A solid case against localism for transit. The parallels to education are strong.

The ideal role for elected leaders is to set overall funding levels and then just let the professionals work. If the professionals are failing, it’s fine to replace them with other professionals, chosen based on past successes in the same field…it’s critical to understand that localism subtracts from civilian democratic control of the state, through its elevation of petty voices. And if subdividing territory into local fiefs doesn’t work, the alternative is to subdivide it thematically and let subject-matter experts handle planning.

This month I’ll be corresponding with @annie

Hi Jason,

First - apologies for the past-due letter. Good intensions and best-laid plans and busy weekends. At any rate, here we are now.

My best friend Jennifer and I used to exchange letters over the times we lived in separate places. She moved to Kentucky, then I moved to Puerto Rico, and now we’re both back in St. Louis. We meet for walks and coffee and in-person conversation now, which is its own delight. But there’s something special about receiving a written letter, whether digital inbox or physical mailbox, and words you can absorb at your own pace.

Moving at my own pace is something I’m learning how to do, and slowly, and it’s clumsy. This stage of learning feels less like learning and more like an exercise in whacking my head against the metaphorical wall. But I’ve been in this particular stage enough times to recognize it now. I call it the slog, which I’m fairly sure is not a real word. The SLOG, that mid-point when the excitement of newness and beginning has worn off and you’re not yet making enough headway to trust your progress. This is often the point when - particularly with creative endeavors - I think it’s a good idea to start over. All over. Something must be wrong with the plan. Otherwise, I’d be making visible progress, moving steadily forward, and feeling confident. Right?

What silly expectations I have for myself. Writing them down or saying them out loud, or pausing in any other way and looking, really looking, at what I am expecting of myself brings me up short. All too often it’s not reasoned or reasonable, not even human. I’m expecting something more (perfection?) and something less (emotional neutrality?) than human. But here I am, as I have always been, quite human. 100%, last check.

And that’s the point I am revisiting, the lesson or skill I am learning, one step through the slot at a time. To let myself be fully human and move at my own wide and varied and slow and stumbling pace, to accept the missteps and flailing as part of the dance. Failing isn’t an aberration; it’s a necessary part of any process that involves growth. Knowing this doesn’t always make me feel better, but why do I need to feel good about things all the time? I don’t, as it turns out. The slog does not require me to go forth with shouts of joy. It only requires that I keep going. Doable. (And, also, it’s okay to stop and rest a bit, too.) There’s trust needed to slow down. To move carefully. To breathe deep, to rest, to get there when I get there. Trust in myself. Trust is at the heart of so much of this, maybe all of it. Do I trust myself to focus on what matters, to choose what’s important, to notice, to not miss things, to be okay? The answer I’m finding isn’t a simple yes. It’s more like: I might not it right. I might very well miss things, even important things. And I will be okay.

I often feel a sense of urgency over nothing and everything. Perhaps that’s just a feature of life in the 21st century. The ‘world is too much with us.’ We know too much and don’t know how to handle it. It’s also a residual feature of some of my own experiences in the last few years. It’s kind of an arrogant feeling, as if the well-being of the world or some portion of it depends on me. I’m all for taking responsibility, but that’s a stretch. What if I let my hands be as small as they are? What if I let my reach be short, extending only as far as my arms can actually reach? What if I expected no more of myself than to wake up each morning and do the small tasks that are mine? The world doesn’t end - or it does! - but either way, it’s always been a bigger ball than I can juggle. There’s peace in accepting my own limitations.

I’ve not asked about you, only talked through my own meandering thoughts, but I’m curious, and grateful to be part of this experiment.

Take care, Annie

Hi Annie,

I am reminded of this Ira Glass quote:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

This, of course, applies to skills as well, where we often reach a stage where it becomes clear what’s possible, but our bodies or minds cannot achieve it yet. Yet is such a powerful, difficult word. There’s so much between now and yet, and that chasm is often left uncrossed.

I think the thing I’ve held onto with similar journeys lately is that it’s ok for yet to become later or never. Sometimes between the start and the yet I realize something isn’t that important to me or maybe I no longer want it at all. I can be caught up in needing to finish what I started– it was years before I was willing to put down a book I started even if it was terrible– but I’ve started to feel like I don’t have time to waste on things that aren’t moving me. There are times we have no choice but to go slow, to slog, to cross the chasm to that future point where we can do the thing. It’s good to practice taking things to completion so that when you have to dig down into yourself and push through you still believe it’s possible. “I have done this before. This is how it goes. We survive this. We will again.” But it’s also ok to say, “Maybe if it’s this hard, maybe the right answer is not now.”

I have been bobbing up and down through cycles of burnout since I’ve been working at the same start up for 9 years. There are periods filled with not trusting myself, feeling like I need to start over, and then energy, growth, pride, and reward. The exhaustion-elation rollercoaster is to be endured, built into the risk-reward of something this challenging. It helps to have a partner I can trust and who can trust me back. In the best times, we’re at different phases on the cycle and can support one another. In bad times, we’re synchronized, or some challenge erodes and weakens that trust and then things get dark for a bit.

I think about how “the world is too much with us” all the time. My work, building operational and administrative software, is all about making processes more efficient and effective but also fast. So much of what I touch would have taken an eternity, relatively speaking, 30 or 40 years ago. It was slower and harder 20 years ago too. The easier part feels good, the always on always, immediate part of faster I sometimes question. Our expectations for responsiveness and information and change keep getting faster, and while on the micro level I have the same demands, I wonder if on a macro level that just… breaks things.

A lot of what is changing all around us is about removing friction. We’re so used to friction being a bad thing that we’ve forgotten that friction has been a signal, a control, a limiting factor. Friction is a guard against impulsivity. The right guard? The best guard? The intended guard? Perhaps not. But remove it, and our impulses win just a little more often, just as our frustration also abates just a little bit.

I’m going to spend sometime this week, inspired by this letter, to think about what I want to rededicate to, knowing I’m in the slog, and what I want to let go of, listening to the friction and frustration and lack as a signal.

Jason

Sometimes you have something that somebody else needs more than you do, and you can afford to spare it, and the easiest thing in the world is just to give it to them. In that moment, to have what you can give them is, itself, a gift, a thing to be thankful for. In my lifetime this society has seemed ever more fanatically opposed to that possibility, and ever more committed to the idea that of all the things a vulnerable person might legitimately need, help—simple material help—is never one of them.

– Albert Burneko, Jordan Neely Just Needed Some Help

Cruelty becomes a virtue in a world that emphasizes individualism over empathy.

Brown’s Introduction to CS class is now in Python and does quite a bit of data analysis, and I have to admit, as good as Intro to Object Oriented Programming was (clearly, as it was my only formal CS class), I definitely would have been a concentrator if this were my introductory course.

I have already been deeply nerd-sniped reading just a few parts of A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing. And given where I ended up as a fake developer, I can’t help but agree with, admire, and salivate over this vision for introductory computer science.

I just missed it all by being there 2005-2009 (2010 if you include my master’s).

Hi Jason,

You were really lucky to have benefited from a liberal arts education. If I had to do my education all over again, that’s exactly what I would do. Although there are a few options to pursue the less-trodden upon path in India, the “smarter” i.e., the kids who excel in school, are expected to pursue a STEM degree. I rebelled a bit and instead chose architecture which my parents justified in their head because it was a scientific art degree and also, the fact that I was the 21st living potential architect in my extended family. So hardly a rebellion. But at least that education exposed me to history, elements of design, society & culture, vernacular context, etc something I would’ve have learned in an Indian engineering college.

But even then I think I made a mistake of choosing a college based on the potential of the faculty rather than the potential of my peers. I should have understood better the importance of how peer norms and peer expectations drive your motivation and expose you to things that you didn’t even know that you didn’t know (sorry, Rumsfeld). But I think I managed to make amends when deciding to pursue my graduate education in the U.S. I choose Public Administration & Public Policy. You can imagine the puzzled looks on the faces of my Indian acquaintances until I realized I could stop trying to explain by simply saying, “With this degree, I may work at the World Bank or the United Nations”. This is partly true only because no one had any idea what exactly those two organizations do in their day-to-day functioning.

This brings me to your question of “what are some of the foundational ideas that guide your thinking on education”. If I had to put it in one term, I would say, critical thinking. The ability to understand the question before you even try to come up with a solution and how constraints in our thinking (as Simon called it, bounded rationality) affect what we do and what we decide to do. One of the best classes I took in grad school was Logic in Public Policy and believe it or not, it was one of my first formal courses in philosophy and how it affects our decision-making especially in the world of policies. Discovering the various fallacies and argument styles may have caused some of my friends to hate me when I called on their BS but it also let me read everything with fresh eyes. The work of John Rawls’ and his Theory of Justice (Fair and Just) has informed my thinking ever since and has helped tremendously in understanding issues of equity that often my STEM friends have trouble wrapping their heads around.

I totally relate with the uncertainty that you experience when you read or learn more but I’ve always found much truth in Will Durant’s quote - “education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance”. And THAT is exactly what separates us. Admitting that we do not know everything and are also uncertain about the things we know is I think, the essence of education. That feeling, I believe, keeps us learning for a lifetime and there’s no such thing as “I have completed my education”. Some consider this snobby but strangely, it keeps me humble knowing that there is much to learn out there. We can only be more certain but never 100% certain so I’m often bemused by people who are always absolutely certain. and don’t experience self-doubt. Perhaps working at a university where this belief is ground into you may have helped (nurture v nature) but after many years of reflection, I’m at peace with how this feels.

I may have been all over the place in this letter but I wanted to write back before it got too late as we wind down the month.

Cheers, Pratik

Hi Pratik,

Isn’t it amazing how that Rumsfeld quote is so dang useful from such a horrible man? I swear, it comes up constantly in my life.

The Veil of Ignorance remains a powerful way to see the world for me, and I’m sure even more so for you having experienced life in India and the US. I have found it particular powerful as someone privileged to be born here with typical American blindness that comes with it to consider this as part of my own conception of justice.

The unknowable used to haunt more more. I do agree, of course, with the “progressive discovery of our own ignorance” and I have no problem with the academic standby of “it depends” that gets so skewered. Lately though, I’ve been more terrified by the “known”. It feels like all around us we face challenges that are very much known with solutions that are very much known and a social-political-cultural context that cannot act in the collective interest.

I’m curious given your varied experiences with public policy and experience in a large, growing country outside of the west with a very different state apparatus– where do you lie on our ability to solve problems? This is an odd way to phrase it, but it’s a big question. What I mean, for example, is where do your impulses go on participatory, small “d” democracy, local governance, etc versus centralization, technocracy, professionalization, etc. It feels like this is a core tension in US education, the localist of local control democracy in many cases, but it’s also a core tension facing us with climate change, global war, tackling poverty, healthcare, and more. I think a lot about how we’ve managed to build a system that seems almost uniquely poorly suited to address the problems of the day, while understanding the history and context and successes that led us here.

I’d also like to know about a space you love. As someone who studied architecture, what is a home, a building, a public square, any where that grabs you? What makes it feel special?

Jason

Nilay Patel’s Welcome to hell, Elon is already a classic. Perhaps the most cited line is,

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation….

But I think most people still think of moderation as being about the “bad stuff”. Nilay doesn’t fall into this trap,

They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff.

But I think “incentivize the good stuff” doesn’t quite pull out the full breadth of content moderation.

In a way, content moderation is about creating a community people want to be a part of. And that’s all well and good, but a critical part of accomplishing this goal is helping people find a community people want to be a part of. Social networks are not one community, they are a multiplicity of overlapping communities.

What I’m getting at here, of course, is that a key part of content moderation is content discovery. All the work to make sure good stuff is flourishing on your platform doesn’t help if users can’t find it.

What makes algorithmic timelines, searching, tagging, reposting, likes, quote-posting, and more critical is that these are the tools of content moderation to make it easier to find and participate in communities I want to be a part of. Bootstrapping community is incredibly difficult, and there’s a reason why Facebook API access got shut off real fast as people bootstrapped their networks across other social web services and why data portability is a powerful anti-trust tool.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of folks behind tools like Mastodon (and even Micro.blog) are terrified of providing tools that let individuals bootstrap a community. Discovery is weak across most of these platforms, at least partially because discovery has the potential to become a vector for abuse. But discovery is as critical a part of content moderation as any other tool. And just like users need to be able to report abuse and have tools for blocking and muting, users need tools to facilitate discovery that are up to the task.

I’m all for more, smaller, fractured communities on the web. I just hope I can find the ones that would welcome me and that I would welcome being a member of.

Hi Jason,

I must apologize for my tardiness as my second letter is being written almost two weeks after my first one. A new job can definitely lay waste to your carefully laid personal plans. More on that in a bit. Currently, I’m writing this from New Orleans where I’m visiting for a conference.

I have followed your Mexico trip (stay?) posts and can imagine it was a wonderful experience. The best way to experience a new place is to immerse yourself in it and make it part of your daily life even if it’s for a short while. I think even the locals then start accepting your presence and opening up unlike a tourist who is just passing by.

Professionally speaking, I stumbled into education and definitely hadn’t planned on working in it. I come from a family of teachers though and my now-late mom thought it even further by having her own preschool that literally started in our living room and soon expanded to three different locations with 450 kids at its height. Being around teachers and seeing the early childhood education firsthand, for a while after my Masters, I even contemplated moving back to India and “expanding” her school to a full primary and secondary institution with an emphasis on “how to learn” rather than “what you should learn”. But setting up an educational business in India is not easy considering the bureaucratic hurdles, the greasing of palms (yup), and raising capital just to buy land.

Anyhoo, I guess those thoughts never left me as I found using my graduate degree in working in education research. Initially, on the data side and then working in the policy and academic research. I share your concern about deteriorating conditions surrounding education but I wouldn’t call it a crisis of confidence as I still feel that education is your best chance at improving your life outcomes, regardless of the personal anecdotes that people often cite against it. However, I do believe that how you learn TO learn is pivotal instead of just going through the motions of focusing on test scores and assessments. While I was raised in a very STEM-or-nothing environment, I have come to appreciate the long-term benefits of a liberal arts education. The role of critical thinking and reasoning skills has never been more important, I believe, in differentiating between what kind of education or degree you received and from where.

I would love to expand more on these thoughts in our letters. Now I regret not saving the blog posts I had written nearly 20 years ago during the time I was thinking of moving back to India to set up that school.

Pratik

Hi Pratik,

I was the beneficiary of a liberal arts education, which took me from a chemistry degree (and pretty close to a Judaic Studies degree) to a master’s in urban education policy. I still think that learning how to learn was one of the most important skills I developed in college. And by attending a school with an Open Curriculum, I think I also learned how to pull together connections across fields and domains in a pretty unique way. While serving as a student representative on a college committee, we often discussed that the “inter-curricular”– the connections students made between the courses they took– was actually often the most important.

While I believe in all that, and I see entirely how it improved my own life, I am also uncertain how much of that view is an elite view, from an elite, competitive school, where I was a strong fit for their philosophy. I find it difficult to generalize from my experiences, which tends to push me much stronger toward the program evaluation/econometric side of education research. I just don’t trust myself, but I’m reasonably willing to trust (primarily, but not solely) quantitative research (with all of its flaws). I find that in the data, I can see more clearly the lines of someone’s argument, the strength of their case, and the obvious weaknesses. Maybe some of my nihilism is feeling like studying social systems has only generated certainty in my uncertainty.

I miss being connected to a university. I never did that final degree– it just always made absolutely no financial sense and felt too risky to do for the love of it– but for a long time I was still connected to academia. I stayed and worked in the same state, in the same city as my university, roughly a mile and a half away, when I went to work for the state department. I came back and worked at an education research center that was apart of my university through a multi-year fellowship after that first state department job. For a long time, I felt like I was doing the work that people with PhDs did who didn’t get a coveted tenure track offer. But those jobs were only the first 5 or so years of my career. For the last 9, I’ve worked with school districts but at a technology startup. And while it’s a wonderful fit, incredibly rewarding, and, I think, more impactful than just about anything I did prior, I miss having that connection to the academic world.

I am the classic dweeb that could have circled back around and gone through my undergraduate years 10 times with 10 completely different course of study and still I’d ask for an 11th shot.

I’m curious what are some of the foundational ideas that guide your thinking on education. Are there books/texts/scholars/philosophies that have shaped your future thinking? For myself, I constantly come back to a few things. I think about the long conversations we had in the one pedagogy course I took about E.D. Hirsch and Ted Sizer– who had it right and are their ideas even in opposition? I think a lot about the famous Harvard lecture course, Justice, which was released on iTunes U in… maybe 2007? 2008? I’m pretty sure I listened to it on my original iPod Nano walking around Brown’s campus. There was an education policy and history class I took that marched through the major movements in America, from Horace Mann to today, but primarily focused on the major Supreme Court cases that have shaped education in the US. I think a lot about Paul Manna’s books on federalism in Education as well. Oh and Daniel Koretz on assessments.

Jason

Most of the time I would say that my number one travel tip is to have two of everything¹ so that one set is packed at all times.

But honestly, the best tip is that everywhere has convenience stores. Underwear is cheap and can be hand washed.

Pack what cannot be replaced first; don’t stress about the rest.

I have been thinking a lot about the Tennessee legislature, and the thing I keep circling back to is this post by Kevin Drum on Calvinball.

There are lots of different rules that are fine in theory, but there’s no excuse for changing them just because the opposing party wins an election. That’s what we’re complaining about.

It feels to me like the left is constantly being told they’re ridiculous when trying to hold anyone accountable to rules, standards, or even consistency in ideology, then stuck defending themselves against the same attacks. Sometimes there really is a double standard, and the left is stuck being held accountable for the things they believe in by a right that doesn’t actually believe the same things and won’t hold themselves to that standard. But mostly it’s just Calvinball, where the only thing that determines the rules of the game is who they benefit here, today.

It’s a one-way high speed rail train to the destruction of legitimacy. It’s among the scariest structural failings of our whole system of government.

(Meta Note: yeah these went out of order, but I answered as they came in, and was glad to do so. So the title is correct for the month this applies to, and the publish date is correct to the date I responded)

Hi Jason!

It’s our last week of letters and I had actually written one earlier in the week after yet another untenable situation broke in the news. But it was filled with rage, laced with fear and madness and I didn’t want to end our time together like that.

So instead, at this late hour, I will tell you a brief story about a teacher I had in High School and the promise of perseverance.

This New Jersey English teacher that I had for both 10th and 12th grades was a polarizing figure amongst the student body when I was in school. You either loved her or hated her. I loved her. She expected only the best out of her students. Not HER best, but YOUR best. She didn’t care for the usual disruptive classroom shenanigans but she would easily be a co-conspirator of shenanigans when the time was right. She taught you everything about words, sentence structure, etymology and “hacks” on how to figure out what a word meant. She exposed us to literature and all the worlds contained within.

She even started a creative writing society at school and a literary publication/newspaper (both of which I participated in during my time there in the late 90s).

I knew then that she was a writer, getting short stories and poetry published but never a novel.

However, last night I attended a book launch party at a hotel just north of Baltimore. Available to the world as of yesterday, this party was for her first published novel. It’s the first in a series of, as she says, “at least five.” Published a “mere” 23 years after I graduated… likely 40+ years since she began writing…

It was a pleasure to see her again after all these years and my honor to ring in the dawn of a new era with her - the era of Ef Deal, published novelist. A lovely reminder that it’s never too late for new things to happen, never too late to break through, and never too late to do the things that you love to do, that fill you with joy and magic.

I am new to the steampunk genre and I thoroughly enjoyed her book. I can’t wait to hop into the next adventures with these characters. Set in 1840s France, it’s a quick read and a rousing good time laced with horror, mechanical imaginings, intrigue and a wee bit of romance. If it’s up your alley, I’d love to hear what you think of it when it makes your “read” pile.

Best,

~Julie

Hi Julie,

I’m glad to end on a more uplifting note. It’s made me think of one of my own English teachers, Ms. Biondo, who I had in 9th and 11th grade. It was her first and then third year of teaching. I don’t think she had quite gotten the hang of it all yet, and I know I didn’t make things easy at all. But I also remember getting just tiny glimpses into who she was, and I feel pretty strongly that as a teenager I missed a lot that I would understand today. It’s strange to think about, but it’s quite possible we would be friends as adults. One of my only regrets from giving up Facebook years ago was that it was a great way to connect with some of my old teachers.

My best teachers, the ones I gained the most from at least, were always controversial. I wonder if you have to be polarizing to be great, at least for some kids, because what each of us needs from a teacher is so different.

Steampunk is funny as a genre. Sometimes it feels like a genre, in that the mechanical is key to the mechanics. Sometimes it’s more of a setting. But I like horror and intrigue and romance and “rousing good times” so it’ll for sure go on my list, even if I am not the biggest fans of puns.

Given all the upheaval and changes and self-discovery that you’re currently in, I can’t help but to wonder what you’ll be doing in 20 years that will have been a 40 year project for you. I wonder what your book launch party will end up being and where things land.

I’ll be looking out for whatever it is.

I wonder the same for myself– being so engrossed in my current job, I sometimes fantasize about when this all ends what will I rediscover or suddenly realize has been sitting in the on deck circle all this time that I can’t wait to do? I can’t see it or feel it right now, but I hope it’s out there.

Jason

Hi Jason,

It’s April, and it’s time for me to write you a letter. I read about your experiment and immediately thought it was a great idea. But would I be able to keep up? I wasn’t sure. I signed up nevertheless and received your reply, “You got April.” At least I didn’t have to think about it for a few months. I followed your experiment with others, and it was going better than I envisioned it, and I’m glad I opted in. I was a bit apprehensive after seeing the quality of the conversations, though, as I mentioned on Micro.blog a few weeks ago.

I have always enjoyed writing. My earliest memories of journal writing were in 1988 when I was 11 years old. I remember that distinctly because I received this free journal as a gift for my annual subscription to Target, a kid’s magazine in India. It asked me to describe myself, my best strengths, weaknesses, etc.. I remember asking my mother about what she thought my best strength was because, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of any that was worth writing down in the About Me section of a journal. She suggested I write about how good I am at being focused when reading, so that’s what I did. Over the next year, I wrote a couple of lines in the lines provided for each day. Often I had more to say than the space provided, so I wrote mostly to capture the highlights of my day. It was nothing exciting and mostly about school or friends. I recall writing about some world events, too; something about a Palestine state formed, which was surprising now that I write about it since it still doesn’t exist as an independent state. So I looked it up as I wrote this and learned that it was indeed declared as a state on November 15, 1988, by the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Anyway, back to my journal, and now that I think of it, thanks to my writing, some of my memories from my childhood are from that year. Maybe because I wrote them down, eventually, as I came to the end of the year, I ran out of space and stopped writing in a journal. I would write off and on again in a notebook, but never as consistently as I did that year. Eventually, school got busier, and if you know anything about the Indian education system, they make you write needless things until you begin to hate the act of writing itself. So I could imagine myself getting any more writing done at the end of the day. My school essays were slightly better than my peers, so they got noticed by my teachers, and I was encouraged to enter into inter- and intra-school essay competitions. Nothing can kill the joy of writing more than making it a competition. But that’s how things are in India. With a billion+ people, you must constantly compete in every facet of your life. Yes, it was as tiring as it sounds.

As usual, I have rambled on without telling you more about my current life. I live in Austin with my wife and almost-12-year-old son. I work at the University of Texas at Austin and have worked here for the last ten years and am involved in academic research, although from the perspective of research operations. I’m not an administrative bureaucrat or one of those umpteen Vice Presidents of , but I have to deal with them daily so that the professors I work with don’t have to. If you ask me, I’m getting the best of both worlds, and I can enjoy my weekends without the fear of perishing because I have not published.

I’ll stop now lest you think I’m writing a month’s worth of letters on the first day. I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Pratik

Hi Pratik,

Recently I remarked on how I’ve written a lot less in DayOne since coming home to Baltimore from about 2.5 months spent in Mexico this winter. Even though it’s only been a little bit since I’ve been home, I’ve been having a similar sense that by not writing as often lately, I am forming less distinct memories. Of course, I am comparing a time of relative normalcy to a time that was quite distinct (living in Mexico City), but I absolutely believe that writing about our experiences solidify them. Much like we organize our thoughts and what we’ve learned in our sleep, I think writing about our experiences helps us to re-experience them as well as add a layer of metacognition that serves to solidify them.

I’ve worked in education in some form most of my professional life. I transitioned right from my undergraduate studies to a degree in urban education policy, and then worked at a state department of education, a large urban school district, a university research center, and for the last 9 years at a technology company that exclusively works with K-12 schools. Given your current role at a university, your almost-12-year-old, and experiences in India, I’m guessing you have a lot to say about how these systems do or don’t work.

I’ve been having a bit of a crisis of confidence around education lately. The political environment has been… less than encouraging. I’ve generally fallen on the wonkish-side that might snidely remark that one of the challenges with education is everyone has an opinion based on their own experiences with it. I prefer data, and so I’ve spent very little time investing in understanding my own educational experiences with an adult eye. I think this is a lot easier when you’re child-free and not re-experiencing education through that lens. But lately, I think in part because of the chaos of the politics around schooling and my own concern about the health of our K-12 system in the US, I’ve found myself drawn to re-examination what was so crucial about school, at each level and time, for me.

It’s not like I feel like I had the ideal educational experience or trajectory– far from it– but I want to understand those experiences and moments that were formative for me. How do we find, capture, and encourage what matters. In some ways, that’s been an increasing part of this project– what matters to me and the person I’m talking to right now? How can these letters be a space to think about at least a little bit about what matters this week?

Writing in your journal mattered, but those essay competitions didn’t. Or maybe they did, but in a completely different way. Hopefully writing these letters will matter, at least for a little bit for you in April the way they have for me this year.

Jason

My grandmother lived about a five minute drive from one of the better multiplex theaters in Nassau County. Whenever I stayed there, we went to the movies. It was our routine. I loved going to the movies.

Later, a much smaller theater opened up walking distance from my house, just in time for me to be old enough to head out on my own in the evenings. It wasn’t a great spot, and I still saw most movies elsewhere, but it was incredible to be able to walk a mile and see a movie.

One of the few treats in college was walking down College Hill to the mall, then head all the way up 6 floors to get to a huge movie theater at Providence Place. I had friends who liked the same movies I did, and I formed more memories there. Like that time we went to see Shoot ‘Em Up, without me knowing a thing about it, constantly looking over to my friends with a huge smile. Or that time I went to see the new Star Trek film with Fiona and found out it was one of the only movies she’d ever seen, that movies were just not a thing in her life.

Elsa’s mom likes the movies, and so do we. So we went a lot, especially when we first moved to Baltimore. Her dad would buy us stacks of tickets to AMC through fundraisers at Elsa’s younger brother’s school. Movies were “free”, or at least less expensive, and a good time.

But I think we might be done with the movies.

We’ve long had a “nice” home theater. The first thing Elsa insisted we upgrade when she moved in was my old 32" LCD to a TV that would “fit” the space between the bookshelves (at the time, a 50" tv). Now, we are fortunate enough to have a 65" OLED TV. I’ve always cared about sound, slowly upgrading to a quality setup with great speakers (Paradigm Monitor 7s in the front, with a Bowers and Wilkinson center channel, because the Paradigm sounded terrible to my ears, and two Paradigm Titans in the back, all bought second hand over time, with a nice SVS sub). Our home theater has been great for years.

Of course we didn’t go to the movies for a few years because of COVID-19, and we’ve gone back a few times post-vaccination. But this weekend, we didn’t go to the movies. We didn’t last weekend either. John Wick 4 is out, a movie I definitely want to see. The new Dungeons and Dragon movie is out too, and that’s also something that, because of good reviews, I’d normally want to see in a movie theater. Lights out, world turned off, and popcorn by the bucket, full attention on silly fun with big picture and big sound.

I just didn’t think to go. I don’t super feel like going. What would have almost been a default behavior before just, isn’t. The “event” movies I need to see are fewer and fewer. Most theaters have worse projection and sound than I have at home. With the habit broken, the magic has been too. I’ll see the second part of Dune in theaters. Star Wars will one day get me back in my seat again too. But not much else pulls me toward the movies today. Maybe I’m just done.

A new theater is opening up soon, walking distance from my house. Maybe I’ll take a walk to the movies. It’s a little sad to think that maybe, not.

They don’t really make Barber & Beauty Supply Shop Fixtures & Supplies buildings like they used to. I find myself thinking of how different our economy used to be, and how unsurprising this building ran into trouble in 1929.

Hi Jason,

Yesterday morning, I found myself in the middle of a maddening juxtaposition.

After years of again off again genealogical research, I’ve made great headway into identifying my paternal Great Grandfather who was out of the picture before my Grandfather was even 2 and was never spoken of again. It’s a knowledge gap I know my Dad would love to see filled.

During breaks in this difficult quest, I’ve gathered intel and filled in other information on other branches of my family tree. I’m finding facts that lead to imagined stories of soldiers (Civil War (Union army, I find myself happy to report), WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam) and stories of great passages to new lands where my ancestors knew no one, not even the language, in pursuit of a better life.

Everyone’s family tree has such stories - individuals sacrificing and working hard to better their future, the future of their kids, the future of those who may come after. You and I represent thousands of people who did what they did and through time, their perseverance and dreams came together to make us possible.

And yet…

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their latest report in a long series of reports warning of the damage we are doing to the planet. More than that- the catastrophic harm we are doing to humanity itself. (Because, let’s face it - after humans have gone, Earth will be just fine again in time.)

I am not a student of history but I know there are plenty of times throughout the existence of humans where we both faced foes together toward success AND couldn’t get out of our own way, our own shortsightedness or selfishness which lead to our doom.

We stand on the brink- and have been for decades, if we’re honest- and not enough people who have the power to make these choices toward saving ourselves (or, really at this point just making the future a wee bit less awful) are doing enough to solve these problems.

And here’s the kicker- WE HAVE THE TOOLS. WE HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE. We know what needs doing. ACTION is the last piece left. This is what enrages me the most.

Just three generations separated from hard struggle, I have leisure time, technology beyond my ancestors wildest dreams, and the means to do more than just feed and house ourselves. And in three more generations beyond me (or less), due to simple lack of action and infuriating shortsightedness, my family’s story- all of humanity’s stories- could be lost to what will become once again the daily toil and basic struggle to survive, to exist, in uninhabitable conditions.

I carried this infuriating bucket of feelings around with me all day. Annoyed at the powerful for making choices along the way that harmed the future. Pissed at those in power now for being unable to agree, decide, and put plans to action. Heartbroken for the future my son, his peers, their children will face. And let’s be honest. We live in Virginia, not Africa or a tiny agricultural island nation - we’ll be “fine” for longer.

And then…

We watched Galaxy Quest after kiddo had gone to bed. And you’re right, it has absolutely no business being as good as it is. A beautiful parody clearly made with great love and pitch perfect in pretty much every way. It also seemed to be a salve to the dread that consumed most of my thoughts that day. Never give up. Never surrender.

Sure, I am only one person - sadly incapable of saving the world. But there are still things I can do - and I will do them. Because giving up is not an option. This is why I love movies - sometimes there’s a larger message that strikes you in just the right way.

Have a great week!

~Julie

Hi Julie,

I don’t know how, but I just knew that you were going to pivot to climate change from your opening. Maybe I just share that same deep dread, that same feeling like I’m pounding up against a wall, that same complete lack of power against are true foe.

I have a lot of dread thinking about the world in 20 years. By Grabthar’s hammer, and a lot of international cooperation and willingness to pull our heads out of our asses…

I find it really hard to understand how unprecedented the threats are today. I have no problem understanding their potential severity, but I think about the threat of nuclear war, the World Wars, the global flu pandemic (heh), or a world without antibiotics, and I wonder if every generation faces a world shattering threat. Does it feel that way at the time? Is it that each generation is called upon to actively demonstrate the will to continue?

We live in a world that has been so focused on individual action and maybe, just maybe, small community action. We have created a culture that abhors cooperation. We have whole parts of this country that meltdown at the idea of a collective decision to do something to save ourselves, fed an absolute horseshit information diet. We just have to get out of our own way.

We recently had a major revelation in my family via 23andMe. I’m not sure how comfortable folks are with me sharing the details, but let’s just say we learned about a pretty earth-shattering feeling secret that was taken to the grave, surprising all of us– in a good way. We’ve been able to welcome some new people into the family and expand their understanding of where they came from. Unfortunately, most of my family’s history was lost during the Holocaust. We have some idea of the scope – at one point across my father’s and grandmother’s side we counted close to 100 known relatives that didn’t make it– so it was nice to add to our tree for once.

Last night I finished The Once and Future Witches by Alex E. Harrow . It’s about a world where women have had power, but are constantly having to fight to keep it. Power is constantly stripped away from them. Their ways are unappreciated, ignored, reviled, and stolen. It’s about colonialism and feminism. But there is a real journey of empowerment by the end, and in these unprecedented times, empowerment is something we all could use a little more.

Time to pack to head out of Denver for a conference. Looking forward to next week’s letter.

Jason

I have this recurring feeling that’s not quite the same as regret. I miss a choice I used to have even if it’s one I didn’t take advantage of all that often.

I miss that restaurant I only went to two or three times over 5 years. I miss that trail by that apartment I used to live in that I only walked or bikes twice. I miss that friend who moved away that I only went out with for a drink two or three times.

I don’t miss the specific times I did these things. I miss knowing they were options, even if when they were options they’re not the ones I chose very often. I wonder if I miss them because their absence is a remind that time has passed. I wonder if I miss them because they force me to stare down the harsh reality of impermanence.

Or maybe I miss them because today I wanted to walk on that path, with that friend, and then go get a drink at that restaurant even though those three things never coexisted in time or space.

I am starting to work on a more permanent home for Letters here.

I need a better/consistent naming convention. I also think I want to figure out a way to list the name of the person I’m corresponding with.

Finally, I’m thinking about putting the post content, perhaps a full month at a time, behind a show/hide button on the page. As in, “Robb Knight, 2023 - January” listed, and it’s actually a toggle that opens up all of the contents of January’s Letters on the page.

Here’s the current state of my template as I start thinking through this.

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{{define "main" }}
<div class="content list h-feed">
{{$pages := where .Site.Pages "Type" "post" }}
{{$letters := where $pages "Params.categories" "intersect" (slice "letters") }}
  {{ range ($letters.GroupByDate "2006-01").Reverse }}
    {{ $themonth := (time (printf "%s-%s" .Key "01")) }}
    <h1> 
      {{ if lt $themonth.Year "2023" }}
        About Letters
      {{ else }}
        {{ $themonth.Format "2006 - January" }}
      {{ end }}
    </h1>
    {{ range .Pages.Reverse }}
      {{ partial "li.html" . }}
    {{ end }}
    <hr>
 {{ end }}
</div>
{{ end }}

Bonus

Here’s a shot of my Panobook where I started writing ideas before I began fiddling with my actual templates/code.

You can see I was thinking about a collection of short codes before looking at my own site and realizing that my existing Archive page is actually a pretty good starting point and that my collapsible post content idea may be better as a partial.

A proper response to slavery would have been to enshrine in law that it must be taught, clearly and honestly, for the evil that it wrought. That’s my understanding of how Germany handles teaching about the Holocaust. The idea that we’ve gone in the other direction, essentially ensuring we cannot properly teach the history of slavery is wild.

For example, for those who don’t click through, among the concerns in Virginia specifically are:

The problematic presentation of the history of slavery. The standards ascribe sole responsibility for the “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” to “Western African Empires” (WHII.6d); imply that indentured servitude (“bonded labor”) was a “type of slavery” (VUS.3b); and remove the term racism (mentioned 22 times in the original August draft) from any of the actual course-level standards.

There’s more that is equally frightening.

For all the right wing fear mongering of a government that’s too powerful, most of which is done to ensure we don’t have enough IRS agents to enforce tax evasion and fraud or a sufficient workforce to enforce child labor law, I’ve never been more afraid of government power than when its erasing history.

The folks who say education shouldn’t be political are using education to push their political project by teaching a narrative we all know they know is false.

Cut the bullshit. We know that these people don’t believe that West African Empires are responsible for the slave trade, or that indentured servitude was slavery, or that racism played no role in our history. We know that they don’t believe its unimportant to teach about history after the 1960s. They don’t believe these things. They’re lying to people who know they are lying and everyone is winking at each other. In 20 years, the kids who grow up under this regime won’t be winking. They won’t know they were lied to. They will deeply believe something untrue, and it will reshape our world into an uglier, crueler, and scarier place.

“As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force,” Columbus wrote in October 1492, in a slice of the journal quoted by Zinn. “They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want,” he also wrote.

But last school year, when the North Carolina teacher tried to give this lesson to her sophomore honors world history class, a parent wrote an email complaining that her White son had been made to feel guilty.

The teacher recalled replying by asking, “Why would your child feel guilty about what Columbus did to the Arawak?” The parents of the student escalated the issue to human resources, the teacher said, spurring an administrator to warn that she needed to stop “pushing my agenda — telling me that having my children learn the truth about Columbus was biased.”

We cannot teach what Christopher Columbus said. His words, a primary source.

No one believes that this kid “felt guilty” or that whatever this kid felt was something that was damaging in meaningful way. This is about a weird quirk of inventing an American history because we were a new nation without a single narrative or story to hold us together and a quirk of Italian-American history choosing to uphold Columbus as a hero figure. This is about adults who refuse to grow up, somehow believing that learning more and having a more complete picture of the world taints their previous experiences.

They want to talk about “snowflakes” and “safe spaces”, meanwhile they are conducting a full court press against reality as it was in favor of reality as they wish it to be or reality as they recall receiving it at some previous time in the past.

This kid was not feeling guilty. We all know it. This was another wink, another whistle.

You know, there’s a lot of stuff that we should feel guilty about. Guilt is an important and powerful emotion. Guilt is a sign that we are growing, we are learning, and that we can face turning our moral capacities to judge ourselves by our own standards instead of always judging everyone else. It would be great if more people felt a little bit of guilt now and again.

Hi Jason! Thank you for your reflection - it’s clear to me that you are someone far more in tune with themselves and I look forward to occupying similar space in the future. I was struck by your “what I know about myself” list. I wasn’t clear enough on them to explain it like that but I am on the same page with that list. #3 has me reflecting on what I’m holding on to (‘relics of people I used to be’ as I noted in my first letter) that do not need being held on to anymore. I hope to find a way to leave a little space in which to honor those people I used to be while not giving them hold on the person I am or may yet be.

But I want to jump in on books and movies! I LOVE movies. I used to go to the Alamo and catch a Tuesday Matinee and have lunch with myself several times a month. I even signed up for their Season Pass… in late February of 2020 so it got basically no use. It worked out though, as I do not have the bandwidth to keep up with the new movie schedule anyway. Now I get to set my own lineup - currently I’m sourcing for my April+ personal showings: Movies Alan Rickman Saw followed by Movies Alan Rickman Was Involved In. I recently read Alan Rickman’s autobiography/published journals and he made enough notes about plays/movies/etc he experienced that it was a rabbit hole I wanted to follow. Plus, apparently there were still a ton of his movies I’d not yet seen.

I get limited time for these things now - especially if the movie isn’t 2 year old friendly (I can quote you the entirety of Cars and Frozen, if you’re so inclined.) But while I traditionally hated splitting up the viewing of a movie (with an LOTR marathon excepted), it’s the only way to go these days and I’m cool if it means I get to watch the movies I want to.

While I’m not active in media critique (I have zero Letterboxd reviews going) I enjoy other people’s reviews. Specifically when something bugs me about a movie or edit and I want to see if anyone else kvetched about the same thing. While I start looking for one thing, inevitably, I find some new insight I can go deeper on, sometimes even making a re-watch necessary.

Having felt a huge void in the last decade or so where reading used to be, I’ve made a conscious choice to go to bed 30+ minutes earlier specifically devoted to reading time. I’ve devoured two fun-and-fast reads - #28 and #29 in a long running series about a female “bounty hunter” in NJ (where I am from) in the last week. I’m also in the middle of a book of essays, a parenting book, a book about boundaries and breaking generational trauma, and some fiction I haven’t figured out the plot for yet. I’d prefer to take it one book at a time but several library holds became available unexpectedly all at once and I went with it.

I’d love to hear what media you’re currently involved in or some that have stuck with you over the years.

~Julie

Hi Julie,

First off, if you haven’t seen Galaxy Quest, you’re missing one of Alan Rickman’s best. Just skip right to it and enjoy something that should not be nearly as good as it is.

Reviews and criticism are things I’ve struggled with. Last year I started the year writing a Letterboxd review and blog post for every movie I watched. I don’t think I even made it a month before I realized that felt more like a chore than something I was enjoying, so I jettisoned it. I think the best thing with movies is find someone who wants to engage with them on the same level you do and talk. It’s how some of my best friends in college, well, became some of my best friends in college.

There are times I feel compelled to write. I never regret having put down my thoughts on The Batman– I find myself referencing it often online. It seems to be a movie everyone wants to say something about when they’re done watching it.

I try hard to read mostly fiction. I sometimes listen to nonfiction in audiobook format, but I find that very little nonfiction is actually suited for book length. I often joke that every single business book and self-help book is actually just a blog post stretched well past its welcome. I record all the books I read on my site, though I’m not in love with how my host grabs book images. It’s a bit of a crap shoot.

Books are intimate. Any number of books I’ve read over the years have made a strong impression, but I find that recommending books is something I do cautiously and gently. They are a major investment, and honestly, it hurts in a different way when a book connects so strongly with me and falls flat for someone else. When someone doesn’t understand a book I love, it’s like they don’t understand me in some fundamental way. It’s unfair to expect someone else to not just empathize with me, but react and feel like I do to a story. It’s not really what I expect, but being confronted with someone who doesn’t have the same reaction has the effect of underscoring the otherness that exists between the self and everyone else.

I recently read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and was blown away. It’s a beautiful story about friendship, creativity, trauma, belonging, and growing. And a lot of what’s in this book is about what it means to know someone, what it means to share with someone, what it means to see someone, or sometimes, not.

A lot of what I’ve read the last couple of years were books that end a trilogy or long series I’ve invested in over time. I’m mostly a sci-fi and fantasy reader, so too much of what I read seems to never end.

Maybe that’s why I abandon television? So much of “peak TV” overstays its welcome for me. I like an ending, but I also don’t like a story that goes off rails to keep production costs low or a show that has an ending they have to write themselves out of to keep going. The best stories know what they have to say and say it. I think that’s why I like miniseries so much. It’s probably why I also tend to like adaptations. Slow Horses, Station Eleven, and The Last Of Us come to mind. All are well plotted, with a clear idea of where they’re going and how their characters are meant to change and evolve. And they all have clear endings. By contrast, Severance was incredible, but I have close to no faith that they will be able to continue to execute at a high level and satisfy on their own mysterious elements.

A toast to our past selves, for the ambitions they had and things they loved; we may no longer share these things with them, but we know what it felt like.

Jason

I pull my git repository. I crack open my editor. I open neovim and want to get to work. I notice something that looks strange or I don’t quite understand. I begin to pull a thread. Hours go by.

I have, once again, made small tweaks to the structure of the HTML documents on my site. My h-feed, h-card, and h-entry all look better. The tree of elements makes more sense on the page. I have made one small tweak to colors or spacing or something. I got rid of some extra CSS.

I wanted to work on a new set of pages with a new set of designs. I wanted something I could publish. Instead, I fixed something no one sees, uses, or cares about. I barely do.

It’s a rainy Sunday, and I’ve managed to shave my yak.

Meta note: I’ve decided to move away from block quotes as they become less legible for longer letters. Hopefully the salutations and <hr> are sufficient to make reading these easy.

Hi Jason!

I am incredibly excited to see what comes of our month of writing and also your project at large.

I had wanted to give you a quick bit of info about myself to start out this first letter but it turns out the “about me” isn’t just an intro - it’s the capital T Thing at this moment of life so I figured I’d run with it.

Always involved with something, always moving, I have spent my entire life proving my worth by doing. I defined myself by my work. I’ve had quite the array of jobs, too - auto insurance sales (while I worked on my masters degree), library technology projects, technology consultant, public speaker, web designer, adjunct professor, board member, etc… and then 9 years ago and basically out of nowhere, I started a cookie company for no particular reason beyond it felt fun and “next.” (And. It. Was. Awesome.)

But then this past December I closed that business. It was a hard but right choice in this phase of life. As for what was next up, I planned to pivot to things that matched my Q1 2023 motto: “Passive Income!” I’d just spent nearly a decade needing a human present to deliver on every single sale I’d ever made and I was looking forward to creating something once and letting it sell and deliver itself. Think online self-paced classes, downloadables, and maybe even some designed home merchandise (that someone else printed and shipped).

And then I sat down one rainy day and realized how exhausted I was. With the exception of a few one-off events, I’ve basically not stopped moving since high school. And now, a 40-something pandemic mom of a (wonderful and gorgeous) two year old, I am staring at an unknown future for the second half (?!) of my life. I think my not-yet-midlife existential moment stems from all that doing and not a lot of sitting with myself and just existing for a while. There are a few key conversations with friends that keep popping up for me illustrating the point that I could be wishy washy with who I was and what I wanted. The 1961 essay of the late Joan Didion entitled, “On Self Respect” comes to mind. Or maybe some people are just like that - not as laser focused on one or another thing for great lengths of time.

Some have called me a Renaissance soul but that’s never felt right to me. In my mind, Renaissance souls have worked for NGOs and have a kiln in their backyard. I’ve just gone where the wind blew me; flying by the seat of my pants, following whims and never really planning deliberately for the long-haul. (Thankfully, it’s generally worked out.)

Now, I feel like I am in a strange place and space in time meant to reclaim (uncover?) who I am. (And by extension be able to make more deliberate decisions as to what life could be going forward.) The first important piece of this huge puzzle was to reclaim space in our home.

We turned my home office into a nursery back in early 2020 and everything in that office went scattered around the house. But as of two weekends ago, I once again have a home for my stuff. Think unfinished art projects, a pile of things that need fixing, books that overflow the rest of the house bookshelves, and boxes and boxes of relics of people I used to be. The student, boss, geek, writer, daughter, creator, friend, etc. But this is also a place I can exist alone for a short while and that will be the most valuable in this time of unknowing.

Yet, I understand deep in my bones that the mental and physical space I currently inhabit and the time and space I can take up is the ultimate human luxury. And I don’t want to waste it.

So here I stand, probably on the downswing of life’s bell curve, asking really strange questions like “do I really not like shrimp or did i just have a bad day once and it became part of my being?”

How does one begin to know who they are? How does one get reacquainted with themselves after years of doing for and listening to others? If you woke up one day and realized you were waaaay off the path you’d envisioned - do you hop back on? How? Can a person deprogram their American capitalist mindset long enough to do things for fun (and not profit)?

Can you stop at any point and re-evaluate what you can do or be for your “one wild and precious life” (Mary Oliver)? Can people be vastly different humans in different stages in their lives or are there always common threads? What if someone finally calls you out on your shit? (Being a parent is a GREAT WAY to uncover all manner of things about yourself you were blind to -perhaps purposefully- before.)

At the risk of guiding where we go from here, I’d love to hear your thoughts, ponderances, or even stories if you’ve found yourself in similar fork-in-the-road moments in your life.

Here’s to adventure,

~Julie

Ps - If you’re interested, I was in the process of creating a new online presence for myself but it seems I need to fix a thing or two before it’s back up. My cookie biz site exists in a new form and has some recipes and a free baking guide available.

Hi Julie,

I think a lot of us, at some point in the last couple of years, got hit with all of the tension of the pandemic rushing out and looked around and wondered, “Who am I? Where am I?” In some ways, I feel like I’ve been living in y “not-yet-midlife existential moment” pretty much from the start. Nothing has been to plan, and I’m a person who likes a plan. But the strain of making it through the heights of the pandemic, when uncertainty was pushed beyond any familiar bounds, took things past some cutesy follow-where-life-leads and be-open-to-the-universe. The utter lack of control and loss of all foresight pushed me toward craving intentionality.

Sometimes I think that intentionality gets a bad wrap. It seems to some it means that things are structured and instrumental, all telos. But intentionality can also come in the form of choosing to be loose, to feel, or to be lost. When I say I crave intentionality, I mean that if I am not doing something I love, I want it to be because I chose to let it go. I want to remove the illusion that I have passively constructed my life and take responsibility and agency for the choices I am making. Especially when choices are important, they deserve my foresight and attention. For a long time, I don’t think I respected my own choices.

That’s the struggle that led me to try and read more fiction. I was in my sophomore year of college. I was depressed and overwhelmed. I was taking far too heavy a course load and paralyzed into inaction by the seemingness endless, but routine grind. Something kicked in the back of my mind, and I realized that I hadn’t read fiction for fun in two years. I was never without a book practically from the time I knew how to read. Yet here I was, two years or so into college, and I"m no longer reading. I spent a week off from my classes devouring several books, and I felt significantly recovered. My grades probably suffered a little, but I neither remember them now, 15 years on, nor did it have any impact on my life. But reading for that week had a huge impact.

Just the same, this year I’ve not even finished two books. I normally read 35-40 books a year, so this is beyond unusual. I find myself not wanting to read. But what’s new for me now versus 5 years ago is I am guiltless in this. What’s new for me now versus 15 years ago is I am quite aware of what’s happening. I know that I do not feel like reading or that it feels that important to me right now. I accept that, and I’m choosing to allow other things to be important.

I don’t know how we begin to know who we are. I am asking myself that question all the time, and I never seem to respond with a satisfying, stable answer. Who I was is dead. Who I will be is unknown. And who I am now is, at best, when I work at it, someone I’m actively choosing to be.

Sitting with yourself in the unknown and finding some comfort there, in my mind, is a way to quiet the stories you already know about yourself. You have to let who you’ve been quiet down so you can freshly tune into the signals of who you are right now. There’s really two tricks to intentional change. Step one, you have to actually be able to listen to yourself and know the change that you want. Step two is you have to pretend to already be the person you want to be.

What’s the difference between pretending to be a good person and being a good person? Practice and then habit.

Here are some things I’ve figured out about myself:

1. I love great TV and movies, and I love media criticism and participating in it. But I get almost no joy out of passive media consumption at all. Watching, listening, and reading always has to be some thing I am choosing to do rather than something I do to fill time and space.
2. I love communal physical activity. A hike alone is sometimes just what I need– but that sometimes is maybe one in every twenty. The gym alone is ok, but in a small group environment is energizing. And recreational sports are the best shot of endorphins in the world– being with people, working hard toward a goal, in an environment that permits thought about little else but the now is something I love. In short, it’s boring, but there’s a reason I loved gym class.
3. There are things that I used to love that don’t move me like they used to. I have to let go of the idea of being great at guitar, because I’m just not willing to put in the work the way I was in high school. I have to let go of the idea of writing fiction, because I’m just not willing to put in the work the way I never have. People, art, and activities can move and inspire me but not generate the drive or creative force to emulate them.
4. The perfect day is not one that I plan the night before, but instead, one where I listen to myself each moment and adjust as needed.
5. There is a lot of the time that I don’t like myself very much, and I need to listen to that voice. Not because self-loathing is good or anything, but if I’m not liking myself I need to understand why and put the work into being more like someone I do like. And sometimes, because if I try to find a why and can’t, I need to realize that I am choosing to feel a certain way for no reason and it’s making me feel bad and that’s trash I need to throw away.

Maybe you like always moving, or maybe that’s something you did because you liked the story it told to others. Maybe you need to figure out what that story is and make a choice about how you’re going to tell it. Or maybe you need to accept that you’re not being wishy-washy about what you want, but instead, that what you want is to be wishy-washy. It could just be that you enjoy the chaos of five half choices without having to commit. You can commit to not committing.

That’s where I’m at along a similar journey of some kind of self-reflection. I still don’t know if I professionally identify as a product manager, data analyst, manager, entrepreneur, policy wonk, or something else entirely. I keep wanting to write a new resume or some new story about who I am and what I’m doing here and the kinds of things people should want me on their panel or talk about or on their team working on, but I can’t seem to choose. I am a Jason-shaped Jason, and I seem allergic to coherent branding. I still don’t know who I am personally. But I’m trying to listen, and I’m trying to make choices.

Jason

I never came up with a word for this year. I still don’t know what I’d like to do, what I’d like to focus on, who I’d like to be more or less of. I don’t have a sense of a direction at all right now. I wouldn’t say I’m lost. I think I’d say I’m detached.

And yet, I finally started filling in a Theme System journal I’ve had for years. There are a few sections on each page. I fill the top two sections with a punch list– one personal and one professional– of the things that happened that day. It’s a freeform “not quite a tracker” log, with things listed like:

• Personal
  • Listened to an album of music
  • Played 30 minutes of guitar
  • Cooked dinner for us without asking what she wants or if I should
• Professional
  • Booked travel for two trips
  • Thoroughly reviewed a complex PR
  • Forgave myself for only doing my 6 hours of meetings

My rule is basically that anything that, upon reflection, contributed to the way I feel at the end of the day, list it.

The next, larger section I write out a narrative about my day and what I’m thinking or feeling. Sometimes this is half a page of writing, sometimes it’s three sentences.

The smallest section at the bottom I put a rating out of five and just a couple of words why I rated things that way. Something like, “3/5 quite productive, but spent a lot of time stressed about nothing”, or “2/5 wasted too much time, but I didn’t feel bad about it”, or maybe “4/5 it wasn’t spent on the things I planned but really pleased with what got done”.

This is the longest a “daily pages” style habit has stuck. We’ll see how much it continues. I have, at times, spent quite a bit of time writing in DayOne, but right now, it feels good that these are written by hand. I’m not sure if I would keep the habit if I type them, and I"m not sure yet if I want to enter them in DayOne or let them fade away as entirely ephemeral. It’s early enough that I could still type up what I can decipher of past pages if I change my mind.

Meta note: I really didn’t think through this post naming schema to support these split weeks. Big thank you to Jeremy for being my second participant in this project.

Dear Jason,

Yes, it’s definitely hard to do anything outside during winter. To be fair, though, winter here in the southern half of the state isn’t all that bad. Two or three big snows per winter, most days around forty degrees. (I recall winter being more severe in my childhood but those kinds of memories aren’t always reliable.) The thing that really keeps me inside is the lack of light. My job has the traditional 8-5 working hours so by the time I’m done with work, I’m tired and it’s dark and I have a hard time doing anything except sitting on the couch.

As for the garden, this will actually be the first year we will attempt to grow any significant amount of food. The past few years have been focused on native plants and plants that attract pollinators. Orange butterfly weed is, of course, the star of the show; it’s a favorite among people here who grow native pollinator plants. My favorite, though, is hairy woodmint (blephilia hirsuta). It’s not the prettiest plant—when it blooms the flowers are tiny. The flowers, though, grow in a pagoda-shaped cluster, the leaves are beautifully minty, and the bees just love them.

It’s not often that I talk to someone who knows what GASB is! It’s like finding someone who understands your secret language. There is a lot of crossover between IT and accounting now, isn’t there? Especially when you get either to a certain scale (and can’t use QuickBooks) or in a specialized field. I work at a university foundation so our organization hasn’t been able to use much off-the-shelf software. For example, we’re (yet again) building our own endowment management software because none of the readily available software does what we need—and we don’t want to manage a large endowment on spreadsheets!

In fact, this new accounting standard implementation (which is a separate issue from building a new endowment management system) is going to require us to acquire some lease management software for the future. So many systems to maintain. It feels like it never ends.

I’m glad you’re enjoying volleyball so much! I imagine it would be good for a person in a variety of ways. Like most people, the only time I ever see volleyball is during the Olympics. I can see how its systems could be described as elegant like dancing. Even to someone who knows very little about the game, the coordination is clearly visible.

And it’s impressive how much variety your city’s rec league has. I live in a small town and we have nothing remotely like that. Your leagues are clearly an advantage of urban density.

Sincerely,
Jeremy

Jeremy,

I think we may have different definitions of “all that bad”– I don’t want to spend much time outside in forty degrees. We do agree on lack of light. My time in Mexico City this winter was not marked mostly by far milder temperatures, but instead was notable because of the far later sunset moving southward.

I love natural gardens. I really hope we can move away from rows and rows of Kentucky bluegrass. I think it’s kind of incredible how some mix of capitalism, conformity, and culture has taught us that the natural and native is ugly meant to be tamed at best and eradicated at worst. The project you’re undertaking reminds me of this excellent recent win in Maryland for native lawns.

I’m surprised there’s no market for purpose-built endowment software. The market, by definition, has resources, and it’s the kind of problem software can be great at. You’re giving me business ideas. Working with financial accounting is quite complicated for software engineering though. The standards and practices and (somewhat) common data structures from a distance can lull the engineering mind to believing that you can simply follow basic standards and principles and arrive at a universal solution. In reality, accounting data has fractal complexity, with each organization being able to adopt and adapt from one common shape into something completely unique. Every person I work with has found a different way to reflect their unique organizational structure, needs, and practices. It’s almost shocking how much customization and flexibility is required, and anyone who digs in can easily see why ERPs are huge, slowly changing, and incredibly costly to change involving heavy customization and training.

I am a true ambivert– I treasure and require solitude. I am very comfortable alone; I also love being alone in public. I like to sit at a bar reading a book. I like sitting in a coffeeshop to get my work done. And I do get a lot of energy from interacting with the right kind of crowd and love taking a stage to talk about something I’m passionate about. I say all this to emphasize what is so great about having a recreational league structure in Baltimore and why cities are so important to me. The best part about returning to playing a sport is that while I’m playing, I can truly shut my brain off to everything else. It’s impossible to stress about work or family or anything– there’s just what’s happening in the now. I am fully engaged in the moment, and in some ways, largely in my own head. And yet, what’s great about recreational sports and teams is I’m also with people building relationships. I get social interactions and familiarity and camaraderie from working together toward a goal free from obligation and true stress. I think it’s incredibly healthy for anybody, but especially for my particular blend of social wants and needs. It’s a form of community, which I feel is harder and harder to locate these days.

I’m looking forward to seeing spring garden pictures this year.

Jason

Call me a neoliberal all you want, but the federal dollars we’re trying to pump into clean energy and industrial policy in general should be pay for performance and not highly regulated via procedures and reports.

I don’t want 10 year guarantees of not expanding in China; I want factories actually open and producing in the US.

We need to build transmission lines, solar and wind farms, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and public transit now. Plans are worthless without execution. We need to build, and we need to build so often that we get good at it and it gets cheaper and easier and more predictable how we do this work.

My grandmother sometimes wrote daily travelogues when on vacation. This morning, my mother scanned and sent one from a trip to Israel in December of 2000 when my Uncle Erwin passed away and his estate needed to be taken care of.

I teared up when she wrote,

For me, it was very difficult to say “shalom’ to my cousins Ahuda and Arelka - Inwardly, I feared never seeing them again, especially Ahuda - who has not been well for a very long time.

In June 2008 my sister, my grandmother, and I went to Balfouria together, and she was able to see her cousins again. It was the last major trip my grandmother took anywhere. I’m glad it was to see her family in her once home.