In conversation with a friend last night, we developed a fourfold list of precepts that, if held together (in partial tension, for sure), will lead to a happy life:
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. 🎉
Circumvent Google’s default search results page—including its new, unwelcome AI results—and return to a simple list of blue links. 💻
Saying “thank you for your patience” before the speaker knows his listener will give it is presumptuous. Better to say “I’m sorry.”
I stand with carbohydrates. 🍞
🎧 🎵 I happened across a CD copy of local bluegrass stalwarts Tussey Mountain Moonshiners’ 2016 album SHINE last year at the AAUW used book sale. It cost me a dollar. It’s (more than) good enough to make me feel as if I have stolen from them.
Hypothetical future album title: Self-Preservation for the Sake of Others
What is microblogging for?
Is style a virtue? If so, how?
Scott: Hey, no pointing. It makes me nervous.
Sullivan: I wasn’t pointing. I was air-rubbing your teeth.
Ever take a grief nap? I sure have.
Carla: There’s a book I wanna read.
Éa: Me, too. But I finished it.
Self-efficacy. To be virile and know it (without being haughty).
It’s a TikTok standoff. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Regarding my overpopulated social calendar, I have two directives for myself:
The CEB reads: “You have this faith and love because of the hope reserved for you in heaven” for Colossians. So the vision of heaven enables us to be faithful and loving! Fear of death be gone! You see this in stories of the original Christians.
“Mr. Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly represented those mixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling with him, as with all of us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge” (George Eliot, Middlemarch).
Isn’t this true for all irritations! We don’t seek the deep reason. We simply want to know we’re right in feeling!
Park Forest is a therapy dog. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
When you marry, you relinquish unilateral control of your self-sacrifice. Most of it is automatically dedicated directly to domestic relationships. And even what remains is subject to a bilateral decision with your wife.
What could I be doing now in theory that I’m not doing because Carla thinks I would be overextending myself in light of family life and my involvement with house church (which is true):
Now, maybe once I finish the Cross essay, I can start singing again.
I should be more strategic with how I spend my time. Wait. More strategic? Oi vey.
Instead of my task list, my new default should be being with Carla.
Sixteen candles, and what do you get? A man, I say, and a good one yet.
Humor and trust, ‘magination and joy, Honesty, playfulness, ambition and, boy, Invention and wonder, forgiveness and caring, Spontaneity, patience, focus, and sharing.
↑ A virtue list I wrote years ago. And all of them, Son, you continue to show! Permit me to add to it just a few more That you seem to have added to your inner core:
Ability, sympathy, detachment, loyalty, In my view, Oake, you’re better than royalty.
I’m proud of you.
I caught my son meditating this morning. God, Your ball!
We actually talked about a wind-down in the time footprint of my contribution at DiamondBack today in my annual review. Progress!
Now, as with paying reparations to descendants of slaves, the devil is in the details: At what point do we start doing it, i.e., what is the trigger? What does it look like, step-wise, to do it? Certainly, it doesn’t happen until I’ve finished paying my part in my children’s education (i.e., until they finish their post-secondary educations). Maybe at that point, I take whatever the difference is between the proposed raise and the years-aggregated inflation rate as time? What will that mean for my work itself? At what point will I no longer be able to make a contribution to DiamondBack?
Ben did say wage inflation will always trail price inflation. That seems like a problem.
“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’—she always called me Elwood—‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”