It’s relatively well-known, at this point, that allowing ourselves to feel gratitude is a calming, anxiety-reducing, happiness-inducing, overall psychologically healthful exercise. Reflecting, meditating, praying, journaling—anything we do to remind ourselves of the wonderful people and things and experiences from which…
I’m in the process of rethinking my platform use, moving things around, and reconfiguring various projects and online presences. This process is partly the consequence of a semi-regular desire to shuffle the components of my life and try out new…
I believe that looking for commonalities and shared concerns will typically lead to better outcomes than creating and reinforcing tribal (in the sociological sense of the word) labels, reflexively opposing anyone not of Our tribe and attempting to claim more…
Our lives are stippled with parasocial relationships. We engage with other peoples’ work and feel connected to those people as a consequence. Sometimes these relationships go deeper and we make contact with these makers-of-things, and sometimes we engage with photos of…
I semi-regularly catch myself fixating on minutiae. This is possibly the consequence of my tendency to become absorbed in whatever I’m doing (and to assiduously quash distractions and the temptation of multitasking), though it might also be a component of…
We are (alarmingly but maybe predictably) tumbling into holiday shopping season early this year. Tidal waves of deals are flooding the market as not-good back-to-school sale figures alarm analysts, and as a looming potential global recession triggered by a slurry…
A few weeks ago I decided to kill one of my projects. I’ve been running a little podcast called I Will Read To You since September of 2021, and in the past little-over-a-year I’ve recorded and published nearly 200 poems…
I’ve been in Seattle, visiting family and pet-sitting for a week. I’ve been sick for nearly the same duration. I had a few days of relative normalcy and then—immediately after driving back from the dock where I dropped my sister,…
One of my favorite myth-related conceptual labels is that of chess tournament centaurs: a human who plays with computer assistance. Centaur players tend to outperform both software and human players, though sometimes straight-up AI will have the advantage and some…
I think (and write) about consumption a lot, because—as someone who loves to create things—what I consume informs what I produce, and the time and energy I spend consuming are resources I cannot use to make things. Consequently, I use…