“Why so dreary? It’s not as if the world is ending.”

It was an innocent enough question, but the answer was complicated. Outside, the sky was bright, lined with a few puffy clouds. They looked inviting, as if beckoning one to climb in and relax awhile. If she didn’t know better, Fabina would have thought sure, no way was the world ending. But it was ending, and she was the only person who knew it.

“Seriously, you’re lost in thought and I’m right here, are you okay?” Piper was one of those friends who could read between the lines so well it felt like she was reading your mind. She was the kind of friend you’d want to have along to witness the end of the world.

Fabina let her gaze drop from the clouds and looked at her friend. “The world is ending, Piper. We need to get out of here.”

Piper stared at her. “How long have we got? Oh, and when were planning on telling me?! You’ve been holding out, girl.”

“A week, if we’re lucky.” Fabina took a sip of her coffee and smiled. “I figured I’d tell you, oh, a minute or so ago. When you were ready.”

Piper rolled her eyes. “Some sage you are. Come on, let’s go. Sounds like we’ve got some work to do.”

Fabina laughed and fished for her keys from her bag. “You’d better not spill my coffee on the ride. We’re gonna need it.” The two friends got up from the table and headed out the gate.

“Whoa, this is yours? Never pegged you for a biker. Damn, this is nice.” Piper admired the gleaming blue road bike with purple and red-hued flames curling along the side.

“I figured since we didn’t have much time left around here, I might as well get around in style. You like?” Fabina sat down on the side of the bike, then suddenly kicked her legs up and did a full two-seventy spin before straddling the bike. She wagged her eyebrows at Piper and started the engine. “You got moves like that in you? I’m only friends with people who do, so you’d better. And you’d better not do a stupid cartwheel.”

Piper grinned at her, then turned away. Suddenly, she spun the coffee mug and tossed it into the air, then dove into a back handspring. She effortlessly launched herself into the air and with a slight twist landed cleanly astride the bike. “Your coffee, madame,” she said as she caught Fabina’s mug. “Not one dropped spilled.”

Fabina grinned with a sigh and shook her head, feeling better knowing she didn’t have to go it alone. She revved the engine a few times, and marveled at its power. Piper tapped her shoulder. “Where to?”

“The sunset,” Fabina said. “It’s almost time.”

It’s day 30 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

It doesn’t take much right now to recognize that by simply being a person of difference, be it an immigrant, person of color, queer, trans, woman, or otherwise different, one’s humanity can be removed from them for the sake of politics. I know this because I came of age during a time in which my very identity was declared to be a choice. Rights for gay people were contested first for so-called “moral” reasons, then because we had the same rights as everyone else and being able to be treated equally under the law would be a “special” right (as in, queer people had the right to marry someone, so long as they were of the opposite sex).

What happens to one’s sense of self when society places such limits on a fundamental aspect of their humanity? We are forced to live in the closet, hiding in fear that should we let ourselves shine, we may be hurt, or hurt the ones we love. Having grown up in a religious tradition which did not embrace gay people, it compounded what I perceived from the culture at large. I came of age when queer people first could not serve their country, then could only do so if they swore never to tell a soul.

It took years for me to accept myself, then even longer to have the courage and the strength to live my truth. The result? I’ve been able to live with integrity and serve my community. I give back in as many ways as I can, and I strive to use the gains from my own life as a means to help lift up others.

The world I envision is one which embraces everyone, no matter their national origin, their language spoken, their sexuality, gender identity, or their religion. I advocate for a world which supports those who are ill and does not bankrupt them. One which offers food and shelter for all, not only those who can afford to pay for it. I work, and vote, for causes which protect this earth we live on so that we can enjoy it for generations to come, and I reject the notion that its resources should be used for gain.

It can seem an insurmountable goal, but I hope that be keeping these lofty visions, and continuing to talk about them, we can keep that hope alive no matter what.

It’s day 29 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

If you follow the world of tech, it’s easy to find instances of dogma. Mark Zuckerberg would rather the world collapse into fascism than have his company be regulated. Adam Newman founded WeWork, an office rental company, and insisted it was actually a way of life.

In both instances, these men have elevated their relative businesses into their own forms of religion: they alone know the one true way, and they alone are the only ones to be trusted to lead this.

I suspect, on some level, that this is a result of what economists are finding to be more and more extreme capitalism in this country. The common theme flowing through everything in tech right now is money: from investors hoping for insatiable growth so they can line their pockets with extreme returns on their investments, to cash grabs in the form of initial public offerings for companies, such as Uber and Lyft, which are not actually profitable and used venture capital to undercut their competition and boost use of their services.

This addiction to capitalism is itself cause for the war and strife, in the same way that religion has for centuries done the same. It’s up to us to recognize it, and in this case, literally use the power of our own resources to cultivate change.

It’s day 28 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

We’re living in challenging times, and it’s hard to feel hopeful about the world as we see so much of it arguing and fighting over power, control, status, money. I’ve alluded to this before, that something I find incredibly comforting when facing significant personal challenge is to gaze at the sky and marvel at the stars. It is with this in mind that I want to offer this poem:

I hope you look to the stars
And marvel at their splendor
Light traveled millions of years
To show you something beautiful

I hope you look to the ocean
Feel the waves wash your spirit clean
Find solace in the irregular rhythm
And lose yourself in its wisdom

I hope you look to the trees
See the life they so generously sustain
They rise in all their splendor
And speak through the rustling of leaves

I hope you look to the earth

And see not profit to be made

But wonders to embrace and love

To share with others now and forever

It’s day 27 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

There’s a danger as we get older to tie our identity to what we do, or where we work. I fell into the this trip a few years ago, becoming very tied to a specific position and the associated role and title I held there. This lead me to hold onto this job much longer than I should have, and the toxic environment it spiraled into left me feeling broken. I had up that point not experienced anxiety in an acute way, and had no framework of recognizing that anxiety and depression can result from seemingly “external” factors. Burnout, and hostile work environment, can certainly do that.

My decision to leave was in large part a decision of self-preservation, and it remains to this day one of the wisest decisions I’ve ever made. The aftermath left me reeling, and struggling with a complete sense of loss of my own identity. How would I move forward? How had this thing I had worked so hard for come crashing down so swiftly? How was it that I had built skills, and yet had suddenly lost them?

It turns out, much of what I experienced was directly related to burnout and a hostile work environment. My recovery from this has had an interesting trajectory: once I began to re-establish my own identity to myself, I became more committed to a sense of self and less committed to a sense of place. I am what I do, not where I do it, as it were.

Further, I think often about this pivotal experience of my life, and use it as a bit of a North Star to guide me and keep me grounded. By processing what went wrong, it’s less of a scar now and more of a guide. Contrary to conventional pop wisdom, it didn’t happen for a reason. But I have learned a great deal from it, and for that, it feels like less a loss to me now than it did to me then.

It’s day 26 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

Over the course of my life, I’ve been filled with aspirations to be like others I admire. This changes from one day, week, or year to another. When working with patients with swallowing disorders, I wish I could be like the mentors I’ve identified (most often, unbeknownst to them). Perhaps it’s the many women who helped me understand the fundamentals of speech and swallowing anatomy and physiology. Perhaps it’s the man who pioneered much of the research into the role of oral health to swallowing function.

When interpreting, I wish to be like the Deaf mentors and Deaf interpreters who are always teaching me when they don’t realize it. Their vision, and their perception, make me challenge what I see and make me strive to improve.

When training on Ninja obstacles, I watch my peers and coaches and wish I could do what they do. But I don’t have their strength, or their body; I have my own, and my body has been teaching me what it can do right now, and what it can’t yet do. It has taught me to go at my own pace, and that with patience and consistency, I can develop my own skills.

In so many areas of my life, I want to fill the shoes of the people I admire in whatever it is I do. But I am me, and the only ones whose shoes I can fill are my own. Try as I might, I can’t become those I admire, but I can use their wisdom and generosity to inform who I am and what I do. Lately, I have realized just how many people, from all walks of life, influence me. A mortician helps me learn how to think about death, and in turn, life. Graphic designers have helped me think about design in ways beyond nice imagery and graphics. A fabulous hair stylist has taught me the value of taking pride in the work I do, not to mention a surprising amount about business. A tidying expert has changed how I, a sentimentalist at heart, relate to my possessions.

My shoes are one of a kind, because they are made up of influences seemingly at odds with one another, and yet working in harmony because they are all influencing the same person: me. And while I will no doubt catch myself wishing otherwise at some point, I am grateful that these are the shoes I get to wear each day.

It’s day 25 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

I am among the many in this country who have student loan debt. I count myself lucky ones in some respects: I went to a state school and only had one year of out-of-state tuition, plus I worked part-time throughout graduate school and lucked into a number of grants along the way. Still, I landed up in more debt than I would have liked, and have spent the last nine years slowly working my way out.

Early on, a wise clinic instructor pointed out that my monthly payments were the cost of working in the field I wanted to. That’s a fair point, but just as fair a point is that I’ve been repaying that price for three times longer than I spent getting my degree.

There’s no question that tuition costs are rising, and were I to seek the same degree now that I did ten years ago, it would cost significantly more.

The loan “counseling” that’s required to take out loans for school is a joke (basically, it emphasizes that there’s a six-month deferment period, and you need to pay on time every month). Very little time is spent explaining how loans incur interest, and how interest must always be paid before principal. What should be explained is how to quickly and easily calculate the percentage of your payment which goes towards principal (hint: it’s much, much higher than the annual interest rate you’re quoted; as in, a minimum payment on my biggest loan, before refinancing, had 68-70% of each payment going toward principal, so I was lucky to pay down just $1,000 in principal per year at that rate).

There’s plenty of places to point to in terms of just how poorly educated we are about money and finances, but it comes down to just that: for a country as preoccupied as it is with capitalism, there’s scant attention paid to this most fundamental aspect of math and economics: the ability to navigate the world of money in a functional way.

It’s day 24 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

It’s become apparent that our infrastructure In this country is not something to take for granted, and it is also something which is too easily taken advantage of. I can think of two examples, off the top of my head, which demonstrate how insistence on infrastructure can be used for ill purposes.

The first is in Albuquerque: years ago, a vote was requested of residents about removing ancient historical artifacts from Native communities in order to extend a road to a part of town with development interests. The people of the city did the right thing and roundly rejected this measure. The following year, those same developers took that defeat and moved it into the roads portion of the vote, signaling the following: if you want to preserve history and respective Native communities and their land, you’ll do so at the expense of the roads you drive on, because we’ll no longer maintain them. Unfortunately, the people without a sacred history seem to have won, which alas is not all that surprising in this country.

The second is in Houston, Texas: in order to address considerable traffic congestion, the city is proposing building even more highways. To do so, hundreds of residents will lose their homes, children will lose their schools, and businesses would be forced to close. Unsurprisingly, this advancement in the name of improved infrastructure would affect mostly “people of color in low-income neighborhoods”.

As I’ve noted previously, I’ve lived through an expansion of a highway that did virtually nothing to actually improve traffic; rather, it increased the traffic demands further.

We are in significant need of reframing what infrastructure means. First and foremost, I believe that means we need to start recognizing that we need to reduce our dependence on cars as a means of transportation, and focus on truly alternative methods of transit (and no, electric cars are not the solution here, because they’re still cars). We also need to emphasize a cultural shift away from consumerism and extreme capitalism; we instead need to focus on quality of life, and finding ensuring that people of many walks of life are able to enjoy it, rather than those with the most resources and privilege. This is a concept called eudaimonia, which I learned from Umair Haque (his writing on the topic is well worth reading, and his writing on economics and history are similarly worthwhile; sadly, right now he also has to write considerably about fascism, the world being what it is right now).

I hope that as we continue to learn and have these conversations, we can focus on eudaimonia and work together towards a better future with a better infrastructure for all.

It’s day 23 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

With the state of the world being what it is, I find myself looking wherever I can to find good. Things worth recognizing, celebrating, even toasting (a ritual that is too confined to formal ceremony and therefore a bit cliche, but something I think we could use more of on an ongoing basis).

Here’s a small sample of toasts worth recognizing for my own past week:

• Spending time at the Ninja gym working out with friends
• Reaching out to a couple of friends who live out of state, who I hope to visit next year
• Neighbors I can reach out to when something goes awry (like this morning, when our garage was broken into; WTF to the dude who did that, though)
• My patients, who challenge me and make me motivated to learn and find creative ways to help them through their respective challenges. Their resilience and determination in the face of uncertainty is humbling.
• Taking some time to read a book about traveling the world in search of the good death, learn from it and gaining new insights about myself and the world around me.

It’s day 22 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

I am not what some would consider to be in any way athletic. Though I’m often asked if I used to play American football (due mostly to my build), I’ve never been interested in it, and for the most part am not a fan. (The reasons are many, but to sum it up quickly: (1) I work with many people with head injuries, some resulting from sports, and I find the NFL’s continued efforts to downplay chronic head injury among players to be irresponsible; (2) I’m simply not a fan of the way the game is played; (3) I support players who continue to highlight racial inequality and injustice.)

Perhaps in part due to not much enjoying organized sports, I’ve never considered myself athletic or taken much time to focus on health and fitness. That first changed a few years ago, when I became enthralled by Zumba, so much so that I became an instructor. This year, that energy has transformed into a love for obstacle gyms and the body weight training that accompanies it. While it can be a competitive sport, to me it’s been a delightful way to relearn how to play. The side effects of fitness are of course welcome, and the even greater side effect of improved mental health has been an unexpected bonus.

At this stage in my life, I like to refer to my fitness philosophy as “Team Technique”. That is, while the younger folks (and the more competitive folks of any age) like to push for time, I’m much more interested in whether I can simply do something, and care little about the time it takes to do it. This has the benefit of learning to control my movement while also hopefully mitigating risk of injury.

In this current sport of my life, the only one I’m competing with is me. Every week, I try to improve my skill or strength in some way. It’s the most fun I’ve had with any sort of physical fitness or training in years, and I hope to continue this journey for years to come.

It’s day 21 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

I have learned lately that some things in life will take from you far more than they ever return. Sometimes, it’s up to us find meaning in things after the fact. For example, the last full-time position I held was one I absolutely loved. But there was a coworker who made it, over time, become a dreadful environment for me to work in. Try as I might, I was unable to work through the proper channels to improve my situation. As one might think of an unrequited love, I was faced with a decision: I could hold on for something that clearly was not a healthy place for me, or I could move on.

After a lot of deliberation, I chose to move on.

While the immediate aftermath was filled with confusion, I eventually was able to establish some footing and worked my way into more independent environments. And while there’s some sadness for having left behind what I did, there’s far more I took away from it than appeared at first glance.

I’ve learned a great deal about management, both good and bad, from that experience. I’ve learned how to recognize a hostile work environment, and how I respond to it. I’ve learned the necessity of advocating for myself, because if I don’t, not only do I face consequences of burnout and emotional distress, I’m less able to do the best I can for the patients who trust me with their care.

There are, without question, times in our life when we face choices we’d much rather not make. But if we make them with care, and learn from them no matter how distasteful the outcome originally, we can go far.

I detest the sentiment that ‘everything happens for a reason.’ It’s utter bullshit, and bullshit I heard all the time when in the thick of this experience from well-meaning people who wanted to help me feel better. What happened to me shouldn’t have happened at all, but it did. It was up to me to learn from it and use that pain as a chance to grow.

It’s day 20 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

I don’t think of myself this way most of the time, but I love ideas. I can picture all sorts of different possibilities, and see potential. I can create a clear picture in my head of a bird’s eye view of where I am now, and where I would like to be at some arbitrary point in the future.

Where I struggle, then, is figuring out how to get from one point to another. I struggle with wanting things to be perfect, and as I’m writing this out, it’s dawning on me that perhaps the reason why is because I can’t as clearly visualize the steps, and the inevitable evolution, of the process itself. This leads to a fear of getting started, and I fight myself trying to push forward and take the chance. By focusing on the end in my head, I’m missing out on the process to get there.

The primary fear I often have is that something won’t turn out as good as I hope it will. Usually, if I procrastinate for too long, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The secondary fear I notice is that the result will be different than I expect. This is almost always the case, but usually in a way that is either better, or at least not worse.

This inner struggle plays out in many areas of my life: writing reports for my speech therapy practice, creating workshops for continuing education, and even writing on this very website.

I’d like to leave this here as a reminder to myself that I can do this, and that I grow and learn more by taking the leap than I ever will be waiting until just the “right moment” for it.

It’s day 19 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

I make sense of a lot of my world through music. It’s one of my first loves, and something that has gotten me through plenty of hard times. I’m a big fan of listening to albums, more so than songs on shuffle, and when I click with a band or an album, I’ll listen to it on repeat until it settles in.

One of my current favorite bands is Rebelution, a reggae band from California. I had no idea who they were until one day several years ago when I happened to be at a concert they played. They captivated me from the start, and I’ve been listening to them, and seeing them live whenever I can, ever since.

Because of the current political climate, there’s plenty of stress, and it’s hard to watch just how much the people our youth are supposed to look up to are filled with enmity towards anyone who doesn’t look like them, share their religious background, or where they come from.

What I know is that my life has long been richer thanks to the people from many walks of life I’ve been lucky to call friends, even for a short while. Hearing Rebelution Celebration gives me hope that I’m not alone in that sentiment, and I want to keep sharing that message that love and kindness are the most important things we can champion right now.

You know you’ll never be strange to us

We know you got something to offer up

Just be loving and kind

And that’ll keep you in line

It’s day 18 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

Life has a way of making you think you need to be serious as an adult. Certainly, there’s the usual responsibilities that come along with life, but it’s really occurred to me over the past year especially that there needs to be room for fun.

Health is a steadily marching priority, and I see plenty of people my age trying to “gamify” health. Close all the rings on your Apple Watch, hit those 10,000 steps on your Fitbit, etc. Of course, while there’s plenty to be said for accomplishing both, the ones who really want us to do that are the ones who have a vested interest in us tracking ourselves. Having used a Fitbit on and off for a few years, I’ve seen just how much sway those things can have on your life.

The fun I’ve (re)discovered lately is a more fundamental one: that of letting go of what I’m holding onto for a while and playing. This has been helped in large part by joining a Ninja-style obstacle gym earlier this year: in that time, I’ve reconnected with some of the things I loved the most in my childhood. Climbing around on bars, swings, and jumping on trampolines. I’ve also discovered new things to enjoy: swinging on moving objects, scaling walls or beams, climbing poles and leaping to mats down below.

Over the weekend, we were taking a walk in a neighborhood and my husband spotted a playground as well as some of those playground-adjacent exercise machines. I don’t much care for treadmills or elliptical machines, but I was happy to do some inverted rows on one of the bars, and then we climbed some cargo net and I did some dead hangs too.

It broke up the walk, and it made us both smile the moment we started romping around. In addition to the movement and the physiological benefits like increasing heart rate, exchanging oxygen, etc, it flushed our system with endorphins.

For me, fitness and health are best enjoyed not as some type of game with rules to follow and scores to reach, but as something playful that can encompass whatever I like at any given time. It feels like a win-win… I get to run around and play on a jungle gym with friends, and in the process I’ve found myself leaning out and getting stronger.

But the best part? It’s been great for my soul, giving my brain a break from the responsibility that weighs it down so much of the time. All because I’ve been re-learning how to play.

It’s day 17 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

This weekend, we spent the weekend in Santa Fe. While there, we visited the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, which had a few wonderful exhibits and showcased the history of Native people in this country through their art and culture.

Having grown up in New Mexico, I’ve been lucky to have close Native friends of varying backgrounds throughout my life, and they’ve formed much of my sense of humor through their culture and friendship. I didn’t realize just how much until I was reading about a Diné (Navajo) tradition for a baby around three months old: whoever makes a baby laugh first gets to throw a party in celebration of the the baby joining their earthly family.

I love learning about different cultures and ways of life, and this one was something unexpected to learn about and is something I imagine I’ll think about for a long time to come.

It’s day 16 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

In my work as a speech pathologist and as an interpreter, I frequently find myself thinking about different expressions and their underlying meaning. A few that have come to mind recently:

• Please bear with me.
• Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room.
• They eat like a bird.
• Hold your horses.
• It’s raining cats and dogs. / They fought like cats and dogs.
• Don’t have a cow.
• He’s a real stubborn ass.
• He’s a pig / He’s hogging the [item of choice]
• Sly like a fox.
• Get the lion’s share.

It’s interesting how the world around us, and the animals we’re lucky to enjoy as part of it, have such a profound influence on how we talk. It’s also interesting to see the sexism ascribed implicitly within. Eating like a bird, for example, is something I most often here spoken toward women, and is most often intended to mean that one pecks lightly at one’s food. Every bird I’ve observed eating does so with gusto, and according to one source, birds actually eat a lot relative to their size.

Here’s to keeping the good expressions and hogwash to ones which target anyone’s size or perceived gender.

It’s day 15 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

I’ve recently begun to recognize the need for renovation in a few areas of my life. The first area, as I often seem to be writing about right now, was this website. My personal website had gotten dusty and largely neglected. The more attention I give it, the more I realize what was missing for me. I shifted services, simplified things, and recognized that over-worrying about the details was keeping me from doing the number one thing I wanted a personal website to do: give me space to write about things I care about.

Another area that needed renovation was finances, and frankly, this is still an area under continuous improvement. It started with refinancing student loans: even with a “low” federal interest rate, I was putting over 60% of every payment towards interest, and about 18 months ago I decided to start paying them down more aggressively. I finally refinanced the last federal one. I’m paying far more than I was before, but it’s helping knock out principal. What’s been helpful? Deciding I needed a budget, and getting a good look at what goes where. Big lessons learned: auto-saving every month is great, unless you’re sending money to savings which you’ve already spent on credit cards (I’m one who spends on cards for points and then pays in full each month; the rewards I like best are the ones that can be used as cash toward my balance).

A final area of renovation in my life has been learning to take care of myself. This means working to support myself and my husband, and taking time out to rest, give back to the community, and rejuvenate.

What’s interesting is seeing the intersection of all these areas and how they affect one another. Budgeting properly has helped pay loans more readily, while also simplifying my financial life and helping me feel more confident with decisions. It’s also helped me set aside money each month so that I can have moments where I can take care of myself. With a physically and emotionally challenging job, this has meant scheduling a massage therapy appointment once every 4-6 weeks (ideally; sometimes it ends up longer, but so it goes). The routine aspect helps by making it something that I value, and it’s something I look forward to and enjoy the benefits of later.

These things collectively help me see more clearly what I want, what I value, and work more specifically towards those things which bring me the most joy and benefit. It’s also helped prevent me from reaching the point of burnout, which I’m prone to doing. It’s an ongoing process, but taking time out to reflect like this is certainly a nice way to see where I was, where I am, and where I hope to be.

It’s day 14 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

One of the interesting things about being back to writing more online has been giving myself permission to rethink things. The function of the personal blog, in many ways, is to think out loud. What makes it a unique medium is that others can write and respond, and you can learn from one another in unexpected ways. This is different from the stream of what’s become social media, in that the stream is really more akin to a firehose.

When you think about the dreaded term “engagement” which social media companies like to discuss, it often seems to take the shape of who can say the most, the loudest, the most frequently, the fastest. Take one look at the news and see how much coverage is devoted to tweets by the president, and you’ll see what I mean. Never mind that the president likes to threaten nuclear war on the platform, and stoke the flames of white supremacy, look how much engagement we have on our platform! Look at how many favorites and retweets and replies and eyeballs viewing all this information!

Recycling, in the manner I’m discussing here, relates to a return to the hobby that helped me see the good in the Internet to begin with. Writing longer form posts, and especially with this month of November being dedicated to daily posts, has made me see the true value of writing online. Instead of a quick tweet to show I’m thinking something, or trying to create a cohesive thread with counts at the end of each tweet, this writing requires more care and attention. Sure, it’s a stream of consciousness alone, but it’s less reactive and it’s easy to edit what I want before I click ‘post’.

The Internet is in desperate need of recycling. We need the fine folks who migrated away from independent writing, even of small thoughts or ideas, to return to the places they got started. We need a diaspora. We need many places and platforms which can connect with the power of the hyperlink, and we need far more people controlling far less large quantities of our Internet.

It’s day 13 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

Every morning, I usually like to start my day by brewing a cup of coffee. I typically enjoy my coffee black, or occasionally with a splash of cream, when I brew it myself at home. In the morning, my preference is always for my coffee to be hot, irrespective of the time of year. While I’ve certainly heard that drinking a hot beverage on a hot day is the best way to cool down, for me it boils down to comfort. There’s nothing quite like a hot drink to start my day.

I’ve read that for some coffee nerds (I suppose I could include myself there, but I daresay I’m on the mild to moderate side of the coffee nerd spectrum), the important part of coffee is the ritual. For others, it’s the need for caffeine. I fall in neither camp, most days; there’s certainly days I go without, due to time or other factors, and I rarely feel that sense of craving or other symptom of dependence. I like to think I do that from time to time to prevent a physiological dependence, but it’s never a conscious decision. (And, in the interest of fully fleshing this idea out, I may very well be dependent on it; but for the sake of this discussion, I like to think that’s not the case.)

For me, it’s a simpler reason I enjoy it: having a nice hot cup of coffee in the morning is just about the only part of my life which is consistent. My work schedule is unpredictable from one day to the next, and on a given week, I can have a first start to the day in a different place every day of the week. So that cup of coffee? It helps ground me (pun surprisingly not intended, but recognized and embraced almost immediately) in a way that other things can’t.

The simple act of heating some water in a kettle and taking a moment to gently brew a pour over cup of coffee is something I look forward to and enjoy every day. When all else is up in the air, at least I can make a good cup of coffee and go from there.

It’s day 12 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

I was raised on oldies music. Once I’d memorized the typical rotation fo Oldies radio as a young middle school-aged music fan, I graduated to classic rock and did the same. I worked my way up to 80’s metal bands, and onward to the 90’s music, and I’ll never forget the first time I heard Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio. It clicked with me in a powerful way, and all these years later it still does.

The Internet as we know it was far from anyone’s radar at that point in time, so there was no way to do a search based on lyrics, let alone a way to let a piece of software listen to it and return a result in a matter of seconds. It took me several weeks before I even learned the name of the band. A phone call in to request the song on the radio proved unsuccessful, since I didn’t know the track’s name; the DJ’s took the opportunity to mock me on the air afterward though, laughing at the kid with the lisp who “jutht wantth to hear thome Nirvana.”

Despite the sting, I remained undeterred. It’s a weird thing, to think about how much pushback the rock community had towards a gay kid who hadn’t figured himself out yet. And yet, it was rock that fueled me and kept me going. Smells Like Teen Spirit is a reminder of that feeling. The verses have a raw emotion to them, an air of sadness, while the chorus has pure angst. I’m sad I feel this way, it says, and then pushes back with But it doesn’t have to be like this. The lyrics don’t matter, this song is pure feel.

Just plug in the headphones, close your eyes, and let the music take you away. Pouring my soul into music was a way to live through a time in my life when I was afraid, and didn’t know who to turn to or where to go. It gave me a place to feel less alone, even if it was just me and a pair of headphones over my ears. It gave me a way to think differently, let the words mean what I wanted them to mean, and eventually the strength to break my way through.

It’s day 11 of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

Much of the past year for me has been about making positive changes for my health. The past couple of years have been stressful, to put it lightly, with the events of the world causing anxiety, stress, and uncertainty. I try to keep putting my best foot forward, keep advocating for change, and keep doing the best I can to put good out there into the world.

I’ve been less good about taking care of myself in the interim, as I default to emotional eating and sluggishness, finding that sometimes it’s all I can do to keep going.

I was reminded of some childhood memories this year when I worked a short assignment at a Ninja-style obstacle gym. Curiosity got the best of me, and a few weeks later I went on my own time to give it a try. A few weeks after that, I started taking classes, and next thing I know, I’ve been going three times a week for the past six months now.

I’ve never been one to really enjoy going to the gym, or working out in general. I love Zumba, though, enough that after doing it for a short time I went and got trained so I could become an instructor (something I still love to do, but don’t teach regularly at the moment, favoring occasionally subbing classes instead). What obstacle training has done for me, though, is refreshed my memory of what was once my favorite childhood pastime: climbing around on jungle gyms, monkey bars, and swings.

Now, my time spent in the gym is something I look forward to. When there, I find that the events of the day melt away, if only temporarily, while I focus on how to move my body, use and build my strength, and just have fun climbing around and learning new skills. It’s been fantastic both for my physical and mental health. The movement builds energy and makes me want to move more, which is the best side-effect I could ask for. Even on days where I’m just not feeling it, I rally myself to go and give myself permission not to go all out. It’s those moments where I think I need it the most.

It’s nice to be reminded that movement, and exercise, can (and should, I think) be fun. I knew this as a child, and it’s nice to relearn this now, when I need it more than ever.

It’s day ten of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

When life gets busy (and it sure seems to have a nasty habit of doing that), quite often one of the things that suffers for me is reading. Writing does as well, but reading even more so, I think. Over the last few years, as I’ve slowly sought to untangle the mess that social media created with my sense of time, I’ve gotten back into the habit of reading again.

While I very occasionally enjoy an audiobook, I’m very particular about them. I usually prefer them to be read by the author, and depending on the production of them, they can be an interesting way to share the story. The most recent example that comes to mind is Heather B. Armstrong’s latest book, The Valedictorian of Being Dead. It was incredibly powerful to hear her read that, and astonishing to think of how much it took for her to read it after having completed her treatment.

Mostly, though, I like reading the words myself, and being the narrator voice in my own head. I mix up my reading between physical (“dead-tree” edition books) and e-books. There’s something I love about the feeling of a book in my hand, and feeling the shifting of the weight as I progress through it. There’s also something I love about the convenience of having a whole library of books on an e-book reader (or my phone, depending on where I am). When I travel, I favor traveling as light as possible, so e-books really shine.

Luckily, this isn’t an either/or decision. Nowadays, I most often check out e-books or physical books from the library, and don’t worry about owning any except the ones I know I’m likely to read again. This supports an essential part of our public world and also helps keep my spending to a minimum.

It’s day nine of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

In the history of the battle for our collective attention, television feels like it was an early player. From a few channels in the early years, to the tens and then hundreds of stations which proliferated over the years with cable and satellite.

I can’t profess to being a big television watcher, but there’s certainly some shows I enjoy. Streaming is my preferred mode, because I like to watch one episode at a time, and I like to do it whenever I feel so inclined.

I also have a history of enjoying certain reality TV shows, which I try to keep a very critical eye on nowadays, given how much our world and news cycle has taken the extremes of performative reality TV shows into our very real, and very much not-supposed-to-be-performative, lives. Of those reality shows I’ve enjoyed, they’ve most often been competition-based (Project Runway, RuPaul’s Drag Race, HGTV shows back when they were good, and some cooking shows, the best being the Great British Bake-Off). I mention HGTV “when it was good” because it used to be more than inspiration porn masquerading as makeovers. My favorite was Color Splash, followed by For Rent, Income Property, and occasionally something like Design on a Dime. I liked these because they offered different points of view and ways to learn.

YouTube is an interesting aspect of television nowadays, because it’s offered just about anyone a way to create their own TV shows. Of those channels I find worth watching, a few spring to mind:

• Ali Abdaal, a doctor and entrepreneur in the UK, offers lots of insights on tech and life.
• Ask a Mortician is a long-time favorite. Caitlin Doughty is amazing, and her channel is the one I point to when people want a great example of camp. But more than that, I love how much comes from the heart, and her insights (shared on her channel and her books) have helped inform so much of my work when I’m working with patients who may be facing end of life situations.
• The Financial Diet has some interesting discussions on finance and modern life, and I always enjoy Chelsea Fagan’s unapologetically blunt commentary.
• Bryce Langston’s Living Big in a Tiny House is a great look at the tiny house movement. I don’t necessarily want to live in a tiny house on wheels myself, but I definitely am interested in simple living and sustainability.
• Matt D’Avella offers insights into minimalism and simple living, and does some interesting interviews with people along the way.

Of course, one has to be careful to find that balance of learning, enjoyment, and being mindful not to let watching videos become all one does (h/t Shawn Blanc for that link). Of course, it’s okay to realize, as Austin Kleon wisely often points out, reading is a great way to get ideas to write more.

It’s day eight of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

We operate under a bit of an assumption that technology will solve our problems. Technology has the power to connect us, and yet it also wields the power to drive us apart. It has the potential to educate us, while at the same time holding the power to drive misinformation at a scale beyond our wildest imaginations.

In thinking about our world, and the increasingly dire state we’re placing ourselves in, I’ve thought about the role of technology, as someone who largely appreciates the advances it’s helped us achieve.

For the sake of this discussion, I want to focus on transportation. It took one trip to Europe for me to realize just how life-changing decent public transportation can be. I went from thinking that my home town was too small to sustain decent transit to realizing it’s too big not to. In much of the US, driving is essential because the people who wanted to sell everyone cars helped make sure our infrastructure required that. SUVs were sold on being “safer” because they were bigger.

Currently, a lot of the US is focused on transitioning to electric cars to reduce carbon emissions. To be sure, this is a decent idea. Still, lithium mining is not without its drawbacks, and one of our core problems is that we need to be finding means to use less energy, in addition to using more sustainable forms of energy. Part of how I realized that electric cars won’t solve our problems occurred to me while visiting San Diego over the summer. While there, I noticed a significant number of Tesla cars being driven around town, but traffic was still an absolute mess. Having lived in LA, I remember the construction to widen the 405 freeway did virtually nothing to mitigate the time spent traveling along it.

And not only are the economics of ride-share companies abysmal, they also are being found to increase traffic, not lessen it. The one area I see potential for being able to rely on driving less, so far, has been small electric means of transit. They’re not great for long distance, but a short distance run on those little electric scooters is surprisingly fun. But more than that, on that same trip to San Diego I got to get around on a pedal-assisted electric bike. On that bike, I was able to travel to the same location in the same amount of time it took to do so in a car, only I got around on surface streets. It was incredibly liberating, and fun too. An electric bike has the benefit of using far less resources to build than a car, and thus being cheaper and requiring a smaller battery. Of course, there’s times when it’s less than practical (in snowy or freezing, icy weather, as well as perhaps in rainy weather, to some degree), but it otherwise seems to have great potential.

The short amount of time I spent riding around on one has left me hoping to get one in the near future, and to use it in combination with my car so that I start driving less.

It’s day seven of Blogvember. I’m following the prompts from Andrew Canion, which can be found here.

There’s been some cool milestones noted in the Micro.blog community, with Brent Simmons celebrating 20 years of blogging. I wasn’t a regular reader until recently, but that’s okay. Manton Reece noted how blogging can give you a way to reflect on your journey, while Bix quite astutely also points out that social media interrupted many a personal blogger.

In my own journey, I’ve had somewhat of a mixed experience. I’ve always maintained my personal blog, even when I wasn’t writing much at it. For a while there, I’d post maybe once or twice a year. I’ve reflected on and off about what kept me away. While an avid early user of Twitter, I used to love it for the jokes we liked to write. Facebook was a college gimmick for a glow-in-the-dark night frisbee club, but despite having had an account there for nearly 12 years, I didn’t actually post much in the way of statuses or photos (it largely became a way to keep a list of people I knew, view and like their photos, and otherwise interact minimally unless I saw them in person).

Probably the only real site where I did anything resembling regular blogging was Tumblr, which had that nice sweet spot of ease of posting and a solid community.

The above, though, are still only part of the culprit. Some of what took me away was grad school, and having to work nearly 30 hours a week while being a full time grad student. Upon graduation, the work of a commuting job for a fellowship position took considerable time and energy, and then various career moves since. Some of these I’ve written about, others I haven’t.

I love the work I do, but as someone who ended up on the wrong side of burn-out one too many times, I left the predictability of a full-time, single position in favor of a combination of positions between two fields, being largely self-employed. This has lead to some overwork, wherein I work all day, then have paperwork at night, and also do some scheduling, admin work, etc.

In a word, having minimized my use of social media (and in some instances completely deleted), I still wasn’t writing like I used to. I found my way to personal blogging from message board groups, and for years it was a great way to think out loud, work through my thoughts, and watch them change over time. Lately, I’ve recognized that I spent far too much time trying to focus on work, and not spending enough time reflecting in one of the best ways I know how: by writing. Some of my writing ends up in journals (analog and digital), and other writing I like to post online.

Taking this month to focus on writing has lead me to an interesting realization: scheduling intentional time to do something just for me has been great for the soul. If some of my words help others realize something they needed, then so much the better.