This actually isn’t surprising at all, but it still needs to said over & over — the biggest barrier to more urban biking in cities is the fear of cars. “A study confirms that if we are serious about getting people on bikes, they need a safe place to ride.”

– Brent Toderian, linking to Biggest Barrier to Biking Is a Fear of Cars

We don’t need a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars. We need to spend money on safe, separated bike infrastructure and e-bikes.

DayOne has turned out to be the perfect travel journal. There’s not a lot I want to write about while in Mexico, but Elsa and I did want to keep track of where we ate.

I thought about using various geotagging services, but very few are private. Those that are, well, kind of stink. But I’ve been making entries with pictures and taking advantage of DayOne’s great support for geotagging to record most of our meals here in Mexico City. When making DayOne entries, your location is recorded. This way you know where you are, the weather, and other facts while writing an entry. One killer feature is that when I add photos to my entries, DayOne will prompt to ask if I want to change the entry date and location to match the date and location of the photo. This means I can take pictures inside a restaurant, museum, park, or store I like and not worry about making a journal entry in the moment. I can come back days later and still get the correct date, time, and location for my entry.

I have a private map of all the places I’ve been. Since CDMX is likely going to continue to be a fairly regular destination, it’s easy to keep track of favorites and make sure we try new things.

When I started using DayOne I wasn’t sure what it would be for. Over the years I just keep finding new ways to use it. It’s not just one thing for me. None of my favorite tools are.

It feels like in the past few years there’s been a growing wave of people talking about the power of adult friendships (and frankly, the crisis of adult friendships, at least in the United States).

Friendship Forever is another article in that vein. It’s filled with powerful quotes. This one is my favorite:

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone. —David Whyte

I was reminded of Noah Smith’s great The internet wants to be fragmented post from a couple of weeks ago when Matt Bircher linked to it.

Matt pulled out the same quote that resonated most strongly with me:

It started with the Facebook feed. On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew.

I didn’t always believe this. I changed all of my user names to be something that was both consistent and identifiable around 2006. One reason¹ I did this was that I came to believe that being identifiable meant I could be held accountable. Pseudonymity and anonymity in most contexts felt like avoiding standing behind your statements. ² This was wrong.

At this stage, I kind of think that Reddit is closest to an ideal centralized system. It’s a place that aggregates many individual communities around one log in. Each community can be moderated based on its norms, with voting distributing norm enforcement in a fairly easy way. I think the one thing that’s missing is you still have to be the same person across Reddit. Imagine if Reddit allowed a unique psuedonym for each communtiy you post in. One log in, but your identity does not persist across communities. Finding that I wrote something in r/Urbanism about my politics doesn’t invite you to come after me in r/ProductManagement when I’m discussing something professional. Reddit the service can know I’m the same person, and this way truly egregious behavior can lead to more global banning, but otherwise, each identity can be separated to be policed separately within each separate community. No more clicking on my user name and finding me anywhere across the site. Of course, Reddit doesn’t even let you change your username, so there’s little hope in this feature appaering.

Centralization on the web is valuable to the extent that it permits me to have one login that aggregates multiple communities/people I’ve curated. That’s what my Twitter feed was/Mastodon feed is. That’s what my list of RSS subscriptions are. That’s what the Reddit communities I’ve joined are.

In all the blogs I have ever written, I have had analytics that tells me how many visitors came to various pages. What posts were popular? Tap tap tap 🎤 is this thing on? When I moved my blog to Micro.blog after years of self-hosting, I removed my Google Analytics snippet. What little proof I have that anyone is “here” comes infrequent and primarily from strangers.

I don’t know who has subscribed via RSS.

I don’t know who is following @jsonbecker@json.blog via ActivityPub.

I don’t know who subscribed to the newsletter I briefly turned on and paid for and then turned off, though it still appears to get sent.

I don’t use Conversation.js to view WebMentions or replies of any kind.

All other forms of social media tell me not just how many people follow me, but who has followed me. Most provide me with stats on individual posts, including both views and various forms of interactions. I don’t know how many people read this site. I don’t know who reads this site. Even if I wanted to know, I’d have to somehow collect RSS subscriptions, site page hits, Micro.blog views and interactions, Twitter views and interactions, and Mastodon views and interactions– at a minimum– to get any kind of picture of “reach”.

I used to like knowing that a particular page about how I solved a problem in R continued to get a lot of search traffic. As a result, I was motivated to keep that post reasonably up to date. On social media, I liked knowing that certain friends were reading— it made it possible to make a knowing joke or let me assume that they knew about something that was going on with me because I knew they read it. I guess I don’t agree that likes, follows, replies, or audience metrics are distorting popular contests. Not all feedback is toxic.¹

Maybe it’s easier for me to absorb the various metrics about posts because I’ve never had meaningful internet popularity, nor was that ever my goal. I don’t like blog comments— this site is for my words, not everyone else’s— but I do enjoy replies, which remain significantly easier on social platforms than anywhere else. I only rarely receive replies, and I get them entirely through social-like systems where I crosspost like Micro.blog, Twitter, and Mastodon. I like getting a like, because it says, “I was here, and what I found resonated with me.” I’ve had my email address on this site for years and received one email in all of that time. I can’t help to feel like there are better solutions than stripping it all away.

Some people use their blogs as a personal repository of knowledge. They talk about how their site is like a public version of their outsourced brain, letting them search for answers they already have. That’s not why I write. These are my thoughts, sometimes personal and revealing, often not. They always start as something private, but they become something I choose to make public. I want someone to read what I write. I want it to make them laugh, or smile, or think, or get angry, or just get to know who I am a little better.

Why do I write anything in public? Mostly because I would drive my friends crazy with emails and text messages if I shared each thing I thought they might like with them. I kind of already do. I would drive them crazy if I shared all the thoughts I have that I’d love a reaction to. Writing in public is an easy way for me to broadcast to a self-selected group of folks and have them grapple with and engage with me. It helps to maintain many social and para-social relationships without the pressures of direct, synchronous communication.

If a friend leaves me “on read” when I sent them an article directly with my thoughts, I’m going to feel bad. Did I interrupt them? Am I annoying? Are they interested in this conversation? Are they interested in me?

If I write 10 blog posts and I find out they read just one of them, however they let me know, on their own time, I feel great.

I have been thinking about all of this since reading Monique Judge call for a return to personal blogging. I agree with so much of that article, which is why I’ve been semi-consistently blogging for years. But there’s one thing that struck me as, if not wrong, challenging:

People built entire communities around their favorite blogs, and it was a good thing. You could find your people, build your tribe, and discuss the things your collective found important.

Creating communities around blogs remains hard. Very popular sites with authors that focus on very specific topics who also spend significant time moderating their comments sometimes ended up with an entire community. Most blogs just got loads of spam and a drive by comment from someone who landed on your page via Google and decided to be a jerk.

One of the triumphs of social media over blogs was how quickly and easily you could join or bootstrap a community. Are these communities as great as the niche internet of 2001? No. But so many more people were able to find community on social media. Web 2.0 was meant to make the niche web that felt like a community accessible to everyone. It succeeded.

Social media’s success at bringing community to everyone on the internet is mirrored in its failure to ensure those communities were healthy and safe. The real Web 3.0 shouldn’t retreat from some of the goals of Web 2.0 – replies, likes, reposts, follows, and views are all native parts of how communities are built on the web today. I don’t think they are the problem. I just don’t think they are the end point.

This month, I will be corresponding with Robb Knight. He can be found on Micro.blog at @rknightuk.

Hi Jason,

We have only interacted briefly on Micro.blog so I figured I should start by introducing myself. I’m a 30-something developer working on software for the property industry. I live with my partner, Jess, and two cats in Portsmouth on the south coast of the UK.

We have spent the past 12 months decorating and redoing every room in our house - the previous owners lived here since it was built in 1971 and hadn’t done any work to it since then. This involved me learning a whole set of new skills like floor laying, wallpapering, and fitting new skirting boards (baseboards for Americans).

In July we found out my partner was pregnant with a girl and she is due in March 2023. This accelerated the timeline of getting the house finished but we are now ready for her arrival at least in terms of furniture and the nursery. Mentally ready? I’m not so sure.

Look forward to hearing from you, Robb

Hi Robb,

First of all, congratulations on pending fatherhood! I’m glad we were able to slip in our month of correspondance before the pending sleep depravation.

What an exciting and busy year. Even though we moved into our home 5 years ago (and it was new construction), I still feel like we need to keep decorating and redoing. Our work has been less skills-based and more “accumulating more stuff than I am comfortable owning”-based, since our new(ish) home is much larger than the 700 square feet we lived in previously. I have always found that I have ambitious of being handy in theory, but mostly fail when it comes to applying that ambition. At this stage, my partner Elsa just pays people to do things before telling me they’ve gone wrong or haven’t happened.

I am curious, what room or project are you most proud of? I’m not quite “done”, but pretty close to having my office set up how I’d like. It was a big pandemic project since we got rid of the company office right away. Having my own space has changed my whole relationship with my home.

I took a peek at the work you do and it’s fascinating. I have actually discussed this area (home management, focused on home inspections in the US followed by “asset management” and warranty support nad the like) with my work partner multiple times as an idea to pursue{^tech]. The intersection of home-renovation and your work must have been an interesting exercise. I’d be curious what you’ve learned managing your house that suprised you or changed your perspective on the work you do day to day.

Thanks for your participation in Letters. I’m already enjoying this project, and I hope others will as well.

Jason

I read fewer books and fewer pages this year than last year. That’s ok– 2022 saw the conclusion of the Scholomance Trilogy and The Founders Trilogy, both of which ended in deeply emotionally satisfying ways. It also so the continuation of the Checquy novels, Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War, the Nisibidi Scripts, and more, which all had strong entries.

I enjoyed everything I read this year, but I’m not sure that anything was truly a standout. Robert Jackson Bennett has now had two trilogies in a row that I adore and felt stuck the landing. Naomi Novik was already a favorite with both Uprooted and Spinning Silver, but the Scholomance books have cemented her alongside Robert Jackson Bennett, NK Jemisin, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Becky Chambers as “writers I will buy sight unseen until they prove otherwise.”

I still have a lot of sequels to catch up on, including by some authors in my “must read” list, so I expect 2023 to be off to a quick start. I’ll stick with my goal of 40 books, because that seems to be about right in terms of level of “challenge”, though I still wish I could ramp up to 52 a year.

I listened to a few audiobooks this year (non-fiction) that I continue not to track (and a couple of non-fiction books). I really miss iTunes University lectures, so I think I’m going to try and find more lectures to listen to in place of podcasts next year.

This Year in Reading

If I took a picture of every sign I loved in CDMX, I would never get to my destination walking. Here’s a few I stopped and snapped, but far from the “best” or only ones that I liked.

Sometimes it pays to stare, to sit with ideas, to think, to see all the cards laid out in front of you for days until a coherent narrative appears. For me, it was looking at a pile of disconnected features and ideas and being unable to figure out how they did or did not fit together.

After over a week of coming back to various lists and filling in the details, a bigger thematic picture emerged.

I now know what stays and what goes and how to help my team make decisions along the way without me.

The work that’s left to do is all about being Consistent and Complete.

Over time our product has left behind a bunch of small improvements that are obvious to us and our users, but for various reasons were cut from scope with the initial feature implementation. And as our application has grown and matured, we’ve sometimes developed better user experiences and/or better components and patterns in our implementations to achieve similar ends. We need to pick up after ourselves, finish our rough edges, and use our best implementation everywhere, every time.

Now to convince the leadership team, and prove that these guiding principles can be used to say “no” to some things and “yes” to others.

The social web really started as an easy, consistent way for someone without technical skills to build a homepage about themselves.

As blogging took over, the social web became an easy way to read and write in one place with a consistent experience.

I think we over consider the social/follow/respond/boost elements of these products. What these services and their client applications got right was where we read is where we write. Maybe NetNewsWire had it right when it’s early iterations had blogging features, versus later splitting MarsEdit into its own application.

What Google Reader ¹ had right was commenting and stars, adding a conversation and sharing layer to the web. It lacked the blogging tools for a more complete “write” layer, but it added an element of discovery/serendipity and a chance that what you write will be seen.

That’s why reading and writing in the same interface is so powerful— there’s a sense that everyone else participating in reading and writing on the web might interact with what you have to say. Google Reader created a global comment section, filtered to the people you chose. Twitter functioned much the same way.

All of this could live via protocols and without centralization, whether through Webmentions + RSS + Micropub/MetaWeblog or ActivityPub. But easy reading and writing in one place, with a strong product vision, and just the right amount of serendipity is the magic formula.

The power of RSS (and feeds in general) is you can build a reading product on top of the whole web, and anything you write is also available to the rest of the web. The power of domains is owning your identity (or identities, real or pseudonymous). The power of webmentions and ActivityPub Notifications is visibility, with your response and links communicating with the original content that someone has read it and responded.

Maybe the one missing piece from the existing set of web protocols is discovery. Domain as identity side steps discovery, and I think this is where services have excelled. They create a single, standardized index for finding people who share your interests (or who you already know). I wonder if standard About or Now pages with appropriate metadata could make indexing and discovery more consistent.

I have decided to work on a new project on this blog in 2023. This is risky, because I need other people to participate and I came up with the idea this morning. So this serves as both an announcement and a call for participants.

Letters will involve me corresponding with someone else on the internet over the course of a month. Each week, we will each write a letter to each other. There are no set topics. The rules will be:

1. The person I’m corresponding with will write the first letter.
2. I will respond during the same week. They do not have to write again until the next week.
3. Each letter will be at least 250 words.
4. I will post the correspondent’s letter followed by my response on my blog. If they have a blog, they can do the same and I will gladly link to them.

If you’d be interested in participating in Letters, email me at hello@jbecker.co and provide me with two months in 2023 that could work for you. Feel free to link me to your personal webpage or provide a short bit about yourself (but no pressure on any idea of topics).

Why am I interested in this project? I was thinking about how much of our history (in the West at least) comes from important figures having extensive private correspondences that were saved, catalogued, and released after their deaths. And while I’d love some private pen pals, it just got me thinking that public letters are a rich way to discuss complex issues. What’s the point of having a blog and not restricting my online presence and interactions to 280 characters if not engaging in richer, complex conversation?

My favorite world online was that of personal blogs and journals in conversation with each other. I’m hoping Letters can jump start that for me. I’m also hoping to build some deeper relationships online with folks who are in my orbit enough to see this post, but I don’t really feel like I know them in a meaningful way.

So that’s the idea for 2023. I hope some of you will be interested in participating so that I don’t have to spend late December scrambling to convince folks to write a letter to me each week or cancel the project all together.

Let’s make something fun on the internet.

I already have one confirmed, and three “maybes” for my Letters project.

Although I was not inspired by Substack, who it turns out I was ripping off, I thought I should share what set me on this train of thought.

Jess shared a tweet thread by Michelle Huang about training GPT-3 on her diary. The result was the ability to have what Michelle felt were uncanny conversations with her younger self. It was an interesting example of using what I normally deem to be pretty creepy machine learning in a therapeutic context. As per usual for me, instead of coming away with thinking about all the things I bet I was supposed to think about, my takeaway was this– I don’t have much, if any, writing from my younger self. What journaling or writing I did is all lost to deleted LiveJournals, bulletin board forums, blogs, or hard drives erased and dumped. I don’t often mourn for this material, but this was the first time in a long while I thought, “If I knew about this possible future application, I might have saved more of what I wrote, even if it was just somewhere for me.”

A few hours later, I read about yet another famous, respected actor defending their colleagues who hold disgusting views. “We can’t ban people!” or some such “anti-woke” nonsense was their response, I believe. And my thought was, “One of the ways that our modern media climate is a mistake has been the direct access to artists.” Of course, this isn’t really true; direct access has enabled entirely knew ways to get paid to do art and build a large audience. But my thought stemmed from the idea that it is so much harder to separate the art from the artists these days. We have an all too direct line to the thoughts and feelings of famous people we admire, whether through social media or the expectations that they will speak to traditional media. And I wondered, would we be better off if all most of us ever knew of the artist was their work and how we understand it, at least until their death when their records and letters are released revealing all of their horrifying and deplorable beliefs? The thought was that I am almost more comfortable letting history understand people posthumously, while letting those of us who are the artist’s contemporaries experience only their output.

It is so much harder to believe the artist is dead when they won’t shut up.

It was these two thoughts, disconnected by several hours, that had me thinking about letters. I had the distinct idea of correspondence as this important way that people are revealed to us when they are gone. This also reminded me of the so-called Republic of Letters, which seemed to have been en vogue to reference during the “Will he or won’t he?” period of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase.

And so I thought, “In some ways, my blog represents my correspondence.” I publish on my own site to be in control of my content. This is the largest and most personal repository of my writing¹. It would be better if this blog was in conversation with others. That’s a part of the early web that I miss. We still link to other people, but rarely do I find blogs in conversation with each other.

Letters come from this.

Caveat— I’ve been outside of thinking about the big education philosophy stuff for some time and this may well be a repackaging of a core debate I read tons about and forgot.

This morning I was thinking about whether we need the schools that prepare kids for the world we have or the world we want to create. I think a fair amount of disagreement lives between these two positions. Then there’s the secondary conflict among those who want schools that prepare kids for the world we want to create, because they disagree with what that future world should be.

This came to mind reading an expert who felt it was important to look past whether a program is labeled as bilingual, English transition, or many incarnations in between when considering if an instructional program is empowering.

** This post included a twitter embed that is no longer available, because Elon Musk is a shit **

Artists have periods. During these periods, they create a certain kind of project and it runs its course. Then after a time of exploration, they often being creating again, producing a very different kind of art. Sometimes, they never make art again.

That seems almost impossible as a “creator” online today. The business model is fundamentally about broadcasting, in volume, with consistency.

Maybe this is more specific to “influencers”, but I don’t think so. Think of educational video makers on YouTube. Think of podcasters on episode 500. Think of paid newsletter writers. Think most blogs.

I think these projects need to have an end, or at least ending needs to be an easier option. There needs to be a healthy way to transition away when a project is done and the creativity has been thoroughly wrung out. I am not even sure we know how to talk about these things ending and let folks move on in a healthy way.

I can think of some prominent projects (in my corner) that came to an end. Every Frame a Painting. Minimal Mac. Hypercritical. But ending is the exception, and not the rule.

Being able to mark some thing as complete and move on, much like creating ephemeral, feels counter to our current cultural technology on the web.

For years, large crypto-based companies have been living on a huge hype machine. Whenever folks tried to understand where exactly any value was being created it always came down to one thing.

You reach the point of saying, “That sounds like a total scam in these ways!” The response to this was always, “You just don’t understand this, it’s very complicated and incredibly smart people can see what’s going on. Just look at how much this coin¹ is trading for!” Then you have to decide for yourself:

• Am I smart enough to understand this?
• The social proof is so significant, I may not understand this, or;
• I believe the social proof above my own understanding, and I’m getting on board.

I am hear to tell you that the first choice was always right, regardless of the incredibly wealthy people who decided to put significant, personal financial interest into convincing you that the second or third option were correct.

It’s just that now, it seems everyone is finally coming around to seeing they were duped.

Unbelievable that FTX and Binance are valued on the basis of crypto assets they created with absolutely no use other than a speculative circle jerk.

I don’t really follow 538 for my mental health, but I just saw that Nate Silver wrote some pieces as Nathan Redd and Nathan Bleu to provide two different perspectives for how things might go. I think that’s a great way to help people understand the probabilistic nature of modeling.

Consumers of popular media still struggle with 538 or with NYTimes and their needles on election night. It’s not because this form of journalism is not valuable or capturing important information. It’s because thinking in models and probabilities is still deeply unnatural for most folks.

In the practice of data visualization, there’s been all manner of attempts to visualize uncertainty. We add error bars. We add shaded regions. We play with jittering, simulations, alpha channels, and drawing curves. Folks have built simulators to demonstrate drawing from distributions or the structure of joint-probabilities and such.

But as in the world of policy research, even the most sophisticated folks are drawn strongly to point estimates.

Unfortunately, the idea of “getting it right” based on the point estimate remains a strong measure of success in the eyes of many. And deviations are not meant with an academic curiosity, examination of the data, or consideration of our own failing heuristics. People are angry because they rely on their perceptions, even when their perceptions are filled with unearned certainty built on the back of common failed heuristics.

When the point estimates have disappointed, too many folks have run back to journalism and commentary built entirely on vibes or declared polling and data journalism a failure. The post-mortem analysis on election modeling, which has been fascinating, thorough, and revealing over the last few years, was fully recast (unnecessarily) as an apology tour and still, we cling to the certainty of point estimates.

So Redd versus Bleu is a great idea. All of visualizations and numbers and technical explanations in the world have not provided the average media consumer with strong enough skills to interpret data with uncertainty. Instead of going back to the vibes op-ed to understand what’s going on, experts with the right skills for statistical inference can model how to understand the data from differing perspectives. Sure, it might trigger feelings of Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, but uncertainty is the reality we live in and the muck we have to understand.

I don’t always love Nate Silver, and I don’t always love 538, and I don’t always love how data journalism has shaped coverage of elections. But I think modeling statistical inference and interpretation of uncertain data from multiple perspectives in narrative form is an important tool. I hope to see this expand into more policy discussion space.

I think we’ve taken visualization and simulation as far as we can go for helping people to understand data. The next frontier is making the narrative steel man argument, from data, for different possible interpretations.

Eight years ago today, 6 months into my Allovue journey, I came down to Baltimore for a party in our small office above a bar. The party started at 6, and Ted and I still hovered over a laptop at 6:15pm. We excitedly called Jess over to show her– we just fully loaded our first set of general ledger accounts and transactions into Balance. It was, I hope, her favorite birthday present that year.

I’d be lying if I said that I knew that day was a key milestone in a life-defining adventure and partnership. It just seemed like a cool problem we solved.

Last week I had my appendix removed. It was not an experience I enjoyed.

I had to cancel two trips, my volleyball league and pickup games, and my gym membership, but luckily the appendectomy was more than 4 weeks before we plan to head to Mexico City for the winter. The big trip remains on, as scheduled, and I should be mostly recovered by the time we leave. Right now I’m mostly fighting late afternoon/early evening fatigue and sudden reminders that I still have holes and stitches in my abdomen.

I finally gave in on YouTube Premium– the ads were just too much– though I wish I could cut something out to reduce my monthly bills. If it weren’t for Elsa and her mom, I think Netflix would be top of my chopping block, which is remarkable.

Lately I’ve been itching for a new creative project. I’m not sure if it’ll be writing or music, tactile or technical. I’ve spent the year getting back in touch with the joy of being present in my body and putting in physical effort. Work takes up all the mental space and energy. With an eye toward what I want for 2023, I am starting to consider if there’s some way I can bring creativity into my life so that I can have mental joy outside of work the way I’ve found physical joy.

I’ve got a domain I’m itching to use for something.

Oh yeah, and we finally went to Cuba, with a trip originally booked for May 2020 as a gift to Elsa’s mom for Christmas 2019.

Small thing, but being laid up in the hospital did not mean I could catch up on reading. Even once recovering from surgery, I just couldn’t focus for more than 10 or so minutes on anything. I have never had my body so thoroughly shut down my mind. It wasn’t like I was sleeping either. And while time did pass slowly, it wasn’t the slowest time I’ve ever experienced.

We always say that healing takes work, and I’ve always thought I believed and respected that. I understand it on a completely different level now.

Day two out of the hospital, I was able to complete the delightfully nuts Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty and move on to the next one.

I’m sorry I’ll always associate this book with waiting at urgent care who said I could go to the ER to be certain, or go home and try and get a follow up with my PCP the next day (provided nothing got worse). Then the first ER where I wanted to be treated that had a 10 hour wait. Then the next ER when I was seen after an hour, was quickly told I almost certainly had appendicitis and it was a really good thing I showed up at the ER that night. Within another hour I had a CT scan, which, was a horrible experience (the X-ray contrast caused me to immediate convulse, gag, and vomit up bile into my mask, thankfully the only contents of my stomach since I hadn’t had an appetite for a day), and developed a temperature, both confirming the diagnosts. A 3 am transfer to another hospital where I could have the appendix removed. That unbelievable day of fever and pain while I waited for a 3pm surgery since I was unscheduled. Waking up, being told almost nothing, and feeling like my teeth were going to shatter I was shivering so severely because of how cold I felt. Carted back up to my room about 20 mins later and finally getting placed under warm blankets. Waking up some amount of time later (I have no idea how long the surgery took or when I finally woke all the way back up) and learned my appendix had been “perforated”— which I know means hole, but for some reason everyone said perforated or maybe “ruptured” but never “burst”— which is just great. My fever spiking to 102 at 5am and my only knowing that because I read the machine and not because the nurse told me. And another day and a half in the hospital in a ton of pain, but somehow, slowly getting better. Wanting to avoid withdrawal symptoms, I nearly always refused painkillers. I took oxy exactly twice— once the night when I came into the hospital from the ER when the pain was unbearable and I couldn’t sleep, and once after the surgery while my shivering made everything hurt. I haven’t taken once since I’ve been home and I doubt I will. But I should have taken a lot more oxy.

These last few months I’ve been as physically active as any time in my life— consistently lifting weights 3x a week, playing volleyball at least 3x most weeks as well, and trying to get in a good amount of walking every day. I had two trips planned before moving to Mexico for a couple of months this winter. I wanted to spend my time in Mexico doing a lot of barbell strength training to really bulk up on top of what is probably the best muscle base I’ve had at any point in my life.

Those trips are gone. We’re still going to Mexico, I hope, since I was cleared to fly after 4 weeks provided my recovery goes well. But instead of entering elevation at the peak of my physical fitness, I will come just barely recovered from the most physically traumatic experience I have ever had. Instead of bulking, I’ll be very cautiously and slowly reintroducing any form of resistance training— even if everyone says I’m fully recovered, am I really going to trust my body so quickly again? I’m going to be doing a lot of mental work alongside that physical work.

Modern medicine is a marvel. I’m not sure how anyone handled this without excellent general anesthesia, powerful intravenous antibiotics, and intravenous fluids. Without laparoscopic surgical techniques, which still left me with a nearly 8 inch incision, I can only imagine the pain and trauma. And although before and for at least 24 hours after, I could barely imagine recovering in a reasonable amount of time, 72 hours after surgery I’m doing pretty well. I can listen to a podcast again. I can read again. I could write this post. I can walk around the house confidently. I can believe better health is coming again.

I am not grateful for this experience, but I am grateful that until I was 35 I never had so much as a broken bone or a single surgery. I am hopeful, quite against the odds, it will be at least another 35 years before I need another surgery. I am so glad that I was able to recognize I was still feeling worse, and I should just go to the ER, even if I was convinced it was going to be some combination of gas/constipation. I’m not really sure what would have happened if I tried to sleep it off in bed and my appendix had burst at home. I wouldn’t be writing this post today, that’s for sure.

At some point this year, I made it a goal to refresh my resumé by April. I did not do that. I still have not done that.

My goal wasn’t to go seek another job, but instead, to turn this into an exercise of reclaiming my professional narrative. I’ve been at the same company for eight years now, but that company, and my role there, has grown dramatically in that time. What has not really evolved is my self-perception or the story I tell about myself to others.

I failed to meet my goal, and I don’t see a new resumé happening any time soon. But the achievement is not a new document, but a change of mindset and understanding of myself. That project remains, as it ever will be, on-going, but I think I’ve made some quiet progress on this front.

I was reminded of this failed goal today when I had to write out a short, four sentence personal biography. I realized there were things I listed confidently I would not have a year ago (volleyball) and things that were missing that would have been there most of my life (anything music related). My self-perception can, has, and needs to evolve regarding my personal life just like my professional life ¹.

I think I should be asking, “Who am I?” more often. It’s not as though my motivations, emotions, and actions have stopped continually expanding, contracting, or shaping a constantly changing self. We are what we feel and do, whether or not we take notice of it. The conscious, narrative sense-making I engage has a natural tendency to lag reality.

My contacts have slowly deteriorated in fit over the course of 18 months. This now leads to having to regularly take them out, clean them, and reinsert them in the middle of the day. It’s terribly inconvenient when out of the house. The process of getting new lenses is pretty involved. Even though I’ve already done my first appointment for my new fit, because my lenses are custom made, it can take 3-4 weeks easily to get a pair back from the manufacturer. And when that pair comes, there’s often a need for adjustments. It’s not unusual to have to go back 3 or 4 times over the course of months to get lenses with a good enough fit that I can then wear them for 12-18 months before going through the process again.

All of this for a pair of contacts that would cost me $1500-2000 easily, out of pocket, were it not for having just the right kind of insurance that covers one pair of medically necessary contacts a year. I say the “right kind” because the distinction isn’t even “good” or “bad”– at least in the US. It seems somewhat arbitrary (based on online forums) which health insurers will cover scleral lenses and which will not.

Ultimately, things are not so bad. I have not yet had to have a cornea transplant (though this is a real possibility one day). I can see 20-20 with my contacts, despite significant corneal scarring in one of my eyes. Although I do get some intense glare at night, I can still drive, especially short distances. I have some daytime light sensitivity, but I’ll trade that for being able to buy non-prescription sunglasses. I also don’t have the discomfort some people experience, and routinely wear my lenses 14-15 hours a day. There are all kinds of people on Reddit who proclaim they are suicidal over their keratoconus diagnosis, but at least from my experience and my situation, that seems bonkers.

It just makes me wonder what would happen if I were living in a different time or income bracket. I’m effectively unsighted without my contacts. So although my lenses these days are constantly getting covered in schmutz and getting new ones are a pain in the ass, I am grateful.

Tipping has gotten out of control. I tip everywhere, because I am relatively affluent. But I resent the idea that everywhere I buy things (thanks Square/Toast/Clover/whatever) asks about tips. Not every service job should be reliant on tips.

So many of the things I buy today also have service fees. Why is Lyft charging me a separate gas surcharge? Restaurants are separately charging for delivery and service fees.

It is well past time for a legal remedy. Tips, service fees, and surcharges are nonsense. Charge what you need to charge to pay people a proper wage and achieve the profit margin you need, period.

Prices should be reported with taxes included as well, while we’re at it.

I had this great product that was a face moisturizer with SPF30 that was designed to be rubbed into your beard as well. It was discontinued, and I still can’t find a solid replacement.

Even with what feels like an increase in men’s skincare products in recent years, we’re still well behind what’s marketed to women.

Look, I think there’s a huge pink tax that’s at least 50% bullshit products that shouldn’t be sold to anyone. There’s also no reason to gender 95% of these things. But there should be protective skin products that are designed to work with and for facial hair.

The opening to this piece made it sound like it was just about some argument between two public-ish, intellecutal-ish, journalist-ish people. Blech.

But I kept reading, and it’s actually an excellent defense of and argument for the use of “semi-fascist” to describe Trump and his movement.

The fact of the matter is this: Trumpism at its core is a movement fixated on restoring national greatness through the charismatic leadership of a single providential individual who “alone can fix it.” It is obsessed with national decline and attacking internal enemies. Although more loosely organized and weaker than those of the classical Fascisms, MAGA also has paramilitary formations that have tried to carry out this project to the point of attempting the overthrow an elected government. From the very beginning of his political ascent, he attracted the interest and enthusiasm of the extreme right: he was the kind of thing they’d been looking for for a long time. Perhaps now a disappointment, perhaps now a failure, but certainly a step in the right direction as far as they were concerned.

It’s worth the read, even if the opening was a bit insider-baseball cringe.

Although, for what it’s worth, within the cringe was my first introduction to A.O. Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction. I immediately recognized all three arguments, and I’m quite certain I’ve made some of them myself. I’m definitely going to read Hirschman now, and I’m sure I’ll notice these “theses” all over the internet.

In the construction of his arguments he closely follows something similar to A.O. Hirschman’s famous theses from his Rhetoric of Reaction: the “perversity thesis,” where any action actually result in the opposite of its intent, the “futility thesis,” where any action will actually accomplish nothing, and the “jeopardy thesis,” where any action will threaten some already accomplished social good. These three simple guides provide a template for the pundit for a long career in journalism. They give the appearance of thoughtfulness and counter-intuitive brilliance, when they just methods to generate rote responses.

The last six months have been better than the six months before that.

I said this year was going to be about fun. I didn’t really know what that meant. I just knew that 2021, especially from about June on, was a real slog, and a times, quite dark.

If I had to guess what “fun” meant, I don’t think I would have said, “Your once a week volleyball league will turn into a 3-4 time a week thing.” If I’m in Baltimore, just about every Monday through Thursday, I’m playing volleyball. These days it’s mostly indoor pickup, where folks just show up and self-organize. I’ve learned I really don’t like playing in the sand. I get home tired. My body often hurts. But it’s the most fun I’ve had in years.

I’ve even made some friends, which is pretty great, because my best friend moved away this summer.

I’ve been listening a fair amount to three new albums by Cave In, Porcupine Tree, and Dashboard Confessional, which feels would make as much sense in 2002 as 2022.

Somehow, my household has continued to be COVID-free, and with at least seven trips between now and the end of the year, I am anxious for a fresh Omicron-specific booster.

The dogs are great.

I’m thinking about adding an About page of sorts to the blog. Possibly replacing “Uses” or making Uses a section on that page.