Category — Uncategorized

I’ve been trying to get picky about new games because my game routine has grown ridiculous. In the morning, I play 9 games while I drink coffee. After work, I play 7 games before I start dinner. 16 games. Per day.

Granted, most of them take under two minutes, but still, that is about a half hour of my day given over to naming countries and guessing words.

A game needs to be exceptional to enter the rotation. Letterage is the latest game to achieve that status. It’s the final game in the evening queue.

You can play with 60 or 30 letters. The letters fall into slots on the screen, and you spell a word using your letters, like Scrabble. The difference is that you don’t have to hook onto any word, and you get more points if you use a letter more than once. For instance, if you had C – Q – K – E – N – R – T (you always have 7 letters at a time), you could spell “cent,” but you’d get more points for “center.” Once you use the letter, it disappears, though it may come back in a different set. The letters that fall into the slots change each day.

Enjoy!

Speaking of questions (are you doing 10Q?), I liked this list of questions that someone linked to recently.

I actually think they’re so perfect that they should be answered once a quarter – maybe Jan 1, April 1, July 1, and Oct 1, making the “leaves” question something more generally stated about hidden things being revealed.

I especially loved “What am I pretending is working, but isn’t?” and “What am I hungry to feel again?”

A lot of times, when I think about the concept of having “enough,” I think about time. Or togetherness. As in, not having enough time with the kids.

But we’re doing a lot of financial planning/updating documents right now, so I’ve been thinking about enough as in having enough money or the opposite, feeling like you’ve worked enough years and are ready for retirement. If you don’t have a retirement date attached to your job, you need to figure it out yourself. And those two ideas: having enough money and having had enough of work sometimes go hand-in-hand, but sometimes you want to continue work for other reasons, such as purpose or interest.

I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of not working. I know I could fill my time in other ways, but I like working. I like that structure. I’m not sure how I’ll know when I’ve had enough of that structure.

And financial planning is such a strange idea because you’re planning for a complete unknown. When you’re saving up for a purchase, you know the amount you’ll need, you know how close you are to having enough, and you know what you need to do to get more. But when you’re saving for retirement, you’re saving without an idea of how much you’ll need beyond a general ballpark range.

Like you can theorize that X will be the smallest amount you’ll need if nothing changes in terms of interest rates or the market or social security or your health or your home. And you can theorize that Y is well beyond what you could ever need. But the number in between those two numbers is so enormous that it makes it impossible to plan.

How do you not know you’re not going to need a little bit more? And if you do, how do you know you’ll be able to get it? The whole thing feels a little too loosey-goosey for my tastes.

I’ve never done 10Q, but I decided to do it this year, and it begins tomorrow (Sept 22, 205). You sign up and then receive 10 questions over 10 days. If you’ve never heard of it, this explanation from the site sums it up:

Answer one question per day in your own secret online 10Q space … When you’re finished, hit the magic button and your answers get sent to the secure online 10Q vault for safekeeping. One year later, the vault will open and your answers will land back in your email inbox for private reflection.

I’m not sure whether I’ll answer the questions publicly — as in, here — or privately in a journal or use the 10Q vault. I kind of like the idea of not being able to see my answers for a year and then reading them again down the road. And I also kind of like knowing my answers are somewhere within my control.

For me, the fall has always been the start of the year more than January, so I kind of like this pause right now to reflect and look ahead.

There is a commercial that keeps airing on one of the streaming services that shows a man standing teary-eyed in a house, and the voice-over talks about how he thought he would never be able to afford a home, but a loan from X place made his dream possible. It’s not that I don’t want the nice actor to have a house; of course, I do. It’s the point that housing, food, water, utilities, health care: These necessities should be affordable. Having a place to live is a basic human need.

Of course, it doesn’t have to mean home ownership. It could be affordable rent with a fair lease and stability.

If you don’t know the musician Erin McKeown, you’re missing out. She is a hugely talented singer and songwriter, but she’s also just a great writer.

In her recent Substack, she talks about losing her home for the last 20 years, a cabin that has featured as a character in her casual YouTube videos. She tells the story about how this cabin became her home, and then how it came not to be her home. She writes about trying to buy a house a few years ago (in lowercase):

the last few years, approaching age 50, i made a decision to change my priorities. reading our current cultural landscape, looking at my shifting physical and mental health, i decided to try to buy a house. to spare you a long and humiliating story, its not in the cards for me. … in this moment, i viscerally get why the mirage of homeownership is so potent. why people do crazy things to achieve it or keep it.

She ends with important questions: “what does it mean to say goodbye to a house? was it ever mine? what does a place mean to creativity? what happens to your art practice when you change your home?”

I think about this a lot. A friend of mine moved recently, and while the act was hard, the end result was freeing. She no longer has moving anxiety, even though the idea of saying goodbye to her space felt enormous.

Deep questions.