybody else from COVID or any other type of disease. They are specifically designed to be as flimsy as possible; some are even see-through. It’s a product for people who want to be assholes, pretend that COVID is not real, and thumb their noses at responsible people. Apparently it is also a product for parents who wish to teach their kids to be assholes, too.

My daughter has been in school three days so far this school year. Every school day, our entire community has received an email from the superintendent of schools stating that there are new COVID cases affecting students and staff at all, or almost all, of the schools in the district.

This is from today’s email:

As stated previously, I realize that our school community has varying viewpoints on COVID-19 and specifically on mask protocols. We are going to continue to make decisions in the best interest of safety for our students and staff. In only three days of school, we already have had 21 positive student cases and 10 positive staff cases. It is essential that we stay vigilant and monitor for signs and symptoms of COVID-19.

I live in a mid-sized town, and each school is pretty small, and most of the elementary schools have no air conditioning. The kids are being allowed to take off masks for “excessive heat” reasons, due to a loophole in our governor’s COVID masking mandate and due to incredible pressure by a vocal faction of parents. My wife and I believe this attitude about masks is cavalier and dangerous. We hate the idea of sending our daughter into this environment with a vaccine, and also hate the idea of pulling her out of more school because being away so long already has not been good for her mental health. All of us are frustrated and exhausted by all of this, and there does not seem to be an end to the pandemic in sight.

I can’t clean my office because I’m too busy to do anything with it all day, even though I am working in there, and at the end of the day I don’t want to be in there anymore. I have been thinking that I should break up the mess into chunks, box part of it each day, and organize the box while I watch TV. The problem is, I don’t really watch TV much anymore. When I do, it’s usually “good” TV that I have to pay attention to. I no longer have mindless TV shows that are good to kind-of pay attention to while folding laundry. When I was younger and lived alone, I always had sitcoms and sports on that I didn’t really care about, but were good distractions while I was puttering with something or doing light choses. That took up a huge part of my evenings. Now that I have a family, all of that is gone—mostly for the better—but I think I need a little of it back in my life sometimes.

On Saturday, my nine-year-old daughter hosted a pasta party for the family that she had been planning for weeks. She created invitations that listed a schedule full of activities. She also created a menu of four different types of pasta (spaghetti, ziti, farfalle, and elbows), homemade meatballs, homemade bread, and for dessert, chocolate pudding and homemade shortbread. My wife, my mother-in-law, and I cooked. During the party, my daughter led us through telescope painting and decorating (the telescopes were paper towel rolls) and a pasta parade (we walked around the block while my kids held toy pots). After dinner, she gave each of us a goodie bag containing a thank you note and a ten-page short story that she wrote about making a new friend. She worked so hard on everything, it brought tears to my eyes. I am very proud of her.

I got my first job when I was sixteen. I was a dishwasher at a restaurant for about half of summer. Soon after I started, my mom wanted me to tell my grandfather about my new job. She was proud of me for getting a job, even though it was a job with low status and poor pay. My grandfather had worked as a short order cook and a baker for most of his life, so he was well-versed in working in a kitchen.

When I told him about the dishwashing job, what he said back to me was really strange. He said, “That’s great. Washing dishes is a good skill to know in case society collapses and machines won’t work anymore.” It was out of character for him to say something so cynical, and it pretty much stopped the conversation in its tracks.

Now it is over 25 years later, and I wonder, as I listen to podcasts dissecting news, technology, and podcasts as I wash dishes in my house four times a day: Is society going to collapse? Is climate change the thing that does us all in? Are we, as a species, extinguishing all of the natural resources we need to survive? How long is it going to take for things to start falling apart because of it? Maybe not as long as I would like it to be.

If that is how society collapses, perhaps machines will be the only things left that will be able to wash dishes. In that case, my dishwashing skills will not be useful after all.

I have just started to use my new Planck keyboard for work for a short, short time each day. It has been rough going so far. I expected to have trouble typing in Colemak-DH because I just started learning that layout. I did not expect to have as much trouble with chording keyboard shortcuts. The problems I am facing are making me doubt whether I really can use a 40% keyboard for work, where it would give me the most benefit.

On my Mac, this is almost never an issue. In general, Mac keyboard shortcuts are easier to enter, and are friendlier to laptop-style keyboards that lack certain control keys.

Conversely, Windows apps like Excel make heavy use of function keys (F1-F12) and operator keys (-, +, *), which, on the Planck, live on a secondary layer that requires a key held down to access. When a Windows shortcut requires a function or operator key plus a modifier key (typically Shift, Alt, or Control, or a combination of them), I find it very challenging to enter it. There are just too many keys to hold down and it gets very awkward.

In Excel, I especially miss a key I never even used until last year: the menu key. I must find a suitable mapping for it, because I have come to rely on it for all sorts of things, primarily special forms of pasting. Furthermore, my Windows file manager of choice, FAR Manager, assigns important functions to keys my keyboard does not even have, like Insert, Right Shift, and Right Control, and makes extensive use of Shift+Function keys for common operations such as renaming a file.

I am slowly figuring out how to map some of the complex key command chords I use to single keys on another layer. That may be the answer for some things, but it doesn’t scale well. I may have to adjust what software I use and how I do certain things.

One challenge with the Planck that I did not anticipate is that I have trouble hitting the (little) left shift key, and I miss having a right shift key (the Planck has none). It is especially surprising to me because I rarely used the right shift key before I made it a goal last year to use right-shift all the time, rather than stretch my left pinky crazy distances. I think one reason left-shift is more difficult to hit is that the Colemak-DH layout keeps my fingers on the home row all the time. When I type QWERTY, my hands fly all around the keyboard like a concert pianist’s, so it feels more normal to shift my entire left hand to press the shift key.

To mitigate my shift problem, I enabled the AutoShift feature of my keyboard’s firmware. If I press and hold a letter key—which feels a bit like a firm press rather than a ling press—a capital letter is produced. It is a really smart feature, but I am still getting used to it, and it interrupts my flow.

I have been typing more and more each day with the Colemak-DH layout on my new Planck keyboard. I basically know where all the keys are, but my typing is laborious and slow. I have to think very hard to type every word. At my best right now, I make a plan for the word I will type next, then try to execute that plan without making too many errors. At worst, I look down at the keyboard and hunt and peck.

I remember when learning QWERTY that, after learning where all the letters were, I started to memorize certain patterns to type particular words or parts of words. In other words, I chunked it. Typing fast was a matter of stringing along series of predefined multi-key movements which acted like mental macros.

I see myself at the very beginning of the chunking process right now. It will take a lot more practice to get fast, but I plan to stick with it; hopefully it will be worth it in the long run. If I can type more efficiently I believe I will incur less RSI going forward. That is my main goal in switching keyboards and layouts.

Tomorrow is my daughter’s first day of school—in-person school—since March 2020. Thinking about the sleep schedule changes this will require for all of us has been nerve-wracking all day. Remote learning and remote work have, for the last year and a half, given all of us in my family an extra hour of sleep every night. Because my daughter and I are all night owls, it will be impossible for us to make up the lost sleep. We will just have to adapt to getting less, I’m afraid, and the transition will be difficult.

We are all replaceable. That is written into our biology. Our social and economic structures reflect it, too.

We are all unique. A human life is irreplaceable. But a human is replaceable.

You don’t have to be smart to be right.

Just because you are smart doesn’t mean you’re right.

L’Shana tova for all those who celebrate. Let’s hope for a better year ahead.

When I was in business school, back in the early aughts, I did a team presentation project on the topic of the male/female wage gap. To this day, I am embarrassed at my work on this project. I was young, hard-working, and idealistic, but I was unknowingly naive to the world and think I got it all wrong.

At the time, I worked at an insurance company, and there was a huge number of women in the departments I worked with at manager and director levels. I was just starting out in my career, so I was lower in rank than almost every woman I worked with, too. That may have clouded my thinking a bit, because I lacked the perspective of someone who worked in a more exclusively male-dominated work culture. I didn’t see how women were treated at other workplaces.

To prepare for our project, which was a group presentation, I did a lot of reading on the wage gap issue. It didn’t make sense to me that it could exist. I could understand if compensation amounts averaged out with a gap between male and female average wages, but I thought there had to be a sensible reason for that. It must come down to things like the type of job taken, the number of hours worked per week, the number of overtime hours worked, employee performance, and on asking for a higher salary when applying for a job. The literature I read on the subject supported that, conditionally, but was noncommittal about whether a wage gap really existed, and about what the average male and female wage numbers actually reflected.

My main logical argument against the wage gap actually meaning that there was a male/female bias in the workplace, was that if women made less money for a particular job than men, I, as a rational employer, would predominantly hire women for that job, to save money on labor. That isn’t happening; therefore, the gender pay gap did not really exist. My project team was mostly young corporate women. They agreed with me. We didn’t even really argue about it, though I remember acting a little embarrassed about the conclusion I had come to when I presented it to them. We presented on the topic based on my conclusion, and otherwise had a successful, if uneventful, presentation to our class.

The problem is, my idea of rational hiring decisions does not reflect how the world works. People make hiring decisions—and all kinds of other decisions—for reasons that don’t make rational sense at all. At the heart of these decisions are preferences, and preferences are largely affected by bias. Bias is, essentially, a preference that can’t be adequately explained. Put another way, bias just doesn’t make sense. No sense can be made from it because it doesn’t depend on sense.

I came to this conclusion shortly after my team completed that project. I have thought a lot about it since. The thought of it pops into my head unexpectedly sometimes, like the memory of a time I sang the wrong line of a song in the high school musical, in front of everybody on closing night, and it crowds out memory of the rest of my performance, across all the performances, where I made no mistakes. It’s easy to dwell on the times you get things wrong, I suppose. At least in this case I learned something.

Now that I am older and have more experience with and exposure to the world, I notice that bias is everywhere. Bias is the sort of thought virus that nibbles away at logic and replaces it with something that feels more right or more comfortable to the thinker or decider. You do not choose to be biased; if anything, bias, soaked up from the society around them, chooses you.

Since I made that business school presentation years ago, my conclusion on the topic has completely reversed. Bias must affect hiring decisions and wages to the detriment of traditionally underserved or discriminated against groups of people, including women, because it affects everything else. Moreover, you can’t go looking for it with logic, because bias is inherently illogical.

In the 1990s, the old guard of educators—mainly white men like Harold Bloom—decried the decline and of the Western canon. In general, the Harold Blooms of the world lost that argument. High school reading lists today are far more diverse and are—as my high school English teachers feared—diluted in quality. The classics have been pared back, to make way for new ideas and more diverse voices.

Case in point: my wife is teaching The Hunger Games to high school juniors this school year. I have read The Hunger Games and could probably craft a few lessons based on its material, but I don’t think of it as literature; it’s a fun Y.A. beach read devoid of subtext. The dilution in quality is not a function of the increase in diversity. It’s a function of trying to hold kids’ attention.

I think it must be possible to make classic literature interesting and relevant to high school students. That said, it is a challenge I do not face.

After getting very upset at our daughter’s elementary school’s plan for lax COVID safety protocols announced during a webinar last night, she woke up at 4 AM this morning and wrote impassioned emails to the superintendent of schools, the school board, and the principal. She emailed and talked to other teachers at the school, our rabbi, our pediatrician, and her doctor friend to ask for advice. She and I seriously talked about disenrolling our daughter and home schooling her. After a lot of thought, though, we decided that we have to accept more risk than we are really comfortable with, for the sake of our daughter’s mental health. It was a stressful day, and we did not get what we wanted, but I am proud of all the effort that my wife put in to try to push for something better.

As for me, my main contributions today were cogent conversation and homemade chicken noodle soup, fresh baked bread, and salad.

I didn’t get everything I wanted to do done this week. I’m OK with that. Life intervened. Stressful things came and went. I did right by my family each day. That has to be the most important thing. It’s time for a holiday weekend and then Rosh Hashanah. Onward.

I am trying a new keyboard layout, Colemak DH, and have switched around keys and reprogrammed the Planck EZ to enable it. Colemak is proving easier now that I can look at the key legends for the correct letter.

My daughter’s elementary school will not require masks if the outside temperature is 75°F or over. They said that means masks will effectively not be worn on classrooms for the entire month of September, and probably through October as well. In general, the COVID measures are based on outdated conjectures about how the disease is spread, and will be ineffective against an airborne pathogen. My wife wants to pull our daughter out of school. I’m not sure what the right call is, because I’m not sure how to quantify the risk or be sure about what would be equitable for my daughter.

Vulnerability is a new ideal masculine trait. Being open, honest about, and comfortable with your flaws is nontraditional, unexpected, and disarming.

But that isn’t vulnerability. It’s invulnerability. You need to be tremendously self-assured to take social risks and not be flummoxed if things do not go your way.

When I was in college, I longed not to be learned but to be wise. I was learning rapidly, and soaking up new ideas all the time. I was making connections between all sorts of different systems of thought and culture. I thought I had human nature all figured out.

I was, however, wise enough at the time to know that I would be foolish to consider myself wise. That paradox never really resolves itself. The moment you think yourself wise, you have made a fool of yourself. Go ahead…try it, then wait a while.

Still, I must have shot my mouth off about how wise I was, because some people thought I was wise, and would ask me to help them sort out problems in their personal or academic lives. I was foolish enough back then to try to help them.

Now that I am middle-aged and raising two children with my wife, I feel both smarter and more foolish than ever. It is hard to feel wise when you can’t get your kids to do the simplest things most of the time. I find people–even the ones I am closest to–to be, at turns, more predictable and more inscrutable than ever. It is much easier to predict what people will do than it is to understand why.

What does it really mean to be wise? It’s certainly different than being smart, clever, or quick–though all those things don’t hurt. Being wise is about seeing the big picture, especially when those around you have lost sight of it, and using that viewpoint to help others help themselves.

I can write. I always could.

In high school, I wrote cogently and forcefully, like someone who read the up-Ed pages of two newspapers every day. Unlike most of my peers I had figured out how to revise and shape text—how to edit out hedging and weasel words and unfinished thoughts. Essay structure and organization fascinated me.

In college I wrote passionately with explosive figurative language. I wrote and put on a play: a farce poking fun a dorm life at my school. My seniors honors theses had jokes in them and won awards. My prose was called “airtight” in creative writing class.

As a young adult, I thought I might write professionally. I wrote four or five nights a week, at the local library, after work and dinner were done. I worked on short stories and screenplays that, sadly, didn’t end up going anywhere.

Writing was a lonely hobby for me. I had no community. I lived in the suburbs and didn’t think I could even find a writing community near me. I envied friends who lived in cities and could join writing classes or groups. The worst part of it was that I couldn’t figure out how to create interesting plots. I could write stories, but I had no stories to tell. I have no gift for plots—only for telling. Eventually I stopped writing entirely, in favor of business school and other things.

So, I can write. I have a voice. But I don’t have much to say. I never know what to write about. I lack ideas, which is frustrating when I have the ability (perhaps the gift) to shape and communicate them clearly.

Recently, I decided to write and publish…something, maybe something small, maybe a whole essay…every day, to force myself to think, write, revise, and publish even when the ideas don’t come. I think that the activity will help me get over whatever block or self-editing has been standing in the way of my writing endeavors for so long.

My caffeine experiment is almost at its end. For the past week, I have only drunk decaffeinated coffee. One funny thing I noticed is that decaf coffee is not nearly as disappointing when you are no longer addicted to caffeine.

My caffeine free (or almost free) lifestyle thus far has left me with no downsides: my energy level is just fine all day. I am not tired at all during work hours, and I no longer desperately crave an afternoon coffee each day. I do fall asleep earlier at night and more easily, which is a benefit. Instead of not being able to sleep until 2 A.M. most nights, I am ready to turn in by midnight, and sometimes even earlier, which puts me more in sync with my wife.

All in all, after a rocky start with three days of withdrawal symptoms, my experiment has been a success.

Today I started flashing custom layouts to my new Planck EZ keyboard. It runs QMK firmware, but the manufacturer has tools call Oryx and Wally that make customizing and flashing simple. On a software level, it is the best keyboard I have ever used. On a hardware level, it is solid, too, but I am not used to the ortholinear layout yet or the layers system. Typing with my left hand, especially the letters C and X, is a little problematic for me, because the Planck requires the use of different fingers than what I use for those keys on staggered layouts. Also, I my fingers tend to land in between the keys sometimes when I have to stretch my index finger or pinkie to reach a key.

I have been taking Matt Gemmel’s blog posts about the Planck as an inspiration for customizing it. Following his example, I created a numpad layout today, which will come in handy for work. I also turned on automatic capitalization, which capitalizes letters if you hold them down a tiny bit longer than a normal keypress. It is a cool feature, and may be more important for ergonomics than the layer system is for me.

I have also been practicing the Colemak layout on Keybr.com. Strangely, I could not get the web app to understand my keyboard layout unless it is in QWERTY mode; I have to emulate Colemak in the app, which is kind of a mixed blessing for now, when I could not even log into my computer in the Colemak layout.

All in all, it is fun to try something new. I wonder if I can actually learn the Colemak layout well enough to use it full time.