Life

Over time I am going to start bringing in older and older posts from my old blog, dot unplanned. I took much of it down several years ago during a big web reorg, but I want to start putting some of it back in place.

Make more, fret less.

This weekend I saw a few culture-clashes go by around the topic of photography that helped my thoughts gel. One involved a small dog-pile over charges of elitism, and one involved a putative professional talking down to someone who was just happy about their new camera. You could characterize those clashes as people talking down or talking up, but also just talking past each other. Sometimes I want to write a screed about photography culture and inclusiveness because I’m an outsider in parts of that culture and find parts of it as frustrating and tedious as any other human endeavor that can be gate-kept....

Once I knew my time at Puppet was winding down I took stock and decided to take a break. I gave myself November and December to rest. I didn’t think a lot about what it would mean to rest, I just knew I was going to do it. I’ll probably write more about it, because I might have something useful to say to people who are in a position to rest but don’t know how....

Almost 12 years ago I wrote up a few thoughts about a morning routine I’d adopted to help me deal with some creative and personal insecurity. I called it “exposure therapy,” and it was just an active practice of looking at photographs, understanding a lot of them would be better than the ones I was taking. I stuck to it for a while until something broke up the way I organized my mornings....

Last night after a 12-hour day of learning how to put down flooring then putting down flooring I tacked down some baseboard on a single wall so that I could at least narrow my vision a little and see the end of the project, which has consumed a big chunk of November. Everyone had to deal with their own lockdown stuff in some way or another. In our family, it took the form of not having a ton of space by the time we’d flipped a few rooms into offices....

I’ve got a life-long habit of spinning up virtual people and arguing with them, which is to say a life-long habit of telling stories to myself that aren’t true. It’s tough to break, and I haven’t broken it. But I’ve added a little thing to the loop.

All of these ‘attack liberals from the left’ outrage merchants are plainly trying to serve a market niche of some sort and seem to be doing okay at it.

Definitely recommended for its low-key vibe, and its emphasis on deliberation and care over simple prescriptions or tech abstemiousness. I’m going to give some of its ideas a try.

I think we just have to know what we know for ourselves, and not because we need people to agree with us. And we need do the best we can to provide a little bit of light for the people right around us.