Category — Uncategorized

I worry.  A lot.  I like to share those worries with Josh.  A lot.  John Mulaney has a joke about why he married a Jewish woman.  “With Jewish women, you do not have to guess what they are thinking
They will tell you.”  I like to tell Josh things; the things inside my head.

But I really do like this idea from Forbes about creating a “to worry about” list throughout the day, and then setting aside time for the worrying when it’s convenient.  It’s pretty simple:

Make an ongoing list of things that you need to worry about … Designate a time to sit down and review the list. When you do, you’ll realize most of it was nonsense. However, there will be a few points on there that require your attention. Instead of ruminating, make an action plan to address or resolve what’s bothering you.

I have this on-going “happy” list that I started because Mo Gawdat told me to start this list when I was reading Solve for Happy.  Putting things on my happy list makes me happy.  I like lists, and getting to write down pleasurable things is really pleasurable.  I am very specific: “I am happy when I’m eating a good cucumber (not the sour, yellow, malafafonny types)” — malafafon is Hebrew for cucumber, and I associate a certain type of disappointing cucumber that I once purchased at a shuk with that word — or “I am happy when I find something that was missing” or “I am happy when I think about the possibility of one day having my very own puffin!” or “I am happy when I am 100% certain that a space is cricket-free.”

It feels good when I put a new item on that list.  I wonder if it will feel equally good to write out my worries on a daily basis and then reflect on them during a set time.

I guess I’m going to find out.  Come with me on an adventure where I write out all of my concerns in a single space and then read the list over and over again…

Do you keep a happy list?  Do you keep a worry list?

“The architecture of social media exploits our sense of right and wrong, reaping profit from the pleasure we feel in expressing righteous outrage.”

–“How Social Media Exploits Our Moral Emotions”

That was going to be the whole post, full stop.  But I suppose I should unpack the fact that if someone is deriving pleasure in expressing their righteous outrage, someone else is feeling drained from that very same exchange.  It’s not that I want people to stop.  I think the outrage, many times, is justified and necessary.  But it affects us.  Sometimes the emotional cost is the equivalent to a nickel and other times it’s equivalent to a dollar, but there are always emotional costs.  Twitter may be free to access, but it still costs you something.

But.

I don’t feel that way about blogs.  I go on blogs and read opinions, and I don’t walk away drained.  I walk away sometimes Googling for more information or disagreeing or nodding my head.  Posts stay with me for hours, but they don’t gnaw at me.

I wonder if I’d feel the same way if Facebook just let everything flow past me.  If I didn’t feel like my feed was being manipulated to see more (and more and more) of one thing.  If it didn’t feel so curated.  Blogs, at least the ones I read, still feel raw, like they did at the beginning.  We may have gotten a little fancier with our layouts, but the general content still veers towards understanding how someone is processing the world as opposed to absorbing the world.

I miss my feed reader being as full as my Facebook feed.

We went to the beach.  The first day was perfect.  Blue skies, no clouds despite a weather report that promised rain, constant breeze to keep the beach from getting too warm.  We read books and napped in the sun.  It was really perfect.

The second day was grey and overcast.  It drizzled on and off, drops here and there that made you wonder if you should continue to sit or make a run for the car.  But we were trying to stick it out and end on a high note when a group set up next to us.

As in, right next to us.  On an enormous, semi-empty beach, they set up a few feet away.  There were seven people, all in their mid-twenties.  The first thing I noticed were the Trump bumper stickers covering their cooler.  Then I saw the speaker they brought for blasting music on the quiet beach.  Then the stockpile of alcohol they brought to the alcohol-free beach.  The anti-gun control t-shirts.  And finally, when one took off his t-shirt, the neo-Nazi tattoo.

Josh and I looked at each other, and then I stood up and started packing our things, telling the kids that we were getting going.  It was an hour before we were planning on leaving, but it’s almost as if our minds all arrived in the same place at the same time.  We didn’t talk about it until we got in the car.

We did the right thing for ourselves in the moment, though we talked through the rest of the options in the car.  We could have ignored the group.  We could have confronted the group.  We could have moved down the beach.  But something told us to get out of there.  Call it Gavin de Becker’s “gift of fear,” but something in our subconscious told us to take our kids and go.  So I have zero regrets over leaving the beach.

But I’m curious over what others would have done.  You?

I have a daily habit of reading books, so I’m feeling pretty damn smug right about now.  SCIENCE — you know that little thing that is so important that they gave it its own class at school — says that reading makes you… like… perfect.  So I have that going for me.

When do I read?  Thank you for asking because I was dying to tell you.  I read every 25 minutes.  I work using a modified Pomodoro Technique (I skip the long break because it’s not helpful for me), so every time the buzzer goes off, I stand up and grab my book and walk around in a circle reading for five minutes.  When the buzzer goes off again, I sit down and get back to work.

I also read at night before bed, but that isn’t as interesting as slipping it into Pomodoro breaks.

Is it annoying to jump in and out of the story?  No.  I mean, yes, when you first start doing it, it’s a little annoying.  But I’m now so accustomed to reading this way that my brain has adjusted.  And I keep hyper focused during my 25 minute work slots because I know there’s five minutes of read-walking at the end.  Plus I’ve been on a horror-mystery-science fiction tear, so it’s not as if I’m jumping in and out of Kierkegaard.

Regardless, grab a book.  Today.  Science says so.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived in Egypt.  She gave birth prematurely to a son who was born still.  He had ten fingers and toes, a gently curving spine, rounded hips.  He was missing bones from the top of his head — anencephaly — and it affected the formation of his brain.  She mummified the baby and  wrapped him in linen and cartonnage, and turned him into a hawk through the magic of paint.

I don’t know why my heart ached so much reading about this mother and the discovery that a tiny hawk mummy didn’t contain a bird but instead the remains of a little boy who died between 23 and 28 weeks gestation.  We didn’t invent infertility; it has clearly existed for millennia.  But there is something that ties us together, cleaving that woman to our community.

The care she took as her heart ached.

Choosing to release him in bird form.

Not knowing that thousands of years later, we would learn about her and her loss; that her son would continue to impact the world.

It’s a really moving discovery.