Category — Uncategorized

Let’s be honest, it’s a shitshow out there. There have been plenty of other times when we’ve declared the world a shitshow, and in retrospect, it wasn’t but we didn’t know that at the time. We couldn’t imagine a world where we would be in our third year of a pandemic, facing down a war, monkeypox, gun violence, inflation, and everything else I’m not going to write down because listing it out is depressing.

But we have Wordle.

And as this article astutely points out: “It’s hard to converse in a straightforward way sometimes — but in their own small way, these games can make talking to each other easier.”

And, yeah, when the world is a shitshow, sometimes it’s nice to spend five minutes of your morning in the company of letters. And then check in with everyone to make sure they got the word, too.

We’ve all read the articles about how we need to shut off notifications and take a real vacation, yadda yadda yadda, but this is not that. Nathan Bransford has an interesting piece on not turning your vacation into work by scheduling yourself with activity after activity.

He pushes against this mentality: “We can’t just vacation sometimes and do whatever we want, we need to vacation in a ‘good’ way that maximizes our return and helps restore our productivity.”

The whole essay is really about how not doing anything sometimes becomes doing something amongst other thoughts, but the idea of an unplanned trip is what caught my attention.

My first thought: But you’re going all that way and taking time off to boot. Don’t you want to make sure you see what you want to see and do what you want to do while you’re in that other place? After all, maybe you’ll never be back and have missed something that would have been meaningful to you. I don’t mean hitting all tourist points on a list. I mean doing whatever is drawing you to that place. That means something to you.

My second thought: But that would also be so nice. I often wake up exhausted every day of the trip, and one of the nicest things we’ve ever done for ourselves is give permission to skip Toulouse during a heatwave and head to three days in Perros-Guirec at the beach.

My third thought: I hate feeling like I’ve missed something.

My fourth thought: Why am I always obsessed with holding onto experiences and items?

My fifth thought: I wonder what others think about this idea of going somewhere without plans and seeing where the day takes you, every day.

The conundrum: I love receiving emails, but I don’t love answering them.

I think we all feel this way. Right?

The twins rarely respond to my emails. I send emails because I don’t want to interrupt their moment. Texting is disruptive, but emailing is not. It took me a long time to realize that I am disrupted by texting (and Slack notification and everything that dings), but they are not. They can take in the communication and deal with it either immediately or later without feeling frazzled.

I want to be a digital native.

This New York Times essay spoke to me and my relationship with email, especially emailing myself. I am my own worst enemy with self-emailing. Except that I am never waiting for myself to respond. I let myself off the hook with that.

What is your relationship with email?

There was going to be perfect weather last Saturday — not too hot, clear skies — so we set my birthday beach trip and aimed for Rehoboth. Everyone in the US probably knows how this story will go.

We set up our chairs on a less populated stretch of sand and removed our masks. But about five minutes after we sat down, a F-15 fighter jet started circling over the beach. It was loud. And low. And freaked me out.

Josh checked, and Biden was in residence at his Rehoboth house. Crap. We hadn’t checked before we left, but with another loop or two over the sand, the fighter jet left and calm returned. Later, when we were walking in town, we got to see the motorcade pass. And even though I’ve seen a presidential motorcade dozens of times, I still stood and clapped.

Beyond the initial confusing fighter jet situation, it had been a perfect day. French fries for lunch. Great weather. Enjoyable mystery to read and waves to watch. We were the only masked riders for the haunted mansion ride on the beach, but I got everyone to jump on the merry-go-round with me before we picked up Nicola’s and said goodbye to the original location with a picnic dinner. We didn’t know anything was amiss until we got home and people texted to ask if we had been at Rehoboth.

Ooops. We had no clue anything was happening until we got home and saw the news.

My Wordle streak randomly reset back to 1 last weekend. I’m using the same link as I always do, and it still has the number of games played. But my streak is currently back in the single digits. And before you start throwing out thoughts such as, “Did you miss a day?” the answer is “no” and I take a screenshot every day.

This is May 29:

This is May 30:

I won in 3 guesses on the 29th and in 5 guesses on the 30th, but the streak reset to 1. The whole thing is meaningless. There are no prizes for keeping a streak going a full year, and I can always know my true streak by adding the two numbers together. Plus, I only started playing on the phone in November, so all my earlier games weren’t counted towards my streak because they were on a different device.

Did I mention that a Wordle streak is completely meaningless?

And yet it annoyed me enough to write this, days later.