November 28, 2016
I’m a bit of a nut for systems thinking, in case you haven’t noticed. I love finding better ways to do everything. I’m the kind of guy who will do five hours of work to figure out how to do a task in one hour, when I could have used another method to finish it in four hours. I put a great deal of effort into making the routine work of each day as effortless as possible. My goal: work now will mean I can be...
November 27, 2016
I love going to bars, and I appreciate that my day job (selling beer for a craft brewery) requires that I go to bars, because it forces me to do something that’s not always comfortable: go to social places alone and talk to strangers. The benefits of this are larger than you think. It’s undeniable that beer and other alcoholic beverages do damage. They’re drugs, and they can be abused. But they also do good, because a delicious beverage and a slight buzz...
November 26, 2016
I’ve struggled all my life with sleep, though not in a way that inspires pity or empathy. Historically, mine has been the ultimate sleep first world problem. It’s not that I can’t get to sleep—I can fall asleep within minutes, and can nap readily—it’s that I’ve always had trouble getting myself to go to bed. For a natural night owl who has always had so many things he wanted to do (like, ya know, write books), I have long had a habit of staying...
November 25, 2016
A little political musing tonight. I was reading an article earlier, about how President Obama might be better able to affect change in the Israel/Palestinian conflict from outside the oval office. It’s an interesting read, but more interesting to me is a question I’ve long had, and one for which the world hasn’t yet found the answer. If non-violent protest worked for American civil rights in the 1960’s, why hasn’t it worked for the Palestinians now? There’s almost certainly no clear-cut answer to that...
November 24, 2016
Short one today, because it’s Thanksgiving and I shouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the internet . . . even though I’m heading off to my second (third?) job right now, and will be there until seven in the morning, mostly surfing the net. Woo~. Still! I got to have fun with friends all day, drink beer, eat good food, and watch some Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is (each one, and especially all of them together) always fun....
November 23, 2016
If I have a takeaway from today, it’s of just how lost I am without a simple item: a single notecard. I write my daily to-do list every night, on a notecard. It looks something like this: That’s the one from yesterday. I list out the tasks I do every day (habits, or “habs”), highlight tasks according to importance, and generally get a handle on the coming day. I also have a weekly notecard, as well as a digital file where I dump all the other...
November 22, 2016
The first day after I said I was going to do these, I got righteously drunk. Let’s see how this goes. I saw a dog getting dragged behind a car today. I hope it wasn’t on purpose. My first thought was, ” . . . ???” I don’t know that I had a proper first thought. I couldn’t process it. I was doing some deliveries, and I was a lane over and several cars back, and I just couldn’t understand what was...
November 21, 2016
Sometimes it’s discouraging being a writer. You see, I just wrote this big, lovely post where I set out to explain what I was about to do, and what that “Daily 1” in the title means. I think it was quite good, and honest, and all that jazz. Then I realized that I’d already written it. “Radical transparency. I’ll try.” Whoops. The crux of that post, and the other I half-wrote today, is that I wanted to be more open. I wanted to be vulnerable...
November 19, 2016
I’ve cultivated a useful trick over the past couple years. When someone makes a point, and it doesn’t seem right to me and I want to argue back, I pause. Before I say anything, I ask myself a question: “What if I’m wrong?” I’ve found that when I start from a point of certainty, I don’t listen. I’m just thinking about what I’m going to say next. But when I start out questioning, and accept that I might be wrong, I come from a...
November 16, 2016
This is an open letter to Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John Roberts, and the GOP majority: How many people have you killed? You’ve probably never picked up a gun or knife and taken a life directly, though even if you have—in the military, one hopes—the number of lives you’ve taken is probably higher than you think. It might not even be a whole life, but it’s probably not zero. How many lives have you saved? The same is...