And now for something not entirely completely different…

I’m writing a letter to someone else this month. So without any further ado, a double dosing of Letters for July.

Hi Jarrod,

It’s a bit strange to be starting one of these. For those that don’t know me who are reading along, and as a reminder to Jarrod, I started writing Letters on my own blog this year. I wanted to have a different kind of online social interaction, and I wanted to do it with people I may not really know. I thought it’d be a nice way to build up a dialog, be a part of building an Internet more like the one I wanted, strengthen some para-social relationships, and make sure the “long form” content on my blog kept flowing.

Jarrod reached out early, but not early enough for me to have booked up my year. But I’m glad that he decided to do his own project on his blog. I agreed to be a part of that project, so here I am, following my own rules, and writing the first letter for the month of January to Jarrod.

By way of further introduction, I’m the Chief Product Officer at an education-finance technology company, leading engineering, design, and product management. I love what I do, because I get to bridge problem solving and consultative work in my area of expertise (education policy), my skills as a data practitioner, my danger as a software developer, my taste (which exceeds my talent), and my never-strong-enough management skills to solve real problems for K12 schools. It’s wild to be a part of a startup for the last nine years from pre-product, pre-revenue, pre-Series A to now being a “real” company with over 50 employees.

I moved to Baltimore, MD about 7 years ago where I live with my fiancée (which I still have to look up how many “e”s each time), her mother, and our two aging dogs. Prior to that, we lived in Providence, RI for 10 years, and I grew up on Long Island, NY.

These days, besides work, I’m focused quite a bit on volleyball. I played (poorly) in high school, and I play now (slightly less poorly) in adult recreational leagues. This was one of my “I’m vaccinated, let’s go!” activities I reintroduced into my life after 17 years away from the sport. It’s been a ton of fun (and exhausting) and at this point it feels essential to my mental health. I also read quite a bit of fiction (or at least I think), typically hitting between 30-40 books a year. I love to travel, and travel quite a bit for work. Recently, I spent a week split between Portland, OR and Seattle, WA and had a great time getting out of my own routine for a bit and wandering. My style of travel is what I call “urban hiking”— I choose a spot for each of my meals in different parts of a city and wander between them all day long and see what I stumble into. I love getting a feel for somewhere different, and I love to walk.

I’ve been lightly following Hey Dingus, largely impressed with your consistency and keeping an eye on the “Projects” page especially, which is the type of thing I’d like to expand on my own site (see /books, /letters, etc). How do you feel like it’s going? Is it the outlet you hoped for? What’s success for you?

Looking forward to our month.

Jason

Hey Jason,

Oh boy, I’m going to have to step up my game this month. That letter had me in awe of your skill as a writer. It flowed, man.

Thank you for that fun introduction. Given the room to stretch out their descriptions, I’ve found that everyone I’ve corresponded with so far has highlighted such interesting parts of their lives. You are no exception.

For a brief introduction of my own, I’ll say that I like to exist at two ends of the spectrum of “extremely online” and “completely disconnected”. Often flip-flopping between them with little warning.

Perhaps a little more explanation is necessary. My day job is as a mountain guide and gear shop specialist, I’ve spent most of my summers as a camp counselor, and I spend much of my free time outside. I’ve spent months (years?) of my life in a tent, gleefully leaving the internet-connected world behind during those times. But I’ve also been a certifiable nerd and Apple enthusiast for as long as I can remember. In fact, in the time between being a full-time camp director and my current job, I spent a few months working as a Technical Specialist in an Apple Store. Technology engages the part of my lizard brain that loves shiny things in a big way. So anytime that I’m not working and I’m not playing in the woods, I’m probably devouring the latest tech news, spelunking the web, or – as of the last few years – sharing that passion through writing my blog.

Lately, I’ve been considering more about how I can build a better bridge between those two interests. Sure, I get into all the topographical navigation apps, track my rock climbing fitness and routes, try the latest camping gadgets, and am generally known as the “tech guy” in my outdoor circles. But I can feel that there’s more to share. I’d like to write more about my experience in the outdoors – to share how and why they make me feel so alive – but it’s proven difficult to break into that genre.

Honestly, that’s one of the reasons I was so eager to follow in your footsteps for this project. I saw it as a way to try out a different kind of writing.

But enough about me, you offered so many jumping-off points about yourself that I want to explore!

What does it mean to work at an “education-finance technology company”? Do you create finance software for K-12 schools? I was corresponding with Chris Verbree last month about how special it is to be part of something – a company, organization, community – from the very beginning. We agreed that having the opportunity to influence the movers and shakers (and sometimes being one yourself) is compelling. What have been your takeaways seeing that company, and your role within it, grow from its infancy?

Your “urban hiking” approach to traveling sounds like the perfect way to explore a new city. I get intimidated by big cities and tend to stick close to my hotel or AirBnB. Case in point, I recently visited your old neck-of-the-woods, Long Island, for the first time but didn’t get out to see hardly any of it. We used DoorDash for a couple of meals and wandered only once. But with a plan and destinations in mind, I could see enjoying the exploration much more.

Your excitement for volleyball is palpable, and I’m so happy you’ve found your way back to it. I strongly believe that having a hobby to stretch your body is as good for you as having one to stretch your mind. Like you, all kinds of foot-powered travel appeal to me. I went for a 10-mile run just this morning that I only intended to be a 5-miler. I just felt so good to be out and moving that I couldn’t stop. A mental health tonic, indeed!

Thank you for your readership of HeyDingus. “Consistency” is my theme for the year, so I’m quite tickled to hear that it has been noticed. After several years of stasis, my appetite for new side projects there has grown considerably. I’m not holding myself to them all going on forever, but they sure are fun to toy around with. My /lists page has been a creative outlet in particular.

Oh, and I’d love to hear more about your pets and what you love about them. I saw your post at the end of June that Gracie’s health hasn’t been the best. Allow me to offer my condolences. It’s so hard to see a family member in decline. My wife and I have a cat, a dog, and a turtle that we call (and treat like) our “fur babies”. They bring us such joy and it’s hard to imagine our family without them.

Finally, I’d like to offer my gratitude for kicking off this Letters project movement (can we call it that?). You nailed the allure of it when you said it was to build up an Internet like the one you want to see. Thanks for putting it out into the world.

Talk to you again soon,

Jarrod

This month I’m writing letters with @leeS.

Hi Jason,

The irony here, to begin with irony, is that your email to me reminding me to start writing my side of this correspondence got lost in my email. We all have a firehose of info coming at us; nothing new there. For me, the dividing line between finishing work at a reasonable hour and staying at it all night has become dictated by the efficiency of my filters.

I’ve thought long and hard, sometimes literally falling asleep to, various mental exercises devoted to creating efficient filters for my emails, workflows, and projects. I could regale you about the efficiencies of Apple Mail vs. Spark vs. Superhuman vs. Hey vs. Fastmail, and on the project side, of Todoist vs. Things vs. ClickUp vs. Sunsama vs. DevonTHINK; and on the short-form writing side, of Bear vs. Ulysses vs. Drafts vs. IA Writer vs. Evernote (Evernote!), and on the long-form writing side, of Ulysses vs. Scrivener. I’ve tried them all, and while fun to work with, and even more fun to port all your data from one to the other in a semi-useless exercise, they all lack something.

They all process my thoughts but none can do my thinking for me.

Let me branch off to another idea before coming back to that. When Threads launched, I was flung into another this vs. that thought cyclone. It went something like this: Should I crosspost on micro.blog and Twitter, vs. crossposting on micro.blog and Mastodon? And if I did that, which Mastodon instance should I favor in my crossposts (I’m in two instances), vs. posting to LinkedIn, vs. Instagram, vs. posting on Threads? And should I post the stuff I used to post on Twitter on Threads, or create some new magical identity that will gain me followers faster than Paris Hilton? And, if I could drink some magic elixir that would turn me into Paris Hilton, with all of her popularity on Threads, would I want to do that anyway?

In the middle of these various thought cyclones, I tested positive for Covid, which has left my mind in a state of crystal clarity. ( Not really.)

What I need, and what everyone needs, is a digital machete to slash our way through the info-forest. But then, I wonder about that. A blunt-force instrument, even if elegantly constructed of software, would cut away stuff we would need. Example: I was recently promoted to assistant professor at USC. My new contract went into spam. Doh. [Head slap evoking Homer Simpson.]

I think the solution is in stepping away from the mechanics that have brought us so much efficiency, and taking a moment, pausing, creating some space by breathing, walking, staying in the shower too long, or by staring into any distant mountains you may happen to have nearby. There is a superb filter already installed in the mind, always auto-updating to its latest version. I find I can turn it on by asking “Does this matter to me?” And being ruthless about the answer.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Lee

Hi Lee,

A funny thing happened in my life about nine years ago. I started working for a startup that was using Slack, way back in the early days of Slack. And starting at that moment, email got quiet for me.

Sure, I have a lot of junk that comes in that I have to clean up from time to time, but I don’t live or die by email. Email that matters to me is rare, and the process of “doing email” is largely unimportant.

Slack didn’t eliminate email for a lot of folks, but for me, it sure quieted it enough to separate signal and noise pretty effectively. Well, that, plus aggressive unsubscribing from various advertising emails and a few well designed filters on emails from popular political campaign donation software.

Personally, I’m back largely on pencil and paper for the true “management” of my time. My tasks are written on Ugmonk Analog cards or in a Cortex Sidekick, depending on my mood. Sometimes it’s not written down at all. My work and life is sufficiently chaotic that there’s often little mystery where my attention needs to be at any given moment. Taking the time to write down a list, and then paying attention to that list, can feel like a luxury.

Walking is my solution. I’m a big fan of taking multiple mid day walks. When I worked in an office, I would often head out to Walgreens or 7-11 a block or two away for a Diet Coke. Yes, I wanted the caffeine, but doing that a couple of times a day and taking the “long way” back around the block cleared my head. My partner, Elsa, doesn’t leave her office in our home the entire working day. I don’t understand how she does it. I routinely have 5,000-7,000 steps already at the end of the work day even though I have a desk job. I need to get outside, I need to think a bit. I even like to take my meetings as regular phone calls (how not-millennial of me) so that I can walk through the park across from our house while talking through a problem.

We get lost in the tools and the mechanics all the time. But the work I do is knowledge work, and brains need rest just like physical muscle. And brains don’t active best sitting and staring at a machine that flashes lights in my eyes.

Perhaps you’ve heard of forest bathing? Or A Need to Walk? I believe in these things so much, it’s one of the only links on my vanity site. To me, a great vacation is 25,000 steps every day without even trying. Seeing a new city is walking its neighborhoods.

For all that time I spend on the computer and on the internet, for all my posts about the social web, I’d trade all of it without a seconds hesitation to take walk on a pleasant day with a friend.

Congratulations on the promotion, and I hope you have a swift recovery from COVID.

Jason

If you had asked me this morning, I would have told you that the US almost certainly was continuing to increase its greenhouse gas emissions over time. But it turns out, I would have been wrong. We have actually managed to decrease emissions 12% from peak– and that’s total emissions, not per capita or adjusted for GDP.

Turns out, even with very little meaningful policy supports, the transition from coal has been meaningful and fairly dramatic. But we have continued to expand emissions from natural gas, which are quite considerable, and have made only a little bit of progress in transportation.

Transportation emissions are particularly disappointing. We have done quite a bit, seemingly, on EPA standards for car emissions and increasing mileage, as well as introduced major technologies such as hybrid and electric vehicles. I’m not sure how much of this is due to increased vehicles-miles-traveled or the shift away from coupes and sedans to heavier vehicles like SUVs and other light trucks.

The path forward for rich nations like the US on emissions is clear though– continue to phase out coal and start to reduce reliance on natural gas through the use of true renewables and clean energy, make big investments in increasing industrial technology breakthroughs, and reduce dependence on cars.

This is the low hanging fruit we need to start working on right now, because even doing all of that will not be enough by the end of this century– but it might buy us the time to get that far.

I’ve been using the Godspeed caps for a really long time. It was time to clean them up, so I decided to switch keycaps for a bit. Feels weird.

Before

After

Riccardo Mori often has something interesting to say. He recently took a bit of a hiatus, and in his return post he wrote:

A tweet from back in March — So much tech today feels more focused on the creation of ‘digital toys’ more than on innovation that can actually, unequivocally positively help and advance humankind. And [I feel] that a lot of resources are being wasted on things whose real usefulness is debatable, e.g. self-driving cars.

A lot of unease I’ve been feeling in recent times boils down to what I perceive to be a widening disconnect between the tech sphere and the world at large, the real world that is going to shit and down the drain day after day.

The tech sphere looks more and more like a sandbox for escapism. Don’t get me wrong, some escapism is always good and healthy as a coping mechanism, because otherwise we would be in a constant state of depression. But — and I may be wrong here — the kind of escapism I feel coming from the tech world is the sort of ‘bury your head in the sand’, ‘stay entertained and don’t worry about anything else’ escapism that want people to remained hooked to gadgets and digital toys in ways that at times feel almost sedative.

I think this all comes down to software. Marc Andressen’s well-known article, Why Software is Eating the World, from 2011 is often cited, but I think that Ben Thompson is the much better read on this topic. In 2019, Ben asked, What is a tech company? and identified five key features:

Note the centrality of software in all of these characteristics:

• Software creates ecosystems.
• Software has zero marginal costs.
• Software improves over time.
• Software offers infinite leverage.
• Software enables zero transaction costs.

The question of whether companies are tech companies, then, depends on how much of their business is governed by software’s unique characteristics, and how much is limited by real world factors.

There’s a pretty broad set of industries that were full of distribution and production costs that software can eliminate. That’s been the primary engine of economic growth and “innovation” for the last 30 years. On the back of manufacturing breakthroughs in battery and semiconductors, computers kept getting more powerful, less expensive, smaller, and connected. With each step change in general purpose capability and availability, a new set of industries and practices became vulnerable to being eaten by software.

The last decade we have begun to see the end of this parade. Companies often claiming to be software companies these days often do so to pad a longshot investment thesis (the motivation for Ben’s article), but we’re well into the long tail of the “real world” that is not so easily disrupted by bits.

We saw when Apple and Microsoft and Amazon were exciting and watched them topple past giants in money, power, and cultural influence. But they’re big and mostly boring now. It may be some time before more exciting stuff starts to happen, and maybe they’ll never be as financially valuable as the first set of companies to ever dominate a zero marginal cost, zero transaction cost market, but they will exist.

It’s true that we build a lot of digital toys. I don’t bemoan the toys. They’re not interesting, but capitalism builds lots of toys hoping for a market. It’s been the easy path to money. ¹ But I also think that it’s easy not to see some incredible things happening.

I remember in the mid 90s when my grandfathers both needed angioplasty and stents put into their hearts. These were routine, but quite serious surgeries. They were life saving technologies not available to even their parents. But they were in the hospital for days and it was quite nerve wrecking. These days those procedures happen in a catheter lab as soon as problems are noticed. We check your heart and just fix things up while we’re in there and send you home just a couple of hours later. Advancements in laparoscopic surgeries are incredible. mRNA vaccines are real, big time, and absolute remarkable. Solar power has gone from something people laughed at Jimmy Carter about to the most cost effective source of utility scale power that you can also install on your home roof.

There have been advancements in science and technology.²

The problems we face as a society and a culture are not software or hardware problems. Our challenges are fundamentally rooted in hierarchy, power, and inequality.

We’re not really lacking in some fundamental technology we need to address climate change. We lack will. We lack the ability to convince others. We lack the ability to combat misinformation and fight a system that fails to incentivize the longer term and the bigger picture.

We’re not lacking in some fundamental technology to address inequality.

We’re not lacking in some fundamental technology to address racism, homophobia, and an anti-trans movement.

The “technology” we lack is empathy.

I’m disappointed in our society and technology is no longer an effective place to distract myself with optimism and a sense of progress. Riccardo laments, “the kind of escapism I feel coming from the tech world is the sort of ‘bury your head in the sand’” – but hasn’t that always been true? Maybe Riccardo had a different experience with technology than I did. Or maybe he bought into some of the industry hype that rang hollow for me. But I just feel like if what you’re worried about is that “the real world that is going to shit”, and I am worried about that, I’m not sure why you’d look to the computer technology sector for solutions.

Tech world has no solutions for our bigger problems. Tech world is all about making it easier, faster, and cheaper to impose our will in the world. But our social-political-cultural problems are matter of what we will, collectively.

No one needs more meta commentary on the social web this week, but here I am with thoughts and a blog so…

1. My technical and nerdy community fully moved over to Mastodon over the course of the winter and I have a pretty great experience there.
2. A significant portion of the education policy, social science, urbanism, local news, and general policy advocacy world remains stubbornly on Twitter. I use Twitter far less than I used to, and it’s value has declined significantly, but I still find that scrolling for a few minutes a few times a day surfaces stuff I wanted to see and read.
3. I have no interest in Bluesky as an also-ran. I have considered snagging an invite just to hold onto my identity and because crossposting from Micro.blog is easy, but I have no reason to believe that it will be worth investing in.
4. I don’t really get why the folks in (2) find Mastodon hard, despite all of the commentariat constantly talking about how confusing it is. This is the curse of being a technical nerd. But honestly, you just sign up on a webpage or in an app and then everything looks at feels 95% like Twitter.
5. Threads, so far, is filled with lots of content I don’t want. The combination of the Instagram social graph (mostly people I know, not people I’m interested in, per se), the weird algorithmic feed shoving empty brand and influencer crap in my face, the lack of web app or Mac app and lack of iPad app… it’s clearly very popular, but at least right now it’s like a packed Spring Break party on the beach in Miami— not somewhere I’ve ever wanted to be.
6. I love having my own blog, on my own domain, pushing stuff out over RSS, and where possible, into other platforms that make it convenient for folk who want to read what I write to find it and me and engage with me.
7. I am sad that so much of the social internet has closed off the ability to automate posting from outside of their products. Syndication is the solution to widely and natively using everything.

David shared some thoughts on our month of letters. I find the format similarly constraining, but part of what I enjoy has been how the conversation has to be different as a result.

Each letter is shorter than addressing everything could be. And we often have to let a thought from the other person drive by or fizzle out, lest the letters end up endless bullet points hopelessly attempting to recreate synchronous conversations.

As bandwidth increased, the internet moved us from asynchronous by default to synchronous by default. We went from websites, journals, blogs, and forums to feeds and streams.

I kind of like the idea of finding a different resting place than the heights of Facebook and Twitter for my own communication. That’s part of why I blog. Letters, in many ways, has been a project to have a different kind of communication, facilitated by blogging, that I don’t always get as a result of writing here. I’m lucky if a post gets one reply. Long posts almost never get any kind of response. That’s fine– but part of what I want out of blogging is for other people to write about things that I’m writing about and vice versa. A broad, loose “conversation” that isn’t a direct exchange, but a diffuse space with lots of folks contributing thoughts and ideas about similar things that I’m interested in.

Letters is not quite that, but it’s helping me to exercise that possibility.

Part of why I haven’t wanted to update my Now page is I really like the last update. It was calm, hopeful, and transitional, which makes for a great page.

But we’re halfway through the year and almost five months out from my last update so it’s time to talk about what’s going on.

Without a theme this year, I feel a bit less about writing just about “now” and a bit more about what the trajectory of the last five months has looked like and what I’m hopeful for in the remainder of the year.

In my last update I noted:

I never did rewrite my resume like I planned last year. I want to do more to write about things I know this year instead of things I feel. Part of working on my own self-image includes getting over the part of my that places my professional knowledge under the category as uninteresting because it’s unimpressive and not novel. Of course, that’s true of literally everything I write in public, yet it doesn’t stop me when it’s not about work.

Reading this made me feel a bit disappointed. I don’t think I’ve delivered on this front. In fact, I forgot all about this sort of “commitment” to myself. Yet, reading it back now, I can’t help but to feel like I was on to something. Maybe I’ll do a bit better in the back half of the year.

Reading

January has historically been the month I read the most. This month I finished no books. In another sign of growth and changes, I don’t seem to find this concerning at all. I will read again soon, when it feels like the thing I want to do, for as much as I want to do it.

I definitely have gotten back to reading. Maybe not quite as voraciously as I have in years past, but I’m still well on pace for around 30 books this year. Importantly, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read and I’ve enjoyed the act of reading when I’ve done it. I think this makes clear that the years of motivating myself to stick with something I enjoy has clearly engrained reading as a habit that’s hard to break. I have done the work to change myself, and this is a part of me that has not yet changed into something else. I remain a reader.

Movement

Yeah, I did take a break. And when I came back from Mexico, I did, in fact, return to the gym and mostly return to volleyball. I’m playing less than I did at my peak– closer to twice a week versus almost always 3 and sometimes 4 times a week– but I’m still making sure it’s a part of my routine. I was largely maintaining my health overall until April. I got hit really badly with allergies in San Diego. They didn’t really let up for a couple of months. That, coupled with what I can only describe as a bit of a mini-depressive episode led to pretty substantial decrease in overall activity and increase in eating. I gained a lot of weight over 6-8 weeks. I’m feeling better now, and I’m working hard to fight back to a body I feel more comfortable in. It’ll likely take all summer, but that’s ok.

Importantly, movement remains a key part of my mental health. And although I moved less, I never stopped going to volleyball at least once a week. I never stopped going to the gym to lift weights three times a week. I mostly kept up my habits, having largely lost my day time walking and other parts of my motivation, not the bigger parts of my commitment to health.

Letters

We’ve hit six months of Letters. Although I haven’t yet added it to my navigation as I rethink my site, I have collected all of the posts. I continue to enjoy this project, and recently posted some thoughts at the halfway mark.

Gracie

Our 13 year old Pomeranian-Beagle mix is at the end stages of her life. She’s in chronic kidney failure as well as having liver issues and gall bladder issues. After significant time in the hospital, she’s home, she’s happy, and she’s comfortable. She’s not all the way back to herself, and she will never get better. At this point, we’re caring for her best we can, loving her best we can, and in the process of preparing ourselves to say goodbye. With the rate I update Now posts, I suspect that she will be gone long before my next one.

Future

I am trying to find some different adventures to take. I had a week of solo travel due to some circumstances that meant Elsa couldn’t join me on planned trip. It was good for me. I needed that reset and change of scenery. I needed a couple of days outside, post allergies, where I walked 20,000+ steps a day by “mistake” and just did only things I enjoy with myself.

I need more time away from work and away from my existing routines. It’s too easy to find myself feeling trapped in the same worries and anxiety. I feel a heaviness creeping in that I associate with a lot of midlife crisis behavior. I can see the shape of the things I’ve laid down in what feel likes concrete. I need to remind myself that the concrete is an illusion. I can change my life to be more of what I want it to be at any time. I can make different decisions. I get one shot, and I shouldn’t keep doing things just because.

Am I itching for change? Maybe. So much of my life is better than I hoped for. At the same time, I need to know and feel and experience how much change is still possible to give myself the confidence to adjust when it’s necessary.

I never did decide on a theme for this year. But I think maybe I have now.

I want to Lighten.

So much of my stress and anxiety comes from my desire to be able to predict everything. I’m afraid of the uncertainty when things fail or just fail to meet my expectations and how I imagined things would be. The things that feel like the weigh me down and don’t let me make different choices– the heaviness – is imaginary. I want to find a way to feel nimble. I want to feel less anchored by past choices. I want to feel more capable of being tossed in the winds with the confidence I’ll remain aloft, just floating somewhere unexpected.

I want to accept that failing at something is not failing at everything. I want to feel like new opportunities are possible, even if I fail to get everything out of opportunities from the past.

Things can be less serious and more fun.

I need to lighten up. I need to lighten my burdens. I need to lighten my life so that I feel free to seize new things. I need to open myself up to changes that scare me. I need to lighten the pressure I put on myself and the things I care about today. I need to lighten the load I place on those who support me so that I can stand with a bit more confidence on my own.

Hi Jason,

I will likely get back into D&D soon. Once a few things settle down at work I’ll have a bit more energy to play.

Hobbies come and go. I’ve known that for a long time. I’ll have interest in one, then move to another, and another, eventually coming back to the original. Often I max out on one as it has my interest, then I move one.

I’m a couple of days late on this one. Will just make it within the month of June. Time since the Covid lockdowns has been weird. I had a keen sense of time beforehand and that has gone now. Getting older brings with it the sense of time going quicker. What I’ve lost is my sense of distance with time. An event that’s 2 weeks away feels like it’s later than something 3 months away. Makes me a little sad. Makes it hard to look forward to something.

Today has been a long time in the car. 5 hours as I headed NW to visit a couple of clients and return home. Good audiobook time. I’m listening to “Three Body Problem” off the back of the Netflix trailer. I read the book just 18 month ago and couldn’t have told you what it was about (yeah, ok maybe there is a pattern here) but the memory is returning as I listen to it. Years ago I would have dismissed audiobooks. Now I enjoy them, blending with my Kindle reading and my podcast listening. There is something different about a story being told to you. The slower pacing, even for a book I’ve read, means I often pick up nuances I missed first time around.

I will write up some thoughts on our letter writing in a separate blog post and send you a link when done.

Thanks for the conversation, David

Hi David,

It’s funny, I have been talking a lot about the Three-Body Problem lately. Must be due to the trailer. The idea of the dark forest haunts me.

I have never been able to get fiction audiobooks to click. I listen to tons of podcasts, and I can listen to some non-fiction audiobooks (sped up), but my mind drifts while listening to fiction. For some reason, it doesn’t stick, even though I much prefer to read fiction. I think it’s that slower pace causing me not to focus on details I missed, but instead, drift into the my own thoughts.

One hobby I’ve been dong a bit more of lately is cooking. Of course, I am always at least cooking sometimes. What I’m doing now is taking care when I cook. I’m not slapping cold cuts on cold bread. I’m spending that extra time making a small sauce, toasting my bread, chopping veggies to go inside of it. I’m just being a little less lazy about my food. It feels good. Sometimes I forget that it takes less than 10 extra minutes to make something that’s twice as good.

Sorry I’m late on this response.

Last weekend, this time, I was pretty certain our older dog Gracie had just days to live. She’s home now, comfortable, after 3 nights in the ER followed by a couple of days spending 8am to 6pm at the vet. She’s reached the point where she’s not going to get any better, but she’s mostly stable and seems to still have some time with reasonable quality of life. Thankfully once she was home for a couple of days and out of the anxiety of the overnight pet ER and vet, she seems to be about 80% her normal self. We have to give her fluids at home and she’s on a host of medication. But she’s eating, she still likes going for walks, and she loves us.

All that to say, I’m a bit late at least in part because other than work, the gym, and volleyball, I have done little else lately. My thoughts are, well, preoccupied.

Thanks for chatting with me in June.

Jason

Hi Jason,

My gaming took the opposite track to you in the early days. Funnily enough, games then were 2 player at best and unlike the Internet multi-player games we have now - which I tend not to play. In the days of the Commodore 64 we’d sit around and take turns. There was also a large social aspect in “swapping games”.

We were lucky to have the C64. Dad won it at work as a prize for sales I think. That wasn’t his job, but I expect in early 80’s few knew what the prize was. And it was a doozy. A Commodore 64, TV, printer and 5.25" drive.

Fair to say the opportunity was my gateway drug into my career.

I got back into tabletop role playing a year or so before Covid. I’d wanted to play again for a long time. With nobody to play with I headed into my local gaming store and asked if there was a game going. I enjoyed it very much. As an adult there was so much more I could bring to my characters. Covid and anxiety had me pull out. I was playing and DM’ing. It became too much. As a DM playing on Sunday afternoons, not thinking about the game all week until the next Sunday morning and then politely swearing to oneself is a sign of too much. I’m reluctant to get back into it because I’m concerned I’ll end up leaving again at short notice and that’s not fair on others.

I like your guitar story. Justified embellishments aside, were you that self aware of the decision at the time? I’m not sure that I would have been. Hobbies are wonderful things. We each get deep into what calls us and that’s often to the bewilderment of others. They can bring us together in weird and wonderful ways.

Two of my workplaces have had a “What was good last week?” check-in and depending on the cohort in the meeting I’m met with crazed looks or murmurs of appreciation.

Changing habits. Let’s not mention that.

Cheers,

David

Hi David,

I think my awareness on guitar went as far as this: I am enjoying playing music with friends in all forms, whether with my nascent band at the time or in jazz band and wind ensemble at school, while the video games feel less and less present to me. It just wasn’t a thing I was reaching for with my friends or a thing I much felt like talking about or engaging with anymore. My love of computers didn’t change, and this was an era of all kinds of horrible skinning you could do on Windows and futzing with Linux desktop and the like. But games just fell away, maybe because of shifts in friends or just shifts in priorities. I don’t think the awareness extended to “this is a thing I can do with my friends now” but it definitely was an awareness of “this is a thing that I love doing that energizes me, that is not”.

My early computers was not from the Commodore 64 days– I was at the very early Windows 3.11 Gateway 2000 club. The new hotness was the CD-ROM drive where I had Dinosaurs and Encarta and I spent tons of time browsing through both.

Things come and go. Sometimes I like cooking, sometimes it feels like a chore. Sometimes I like playing guitar, other times I haven’t picked it up in a few months. I’ve stopped feeling guilty about it, but I do try and remind myself that these things bring me joy, and sometimes I don’t feel like doing something because I haven’t done it in a while. Sometimes, I’ve forgotten what things mean to me, and I have to force myself out of a bit of a slump. The activation energy is hard, because remembering the joy can be really tricky.

I think you should head back to the TTRPG world. Just take it easy. I have found that it was way too easy to leave things behind due to COVID that I actually don’t want to leave behind. It has taken real effort to re-introduce those habits and hobbies, but also a great reminder of why they’re important. You need to fill that bucket up. Maybe being a DM is just not a thing that you can keep doing at this stage, or maybe joining an existing campaign will make you realize how much you miss it and give you the motivation to not feel like DMing is Sunday anxiety and drudgery. Or maybe you should try something like a trading card game or board games to see if that can generate a similar joy and social connection without the pressure of DMing each week. I think part of why I have moved away from, and stayed away from, video games is because most of the games I liked were huge commitments. I just didn’t have the energy to play like that anymore, and that’s why it became a chore.

Jason

For years, folks complained as companies like Meta shut down or never provided true API experiences. They came out in a time where everyone thought APIs were table stakes and important parts of the web and demonstrated they could ignore that and make a big business.

Now that Meta is talking about building on top of existing interoperability standards, rather than praising this new era of data portability, folks are talking about taking their ball and going home.

Do we want open standards, interoperability, and data portability or not?

It sounds to me like some folks haven’t grown past their teenage anti-establishment, anti-corporate punk phase and just want to “damn the man”. To the extent that I’d like to do the same, I’d rather structurally reduce their ability to amass power and control in the first place.

Social standards and data interoperability were always the best way to do that.

I’m glad to see the old version of the new web start to emerge. I hope we’re not too childish to embrace that and see where it takes us.

I’ve been putting off a project I set for myself a few years ago where I really work on my personal narrative about my professional work. I struggle to describe my role and it’s the source of a lot of anxiety. I just realize I should just work with my executive coach to write a new résumé.

I’m not looking for a change, but I’ve been terrified that when that time comes, I will have no ability to describe what I do. I often find myself leaving huge chunks of my job out. It’s challenging because as an early employee and officer/executive, a lot of my job feels informal or at least easy to forget about. It would be a mistake to not talk about the fact that I play a role in sales and support or representing the company externally at industry conferences as a subject matter expert. I’ve also never really talked about management or leadership in prior job searches because this is my first role where I have managed people and had a formal leadership role.

After 9+ years it’s strange to think that some day I’ll do something else. At the same time, my own anxiety has me preoccupied with being worried about what will happen when that time comes. A fresh résumé with some outside help from someone who knows what I do feels like it could be an easy relief valve to crack open.

Ok, the lasagna at The Pink Door was excellent, I only wish I was hungry enough to eat the whole menu. Solo dining can be wonderful, especially when you have a view of the water, a nice breeze, and a good book. But it’s a real bummer when you’re eating alone instead of with someone who is willing to share half the menu with you.

If you ever want to know the secret to becoming my dear friend, be the kind of person who goes to a new restaurant that’s supposed to be wonderful and order as much of the menu as possible to share. In fact, order more of the menu than is reasonable.

Hi Jason,

Funny that you should say “You can’t dance with someone who walks on the floor with the purpose of making you look bad”. I think of conversation as a dance where both people have to be willing to move back and forth, even if there is a stumble from time to time. It’s also similar to something I’ve often said about trying out new things at work. “You can play by new rules if everyone insists on playing the old game.”

Speaking of games, I’ve finished playing The Last of Us Part I this week (4th time through) and have started on Diablo IV. Gaming has become much more acceptable than it was when I was a teenager in the 80’s. Still get weird stares from a lot of people, but not as many now. Like anything else it’s a hobby and I would guess closest to reading - though more interactive. During the Covid lockdowns it was gaming that allowed me to travel to far-flung places and other worlds to escape.

This week I’d like to focus on changing some of my habits. Some work for me and others don’t. My task is to identify the cues that cause a bad habit to kick in and leverage that into a new habit. There are some where it feels like the cue is just the day. “Oh, it’s Monday night so off to the supermarket for a bag of chips.”. I’ll need to be a bit more precise if I’m going to shift things in the right direction.

Tomorrow (if not Wednesday) is going to be a hard day. As a family we made the decision yesterday that it’s time to let our 15 year-old dog Sam pass on. His health has deteriorated over the last 12 months and is accelerating. Most of the time he looks miserable and pleading. Sam came to us at 4 years-old as a second time rescue dog. We believe his first owner abused him and his second was a single male who, because of the way Sam had been treated, wasn’t able to connect to him. I can understand that. For years, Sam would not even come near me. Originally an outside dog, I found out the girls had been letting him inside during the afternoon, and then swooshing him out before I came home from work. Now, he’s as indoor as they get. I’m glad we’ve been able to give him a better life than he started with. If only everyone’s life could work out that way - getting better all the time.

Regards,

David

Hi David,

It’s funny– I fit all the trappings of a gamer as a mid-30s white guy in tech who was an absolute nerd my entire life. But, I actually stopped playing games around high school. I remember selling all of my video games to buy a guitar. It didn’t feel like a statement moving away from gaming. In the past, I’ve taken creative license in this re-telling to claim that I was making some kind of move to make myself more attractive or fit in better or something in a self-deprecating way. But honestly, I was just less and less interested in games, even as an avid Nintendo Power reader and someone who woke up to play RPGs for an hour before school, and more and more interested in music. I think it was less about rejecting being a nerd– I couldn’t shed that identity with all the money, dedication, and time in the world. I think it was more about being lonely, and gravitating toward thing that were more social. Playing guitar was something I could do with my band (I started just singing and learned guitar to add that to the mix). Playing video games, at that time, was not something easily done with friends. I wonder if I would have made different choices if I grew up when online gaming and voice chat and all of that were around.

Habit changes are so hard. I have been on a mission to be more healthy since the start of COVID, really jump-started in part from my dad’s heart attack that happened in the first year of the pandemic. I’ve found it’s easier to build new affirmative habits–“start doing this”– then to discard bad habits– “stop doing that”. It’s especially true when the new pattern I want to establish takes something from being an easy default to something that requires attention, intention, and energy. Adding “start going to volleyball” is a lot easier than “stop eating a full pizza every time something bad happens as a coping mechanism”. I hope you find some success in changing your habits. I’ve made it at least part of the way, but I’m currently in a back slide. What I’m thinking about now is how I may need to do more to do less. If it’s easier for me to start something new, maybe I need to fill my time and energy with new things to crowd out what I want to stop. If there’s no time for bad habits, I won’t do them.

Letting go of a loved one is hard. I grew up with a golden retriever/yellow lab mix Martina, from the time I was about 5 until I was about 19. She had a really tough last couple of years, but I think overall had more good than bad in that time. It was very hard to let her go. When I was 24, my partner and I got a dog together, Gracie. She’s now starting to show some real signs of aging, and it’s been really hard on us. The vet visits increase, the vet bills increase, and although she’s absolutely still having a happy life, it’s also clear that there’s less quality. She’s able to do less and is motivated to do less with the passage of time.

Sam knows he is loved, and Sam had a life that was better because you and your family were a part of it. I don’t think that’s enough, but it’s something.

Jason

Jess and I went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM, on I think Mallory’s recommendation, in November 2019. It was an absolutely wild and cool experience and one I thought about a lot during the pandemic. I remember thinking about how that bizarre experience may never exist again while wrapped in a bubble of fear during the early parts of the pandemic and I remember being grateful for the experience.

It’s so cool to see it continue, expand, and receiver accolades.

I haven’t read the new CREDO study, but the results are not all that surprising.

Taken from Kevin Drum’s summary:

Generally speaking, the study shows positive charter results for:

• Black and Hispanic students
• Students in poverty
• Urban students
• Schools in northeastern states
• Charter Management Organizations (CMOs)

… It’s not clear why the results line up this way. Poor urban charters are probably almost entirely Black and Hispanic, so the strong results for these groups are likely because urban charters are systemically different from suburban charters in some way. The report doesn’t speculate about what this difference might be, and I don’t have any guesses myself.

I’m more than willing to speculate.

1. Charter management organizations professionalize central office functions like school districts spread over multiple schools versus replicating administrative functions at a single site at high cost. This leads to both higher quality staff and operations and lower operational costs that allow for greater investment in student learning. Also, expansion as a CMO, in at least some states, requires a track record of success generally.
2. Northeastern states have more robust charter authorizing policies from the perspective of ensuring quality. They tend to be stricter about opening new charters and likely disproportionately have oversubscribed charters only.
3. Urban students are coming from school systems with lower absolute performance and growth is asymmetric. It’s likely that it’s easier to grow from low baselines (we see this with “most improved” on absolute scores for things like NAEP or international comparisons like PISA almost always happening in lower, absolute, performers). So improvements should be more pronounced from lower baselines.
4. The same argument for urban students applies to students in poverty and Black and Hispanic students, all being highly correlated. There’s also (in Northeastern urban charters) a reasonable likelihood of a more diverse teaching force and more direct focus on improving achievement for these specific subgroups of students (sometimes it’s a part of the process of getting a charter!).

Places like Ohio look bad because Ohio lets lots of people who have no idea how to run schools run schools with no meaningful consequences. The charters there seem to routinely go bust on financial mismanagement. Bad charter law (re: no accountability, few limits) results in bad charters.

I find discussing “charters” frustrating because the term itself lacks a universal definition. The legal structures governing charter schools vary greatly from state to state. Some of these structures are effective at producing higher quality charter schools, others, not so much. Unfortunately, each interest group involved in the charter school debate has their own agenda. As a result, their assessments of high or low-quality charter laws are often misguided. I believe charter school success should be measured by the educational outcomes they provide for students in underperforming school systems. However, the focus of groups assessing charter authorizing laws tends to be on factors like sector expansion, alternative notions of “choice” or “competition,” or even a desire to eliminate charter schools altogether.

One more thought– suburban charter schools primarily cater to students already enrolled in well-performing schools. These charter schools are established to address the specific preferences of relatively affluent parents who, for various reasons, feel that their needs are not being met by traditional neighborhood schools. For instance, in certain states (which will remain unnamed), it appears that the charter school sector exists with the purpose of segregating white students from their Black counterparts. These schools serve students who are already academically successful and, in many cases, prioritize fulfilling parental preferences that are unrelated or even contrary to educational outcomes.

I haven’t even watched the Vision Pro part of Apple’s announcement video yesterday, but this morning I cannot shake one thought.

I really hate how central our television is in our main living area. We absolutely could rearrange our household to have it be a more communal living space oriented around people and not a screen, but it would not reflect the way the members of my household live in practice today. I acknowledge that.

But I am now wondering, are we just a few years away from an experience with Apple Vision that leads to a television being largely replaced?

My living room is the best home theater I can afford, because while I’m not a fan of the casual daily television experience, I do want to turn off the lights on a Saturday night and watch Dune. Maybe some combination of Apple Vision and iPads means no one needs that television in the living room for any of our practical viewing experiences.

It is tempting to jump in now and say, “But with Apple Vision strapped to each of our faces, aren’t we even more disconnected than watching TV? Does this actually solve the problem?” To that I say that I’m unconvinced that the experience of Apple Vision won’t permit the same level of presence as shared television watching. And importantly, the fact that you can easily put it away and reorient the whole room can help adjust viewing to more of an appointment than a fallback. When the whole room is not setup to encourage falling into television, behavior change becomes just a bit easier.

Here’s a thing you should totally not do.

Manton has made an archive of the posts from App.Net (App Dot Net?) available.

Normally I’d download my own posts with something simple and fast like wget. But since I’ve been trying to write more code in Elixir, I decided to write a small script to download my posts using that.

This script is a .exs file, meaning it is not compiled, and is meant to be run as elixir adn_download.exs with one argument, your user name.

For me, it’s elixir adn_download.exs jbecker.

This will create a folder in your current directory called posts with a JSON file for each post.

I’ll probably do something to parse and make that JSON useful in Elixir later too, but for now, my Saturday-morning-avoiding-responsibilities computer time is over.

Code below in line, and also here in a gist.

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Mix.install([{:httpoison, "~> 2.0"}])

defmodule ADNDownloader do
  require HTTPoison

  @base_url "https://adn.micro.blog/"

  def get_posts(user_name) do
    url = @base_url <> "users/" <> String.at(user_name, 0) <> "/" <> user_name <> ".txt"

    %HTTPoison.Response{body: body} = HTTPoison.get!(url)

    post_urls =
      body
      |> String.split("\n")

    post_urls
    |> Enum.reject(fn post_url -> !String.match?(post_url, ~r/json$/) end)
    |> Enum.map(fn post_url -> @base_url <> post_url end)
  end

  def get_json(url) do
    %HTTPoison.Response{body: body} = HTTPoison.get!(url)

    file =
      Regex.named_captures(~r/\/(?<post>[0-9]*\.json$)/, url)
      |> Map.get("post")

    filepath = File.cwd!() <> "/posts/" <> file
    IO.puts(filepath)
    {filepath, body}
  end
end

[user_name] = System.argv()
posts = ADNDownloader.get_posts(user_name)

File.mkdir!(File.cwd!() <> "/posts")

posts
|> Enum.map(&ADNDownloader.get_json(&1)) 
|> Enum.map(fn {filename, contents} -> File.write!(filename, contents) end) 

Hi Jason,

Friday night, the TV’s on in the background, and I’m wondering where to start.

I first came across your “Letters Project” via previous participant Robb Knight. At the time I was craving conversation and if letters back-and-forth are not conversation, what are they? That seems as good a place to start as any.

As a 50+ year old (mid-early-50’s lol), I’ve been exposed to many concepts. Some resonate strongly and immediately feel right because of their ability to explain my world experiences. The importance of conversations in our life is one of those.

Just now my attention has been taken by the Ben Robert-Smith story on TV. He’s Australia’s most decorated living war-veteran who has lost a defamation case against three newspapers for claims they made that he is a war criminal. The stories are all “He’s guilty! Strip him of his medals! Take him to criminal court!”. The last I agree with as it is the only way to get beyond allegations to evidence.

The media leaves no place for conversation - no place to explore - no place to learn - no place for grey nuance.

I assume the case was thrown out of court because the newspapers had sufficient justification to make the claims they did and so, it’s not defamation. That does not equate to criminal proof. I can’t be sure of that, because it’s not being reported anywhere. Just the result for everybody to lay judgement on.

I see the same in the workplace, in families, on-line. We are not taking the time to sit in conversation. In my training as an ontological coach, we were told conversation is a dance. How much conversation is not a dance but a toe-to-toe fist-fight? The closest it gets to a dance is the gang fight in West Side Story.

I’m confident in saying we’ve forgotten how to listen, but I also think there is a big time factor in there. We don’t leave ourselves time to ask questions, to sit quietly and think, to consider what we’ve heard, or to consider our reaction to it and what that may teach us about ourselves.

That’s the conversation I crave. That’s what I hope you and I can engage with over the coming weeks.

I’ve written enough. Time for me to listen.

Best regards, David

Hi David,

I am also craving conversations, having come to the same set of conclusions as a mid-late-30s year old.

There’s little room for nuance, and so often cries for nuance are made in bad faith. One of the most difficult things about online conversation and media narratives is that they’re so often, fundamentally dishonest. The questions being asked are about framing the debate, not curiosity. Introducing complexity is genuinely seized upon by bad actors to support ideas that are not at all a part of the goal of the initial speaker.

You can’t dance with someone who walks on the floor with the purpose of making you look bad. There has to be some agreement on the basics, and so often these days our dance partners aren’t even listening to the same music we are.

I don’t think individuals have forgotten how to listen. I think this is why in person conversation and face to face interactions are so different from online interactions, especially synchronous or near synchronous, short form, broadcasted “conversations”. ¹ One of the reasons I like podcasts so much is that the human voice can generate a level of empathy and compassion for each other that is missing during online sniping. Folks I feel are abhorrent with views that cause my blood to boil become possible to hear from when they are speaking in their own voice in the room with people who disagree. There’s something about having to face other people impacted by your own argument that softens, expands, and explains to a different degree than the online world or even the written word that’s not built in conversation.

Op/Eds are not conversations, they’re screeds.

I enjoy the long form, asynchronous conversations that Letters has provided. It’s a different type of communication that feels like it was common and now, not so much.

Thanks for jumping in this month.

Jason

I like subscriptions. It doesn’t bother me as a model for buying software or media. But I’m realizing that I’m hitting subscription fatigue as there are quite a number of subscriptions I know I’d like to have that I just can’t bring myself to commit to.

There’s more to listen to, more to read, more to watch, and more to support than ever. And even if I could technically afford it, the idea of adding yet another $50 a year feels… rough.

Maybe I need to just review all of my spending, subscription-based or not, and make some choices to feel better about things. But it’s getting to be a lot.

Maybe I’m just one of the 1000 true fans far less often than I imagined.

Hi Jason,

Maybe our therapists are comparing notes!

This right here: “I miss out on entire emotions, because I’ve already rationalized.” Yep. That’s a whole way of being. And the truth is that it has a purpose and, in some cases, it’s a strategy that serves us well. A tough part of growth is realizing when it’s time to let go of strategies that worked in the past but don’t help us move into the future we want.

I’ll take full responsibility for diving into the conversational deep end without pausing for preliminaries. It’s kind of fun to do things backwards though, and I like that our last week of this letter writing month is coming to a close with introductions and light stuff.

So here’s my own paragraph of introduction:

I’m 41 and pretty excited to turn 42 next month and know (or be?) the answer to life, the universe, and everything. I’m a single mom of four kids: three teenagers (13, 15, and 16) and one 12-year-old going on 27. So that’s where a lot of my time and attention goes, and it’s wonderful and difficult and all the things, all at once. We have two enormously spoiled fat cats and live in a cozy apartment in a St. Louis suburb. We moved back to St. Louis in the middle of 2020, after being in Puerto Rico for 5 years. It was an unplanned relocation in the midst of an unexpected divorce, and since then I’ve been rebuilding my life from zero. I really miss beach life (and speaking Spanish… I’m getting rusty) and my PR community, but it’s wonderful to be near family and lifelong friends and have their support and help. I’m a freelance writer and most of what I do is take tech-speak from the dev team and translate it into readable, hopefully interesting material for the people who want to use whatever the dev team is making. I’m innately curious about pretty much everything and being a writer is a free pass on asking questions and doing research. I love reading and usually have 3-4 books going, a mix of nonfiction and sci-fi/fantasy. I also love a good memoir. I spend a lot of time thinking about the why underneath things. I grew up in a religious home and was very involved with the church until my early 30s, when I left the faith. I didn’t want to, but that whole curiosity/asking questions/looking for the why underneath things… Well, sometimes it takes you places you don’t necessarily want to go. I’m happy to be where I am now, though. Life has 100% not turned out as I expected, but I feel so grateful for what I’ve gotten to experience and who I’m getting to become as a result of those experiences. I love food and adventures and dancing and a good whiskey and trees and solitude, not necessarily in that order.

It’s been an absolute pleasure exchanging letters with you over the last few weeks. I’m going to sign off with two book recommendations (and would love to have a couple from you as well). First: Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. This book is one I reread about every year. It colors the way I look at everything. Second: Systemantics (or The Systems Bible) by John Gall. As a structures/systems person, you might particularly like that one. Easy read, entertaining, pithy.

Here’s to good things ahead,

Annie

Hi Annie,

Yes, we’re moving backwards, but I reject that book recommendations are “light stuff”. I had to think about that one a bit, since I know that you’ve already tackled Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which will be my default recommendation for quite some time.

I decided to go with books that are not huge commitments and that I don’t feel had any recognition in my own circles. I think all four of these recommendations (well, it’s really three) are best read knowing very little:

• A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland
• The Wolf in the Whale by Jordanna Max Brodsky
• Sue Burke’s Semiosis and Interference.

Now that the serious business is attended to…

I fell into “product management” largely from a similar skillset– I was able to talk to the dev team about what everyone else wanted built and they were able to build the right thing, whereas in the past that was a struggle. In many ways, my job goes in reverse of what your role does.

I think something I didn’t quite understand when I was younger was just how much work we all have to keep putting into ourselves and how many new things we find when we keep looking for whys and let go of old strategies and pick up some new ones. It feels like the kind of thing you never really understand as a kid. Maybe it’s the time I grew up in, but so much of what society coded as a midlife crisis or a failure to launch or whatever reads so different as an adult. I don’t know where the norma came from that we are meant to be consistent rather than constantly adjusting and discovering and changing along the way. Rebuilding from zero with kids that rely on you sounds… daunting, even without the major relocation. But letting go of strategies and identities that no longer serve us to head out on our next adventure with food, dancing, good whiskey, trees, and a bit of solitude– that sounds like exactly where I’d like to go.

Well, except for the dancing.

Jason

Places I’ve been, defined as having stayed over night or having been there as a destination versus passing through or simply touching the ground.

United States

States

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Florida
• Georgia
• Hawaii
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Michigan
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington

Territories and DC

• Washington, D.C.
• Puerto Rico
• US Virgin Islands

Countries

• Aruba
• Bahamas
• Canada
• Cuba
• Germany
• Haiti
• Hong Kong
• Israel
• Italy
• Mexico
• Spain
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• USA

To say that I am disappointed in my level of international travel would be an understatement. I wait too long, think about it too much, worry about money far too much, and have stopped myself far too often. Somethign to resolve in the future.

Dear Jason,

Yesterday I attended an event for youth who are overcoming addiction. For eight weeks, they take lessons in classical guitar and djembe drums, make art, journal, and connect with adults who share their stories of overcoming addiction. Then they put on a concert and share what they’ve learned.

As part of the event, spoken word artist Tracy T-Spirit Stanton shared her story and two of her poems. Her entire performance was stellar, but one line is ringing in my head: “If you lead the body, the mind will follow.”

I put a lot of trust in my mind. I wasn’t the pretty one or the athletic one, but I was the smart one. And I held onto that identity as safety. Not too long ago my therapist said, “It’s really tough for you to be wrong about things, isn’t it?”

Um, yeah. I hate that.

One of the things that was hardest to accept about getting divorced was realizing that my own mind had been unreliable. I’d overlooked, dismissed, rationalized, and denied so many things. Clear signals. But I wasn’t ready to deal with what those signals meant, so my mind invented stories. As long as I didn’t ask too many questions, I could keep ignoring things.

But my body knew. Oh, did my body know. I had migraines regularly. I couldn’t sleep. And I developed an ovarian cyst that required major surgery. It was as if my body was taking all the emotions I wouldn’t let myself feel and truths I wouldn’t let myself face and putting them into this mass that became cancerous and could have killed me.

I had this very vivid dream a few days after surgery. I was still on pain meds, so I’m sure those were in play. In the dream, I was lost, running through the woods. It was like a maze, there was danger, and I was trying to find my way out to safety. This voice came from nowhere, right in my ear, saying: “Wake up. Wake up! WAKE UP!” I woke up startled, heart pounding, disoriented, but with this sense that something important had happened.

I still didn’t want to listen, though. So I went back to ’normal life’ and kept myself busy ignoring as much as I could. Then came quarantine. There was so much time and so little distraction. I couldn’t keep the storylines connected. One early early morning in September I was standing outside. Couldn’t sleep, as usual. Staring at the sky. Thinking, thinking, thinking. So much thinking, but so little sense. And I had this physical sensation like my brain was falling apart. I remember reaching my hands up as if I could slip them inside my skull and hold the pieces together.

That was it, finally. I’m still amazed that my body created a physical sensation to match what I was experiencing mentally and emotionally, and did so in such a powerful way that I couldn’t ignore it. I’m really grateful. And I pay a lot more attention to my body now. I also don’t get migraines anymore, so that’s cool.

I didn’t start this letter with the intention of going through my recent personal history, but it colors everything for me these days. My mind is still trying to sort things out all the time, analyze, categorize, find congruence. That’s part of who I am, and it’s not bad, but finding a balance is the work I’m doing now. Respecting and using my mind, yes. And equally respecting and trusting my body to tell me things more viscerally and immediately, and to listen when she does. The body says no, the body says yes, the body says wait, the body says be careful. Sometimes the body says run the fuck away! And sometimes the body says, “Hang out right here, because this is delightful.”

Annie

Hi Annie,

Are we going to the same therapist? I, too, find it tough to be wrong about things. I rationalize. My identity my whole life has been defined by my power to process fast and rationalize. I miss out on entire emotions, because I’ve already rationalized. I blow past signals and warning signs like the train in Back to the Future 3 heading for 88 mph or the gorge, which ever comes first.

This is why going back to playing volleyball has been so important for me. I need to spend literally hours each week playing a game that takes so much of my body and concentration that there is no “mind”. There is no thinking. There are no stories to tell, except maybe about how shitty it feels to be shanking a pass. I have to have time that I shut it down. That’s also why I have to read fiction. I need to fill my mind with a different mind.

Those are forms of rest. They quite the mind. But what I’m less good at is where you seem to have made it – listening to something else entirely. I haven’t figured out how to, in the quiet, let some other signals creep in and teach me things I need to understand about myself.

I have only started to slowly get better at this. Unfortunately, it was also due to excruciating gut pain– my appendix. After being sent home from what could only be described as completely negligent urgent care, I went into the ER a few hours later because I listened. Of course, my body was screaming, but even my doctor was a little surprised (in the best way) that I actually brought myself to the ER because things got worse. And I did so, in many ways, just in time.

The effect has been troubling. I’m far more nervous about aches and pains and changes to my body than I’ve ever been. My body has failed me in the past, but perhaps more importantly, I’ve learned not to trust my own sense of what is serious and what can be ignored. I have recalibrated, and I’m not quite sure yet if my new normal means “listening to my body” or “living with irrational anxieties in yet another area of my life”.

It sounds like you’re getting great feedback. Your body is telling you that the hard things you’ve had to do are the right ones.

We’re coming toward the end of our month, and I realized, partly my fault, we got heavy fast and never did some introductions and light stuff. So I thought I’d take this moment to pull us back a bit, reintroduce some folks to me, who may have already forgotten what I have going since the start of this project 5 months ago, and end us in a place that I hope feels like hanging onto because it’s delightful.

So here’s my run on paragraph about myself.

I’m in my mid 30s, no kids, living with my fiancée (who I’ve been with since 2010 and have been living with since 2011) and her mother. We have two dogs that are getting up there in age. I work for a tech company doing tech things for US K12 school districts after getting a master’s degree in urban education policy and working for school districts and state departments. We’ve been in Baltimore for 6.5 years now and lived in Providence for 10 years before that. I grew up on Long Island in New York. I read 30-40 science fiction/fantasy books a year (I prefer speculative fiction to SFF), play volleyball a few times a week and try to lift weights 3 times a week. I continue to struggle with being meaningfully overweight like I have been my whole life. We love to cook and eat. I am broadly interested in tax policy, urban development, and transit policy. I like to think about the world we’ve built around us how it changes our behavior and how we can build a better world, physically and politically. I’m a structures person, and I think a lot about them, whether when doing policy work or programming and data work. I tend to think of systems and structures as the geography and human behavior as water running over that terrain. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I watch a lot of cooking and educational YouTube videos. I like a great coffee and just about any Diet Coke (no, Pepsi is not ok, but I’ll suffer through it). We love to travel, having recently spent a few months in Mexico City. Elsa, my partner, was born in Mexico and is half-Mexican, half-Haitian, and trilingual. I travel a lot for work and I travel a lot for fun and I’m absolutely terrible about taking vacation.

The last few years, at least partially triggered or accelerated by the pandemic, have led to a lot of changes in my life and what I’m doing and who I feel like I am. But I have to admit, I feel like there’s a lot more coming, any moment now.

Thinking, and thinking, and thinking, and thinking,

Jason

Meta note: This one came in a bit late– I’m publishing in the order that I receive.

Hi Jason,

Forgive my tardiness and since it’s the second time in a month that I have had to say this, I have realized this is something I have to work on. That is, If I commit myself to a voluntary task, it shouldn’t be considered secondary to my other live obligations especially if it involves someone else. Talking about space, one of my favorite aspects of architecture is in fact, the spaces between the built environment and the world around it. In Indian mythology, a king received a boon that he couldn’t be killed indoors or outdoors and as we can expect, the king soon become a tyrant and one of the gods had to reincarnate himself to kill him on the threshold of the house.

Morbidity aside, I found that loophole interesting since it begs the question at what point does indoors become outdoors. Most architecture makes it quite distinct so the space that blurs the boundaries always fascinates me. Air-conditioning in America often makes such a design impossible but in South India especially in traditional homes, a central courtyard around which a house is built is very common and it works much better than air conditioning in a much warmer climate. Here is an example (there are plenty of examples in the “more like this” under the image). I bet this is very similar to homes in Mexico which is one of the reasons I am hoping to do an extended trip down there like you did. A close second is a public square. It can range from the grand St. Marks’ in Venice to a small plaza outside a movie theater adjoining a Starbucks and an Atlanta Bread Company in Dunwoody, GA where my friends and I hung out all the time.

Moving on to the other topic you raised about our ability to solve problems, my experience of spending nearly half of my life in India actually makes me more hopeful about America. A few months ago, my brother and I were talking about life in India in context of my dad living there after my mom passed away. He’s not exactly a fan of the West and would like to move back whereas me on the other hand, can never think of that possibility but both of us could agree that a civic sense is something that India lacked. I can elaborate that it’s largely a lack of trust in public institutions. The oppressed classes feel it more strongly and that has led to a sense of quiet resentment among the general Indian people which at times erupts in horrific inter-religion or inter-caste riots (literally). Living in America makes me feel more hopeful and even though latest events against democracy, it’s still a country rooted in strong institutional trust, a high sense of civic sense, and participatory democracy. People, in fact, give a shit.

But of course, as you say, in the sense of tragedy of commons, it hasn’t quite worked off late to tackle the large problems that society faces like climate change, healthcare, or even gun control. But I find the root causes are in the amplification of a small minority of “shitposters” even the good-meaning ones who often trivialize talking about solutions. I sometimes come across as argumentative and am expected to “take a chill pill” but that’s mostly because people don’t want to feel uncomfortable and be questioned. And if their beliefs are questioned, they often retreat into a shell of not airing their opinions instead of being open to change. I would say, forget change but even if the historically dominant classes could muster up empathy and recognizing why others are angry, we can make progress.

Anyway, I think between the two of us, we are preaching to the choir but thanks to your experiment of making these letters public, hopefully others can read and ponder without assuming that they are being called on. Thanks once again for doing this and save for my tardiness, I hope this exchange has been meaningful to you. I certainly have learned a lot.

Pratik Mhatré

Hi Pratik,

Elsa and I often joke about how much we love a courtyard. It’s a shame that America spread out with single family homes, but made them all boxes designed like a fortress to the outdoors. All of our knowledge of passive heating and cooling (and siting) left completely by the way side for efficiency. I love the city, and I think most of our homes should be in cities, and the American suburban form seems like all of the efficiency in building with none of the efficiency of living in a city. Cities manage to be beautiful and efficient, but our single family home seem to have chosen, at best, efficiency without beauty— neither form, nor function.

I do love the old courtyards when you can find them in Mexico, whether in older homes now subdivide or incorporated into multi-family apartment structures. The airflow and light alone seem worth it, but so is the blending of indoor and outdoor. A lot of Mexico City is clearly designed for year round comfortable weather, and quite often the indoor-outdoor distinction is more of a veil than a wall.

I find your take on our ability to solve problems at least somewhat comforting. I think it’s hard for Americans to forget about some of the “easy” stuff, that even when it doesn’t work great, is universally expected to work here. I’m thinking the postal service, water and sewage treatment, waste management, and electricity. Even places like schools and libraries, for all that we’re experiencing what feels like an unprecedented erosion in support, are still understood to be present and function well. I do think we give a shit, and most of us expect all of these things to function. We just can’t seem to agree about the why.

There’s a fine balance I think we all have to play when it comes to pushing folks on their beliefs. On the one hand, silently letting small things go by create the underlying conditions for changing what are acceptable beliefs. When someone posts about how they needed to vote via provisional ballot (that was accepted and counted) because of some small issue at a polling place and how that causes erosion of trust in the voting system, how do I respond? On the one hand, in a rational space where we have shared understandings and beliefs, I can have an intellectual conversation about how small inconveniences and errors can cause people to question the efficacy of a bureaucracy. On the other hand, that’s not what this person is saying. And even if that’s what someone is literally saying, that’s not what our current conditions cause others to hear. How important is it to be the voice to say, “Hold on a second, this is very normal, there’s a process, you did vote, your vote was counted, this is everything working in the careful, cautious, correct way that we want. This isn’t a moment to lose trust, this is a moment to understand how these systems function exactly the way you’d want to build trust?” No one likes having to be that person every time. And yet. And yet. And yet.

Where I grew up, casual racism is rampant, and despite having long had large populations of immigrants, mostly from groups that were shit on just like the current wave of immigrants until 70ish years ago (primarily Irish, Italian, and Jewish), anti-immigrant sentiment is rampant. The current, disgusting incarnation of the GOP is rampant. When I go home to my parents, or when I see comments from people I grew up with, I am assaulted with casual opinions that are all just opening a small door to the truly terrible thoughts. The casual prejudice, which we spent so much time in school discussing as one of societies great ills, is everywhere. I can’t help but to challenge it often.

But there is a point at which I can no longer be heard if that is all that I am. There is only so much labor and work I can put into that fight without burning myself out and burning out what tenuous relational currency I had to be heard in the first place. It’s tough to draw the line. I know that for folks like that to truly change their minds, for them to change, they’ll need to be questioned, over and over again by people they trust for decades so that they start to think, “Maybe something is not quite right here.” You have to chip away at beliefs, making the fissures and cracks for self-doubt to creep in.

Keep chipping away.

Jason

Hi again Jason,

I love that Ira Glass quote. It brought to mind another, much less eloquent quote which I repeat to myself and my kids often: “Sucking at something is the first step at being sorta good at it.” Pretty sure that’s Jake from Adventure Time bringing the wisdom as usual. Along those same lines, and echoing your thoughts on quitting, is the idea that maybe sucking at something isn’t a sign you need to get better at it. Maybe you just suck at this thing, whatever it is, and that’s okay. Some things, for example, I’d like to quit but can’t: receiving what seems like 100 school emails a week, handling car maintenance, doing taxes. That sort of thing. A while back I decided there are some things in life that don’t deserve or need my level best, and I could be okay with being mediocre at those things.

It’s been freeing. It forced me to make a distinction between what I care enough about to try to master, and what I’m dabbling in without any need for mastery, and what is a necessity to be completed.

In terms of parenting, I realized that I spend a lot of effort working on keeping things clean and organized, making sure we have necessities, cooking meals, etc. I also realized that, while all that’s wonderful, it’s not as important to me as laughing with my kids, or being around when they want to talk, or having the energy to help them sort through drama or difficulties. Sometimes, having the energy and good grace to listen to middle school drama or get outside and throw a baseball means I’m not doing laundry or cooking dinner. Of course, it’s always been okay to make those kind of trade-offs, but for me it took some effort to get clear on why that is okay. It’s okay because everything could matter, but not everything does matter. It’s okay because what steals time, and energy, and opportunity most of the time isn’t an emergency. It’s just the stuff in that mediocre middle. The scope creep of life is something I have to actively manage.

Turns out managing it is mostly about managing my own curiosity and being realistic about my actual capacity.

The next line of that Wordsworth poem is “getting and spending / we lay waste our powers” and it’s a line that rings in my head so often. The frictionless life, as you mentioned, is maybe not the best life. We need friction to give us pause, to force us to take a breath, to make a choice. This or that. What gets my attention? There will always be more options than time, and which option is right for me, right now, is deeply personal. One way I make those choices is by thinking about how I can optimize for delight. What delights me? Delight is a clear-cut emotion for me, which is helpful. If I’m delighted, I know it. “Should” has no place in delight. There’s no halfway with delighted. It’s on or off. So that’s easy to identify, and I don’t need to analyze the Why of delight, only the How: How do I make more time, space, and energy for This Delightful Thing?

Annie

Hi Annie,

Jake is a wise friend.

…everything could matter, but not everything does matter.

This captures it all, doesn’t it. It’s funny how much we live with other people’s expectations about things that matter. Because everything could matter, other people, our parents, our friends, society, whatever, all get to yell at us about the things that matter to them. It’s not just that everything could matter, it’s that everything does matter to someone, and those people are telling us all the time. Realizing that not all of those things also need to matter to me has been a huge project of my adult life. That’s probably not what people see, but it is a guilt I carried, and still carry.

Optimizing for delight is a great heuristic. I spent time in 2022 trying to have fun, in many ways in search of the same thing. One of the surprising things about fun is how much it is about getting completely out of my head and fully invested into a moment. There’s no “mind” in my fun. Even when I’m reading a book that’s causing me to laugh or cry, it’s not my mind analyzing an experience or thinking about it. It is my body being taken completely into another world and experience its heartbreaks and joys.

I have to admit, so far, 2023 hasn’t been that much fun. I’ve let a lot of things stress me that should, and a lot of things stress me that probably shouldn’t. I’m doing less well at maintaining routine and a lot less well at making time and space for the things that provide delight. I’ve spent a lot of time this year “giving myself a pass”, but I’ve got to find the motivation soon to stop that– it’s become and excuse to not do the things that I know make me happy and are good for me.

This was a good reminder for me. I have some work travel coming up, then a short period of time before some fun travel. I’m going to work on reclaiming some time for delight in my routine.

Jason