I have routines – lots of them. I say that I keep them or use them as a way to free up mental space for other things. Given my mental output, I’m not sure it’s working. I eat the same thing for breakfast almost every day: two waffles and two cups of coffee. On the…
Category: Life
Speculation and Dithering: An Addendum
As soon as I hit publish on my recent post about dithering, I second-guessed how such a post would be interpreted and/or received. This happens a lot when I have concerns about who might read it or what they might think. It happens when I talk about any subject over which I hold multiple and…
Speculative Questions and Dithering Answers
The other day I wrote a long and rambling mess of a post about indifference as a form of accepting uncertainty (Adjusting the Throttle of Indifference). Or at least that’s what I was trying to write about. I was also trying to touch on what it’s like to try to live without expectations and how…
Grouchin’ and Grinchin’
This morning I woke up feeling weathered and old. I didn’t even look in the mirror, but I had this vision of myself with a sagging face and storm cloud skin. I felt washed up and hunched over. I felt like someone prematurely aged by booze and cigarettes and a graying heart. I don’t smoke…
Adjusting the Throttle of Indifference
Indifference…. we sometimes deploy it as a defense mechanism. We sometimes use it as a cudgel. Because it can be used in these ways, it seems important to be able to distinguish between real indifference and manufactured indifference. As a defense mechanism, feigned indifference – saying one doesn’t care – means they can’t be disappointed,…
Another Piece in the Puzzle of Becoming
A journal I’ve heard of through Twitter opened their submissions for a 48-hour window. I had until 11:59 pm on Monday to get something in. This seems to be a thing some journals do – open for brief windows. I don’t know much about the journal other than some writers I’ve followed seem to mention…
With More Enthusiasm than Skill
Twice I sat down to write about free speech, Twitter, hypocrisy, and whether or not a business should be forced to serve people when doing so would violate their religious or ethical beliefs (current supreme court case). I didn’t get very far in either attempt – a few paragraphs here and there about the state…
Learning to Tie My Shoes
I have days, today being one of them, when I feel like my life’s failures and frustrations are mostly the result of poor organizational skills and a piss-poor memory. There are times when I feel like I might have missed some class that everyone took – maybe in the fourth grade or freshman year of…
Poetry and Alchemy
Yesterday I received a rejection email from a journal where I had submitted some poems. Last week, I got a rejection email from a different journal. I had forgotten about the one from a week ago – by which I mean to say I hadn’t even logged the submission on my spreadsheet. I didn’t remember…
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave My Job
11/17/22 Yesterday, I did a thing. Without knowing my next move, I gave notice to the executive team of my board of directors. It was a soft notice, not a hard two weeks. I said I’d be leaving, and I’d like to do so early next year (two or three months from now). I said…
Some Thoughts about Quiet Quitting
I haven’t posted anything… I was going to say significant or substantial, but my cynical side asked the snarky question, “when do you ever post something ‘significant’ or ‘substantial’?” Other than the daily fifty-two project, I haven’t posted since November 19 – before Thanksgiving. I’ve started a half-dozen things: observations on living alone (prompted by…
Revisions and Deletions
This week’s “My Back Pages” list has been full of old posts from three years ago – apparently I was writing a lot then. Most of those posts are raw attempts at getting to the heart of the cognitive dissonance I felt when my engagement fell apart. They are/were my desperate attempts to understand, move…