Category — Uncategorized

I like quiet more than I can put into words. Like, I work in silence. I drive in silence. I wanted a lot more than just 45 seconds of silence.

So, yes, I clicked on Traveler’s article about silent travel when it popped up in my news feed. Their take on silent travel:

In overstimulated times, silence is a hot commodity. The ‘silent walking’ trend that took TikTok by storm at the end of last year reflects a growing impulse to find new ways to escape the noise of our tech-fueled lives. In our travels, too, we’re increasingly looking to switch off and find refuge from the chaos for a little while.

I was not aware of the silent walking trend—in my world, that would just be called “walking,” but there is something enticing about the idea of escaping noise and crowds and doing and intaking and processing and just going somewhere and existing.

And at the same time, I will go on a finite number of trips in my life. It takes time and money to travel outside my home, where I set up my life with a lot of quiet. Would I want to use a trip in this way? The article discusses how “silent travel helps us disconnect to reconnect—to nature, to our true priorities, and to ourselves.” But part of the reason I travel is not to reconnect to myself but to connect with the other people I’m with or to connect to a different culture.

What is the word for something appealing and unappealing simultaneously?

The title kind of tells the whole story. Mostly. I had waited for the DCUK company to release a wooden toy for the last year and a half. I kept the email they sent about it back in 2022 in my inbox and reached out to them sometimes to ask when the toy would go on sale.

It finally went on sale, but the announcement went into my SPAM folder, and by the time I saw it (only a day later), the toy was sold out. I was disappointed and added my name to a list to be notified if they ever went back on sale. A few days later, I received a message that they had a few more. Did I want one?

Yes, I wanted one. Very badly.

I went to purchase the toy and discovered that adding shipping more than doubled the cost. It went from a $30 item to a $70 item, with an added caveat that other import taxes may apply when the item reaches the United States.

Was it worth it? It was worth it when it was $30, but only because I had seen the price and was comfortable waiting for the item at that price. There are other things I’m drawn to that I immediately dismiss when I see the price tag, but this one felt reasonable. Until it wasn’t that price anymore, and then my brain had to shift and ask the question again. If I had known from the get-go that it was $70, I might have gotten comfortable with that price tag, but the jump in price made me ultimately close the tab and not purchase the toy.

I don’t have regrets because it is just a tchotchke. It would make me happy to look at it, but I can’t do much more than look at it. Thinking about things as worthy or not worthy vs. want or not want makes for harder but more meaningful decisions, eliminating many of those regretful feelings. It was deemed not worth it, and I need to let it go. Clearly, I’m still trying to make myself feel okay with the decision.

Goodbye, toy.

I didn’t watch the video Kottke posted, but this line about what you would encounter while traveling through the universe blew my mind:

But after a long time, you might find the most special thing in the universe: Yourself. An exact copy of you watching this video right now. How can that be? Well, everything in existence is made of a finite amount of different particles. And a finite number of different particles can only be combined in a finite number of ways.

So it’s like LEGO houses; if I gave everyone 1000 blocks, at some point, two people would make identical houses. And if I continued indefinitely, at some point, every option would repeat because there are a finite number of blocks even though there are infinite block structures.

Putting this into your brain today.

Putting this out there if you are like me and did not know this was an option. I recently learned about a cool kids’ book coming out that I wanted to read to my nephews. But holding a book open, facing the computer camera, and trying to read a book at the same time is neck-crick inducing.

But I googled whether reading a Libby book on a computer was possible, and IT IS. You go to the web version of Libby, enter your card number, and check out the book. Then, you can share your screen via FaceTime or Zoom and read the picture book by looking at the page on your screen instead of peering around a physical book’s page. So they can see the book and you, and you can see the book head-on and the person you’re reading to.

It works for every book if you want to treat someone to a read-aloud over Zoom.

At some point, I dropped writing the 19 with COVID-19, but it has been about four years of masked living. This week, four years ago, there was a guard at the door of the medical facility when I went to get a mammogram. The twins’ school closed for two weeks, which stretched into about a year and a half. And the stores emptied out as cases started multiplying. By March 15th, we had created an isolation plan as a family. By March 18th, we were all at home for many, many, many months.

We started taking walks and talking to people from the bottom of their driveway. We FaceTimed with family. And we lamented about how hard it was to find soap. I dreamed about soap. I talked nonstop about soap.

We still mask. We still carry hand sanitizer in our pockets. We’ve had many vaccinations. But we travel again. We see friends. We go to parties and eat outdoors. It’s a good life; not as carefree as it was four years ago, but so much better than the beginning when I dreamed about soap.