The starting is the hardest part.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-08T09:09:15-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/10/08/the-starting-is-the-hardest.html", "tags": ["music","tech tips \u0026 self management"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/10/03/just-watched-shadow-of-a.html", "content_html": "Just watched Shadow of a Doubt (1943). One hundred eight minutes of well written, skillfully shot skeeve.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-03T10:06:25-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/10/03/just-watched-shadow-of-a.html", "tags": ["film \u0026 tv"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/29/just-listened-to-nearly-by.html", "content_html": "Just listened to: Nearly (2026) by Bullion. The balmy sound of a teenaged Brian Eno bounding in slow motion upon giant, levitating CGI marshmallows that gently undulate underfoot against a coral sky while an ’82 Riva Aquarama Special bobs below.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-29T20:07:03-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/29/just-listened-to-nearly-by.html", "tags": ["music"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/29/always-be-giving-ill-say.html", "content_html": "Always be giving to others! I’ll say it again: Always give. Attention, effort, money, stuff. And in case you think you’re too poor or tired to give, remember that even when your poor or tired, you can still give thanks. Always be giving! It’s the key to happiness.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-29T12:01:18-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/29/always-be-giving-ill-say.html", "tags": ["tech tips \u0026 self management","Christian","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/24/last-night-in-the-oclock.html", "content_html": "Last night in the 1 o’clock hour I dreamt (again) that I was playing the part of Captain Hook. Or more precisely put, that I was backstage getting ready to play Hook, this time by donning my costume. As always in this subgenre of Scottdream, the peril involved was that of missing my entrance. I was downstairs with the costumer fiddling with the hook and wig and trying to find my boots.
\nIt hit me upon waking this morning a little after four that this dream is a portal to understanding my proneness to early terminal wakeups (i.e., waking up and staying up earlier than intended): Since the thought of getting done all the items in my morning to-do list is frequently my first concern upon wakeup, especially on workdays when there’s a cap on that phase in the morning, and since I often fire up Remember the Milk in support of addressing that concern, is it any wonder that my later sleep is often fragmented and terminated early?
\nHow could I miss making the connection between my frequent inability to stay asleep in the wee hours of the morning before a workday begins and my complete inability to go to sleep at all on a night before an early-morning flight? The phenomena feel very similar: no conscious anxiety, no distress—just alertness. The basic problem is not one of light exposure or working out too hard or the suitability of the bedroom environment, although those things do have an effect. It’s that I start every day, or at least every workday—the phenomenon is less acute on weekends and pretty much disappears while on vacation—understanding that I’d better get cracking on my to-do list right away lest I eat into DiamondBack time, feel a mid-evening grumpiness about “not getting it all done,” or both.
\nWhat to do then? Reengineer the morning is what. Last decade, in response to five early-morning flights leading to five involuntary all-nighters, I made a personal policy of refusing to book early-morning flights. I haven’t had an involuntary all-nighter since. This decade, in response to a suspicion that list mode is leading to sleep fragmentation and early terminal awakening almost every day, I’m going to make a personal policy of leaving my computer, a good proxy for my being in GTD mode, off until after breakfast.
\nTime-sensitive, formally externalized expectations, like flight bookings and to-do lists, demand alertness. That’s not a bad thing in general, but it is a bad thing for sleep.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-24T08:36:38-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/24/last-night-in-the-oclock.html", "tags": ["tech tips \u0026 self management"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/20/theres-always-more-in-life.html", "content_html": "There’s always more in life to do than there is life to do it in. On my best days, I take this as a marvelous gift and smile at it. On my worst days…grrrrrrrr, uuuugghh, and yaaaaargh.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-20T13:26:30-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/20/theres-always-more-in-life.html", "tags": ["tech tips \u0026 self management"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/20/just-watched-the-lady-vanishes.html", "content_html": "Just watched: The Lady Vanishes (1938). Light, absorbing prewar comedy thriller as parable of Britain wrestling with the continental question (and Englishmen being Englishmen).
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-20T13:24:28-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/20/just-watched-the-lady-vanishes.html", "tags": ["film \u0026 tv"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/19/just-listened-to-corelli-opus.html", "content_html": "Just listened to: Corelli: Opus 1 & 3: Church Sonatas (2014) recorded at St. George’s Church in Cambridge on Linn by The Avison Ensemble. Stately but not stuffy. Pretty but not precious. Backgroundable but not boring. And full of emotion—especially Opus 1, which often turns my ears with its late Renaissance simplicity and the remarkable equality of stature given to the second violin.
\nOpus 3, published eight years later and thus further into Corelli’s renown as both violinist and composer, is less egalitarian—still lovely, but tilted some toward the primo. It’s also more filigreed and its tonality and vibe more evocative of daytime public radio, thanks in some part to keyboardist Roger Hamilton occasionally switching from chamber organ to harpsichord, an instrument for which I’ve yet to develop a taste.
\nStill, a winning album front to back.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-19T06:53:12-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/19/just-listened-to-corelli-opus.html", "tags": ["music"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/18/but-the-real-question-is.html", "content_html": "But the real question is: Is it harder to use all four limbs to play five quasi-independent musical voices on a pipe organ or to sing into a microphone while using all four limbs to drum?
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-18T15:10:27-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/18/but-the-real-question-is.html", "tags": ["music"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/17/when-man-invented-the-bicycle.html", "content_html": "\n\nWhen man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle
\n
— Elizabeth West • Hovel in the Hills (1977)
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-17T06:13:03-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/17/when-man-invented-the-bicycle.html", "tags": ["quotations","travel \u0026 transportation"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/11/i-carry-a-bias-against.html", "content_html": "I carry a bias against psychotropic drugs because the world around me seems to carry a bias toward them. If I know myself, then if the obverse were true of the world, the obverse would be true of me. I’m not anti-meds. I’m anti-defaulting and anti-pushing.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-11T12:25:42-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/11/i-carry-a-bias-against.html" }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/07/the-pleasure-i-remember-derivingand.html", "content_html": "The pleasure I remember deriving—and still derive—from performing my greatest individual musical triumphs—singing “Once In A Lifetime” at high school commencement, earning the Valjean understudy role in FUSE’s semi-pro staging of LES MIS, delivering “She Loves Me” at my FUSE cabaret debut, rendering the national anthem at Medlar Field—does not compare to that which I remember deriving from any time I have managed to inhabit vocal harmony, feeling the buzz of the air between me and other singers, triumphant performance or no: the Boyz II Men arrangement of “Yesterday” at high school senior reflections night at Daylesford Abbey, the fifteen minutes of abortive choir rehearsal of “An Irish Blessing” in the lobby of Teen Mania Ministries, “Helplessly Hoping” with Matt and Ben as part of Puddintown Roots, “Something’s Coming” with Madeline, James, and Clara at a later FUSE cabaret, even the two-part improvisations Carla and I frequently used to entertain ourselves with while commuting or traveling as twentysomethings.
\nWhat’s more, I hardly remember the embarrassment and chagrin accompanying my many disappointments and failures in solo performance—ranking twenty-third out of twenty-four baritones at States, melting down and dropping out of Voice 100J, forgetting the lyrics of a simple Vineyard song at Mommom’s funeral, not earning the actual Valjean role in FUSE’s staging of LES MIS. Instead, the disappointments that still stick are the ones that resulted in me missing an opportunity to feel vocal harmony: failing to make Penn State’s Concert Choir and learning that standing at the back of the tenor section of State College Choral Society relegates me to hearing only other tenors.
\nThe above observations make one thing clear to me: I want to be in a vocal group that lets me live inside the buzz of the buzz of tight vocal harmonies. The trick will be to find one whose membership could put up with my relative lack of sight-reading chops. Bonus if we could be genre hoppers; I don’t think I’d like doing only barbershop, only classical, or only pop as much as I’d like doing it all.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-07T07:30:24-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/07/the-pleasure-i-remember-derivingand.html", "tags": ["music"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/03/going-into-a-rereading-the.html", "content_html": "Going into rereading the gospel according to Mark as translated by David Bentley Hart, I for some reason had it in my head that I’d be encountering the most boring of our four canonical renditions of Jesus. Yet four chapters in, I like this Guy. Picking up where John the Baptizer left off, He’s self-assured—or God-assured, as it were—and He has pepper on His tongue. He has a smile on His face every time He speaks because He knows He’s speaking zingy, head-turning, liberating truth. He’s loving every minute of these early days of His ministry.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-03T20:38:50-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/03/going-into-a-rereading-the.html", "tags": ["Christian"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/09/02/from-a-national-security-perspective.html", "content_html": "From a national security perspective, rampant monolingualism seems like a clear strategic disadvantage.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-02T08:04:39-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/09/02/from-a-national-security-perspective.html" }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/31/just-watched-everything-everwhere-all.html", "content_html": "Just watched: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). If the only path to humanitarian existentialism and family wholeness is half-baked, TikTok-speed universe-jumping through temporary nihilism and a jungle of sophomoric gags, I’ll take it—so long as it’s the masterly Michelle Yeoh and endearing Ke Huy Quan you hire to blaze the trail.
\nBut I’ll probably take it just once, because Christ-figuring aside, there isn’t a whole lot of profundity here other than what comes through Yeoh’s countenance and bearing. And unfortunately, the obviously skilled martial arts on display leave me flat, serving as they do as sci-fi premise establishment and gag delivery service rather than pure spectacle or aesthetic event.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-31T18:32:00-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/31/just-watched-everything-everwhere-all.html", "tags": ["film \u0026 tv","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/30/both-our-capacity-for-connection.html", "content_html": "\n\nBoth our capacity for connection and our capacity for separation have to be cultivated into responses that are life-giving and life-sustaining. The power to hold and the power to let go, to connect and to disconnect, each of these powers can be used for good or for ill.
\nEthical maturity learns the difference and knows the right time for each. Neither power can be valorized as an absolute good without risking harm.
\n
— Rebecca Parker • Proverbs of Ashes (2001)
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-30T13:52:00-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/30/both-our-capacity-for-connection.html", "tags": ["tech tips \u0026 self management","quotations","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/29/just-listened-to-villains-by.html", "content_html": "Just listened to: Villains (2017) by Queens of the Stone Age. The tall, crooning goblin king of 21st-century hard rock slicks his hair back with Ronsongoop and manages to remake Low, Blackstar, and (especially) The Man Who Sold The World in his own, more muscled—but equally louche and uncanny—image. Tritones, chord planing, chromatic movement, and descending major thirds abound. Plus, it’s more fun than any of those rightly esteemed Bowie forebears. You can even dance-magic-dance to the album’s first single. (And he does.)
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-29T07:37:58-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/29/just-listened-to-villains-by.html", "tags": ["music"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/27/just-finished-reading-pushing-the.html", "content_html": "Just finished reading: Pushing the Envelope: A Memoir by Mike “the Mailman” Herr as Told to Marykate Herr Weeks (2025). Not a great book, but its delightfully puckish, breezily generous, contagiously upbeat subject comes through clearly, and that’s what matters. The world needed some durable record of the man. Here we have one, and I feel grateful. (Anti-spoiler alert: Carla and I did not make it into the book. But we could have! He said so himself!)
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-27T20:38:17-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/27/just-finished-reading-pushing-the.html", "tags": ["books","wife"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/27/that-tendency-based-on-recency.html", "content_html": "That tendency based on recency bias to assert in a spat with a spouse, parent, or child that “you always do X”? It appears to have intrapersonal analogs. For example, when:
\nOn that note, after some time this morning on a walk asking for Your help sussing out an answer to that perennial question about what I want to do as it regards music, having missed out on Wednesday’s fifth-anniversary celebration of the open mic Stacy hosts at The Speakeasy, I think I have an answer tonight: The music I want to make must feature tight, playful harmonic vocal interplay.
\nTo please Carla, I’m tempted to say I don’t want to be part of a university-style acapella group, but there’s a nontrivial chance that’s only because she has stated she doesn’t care for the genre. It’s true I might prefer something more classical crossover-y, but I’m not sure. It could be a Crosby, Stills & Nash thing. Regardless, I think I know myself here: It’s tight harmonies I can feel—unlike those I can barely hear from the back of the tenor section of a large choir—that find me at my musicmaking happiest.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-27T19:43:00-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/27/on-that-note-after-some.html", "tags": ["music","tech tips \u0026 self management"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/27/historically-it-has-been-difficult.html", "content_html": "Historically, it has been difficult for me to distinguish ahead of time what I want from what I merely think I want. This blindness has gotten me into trouble, some barely worth calling trouble at all (feeling I’ve wasted my time reading I book I didn’t like)—and some quite worthy of the word “trouble” (pseudo-proposing marriage to the wrong woman).
\nThere are two components to this difficulty: ignorance about the purported objects of my desire and ignorance about what delights, soothes, or satisfies me. Both ignorances are in some measure unavoidable, as I, like all of us, am a creature of time with limited perspective and finite attentional resources. Yet it seems to me, despite all the introspection that happens here, that I am more lacking in the latter. (With some exceptions: I do know, for instance, that I always enjoy a walk.)
\nI think this is because, having been raised a Jesus person big on self-denial, I’ve always distrusted the ancient maxim “know thyself.” Why get to know someone I’m trying to deny?
\nCuriously at odd with the above, however, the first word I ever received from God, sometime my sophomore or junior year of high school, was this: “Do what you want.” It was a corrective.
\nDespite that corrective, my suspicion of “know thyself” has remained. I now call that disobedience. How can I do what I want if I don’t examine what I want? How can I “follow the impulses of [my] heart and the desires of [my] eyes” if I don’t know what those impulses and desires are—or, as is probably more often the case, I let my superego interpolate supposed desires for real ones, leading me down blind alleys short and long.
\nOf course, if I follow the impulses of my heart and the desires of my eyes, “God will bring me to judgment for all these things.” Yet if those things are themselves good, and if submitting to dictums like “do not handle, do not taste, do not touch” is worldly, and if Jesus earnestly desired to eat with His friends, and if God Himself is at work in me at the level of my desires, then what reason have I to fear His judgment? (As an aside, whether I’ve done well or not, I in fact welcome His judgment, because His judgment is truth.)
\nHence, from now on, before I decide I want something, I will, in addition to researching the something, research myself—and I will act accordingly, hopefully with the Spirit as my guide. Yes, within God-set boundaries—but not within manmade ones.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-27T19:21:00-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/27/historically-it-has-been-difficult.html", "tags": ["tech tips \u0026 self management","Christian","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/27/today-you-are-young-and.html", "content_html": "“Today you are young and very much in love and you think that your love can sustain your marriage. It can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “A Wedding Sermon from a Prison Cell” in Letters and Papers from Prison, as quoted by Griffin Gooch
\nIt’s been awhile since I’ve attended a wedding. Are we hearing this kind of advice very often these days? I hope so!
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-27T07:53:26-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/27/today-you-are-young-and.html", "tags": ["Christian","quotations","marriage","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/24/trump-lawyers-trompelilers.html", "content_html": "Trump lawyers = trompe-l’œilers. And not very good ones, although that could be because he supplies them with bad paint.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-24T06:14:03-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/24/trump-lawyers-trompelilers.html" }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/23/i-feel-fed-up-with.html", "content_html": "I feel fed up with constantly writing about myself. I’m going to try to turn my ruminations toward other subjects. Since some of the most fascinating alternative subjects are the people around me, that may mean I post less here, as I may end up writing about things that are not mine to share.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-23T19:47:31-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/23/i-feel-fed-up-with.html", "tags": ["virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/08/23/among-the-strongest-of-my.html", "content_html": "Among the strongest of my natural strengths according to an assessment DiamondBack was kind enough to pay for a year or two ago is what they call “responsibility,” meaning “taking psychological ownership of what you say you will do.” Moreover, for better and for worse, “what I say I will do” includes the tasks I put on my to-do list, which at the time of this writing numbers 175 if I count just those tasks I could theoretically start on immediately.
\nThis is a problem, because neither discretionary social engagements, nor spontaneous recreation, nor rest—all of which seem self-evident goods—make it onto my to-do list, nor should they, as putting them on there casts a pall over them that drains them of much of their benefit. As a result, I don’t do them often (especially the last two), and when I do, I feel torn.
\nI’ve written about this many times before. For example, in a private journal entry almost exactly a year ago, I wrote of “failing, once again, to navigate between the Scylla of total control and loneliness on the one side and the Charybdis of irresponsibility in the name of togetherness, joy, and spontaneity.” At the time, I counseled myself to face the fact of the non-programmability of it all and simply choose togetherness, joy, and spontaneity more often.
\nLooking back, that counsel may have worked a little. Yet I still don’t rest or recreate very often, and when presented with social plans, I still regularly have to overcome internal resistance in the name of getting things done. Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the mind of this death?
\nThe spirit of Jesus, I think, in a psychological move that geometrically resembles my hack against perfectionism: Embrace rest, spontaneous recreation, and (especially) the nurture of good social relationships as responsibilities. Not by adding them to the list—again, that doesn’t work—but by recognizing them as standing obligations that rightfully limit the jurisdiction of the list. “I have other sheep that are not of [the] fold” of my to-do list, “and I must bring them also.” There is no Charybdis; on the contrary, I must go with the flow.
\nHeck, Paul and the psalmists even command joy. I repeat: It is my biblical responsibility to feel joy.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-23T19:47:22-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/08/23/among-the-strongest-of-my.html", "tags": ["Christian","virtue","love"] } ] }