Ambient Flora

Me: This music is nice! Who is it?

Jess: I’m not sure. It’s a playlist for plants.

Me:

Jess: Well, it’s been cloudy for days, and I was worried our window plants were feeling sad.

February 18, 2020

Story Time

As I recently wrote, I’m not a big poster on social media. Outside of Twitter, I don’t even look at most social networks with any regularity. But Jess is a big Instagram reader (watcher / looker?), and my colleagues, who are mostly about half my age, seem to mediate their entire lives through the app. So, out of a vague sense of FOMO, or possibly a fear that I’ve become even more of an old, cantankerous Luddite than I’d realized, I recently decided to give Insta-life a whirl.

This weekend, I posted to my ‘story’ for the first time: a captioned photo of the Valentine’s Day tableau Jess left for me on our bed – a pile of cards, surrounded by a giant heart made from a dozen bags of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups (a guilty pleasure I usually finish off before I’ve carried the rest of our groceries home).  

In the days since, whether cooking pasta at home, visiting the MoMA with Jess and my parents, eating dinner with them all at The Loyal, or working at the gym this morning, I’ve snapped a dozen or so further photos, with the intention – if not yet the follow-through – of similarly story-posting.  Even if, at this point, I’m still not entirely clear about what kind of stuff goes in stories versus regular posts.  

Similarly, though I’ve added a bunch of new accounts to my stream, I’m also unsure what kind of picture and video content I actually care enough about to make me reflexively pop open the app.  Especially as compared to Twitter, where I already satisfy my voyeuristic political / journalistic hobbyism while also nerding out on fitness science and relishing really terrible dad jokes.

Plus, I still feel incredibly self-conscious (and, really, self-appearance-judgy) about the idea of selfies and first-person videos and recorded workouts.  At a deeper level, I’m not even sure what kind of stuff I think I should be posting in the first place.  Is it random bullshit à la this site? Personal branding content in the fitness or fitness-tech space? A revival of my long-dormant street and landscape photographing interest?

So, in short, lots still to learn and puzzle through.  But, in the meantime, I’m going to do my best to muddle ahead.  Feel free to follow along. Even if, I suspect, it won’t be pretty.

February 17, 2020

Back Burner

I’ve been slow to post these last few days, due to some technical issues here; the WordPress back-end stopped loading the ‘new post’ page, leaving me unable to add entries from a web browser. Fortunately, the mobile app still worked, though I was sorely limited by my old man thumb-typing skills. And, this afternoon, I managed to temporarily fix the web version, by rolling back from WordPress’ Gutenberg block editor to the older Classic editor instead.

Still, it’s a clear sign that this whole site is in need of a reboot. The WordPress install is crufty with two decades of my poorly-coded tweaks, and the front-end design is even worse – increasingly dated, an HTML/CSS validation disaster, and unresponsive enough to be semi-unusable on mobile devices.

At the same time, as I’ve previously discussed, I’m currently doing my best to ruthlessly cull my daily to-do list, so I can focus in on the small number of projects and goals and habits that matter to me most. And while that does include aiming to post here something close to daily, it certainly doesn’t include rebuilding this entire site from scratch. Having done it several times before in the past, I know how deep that rabbit hole goes, and I just can’t justify the days (or, plausibly, weeks) of work it would require.

So, for the moment, I’m just hobbling ahead with the site as is, and hoping it continues to at least sort of work. Fingers crossed.

February 11, 2020

2020-02-09

I don’t normally read web comics, but Fangs (about a vampire and werewolf in love) is pretty excellent.

February 9, 2020

Pondering

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”
– Søren Kierkegaard

“Cultural capital has become the currency of social mobility.”
-Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

February 8, 2020

Après Nous, le Déluge

When I was a kid, my mother often called me her absent-minded professor. Because, while I’m a sponge for information I find fascinating, I’m absolute garbage at wrangling in my head all the concrete details of daily life.  So, since my early teens, I’ve deeply ingrained the habit of writing everything down, and have built up elaborate systems for keeping on top of my notes – whether as daily to-do’s, longer-term projects and goals, or just interesting ideas and theories and resources I want to keep noodling around or might refer back to down the line.  

And, mostly, it all works.  But, at least several times a week, I come across a note I made to myself – whether earlier in the day, or five years back – with far too little detail.  “Angry dinosaur?” one will say.  Or, “moat marketing connections list.”  Or “expand to long-form version.”  And I will think, what in god’s name does that possibly mean?  

On very rare occasion, with additional puzzling, I can sometimes recreate enough of the context around the note, or my thought process leading up to it, to figure out the deeply encoded secret meaning.  But, the vast majority of the time, I just stare at the words for a few minutes, shrug, and move on with life.  While I’m sure I’ve dropped endless balls, forfeited countless opportunities, and generally short-changed my prior insights and current self in the process, c’est la vie.

So, speaking of French idioms, this afternoon, I was updating the back-end of this (creaky, and clearly in need of a redesign) site, and came across a several-years-old draft blog post – this one, in fact – with no content except the title. Après nous, le déluge.

And, seriously, what?

February 5, 2020