Category — Uncategorized

I read two and a half amazing things this weekend.

One

Pauline Dakin’s recounting of the Weird World on the BBC.  This was such a riveting and heartbreaking story that I couldn’t do anything else until I finished reading it.  Wow.  I’ll admit that I saw the ending coming when it got to the part about the doubles, but… it was still moving to see how it resolved.  If you can only read one thing, read this one all the way to the end and then let me know what you think.

Two

Jerry Selbee breaking the pattern to win the lottery.  It felt like a real life Sherlock, working in a cereal factory.  A math genius who could see and break patterns that other people don’t notice.  It gets even better when the MIT kids enter the story.  It’s also an eye-opening look at how to play (or why you shouldn’t casually play) the lottery.

The Half

Not really a great read, but definitely an interesting thought: Atlas Obscura asked if you could be homesick for a place you’ve never been.  There are plenty of real places and fictional places that I feel homesick for.  Fillory, definitely, enough so that I just start the first Magicians book again when I get through the third one, so I’m always somewhere in the loop, reading about Fillory.  But then also Middle Earth, Hogwarts, and the world beyond the Phantom Tollbooth.  At the same time, I feel fernweh for the Faroe Islands and Newfoundland and Holland Island — three places I’ve never been (and one of which I never can because it’s underwater now).

Is there any place that fills you with homesickness even though you’ve never been, as if the space is somehow genetically coded into your heart and it’s a place you’re supposed to see?

We always knew this day would come.  The kids were so cute and little in 2006 when I started blogging; barely able to hold their own bottle and many years away from Facebook screeds.  A bunch of other bloggers I read all built their families around the same time.

But these kids are now teenagers, and they’re getting social media accounts of their own.

I read a piece on Kveller where the author was talking about finding herself on her child’s social media account.  She writes:

Like many parents navigating this digital Wild West, I’m constantly grappling with these kinds of dilemmas: privacy vs. supervision, trust vs. safety. I’m consciously trying not to start every sentence with “When I was a kid…”

But the questions I didn’t anticipate were the ones that involved me.

Her kid wrote about her once on her main Instagram account, but she hasn’t given her mother access yet to her secret Instagram account.  So who knows what she’ll find when she goes on that one?

You can set limits for what your child can do online, but how do you set boundaries that you personally trespassed in the past?  It’s not just kids; anyone can write about you.

I’ve written about the kids; always respectfully, with an eye towards not embarrassing them.  They know everything I’ve written on here about them, and I still read them any post where they make an appearance before I post it.  They’ve vetoed a few or asked me to change lines here and there.

And maybe that’s the only thing keeping me from quaking in my boots.  I’m hoping they’ll give me the same respect now that they’re in a position to post about all of my foibles.

Would you be okay with someone else writing about you?

Let’s say that you spend 20 minutes per day on social media.  That’s 7,300 minutes per year.  Let’s pretend I do that for the next 30 years.  That’s 219,000 minutes or 3,650 hours.  That’s about 152 days, a little under a half a year of my life within that 30 years period.  Kind of sobering when you think about Facebook that way.

I heard that on a Note to Self episode.  The guest took that number out to two years, 25 minutes per day for the length of the average life span (though I’m going to guess that few babies are online and most people actually use social media more than 20 minutes per day if you add up all the sites).

Manoush was saying that she doesn’t have a Facebook account, and she gave her theory: We join Facebook because we’re scared about death.  We’re scared about admitting that a chapter of our life is over, so we cling to the people from that chapter in life.  And Manoush feels like moving on is important.  Not always looking back or seeing the same people around us.

That fact is why I like social media; because you don’t lose track of people, and if you do, it’s pretty easy to reconnect.  And I like Facebook more than Twitter (and blogs more than Facebook) because it moves at a good speed; not too fast, not too cluttered.  Plus it all comes down to whether I choose to spend my 20 minutes per day online or not.  It’s not as if those people are living on a commune with me.  I don’t have to use my 20 minutes per day.

It’s an interesting distinction because Manoush is on Twitter and Instagram, two other platforms where you collect people from old areas of your life.

Anyway, 152 days.  Even if I cut my usage down to 10 minutes per day, it’s 76 days.

Though if it makes you feel any better, if you cook on average for an hour per day, you spend almost 456 days of that 30 year period cooking.  And no one thinks twice about pulling together a bowl of pasta.

I wear a seatbelt.  A helmet when I bike.  I brush my teeth, exercise five days per week, watch my caloric intake.  I go for my annual physical.  My semi-annual pap smears and mammograms.  Teeth cleanings.

I do so many things to protect my body, and then I dive head-first into Twitter.

It’s not fair to put all the blame on Twitter.  It’s Facebook, too.  And blogs.  And conversations with friends.  And news alerts.  And newspapers.  It’s the world in general.  I feel like I do all these things to protect my physical self, but do nothing to protect my emotional self.

It is hard out there.  It’s always hard, but it feels like not only are the events coming fast and furious, but social media has made the events sound so loud.  There are the events themselves, and then there are the verbal responses to said events.  And then there are the verbal responses to the verbal responses.

I finally took a deep breath and started meditating with an app.  It doesn’t really help, but I’m sure that the response to that statement is that I haven’t stuck with it long enough.  Or I’m doing it wrong.  One or the other.

Playing ostrich and shutting out important conversations about race and gun control and the economy and bigotry isn’t a real solution.  But it feels so loud right now; even the statements I agree with feel like they’re being screamed.

Maybe it has to be screamed. Maybe that’s the only way change occurs.

I love question lists; those exercises where you are supposed to ask another person a series of questions and get to know them better. There is the 36 question list made famous by the Modern Love column in the New York Times (or, more recently, an episode of the Science of Happiness podcast* building off of their Greater Good in Action sheet).  And the New Yorker’s version of the 36 questions.  (I still can’t read that without laughing.)

* Side note: I really loved the point that Kelly Corrigan makes on the podcast that most conversations you have require a back and forth.  You’re discussing something.  Both people are having their feelings heard.  But with question lists, one person is conveying information and the other person is just listening and absorbing.  There’s nothing to interject; no opinion to be expressed.  You’re just a receptacle.  That’s interesting, right?

Anyway, I was interested in Darius Foroux’s list because they are questions to ask yourself, not others.  You’re trying to figure yourself out vs. trying to explain yourself, and that little twist is appealing.

I liked the list through question 10, but then it veered off the life tracks for me because I’m not an entrepreneur.  I do not have customers with pain points.  I mean, I tried to answer the questions pretending that Linus was my client, but all of his pain points had to do with the slow flow of cookies.

I returned to the list for questions 16 – 21, though I clearly lost out on five questions.  I couldn’t think of their replacement, unless I made them about relationships.  How I’m doing as a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend.  Whether I’m involved enough in my community.  What actions I’ve taken to strengthen my relationships.  And then two more questions that I haven’t thought of yet.  Damn this is hard.

Asking a good question is harder than thinking up a good answer.  When someone asks you a question, they give you a content frame.  But designing a question is like pulling words from the void.  Nothing exists and suddenly you’ve set someone’s brain on journey.

What is a good question you asked lately?