Big, Vague Goals
I like to set sprawling, ill-defined goals for myself, and then figure out how best to accomplish them along the way. This is a counter-intuitive approach to goal-setting, I know, but it tends to assuage some of the downsides of…
Sewing Buttons
It was thrilling for me, the first time I sewed a button onto a shirt. I was sitting in a conference room, waiting for a meeting to start, and one of the buttons on my favorite polo—a shirt I’d owned…
Landscape Portraits
It can be difficult to balance the presumed prudence of digging deep into a particular field, a particular topic or profession, with the desire to explore more widely; to dabble in other realms of inquiry and to invest portions of…
Self-Reported
For about a month, I’ve been tracking my sleep habits using two different sensors. One of these sensors is tucked under my mattress, plugged into the wall, and connected to my apartment’s WiFi. It keeps track of movement, and seems…
Tiny Upgrades
I started running again recently. Back in my college years I ran five to ten miles per day as part of my intercollegiate Ultimate Frisbee workout routine. That continued to a lesser degree, just a few miles a day, when…
Flappability
There’s something to be said for a Stoic response to difficult or uncomfortable situations. To be more specific, it’s nice to be able to step back and assess things from a mental distance. To recognize and acknowledge what’s happening, but…
Metacognitive Exercises
Why did I just do that? This is a question I try to ask myself regularly. Being conscious of the reasons behind our actions isn’t something most of us are taught to make time for, but I find it’s an…
Planning for the Fire
There’s something wrong with the fire detection system in my apartment building. In the five months since I moved to Memphis, we’ve had probably twenty false-alarms, the siren in the hallway just outside my flat blaring an enduring, ear-shattering sonic…
Regular Revolutions
Milestones are valuable tools. They’re endpoints that aren’t real in the sense that a rock is real—there’s no physical law stating that the approximate end of a journey around the sun starting from an arbitrary point we happen to use…
Surface Tension
There’s a superficial level to every discussion. If you follow this conceptual thread far enough, you’ll find that language itself is just a coded analogy that allows us to approximate meaning to each other, verbally and with written glyphs. But…