Category — Uncategorized

I wasn’t sure how I felt about the advice Oliver Burkeman gave in his latest newsletter. On the surface, it’s solid: “Make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world.”

In other words, when the world is falling apart outside, recognize that while you may be unhappy with what is happening outside, stabilize yourself by paying attention to what is happening inside (e.g., “The world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.”)

But… the people involved in the local and global emergencies depend on those not involved to educate themselves, support those impacted, and agitate for change when necessary.

I think he meant that getting pulled down by a person who is drowning creates two drowning people; it doesn’t save one. But while he recommends “visiting” what is happening in the world and then retreating to process, gain perspective, and be productive, it also comes from a place of extreme privilege. It assumes that your “real and immediate world” is not impacted by the events of situations deemed far away.

You can hit reply and tell him what you think, but you can’t see anyone else’s thoughts, which is a shame because I think it would be an interesting discussion.

What do you think?

When the tree fell in the backyard, it destroyed the fence, patio, and plant. The fence is the easiest decision — get it standing again. The patio is a little harder. We will need to pay for part of the work, though we don’t know what our part will be. It’s money we didn’t intend to spend because we had a perfectly functional patio.

The plant is the biggest issue. We will need to remove the plant — it’s enormous — and it’s unclear if the cost of putting in a new plant will be covered. So if we’re paying for the new plant, we can either go with the same plant, or we have the chance to do something new with the space.

I cannot stress the size of the plant. It literally took up like an eighth of the yard.

I’ve thought about putting in a soak tub. And berry plants. And rows of tomatoes. And an apple tree. Each idea sounds good in my head until I start thinking about drawbacks, and then I return to just sticking the same plant (albeit new) in its place.

It’s sometimes overwhelming to have a blank slate to play with.

Xochitl Gonzalez got me with the dek: “Yes, New York is an exciting place, but it’s routine that weaves you into the city.”

I loved the idea of being woven into a city. You’re not just skating the surface; you’re part of the fabric. You could make an equally good case for trying new things, but as a creature of habit, I liked reading this article and having my behaviour celebrated.

Josh is an explorer. I am a stayer. He compromises by deeply exploring new things on our regular restaurant menu or trying new products in our regularly shopped-in stores. I compromise by straying from the known every once in a while (though the places found generally just become a new regular space).

The first place that works well becomes my place, even knowing there may be a better place out there. It’s because all other choices are pretty much a lateral move because I’m only going to pause and become a regular if I have a good experience, which means all other experiences are likely to be different by equal experiences. Is it possible that there is an even better choice out there? Sure. But it’s also possible that there is an even worse choice out there, and I would rather be happy in a consistently good space than ride the ups and downs of unknown spaces.

I loved this point from the article:

“From restaurants to, yes, even manicures, these transactions are now less about patronage and relationships than they are about participating in trends and getting a good pic for the’ gram.”

It does come down to patronage and relationships. I want to count on the places I love, and in turn, I want them to count on me. I will be the customer who keeps showing up, who remembers the small changes over the years, the stories we’ve told each other, or the information exchanged in passing. We’re in this together.

I read an amazing book recently, The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe, that I’ll highlight in my best books post next month. Like many Jonathan Coe books, it explores the conservative movement in the UK and the US (within a murder mystery frame), and how people are drawn to or repulsed by certain political ideologies.

But the best part of the book comes on page 168. The character is retelling a lecture he went to while at college where the lecturer makes a point about how famous pairings often stand in for society as a whole:

Here, in the comic interplay between a Laurel and a Hardy, or an Abbott and Costello, you had a microcosm of how all people interacted with one another: frustration, misunderstanding, getting in each other’s way, but also total interdependence and – in the case of the greatest double acts – real and unwavering love. Look at Vladimir and Estragon, he said – look at Laurel and Hardy; even look at Morecambe and Wise – and you see a pared-down image of a more-or-less functioning society. Human beings doing their best to get along together; unable to hide their impatience, sometimes, with the recalcitrant behaviour of their fellow earth-dwellers, but each one unable to do without the other.

The character — and by extension, Coe — continues to talk about how community has changed from that time after the Second World War to the rise of the first mobile phone:

I think people used to believe in a different kind of society. We had a model for it, back then: more or less organized, more or less functioning, held together by the belief that things should not be shared out too unequally. It was imperfect, of course, full of injustices and disagreements and bumps in the road, but above all it was cohesive: just like one of the great double acts.

Even if we didn’t always achieve it, we had a goal of moving together as a society vs. focusing on the individual and uniqueness, our personal needs, and our personal success. He traces the change back to the 1980s.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading the book; it’s hard not to as you watch the dismantling of pieces of society that were in place to keep us moving forward together with equity and what happens when society becomes so fractured that we can’t find each other again?

While Josh and I play most of our word and geography games in the morning (the list has grown so freakin’ long — from Wordle to Worldle and everything in between), we save the Minute Cryptic for after dinner and work on it together. We’re trying to get good enough at cryptic clues to do a full puzzle at some point.

Sometimes, we solve it, but we have no idea how we arrived at the answer.

Sometimes, we need to ask for multiple letters.

But every once in a while, we play the cryptic exactly as it is meant, figuring out the wordplay and getting the answer on the first try.

I like the Minute Cryptic because they have a short video explaining the answer afterward, so it’s truly a learning tool meant to get you ready to solve a whole puzzle.