Category — Uncategorized

Many years ago, I went to Shepherdstown, WV for the first time. When we got out of the car and looked around, I remarked that it was as if they made a town just for me. Teahouse? Check. Coffeehouse? Check. Bookstore, movie theater, great restaurants, nearby river, sundial? Check, check, check.

The town has changed a lot over the years and lost a few things that we loved during that first visit — teahouse, toy store, and many restaurants — but I never forgot that feeling of stepping out of a car and feeling like a place was designed solely to be filled with my favourite things. Even if I knew it was just a happy accident.

I recently thought the same thing as I was reading a book series — Death and Croissants by Ian Moore. It’s not just that I like the books. It’s that it feels like the books were made solely to make me happy. To appeal to all the things I love. Which, again, is a happy accident because I don’t know the author.

It’s hard to pinpoint how it is fine-tuned to appeal to my tastes. It just hits this perfect note, and I fall into such a happy space reading the books.

The last time I felt this way was the first time I read The Magicians by Lev Grossman. It feels special to feel it again.

I loved a recent issue of Strong Sense of Place where she explained how they decide where to travel next. She explains their method: “When we see a photo or hear about something interesting in a particular place, we go there as soon as we can.”

Which is pretty much our method, too. We bookmark photos on Instagram or we read about a place in an article (or the back of a potato chip bag), and it jumps to the top of the list. Let’s go there. Because the picture is interesting or the article made it sound like a place we want to see ourselves.

It means we sometimes end up in a place without deep thought, like Montreal in winter to see what the newspaper promised would be the world’s ugliest Christmas tree. But that’s good, too. You can’t go everywhere, so if you want to go somewhere, it must be chosen somewhat at random out of a long list of possibilities.

How do you choose where you go?

I deeply deeply deeply identified with this essay on the reason the author takes photos. It has everything to do with a fear of forgetting. If you take a photo, and you can look back on the photo, you can release your mind from the act of active remembering because you can always access the moment by looking at the picture.

I love this:

Even when I wanted to stop taking photos, I couldn’t. I had no plans to post on social media—I had no plans for the photos at all. It was more that taking them became an expression of emotion I didn’t otherwise know what to do with: affection rendered desperate, like hugging someone so they can’t get away.

Making the photo album is the first thing I do once I get home from a big trip. During the trip, we keep a detailed audio journal. Everyone sits around the recorder and talks out a 15 minute play-by-play of the day: Funny snippets of conversation we overheard, which subway lines we used, what we ate, how we felt or what we were thinking about in various moments. And that is super helpful to use later on when we’re trying to remember the order we did things or the name of a random restaurant. But it’s also fun to listen to the twins tell us what they noticed, how they processed things — at eight, at twelve, at seventeen.

The photo album is the other protection again the brain from forgetting. I create a key to the photos — a printed PDF that gets tucked in the back of the book that states the date each photo was taken, which one of us took the photo, and the importance of the image. It takes hours, and I often wonder if it’s worth it. But we all look at the photos during the year, so I’m happy that we have them. But, moreover, they make my brain relax because I don’t have to remember every single detail. It’s all captured in the books.

That advice to live in the moment and not photograph everything is great. Except it wouldn’t work for me. Because I would spend that time in the moment worried about forgetting. So unlike the author, I’m happy with the number of pictures I take, the times I take them, and the way I use them after.

This week contains the last first day of school. Months ago, I wrote about this day, dreading it because it removes another buffer between our lives up until this point and when the twins leave for college.

“Very soon, we will have a final first day of school. And then a final last day of school. And then a final last day of summer. And then a college arrival. And then a college drop off and drive away. And I will have to get through each of these moments. And right now, I don’t know how I will do that.”

I still don’t.

I feel like a cartoon penguin on an iceberg — you know exactly what I’m talking about, correct? That common cartoon trope of the penguin’s icy platform growing smaller and smaller as it drifts into warmer waters, until the penguin is balancing on a little ice cube. Except I am a very real person, balancing on a platform of time, watching it melt away while I scramble to find my footing.

Clearly, I haven’t traveled far emotionally from the last time I wrote a full post about the last first day.

Are your preferences your own? It’s an interesting question posed by The New Yorker in regards to options dictated by algorithms. The thesis: “Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are.”

Right.

So am I choosing the route I drive, or is Waze? Am I choosing the books I purchase, or do I purchase books I know about because an algorithm fed them to me based on other purchases in the past? I definitely have fallen down a rabbit hole of British murder mysteries. But did I dig that rabbit hole? I’m kind of happy to be here, but I don’t know what I’m missing out on by taking this path.

The piece goes on to talk about algorithmic anxiety, which I’m not sure I feel. I’m more algorithmically curious about where my preferences begin and outward influences end.