You’re saying I should give in to the vernacular?
— Scott
I miss the white pages ✏️ 🎤 🎵
“For then will I transform peoples with a pure language for them all to call in the name of the LORD, to serve Him with single intent” (Zephaniah 3:9, Alters).
Lord, please transform Christians in this way. As it is, it seems we’re calling in the name of different lords to serve with various, opposing intents.
Just listened to: Traditional Techniques (2020) by Stephen Malkmus. My first Malkmus solo album listen. His lyrics are as weird as in the ’90s, but I had no idea he could make such pretty music. A very good late-night psych-folk stoner album. The effect is similar to hearing The Velvet Underground’s self-titled album. Also, I’m a sucker for 12-string guitar and playfulness with words.
Wait, is that a rule? We’re not allowed to have telepathic antecedents?
— Éa, in response to a gentle scold from Scott about a conversation he couldn’t follow
Today I am taking Focus up a notch: For 100% of day—morning, afternoon, evening, and night—I am allowing zero Messages and WhatsApp notifications to come through from anyone other than my immediate family, people with whom I have appointments in the next two days and, during the workday, my workmates. I am coupling this with a morning clearing and an evening clearing, rendering how I handle my instant messages more like how I handle my email. This experiment will last either forever or until I observe it’s unloving.
So folks will still get text replies from me twice a day. If that’s not fast enough and they need my attention more urgently, let them place a good, old-fashioned phone call. It’ll be like time travel back to 1993 (minus the coiled cords and dial tones)!
I hereby plead with governments, universities, and commercial real estate developers: If you’re going to erect a public clock, please make sure it keeps time. Otherwise, you’re just littering our built environment with noble-looking embarrassments whose only effect is to remind us that everything is broken and most of us don’t care.
The ideal birthday communication is neither the tired greeting card not the awkward phone call. The first is unremarkable; the second requires too much of the recipient. Instead, it’s a heartfelt voice message sent via text. 🎉
Saying “thank you for your patience” before the speaker knows his listener will give it is presumptuous. Better to say “I’m sorry.”
Sullivan said yesterday that every conversation with me feels like an argument. That’s the sort of comment that prompts change in me, I hope!
“She was half a girl and half a flower[.]”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, of the first titular character in “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les” (1924)
Do not talk about your hard feelings after 9 PM. Maybe not even after 8 PM.
Step one in any anti-racist agenda: Refuse to speak in terms of race. Skin color? Pigment? Melanin? Yes. But “‘[r]ace’ itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem” (Ta-Nehisi Coates).
Air: the original social medium.
“Communication is love,” as I just wrote a few weeks ago, is a problem for relating with those people for whom communication is not the only thing they want to do.
Communication is love. If I’m involved, at least, if there’s any ambiguity at all, it must be squashed. Love demands it. However, I think one person’s ambiguity that needs to be squashed is another person’s opportunity for the exercise of commonsense intuition.
Speaking harshly was one of Jesus’ love languages.
My dubiousness about people using the names of the people they’re talking with, which Dale Carnegie suggests in his book as a key to winning friends and influencing people, is sound—times have changed since Carnegie’s book—except, huzzah, when you use the name in exclamations of thanksgiving, co-elation, or congratulation. In those contexts, it is pure simpatico, building the relationship 100%.
I think President Trump thinks “to exonerate” means “to let get away with” or “to fail to produce absolutely irrefutable proof of wrongdoing by.”
My new definition of love: to devote oneself to the good, wellbeing, or flourishing of and the enjoyment of relationship with.
Telling someone they “have been” something is more empowering a way of truth-telling than telling them they “are” something. It leaves the future open for change.
[overheard while Sullivan and Éa build a precarious fort]:
Éa: Sully, did you just swear!?
Sullivan: What!? No!
Éa: No really, Sully, did you say the S word?
Sullivan: No! Only Mom does that!
Carla reports that last night, out of the blue before bed, Éa said, “I think that Daddy’s mune to stuff.”
“You think he’s immune? To what?” replied Carla.
“No, the opposite of that. Mune.”
“I don’t think that’s a word.”
“Really? Well then what’s the opposite of ‘immune’?”
“Susceptible.”
“What?! That sounds like some sort of a….PORT a potty! …like ‘appropriate receptacle’! (lots of laughter by both parties)”
Oh my gosh. Jesus.
— Carla
“Emotional support feels terrible.”
— Carla