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

Over the course of recent efforts to tidy my life, it’s come to my attention that I’m a bit of a completionist by nature. By this, I mean that when things are interesting to me, I can easily become ensconced with a certain idea, book series or other, or hobby.

For example, hearing an interview with Jon Ronson about his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, lead me to not only buy that book, but multiple others of his as well. Of the three books, I have read two of them. The third is on my shelf waiting its turn to be read.

When it comes to music, I’m an album fan, through and through. Shuffling music is fine at times, but I like hearing how artists compile their music, and the intention with which they place them in order. There’s a predictive quality to enjoy as the album becomes familiar, but there’s also the sense of juxtaposition. (A similar and equally compelling argument about the juxtaposition of shuffling songs on an album, or from multiple artists and albums, can also be made. I just happen to favor albums as they’re presented to me.)

For hobbies, I find myself occasionally dabbing in one thing or another. I occasionally like to paint and draw, but there’s a side of me that wants all the materials I see used by artists I admire. I’ve gotten a few kits but for whatever reason, it doesn’t click for me. (A likely thought is that I have no real art background, and as a visual learner, often like to mimic what I observe elsewhere. This leads me to want to have a certain amount of the “right” materials to work with before starting, which in my head I know is nonsense, but that feeling persists all the same.)

A fellow music fan loved and recommended a certain set of speakers (dedicated monitors) for music. He listened to music a certain way, and knowing as little as I did about music production (he was much more savvy than I), I saved up for them and then got a pair. They sounded… fine, to my ears. They were medium sized speakers, which were large on my desk, and could get far louder than I was ever comfortable with or needed. I used them for a few years before accepting that they were much more powerful than I needed. I sold them and bought a smaller set which sounds perfectly fine for my listening enjoyment.

The older I get, the more I learn about what I value. But more importantly, I learn to enjoy what I enjoy, and care less about what others have to say on the subject.

I get to know myself better each year, and sometimes that means accepting aspects of my nature, while other times it means taking steps to improve. Over the last year or two, I’ve focused on enjoying what I have, and bringing in new things only when I know they’ll be used, read, or enjoyed in short order. This means reading the books I have before getting new. In many cases, it’s meant borrowing books from the library instead of purchasing them. This necessarily requires me to read it promptly, so that I can finish it before it needs to be returned.

It’s also meant that I accumulate less, and can enjoy what I have more.

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

Food is one of my favorite ways to experience the world. I love trying new food when I travel, and I also enjoy cooking. I’m not a big entertainer-style guy, I just like spending time in the kitchen and cooking things I find tasty. While there’s some days where I enjoy spending a few hours doing so, most of the time I like it best when something is simple enough to make within a reasonably short amount of time.

So with that in mind, here’s a few recipes I’ve found over the last couple of years that I particularly enjoy making. I don’t strictly cook Paleo, Keto, or otherwise, but I do try to err on the side of keeping grains to a minimum, so most of what I cook these days comes from those types of recipes.

• PaleOMG - Chicken Enchilada Stew: This a crock pot recipe that really delivers. It’s especially great for this time of year, and for meal prep.
• PaleOMG - Pizza Spaghetti Pie: The deliciousness of pizza with spaghetti squash instead. A bit more time-intensive because spaghetti squash, but well worth it.
• Mark’s Daily Apple - Steak with Creamed Spinach: This one is pretty simple and very delicious. It reheats beautifully, and I get asked about it by colleagues any time I bring it for lunch.
• Living Sweet Moments - Instant Pot Mongolian Beef: I’m not super fond of some recipes that require the use of the sauté function in the Instant Pot (I like the flavors, just don’t love the clean-up required). This one uses it subtly, and is well worth it. I haven’t made it in a while and might just add to the rotation here soon.
• Instant Pot hard boiled eggs: I don’t know for sure where I stumbled upon this recipe, but it is super consistent and my favorite way to hard boil eggs. All you have to do is put 1 cup of water in the Instant Pot, place eggs on the included shelf, and cook on high pressure for 5 minutes. Release the air once it’s done and remove eggs immediately once pressure is fully released. I like to place the eggs in room-temp water to cool, then I peel them and enjoy (as is, or make an egg salad). Cooling right away has been key to keeping the yolks at their best.
• Sous Vide Chicken: I’ve found a number of recipes out there, and they’re all basically variations on the same theme. I’ve found I like to season however I feel like, then cook at 151.5 degrees for about 90 minutes. Then I gently sear them in a pan for two minutes on each side, and I’m in business. This is my current absolute favorite way to make chicken, it’s tender and delicious every time.

I’ve recently found that the key to writing more has been a few things: simplicity, simplicity, and simplicity. I’ve marked more days blogging this year than I have in the last few years combined. Nothing too fancy, just me and my stream of consciouness. And it feels so nice.

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

Trust the process. Enjoy the journey. Life is about the journey, not the destination. Failure is just another chance to succeed. It’s only a failure if you don’t learn something from it.

The list goes on.

The above are just a sampling of the clichés that saturate what we’re told is a binary distinction: success or failure. It’s inundated in our culture, found in movies, literature, sports, and riddled nowadays in the world of social media. There’s winners or losers, with winners being those who succeed, and losers those who fail. Alas, it’s even constantly sputtered by the President, who is obsessed with winning at all costs, and being viewed as successful (despite a documented history otherwise, but that’s another story altogether).

When I think of the last year, I see plenty of failure. Missed opportunities, details overlooked, things I said but wished I hadn’t. On the other hand, I’ve had some successes. Professional growth, successful interactions when interpreting, or particularly good progress for some patients who come to me for speech therapy. There’s even some overlap there: errors recognized lead to greater success in the end, or perhaps a specific error I made lead me to a new realization about a concept I hadn’t fully considered.

The more I grow in both of my fields, the more I see how much I still have to learn, and how much I still want to get better so that the individuals I serve can benefit more.

I’ve been a novice in two separate fields, and without the mistakes being made, and the subsequent learning and growing from them, I wouldn’t get to be doing even better by the people I work with now.

I have immense gratitude for the individuals who helped me learn great lessons through my mistakes. Even in moments where I didn’t do my best (I strive for this to only be because I couldn’t, not because I wouldn’t), I not only learned how to work through it, but how to recognize when something isn’t working.

When I was facing significant anxiety at a job I loved, and suffering burnout, my leaving my position felt like failure. But within that failure, I learned about what drives me, about what burnout can do psychologically, and I took the lessons learned from what I now recognize (both to myself and aloud) what was absolutely a hostile work environment created by a colleague. Perhaps my only failure was not being brave enough to speak up in time, daring only to do so when it was clearly too late.

It’s a hard lesson to learn, but it’s lead me to take chances on myself I never would have otherwise. Another cliché likes to say everything happens for a reason. I don’t buy this one for a minute either. That said, I do think we have the ability to take perspective of something, good or bad, and choose how we move forward from it. I think about the path I’ve taken over the past few years, since leaving what I thought was my dream job, and realize I’m in a better space now than I was then. It took work to get there, and does each day, but I’m glad to have taken the opportunity to reflect on grow on it, and I hope I can keep that spirit alive.

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

Sometimes I think about who I am, and where I am today. I think about how I got here, and if this current manifestation of me was where the past manifestation of me really wanted to be. It’s a hard thing to answer, but current me has found that sometimes, I seem to have lost sight of certain parts of myself.

This isn’t expressly a bad thing, because I do my best to move forward, focusing on how I can try to make things better for those around me, as well as myself. What’s been missing, and what I’ve been trying to reclaim, is an interesting thing. Largely, it’s simplicity. I miss the simplicity of my first studio apartment, of a life without the persistent thought of paying down my student loans.

Conversely, when I think about my career, I don’t miss the simplicity of a single job. I run two businesses, and have to plan carefully in order to ensure each is able to run smoothly and effectively. The ability to focus on my work and have a career in two separate fields is worth the extra leg-work required for me to make that possible.

Complexity of modern social networks, and their respective sapping of energy to write online, as I had done for years before, has lead me back to simplify my online presence and focus on having a single blog where I can think out loud, share photos I find interesting, and hold a conversation online, independent of the big social networks.

It’s a fine line I walk, this idea for a simple, calm life with elements of complexity. I am trying to walk it gracefully. I am trying to be mindful of the things that I bring into my life, and the things which I let go. I am trying to take small steps forward, having a little faith in myself to do the right thing. I am trying to not let overwhelm get the best of me. I am trying to walk the path that’s right for me, not the one others think is right for me.

This month, I’ll be blogging every day as part of Blogvember. It’s like NaNoWriMo, but for blogging (and reminds me of course of the old days when we did NaBloPoMo). I’ll be following the prompts from Andrew Canion.

There are days when I look back at photos I’ve taken, mostly on my phone, and I wonder why I took them. What prompted me, in a given moment, to take that photo?

Many times, I want to share a moment with someone. As someone who enjoys cooking, sometimes I want to share some concoction, or its process. I’ll send it to my brothers or a friend, and it sparks a nice conversation. These are snapshots, not artfully framed, and once I’ve eaten, or the conversation has moved on, they’ve served their purpose.

As someone who also appreciates the wisdom of Marie Kondo, I found it insightful that she recently talked about how she goes through photos each day (or other arbitrary frequency) and only keeps those which spark the most joy for her.

It’s here that I understand the appeal of services like Snapchat and the copycat version that is Instagram stories. These services recognize that perhaps we don’t all want photo albums filled with daily trivialities. The appeal is that the photos “disappear”. Of course, we know they never actually do disappear, but they disappear from our memories and we move on, not worried because we don’t personally have to deal with what becomes of them. It’s a false choice, as we who are becoming mindful and focusing on building back the independent web are well aware.

That means that it’s our own responsibility, then, to go back through those photos we’ve taken, decide if they’ve served us well, and delete them and move on.

Thinking about this has helped me be more mindful of the photos I take, and how long I want to keep them. Sharing a picture of a delicious lunch, or a beautiful cup of coffee with careful latte art, is great. These are fleeting moments I like to share sometimes, and that’s great. But I’ve realized they’re less important for me because they don’t quite mean as much to me in the future than they do in the present.

On the other hand, in the spring I joined a Ninja-style obstacle gym, and since joining have taken considerable more video footage. I keep an album on my phone of footage taken so I can watch my progress, and also watch my form so I can learn from my mistakes. It’s an intentional way to learn visually, while also helping document my progress doing something that’s turned into a favorite pastime.

I like the idea of, instead of simply collecting photos and other means of memorabilia, taking an intentional approach to remember what matters most to me.

Joshua Fields Millburn on reaching the end of the Internet:

The Internet is functionally infinite, and it continues to expand. On Instagram alone, nearly 100,000,000 new photos are uploaded every day, so it’s impossible to “catch up.”

I’m not entirely sure where that 100,000,000 number comes from, but if one were to judge by this eye-popping report from Hootsuite, it’s probably not far off. Millburn continues:

Same goes for YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and the rest of the World Wide Web. No matter how hard we try, we’ll never reach the end of the Internet. So it’s best to put down our phones, shut our laptops, and embrace the glow of the sun—not the glow of our screens.

I was recently thinking about the mindless games that steal our attention, and therefore our time. Instagram and its brethren are that on steroids: they give you the impression of having spent time with people you know (friends, family, internet friends) without actually having spent any time with them.

Sometimes it’s nice to realize that what I write doesn’t have to follow an arc, or trajectory of any kind. I can write about what I’m thinking about, post it if I feel so inclined, and move on. It’s nice to remind myself that a personal blog can be… personal.

I understand the appeal of auto-mileage tracking for business, but it’s incredibly problematic. I used it for a while when I first started using QuickBooks Self-Employed, but found it overwhelming to have to sift through every single trip I made. Its other challenge was that it also tracked every trip even when I wasn’t the one driving. Perhaps I was riding in someone else’s car, on a bus, or in a cab. I also found it incredibly invasive in terms of privacy: not only was it tracking and storing every place I went to work, but every place I went on my own time, a record, right alongside my business trips, of every place I went.

Granted, our phones do this already without telling us, but I see no sense in keeping an even more easily reported record of this. In both of my lines of work, client and patient privacy is essential (not to mention federally mandated), and I see no need for the IRS to know the exact location when other data should be sufficiently detailed. I include the date, the start/end mileage of my vehicle, and a note of who the trip is for (my own company directly, or otherwise the agency with whom I am contracting for a given assignment). I manually input my miles using an app called Mileage Log+, and it takes care of handling date, time, distance, etc. Selection of location (using GPS on your phone) is thankfully optional. And all records can be exported into CSV format for use in your own spreadsheet, which for me is much easier to then organize and review.

It’s the simplest, most direct way I’ve found that, after a bit of set-up, is also the most efficient. Also, it spares the “need” for an $8-10/month subscription that other mileage tracking apps seem to want to command.

Sometimes, a beautiful fall day comes along and shows you some trees.

Some parts of the past week have felt energizing, while other aspects have felt sluggish. When I stand back to think about it, the sluggish times are taken up with thinking about the energizing times. This isn’t inherently bad, but it also isn’t helpful for still making progress on things which need doing.

Being self-employed has its perks, certainly, but it is also met with having to keep consistently on top of your schedule, and maintaining a to-do list. I’m not a big “get things done” guy; I just need a general outline of what needs doing for whom, and when. The paperwork, as one might expect, is always the most daunting aspect. It always looms large, reminding me it needs attention. But it also needs considerable time, and I’m less good about scheduling that time. When such time is found, I then find it overwhelming to think about (and see) the sheer volume of work to be done, and quite often I find myself having a difficult time getting started. It’s hard to get started when all you can think about is having it done.

Faced with a daunting task, and knowing it can’t all get done at once, I find myself seeking some stimulus. I’ve observed in the last couple weeks that that often takes the shape of playing a turn of a game on my iPad. It’s a distraction, but for some reason fuels a strange sense of completion. But it derails what I need to be working on, and also can take focus away when I need to be thinking a bit more critically about something. It’s a mask: an action that requires no deep thought (in fact, it actively inhibits deep thought), and it requires no critical thinking or reasoning.

Despite it being Saturday, I took some time out of the day to catch up on some work tasks I’d been putting off. I switched on a pomodoro timer, and set to work. Within a cycle and a half, I had completed 40% of the work I’d been delaying. It’s a marvel that a concept like a timer, with built in breaks to work toward, can provide enough motivation to improve focus. The short amount of focus helped spur movement, and in turn that lead me to want to keep going. Once I had my break, I was able to use it for a quick mental break. Instead of seeking out input, I focused on output. And it’s made the rest of the evening more enjoyable for it.

So I’m putting this here as a reminder to myself: take some time to set aside distractions and focus, for short amounts of time, on what’s at hand. It doens’t have to be perfect (and it won’t be, despite how much you want it to be), and if you take some time and put some care into it, it will turn out better than you expect it. Then you can move on to the next thing, and do it again.

The Empty Chair is book three in the Lincoln Rhyme series, and it takes our characters outside their home of New York City and plops them into a small town in North Carolina. It’s an interesting idea, and I liked that this book started to question the idea of focusing only on evidence and including a little bit of psychology for good measure. It’s sadly under-explored, but it was interesting while it lasted.

While I definitely enjoyed this one more than The Coffin Dancer this time around, it did leave me feeling a bit incomplete. The “gotcha” moments were unfortunately transparent, and the truly interesting bad guy was barely explored, leaving the reader wondering what actually happened to the plot. Was he brought to justice? How did they finally get him?

The book felt rushed at the end, as it tried to tidy up plot lines from various main characters far too quickly, and with a few extra “gotchas” for good measure. I finished it and was like, “Oh, it’s over? Huh.”

This one had potential, but ended up feeling incomplete. We’ll see how the next one goes.

I’ve been tinkering around a bit with the CSS here in micro.blog, and am slowly coming around to having a nice, simple theme that can showcase my writing in a nice format and my photos as well. I’m pleased with the text, and next need to figure out how to render the photos larger.

As I’ve been setting up my site here, bit by bit, I’ve realized just how fragmented my Internet presence has become. There was one place for short snippets, which started out as a fun place for jokes and turned into a place that’s become a bullhorn for fascists. There was another place for personal photos and occasional “real life” friends to interact with. There was another place to keep track of the books I was reading. There was yet another place for photos. And still another place for maybe sharing some video I liked or a song or a quote.

It reached a point where my personal website, where I had blogged steadily for years, became a place that simply pointed someone any which other way. And as those other sites began to show very clear downsides, I either stopped using them (while maintaining my account) or quit them entirely.

What makes writing on the Internet compelling, and indeed what got me into blogging in the first place, was just how little the concept of “niche” actually mattered. We weren’t interested in anything other than a chance to explore our own ideas, and along the way we discovered community.

This brings me back to today, and why I’m happy to have found a new, simple place to write on the Internet. What’s struck me about writing here, on my own site again, is that there’s one home for everything. Photos I want to share can be found here. Small thoughts or ideas can be found here. Longer posts, where I flesh out ideas and then build on them (or refute them) over time, can be found here. Books I read and want to reflect on, podcasts which captivate me, others’ ideas who inspire me.

In this space, I can think out loud, and engage in a conversation with integrity and focus, know that my contributions support a platform so that it won’t sell my identity to the highest bidder. In my own small way, I can do my part to help heal the Internet.

I haven’t yet made the leap to macOS Catalina 10.15. While checking on software compatibility, I’ve noticed a fair amount of software that’s gone unused, as it’s no longer needed (or wanted, in some cases). Seems like a perfectly good reason for a nice digital tidying festival.

Tonight, we went to see Augusten Burroughs at a local indie bookstore. It was my second time seeing him on tour, and it’s fascinating to see the different version of an author at different points in their life. This version felt a bit more scattered to me than the last, though was just as captivating. And while I was thinking about that, I realized that my own version of self has changed, too. I’m a different person now than I was then, and an even more different person than when I first read his books.

My recent re-reading of books I first read over a decade ago has left me thinking about this quite a bit, and it was mid-way through his talk tonight that it occurred to me again.

The Balloon Fiesta is one of my very favorite times of year. The crisp morning air, the clear skies, and hot air balloons floating calming through the air, all conspire to bring a smile to my face every day.

Note to self: in keeping with focusing on less overthinking, please remember to also be kind to yourself when mistakes happen. Since the time has passed, there’s nothing to be done but acknowledge it, learn from it, and move along.

Speaking of less emphasis on perfection, and less overthinking, I found this podcast episode on Basecamp’s recent minor rebranding to be a fascinating conversation. I love the idea of doing something because you like it and just moving along. “Less is more” can be a state of mind as much as it can be a philosophical point of view.

Many is the day when I can visualize what needs doing, and even the steps to take in order to get something done. The hardest part always seems to be getting started. If I could just get started, I tell myself, I’ll be able to get it done sooner and move on. But the overthinker in me kicks in, ever present to remind me that whatever I do, it won’t be perfect. It requires persistent effort to hear that voice, acknowledge it, and say “Okay, but I know that if I just do it like this, it will be good enough, maybe even better than I thought it would be, and I can move on.”

The theme for the past month or two for me has been re-centering. Returning to a dormant writing habit here, reading books more frequently, and taking time to think. In doing so, certain habits I’ve unconsciously formed have begun to fade away from automaticity, and fade into a stark reality.

In this case, I’ve noticed a few daily routines that, when I step back to think about them, leave me wondering why I bother with them. Most glaring are the small handful of mobile so-called games which beg for daily attention. Words With Friends is a never-ending pull of attention, with one game simply blurring into the next. Every iteration strives to pull you in more: collect some coins here, use them to buy power ups, and hey, use these to see if you played the best word you possibly could. I’ve reached a point now where I pull it up maybe once a week, and it’s all I can do to rush through my turns in the five or so games I have going right now. This made me realize, it’s not a game; it’s a chore.

Next two among them are two games I downloaded originally for use as an occasional speech therapy tool: 4 pics 1 word (for reasoning) and Letter Soup (for visual skills and word retrieval). Neither is actually any good for treatment, but somehow I found myself playing them daily, and have for some time now. Each has daily “challenges”, neither of which is really challenging at all, but both of which happily toss an ad your way upon completion of them. This began to gnaw at me, as I realized the only one who benefits from the daily game play are the makers of these so-called games.

The more I think about it, the more I’ve realized that I’ve inadvertently fallen into the trap, albeit not quite as profoundly, of the cultivated and routine-based “play” from the likes of FarmVille. I barely engage with anything, finding it instead to be something mindless that takes a few minutes, but hey, I get a few coins or win a few hints. I’m definitely no more interesting a person for the time spent using these apps, and I’m definitely guilty of occasionally taking a peek at one of them while procrastinating.

I think it’s high time I replace those, and remind myself if I’m going to procrastinate, I might as well do something a bit more worth my while.

Another new favorite feature of iOS 13: silencing unknown numbers. Like many, I’m subjected to a daily barrage of robocalls. I’ve previoulsy used Do Not Disturb to silence calls periodically, but this is decidedly nicer. It also means I won’t be interrupted by a robocall when in the midst of another task I might be using my phone for. That doesn’t stop the robocallers from taking up space on my voicemail, but that’s an easy delete later.

Writing, and thinking about what to write, can be an excellent way to get in touch with the things you think about. My mind likes to travel a million or so miles a minute, but when it’s asked to reach back out to something I’ve been neglecting, it’s forced to slow down and wrestle those thoughts into a direction that might be useful.

It’s a nice way to try to get to know yourself again.

I recently updated to iOS 13, and outside of dark mode, my current favorite new feature is the upgrades to Apple Maps. Specifically, showing a small symbol for traffic lights or stop signs at intersections is incredibly helpful.

Part of my efforts for 2019 has been not only to read more, but to read more fiction. While browsing my local library’s ebook collection, I discovered ebook versions of some murder-mystery books I’d read and enjoyed in high school and college. They were the Lincoln Rhyme series by Jeffery Deaver, and were part of what piqued my interest in some brief studies of forensics during my undergrad.

I first read The Bone Collector, a few months ago, and most recently read The Coffin Dancer. They’re an interesting study in contrast. The Bone Collector introduces the characters, but they’re not fully formed yet and are held together by the tension of the plot. The Coffin Dancer aims to bring more character development into the mix, while maintaining a tense plot.

I remember liking The Coffin Dancer more than its predecessor in the past, but present me prefers The Bone Collector. [Mild spoiler alert forthcoming:] This isn’t due to the suspense, per se, but rather to a certain subplot that both shows its age (being published in 1998) and some old-fashioned homophobia. See, one of the antagonists is gay, or a victim of childhood abuse and sexual abuse, or all of the above. And said antagonist is closeted and so is subject to experiencing “latent homosexuality” (ugh, why was that ever a thing), which is then used to another antagonist’s advantage while various protagonists use the opportunity to use a variety of slurs, because why not?

So what I found myself experiencing was re-reading a book now, as an out and proud gay man, and my past self, reading that same book while closeted and afraid. And where my past self saw such things as a reflection of the culture and a reason to hide, my current self recognizes what is wrong and so pushes back.

In the end, it’s a read that reflected my past right back to me, and for that reason alone, I’m glad I reread it. Otherwise, this one isn’t essential.