Category — Uncategorized

We went to the beach a week ago. We normally have reception on the beach. It’s sometimes a little weak, but I’ve checked email from the beach and made phone calls. But this time, our phones didn’t work for whatever reason. We had zero bars, as the teens say.

I was unreachable, which is how one should be on vacation, but I also could not reach out. I could not check my email, which meant that I couldn’t peek at something for a second and give an opinion. It was a very weird and wonderful feeling to be cut off during those hours. I read my book without feeling guilty because I could do nothing about it.

I mean, beyond going back to the hotel and checking my phone, which I didn’t do because have you ever tried to get a parking space near the beach? It’s impossible, so you don’t relinquish your space if you’ve landed one.

It helped that we were on vacation rather than at home, where we had the expectation that we’d be online. But sometimes, it’s nice to be unreachable.

Consider this your PSA to clean out your vents. I was reading Apple News, and there was a headline about the toilet paper test. What is the toilet paper test, you ask?

Get up right now and go into any bathroom with an exhaust fan. Turn it on. Take two squares of toilet paper and stick them to the vent. If the toilet paper sticks, you’re okay. If it is a little loose or falls, you’re not.

We vacuum our vents, so I didn’t think I actually needed to test anything, but I wanted to see if it worked. We went into the first bathroom and turned on the fan. The toilet paper stuck firmly until we turned off the fan. Yay! We are awesome home owners. We went to the second bathroom and tried it again, and this time, it took a few tries to get the toilet paper to stick. And even when it did, it felt loose.

We ended up taking the fan apart and cleaning everything out inside, too. Better safe than sorry because these fans can cause a fire. So go try the toilet paper test yourself.

The day after the US men’s gymnastics team took bronze, I clicked on a great piece via Facebook. I am so frustrated because I can’t find the article again. I’ll try to summarize it for you.

It was about the pommel horse specialist Stephen Nedoroscik. When he was training as a kid, he realized he didn’t have what it took to compete in all areas. He could have walked away from gymnastics when he realized it wasn’t going to go as he hoped, but instead, he looked at where he was exceptional — the pommel horse — and he went all in on becoming a pommel horse specialist. Being a specialist meant unlike his other teammates, he only got one chance to shine, but he didn’t act like someone who was waiting. This article talked about how he brought his teammates water and cheered them on while they were competing, remaining part of the moment, and then went out there, rocked the one thing he does, and contributed the points needed to get them on the podium.

It’s a great story, which is why he has become one of the stars of the Olympics, but the part I kept thinking about was that he had a choice to make somewhere early on when he received feedback or understood at his core that if he kept going on the path he was going on — the path everyone in the gym was taking to get to the Olympics — he was not going to achieve his goal. Only by thinking outside the box and moving onto a Plan B could he keep moving forward.

I realized reading the article how many of us (myself included, which is why it resonated with me) hear the word “no” and move on to something else rather than finding a new route forward toward the same place. There are plenty of places in life where “no” actually means “no” (relationships, family building, etc.), but I sometimes apply that knowledge to places where “no” is more of a “Stephen Nedoroscik no,” which is a not-this-way-find-something-else “no.” I’m impressed that he thought of trying that path. And I’m going to keep that in mind the next time I hear one of those softer “no”s and look around to see if there are any other options to move forward that get me to the same place, even if the journey to get there will look different.

It’s Harry Potter’s birthday today, so it seemed particularly timely that I finally read a post I had been holding onto by Nathan Bransford about whether we can separate the writer from their writing. Not just separating JK Rowling from Harry Potter but Alice Munro from her collective works or Neil Gaiman or… take your pick. There are a lot of artists out there in the news lately.

He uses Chinatown, a movie I haven’t seen, as a springboard to discussing the issue, ending with a question: “At what point are you, as a consumer of art, complicit in empowering artists to terrorize others in their personal lives and contributing more broadly to unjust and corrupt systems?” He doesn’t claim to have an answer, but people tackled the question in his comment section.

We’ve talked about this a few times over here, and I think what I’ve landed on is to approach each situation uniquely. Do I own their writing already? Where will the money go if I buy a new work? Do I disagree with them, or is something they’re saying or doing harmful or hurtful? Again, no easy answers, but it’s an interesting topic for this day.

Modern Mrs. Darcy posted a wonderful essay a few weeks ago about how pictures have changed. Once you see the framing, you won’t be able to un-see it.

If you look at the pictures before the advent of social media, the composition looks one way. You’ll need to click over to see the examples. And then after social media, well, you’ll see the Instagramification of the framing. Again, once you see the examples, you’ll look back through your camera roll and notice the way you photograph food or people or places.

It’s fascinating, and I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. But there is an Instagram aesthetic, and even things not being posted to Instagram — I, for example, never post to Instagram but I can see this in my photographs, too — are impacted because we’re influenced by the framing that we see daily online.

It’s really interesting.