Fizzy Lifting Drink

So we're going to set aside the navel gazing for a second. A pointing arrow has cropped up, two people in as many days bringing up the same topic independently of each other. I feel the universe is guiding me toward making the Internet and your lives better.

We need to talk about you nerds and your Sodastreams.

Look, I get it. Bubbly water is both amazing and versatile. I understand the burning passion that a man has for a crisp, refreshing, hydrating beverage that tickles his palate and settles an upset stomach.

Make a simple syrup with peaches or berries or ginger or even celery seed (I shit you not), and you've got a soda. Mix it with booze for a cocktail. And may Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, spare MetaFilter user Greg Nog for his idea of cold-brewed fizzy coffee. Motherfucker changed my world with that.

Yes, I get it. Your passion is mine. But why why why must you constantly be bobbling out to Williams-Sonoma to swap your booby-trapped proprietary charger cartridges, only to find out they're out of stock? Why must you limit yourself so? Don't get me wrong, I'm no open-source zealot, but you're grundle-punching yourself here.

You guys? Homebrew that shit.

It takes a couple of parts ordered online, a trip to a home improvement store, and then a quick jaunt out to a welding supply shop. Twenty minutes of assembly later, and you have months of ozone-destroying beverage pleasure. And it's cheaper even than a Sodastream, long term. (Protip: Get the adapter they link at the bottom rather than build the bike valve thing, unless you really need your water super fizzy)

But middleclasstool, you say, why would I spend that time and effort building that myself when I can just buy the Sodastream and get it running in five minutes? Besides, there's a model that looks like a penguin!

Listen to me, you fucking Philistine.

If you have a Sodastream, odds are you're a nerd. If you're a nerd, then you understand that spending even two hours setting up a tool that saves you five minutes of work every time you use it will pay dividends. You drop your money on Textexpander to save you seconds or minutes per day because you know those minutes will add up to hours and days and weeks and months. You're Backblazing your Tent node right now, aren't you, pervert?

This one day of work is going to save you at least a year's worth of errands. Me, I get bubbles whenever I want. I have never known the pain of having a charger run out on me when I'm ready for my fizz. Sometimes I get really mad at Al Gore and I turn it on and let it go, and I still have plenty left in the tank for my bubbles. You need to embrace this liberty and all the sexy ladies that will come with it.

I am a voice of one crying in the wilderness. Make straight the way of the seltzer.

FINGERBLAST THE FUTURE

So I just finished a shitter of a week that ended with a merciful blumf. Two, count 'em, two projects fell out of the sky with the same deadline in the same week that I'm on deck to do some volunteer work for our church, and...well, I won't bore you with the details, but it sucked there for a while.

Friday morning I went for my quarterly psychiatrist visit so that my doctor could be sure that the TV isn't telling me to masturbate on the mayor's dog before she gave me more pills to make the shiny things be less distracting. We talked about my life. I mentioned I was angling for a promotion, and I've got the kids, and Jack's in kindergarten and Georgia's being potty trained, and my wife works too hard so I'm hoping that the promotion will take some pressure off of her, and I'm on campus all the time because I'm a student here working on a Master of Public Health degree, and...

She held up a hand and laughed. "Are you sure you want this promotion?"

Well...no. It's a sexy thing, but no, I'm not. But I know it's a big shot that I'd be good at, I'm unhappy where I am, and I'd rather risk climbing into a fire than stay in this annoyingly tepid sauna of busy work.

There are two items that will forever stay at the top of my to-do inbox. These are they:

The first is a reminder of where I need to go, the second of how I'm going to get there. Do something with your life that needs to be done, find a way to make things a little better and maybe just maybe leave a mark on the world, and oh yeah, work is the only thing that will get you there.

I cling to those two sentences like a life preserver sometimes, and sometimes it's enough just to let them nudge up against my brain. Keeping them in my inbox means I look at them at least twice a day. That way the distractions can't make me forget.

If you had told me fifteen years ago that my pants would be constantly vibrating at work and that that would anger me, I'd have laughed.

— middleclasstool (@middleclasstool) July 9, 2012

It's all so damn hard to navigate sometimes, and if it weren't for my system, I'd probably be traveling upriver to murder a colonel.

My system, if there be a damn that you give, is the stereotypical Mac nerd setup: Getting Things Done (well, most of it) and OmniFocus. It's a bit difficult to get used to, but once you get okay at it (I don't think anyone ever gets good at GTD), it's very useful.

Uses:

• Not standing in the middle of Target thinking what was the other fucking thing that I needed here
• Indeed, having a mobile application that knows I'm near Target and need to stop in there for stuff. Achievement unlocked: ROBOT BUTLER
• Not annoying my bosses or my justifiably weary wife with yet another thing I forgot
• Boiling all the things in my life down to what I can do right here, right now with the tap of a finger
• Remembering books and movies and websites and games and wines and comics I want to remember, ideas I want to write about, and things to make my wife and kids happy

I'm careful not to put only work in there, for fear my system would become a thing I would avoid. I put happy stuff in there like a recurring lunch date with my wife and an insanely difficult puzzle I want us to do together rather than watch TV. I'm thinking of setting up geofenced reminders all around the city of fun things I can do with the kids when we're out and about. Project likely to be called "Planned Spontaneity".

It was after I got all that stuff in there that I looked at my screen and realized I was seeing damn near the sum total of my life, the chores and errands and work and distractions and things I value, my days and weeks and months to come. My system was showing me the hard data of who I am, and I found myself comparing that to who I want to be. The outcome was okay, but there was a vacuum in there waiting to be filled.

So now I use those lists to chase that first inbox item and never fall prey to the second. And it's a wonderful twist of fortune that the same system that mapped out my life for me also relieved my brain of the burden of remembering, thereby carving out enough space in said brain to think about those two sentences.

Every morning I process my stuff, check my calendar, write my day out on a sheet of paper, and update my trickle list. For the rest of the day, I am out of my system unless I'm running errands. Every evening I check off what I did and take time to think about whether I did anything that day to move forward. I usually spend that time trying not to beat myself up. But I also try to understand where I am and where I can go from here.

You can't think your way out of it. Should I go for the job? Shouldn't I? Should I be spending all this money on grad school? Should I ditch it all and learn the harmonica? Shut up shut up shut up.

Forward motion. Get up and do a thing. Fuck finding your passion. Work. Grab anything interesting when it comes by. Keep your eyes open, and keep your stuff out of your brain so you're ready when you see sexiness happening. Go run. No, fuck you, go run, and tomorrow pick up heavy things and put them down repeatedly. Did you write today? Fuck you. Go run, then go write.

It seems the only hobby I have is making myself suck less. I'm okay with that, as long as it's in service of something greater, lest I disappear up my own ass. As long as it's to make tomorrow come. To be ready when the opportunity presents itself.

Notifications that aren't mission-critical may die in a fire. Email, I don't want to hear from you more than hourly. Twitter, I've somehow found the ability to ignore you most of the day, and I believe it's called "Wellbutrin". My system made the space in my brain to think, and I'm cutting all of you off to make the time.

More days are failures than successes. I'm gradually becoming okay with that. I'm gradually getting better at understanding what it really is I want. Road's gotta lead somewhere. Thanks to the pills and the system and the many many people who have led me to this place, I can think about it, but of course I can't think my way out of it.

I keep a third sentence in my pocket at all times, and it reminds me of a related thing that's equally important. This one's from Leonard Cohen:

I hated everyone
but I acted generously
and no one found me out

Your hands will tell you what your brain cannot. Your brain may lie to you; your feet will not.

It's a curious thing not to trust your brain, indeed to think of it as something separate from you that must be managed. Wonderful servant and terrible master and all that. But it seems to be working. I try not to depend on it to remember. I try not to listen to it when it whispers to me about the possibilities. I try to grit my teeth and take a step forward, because it's the only way I'm going to find out.

Want evidence that I'm right? It took me five drafts of this post and probably at least 6,000 words before I got the right foundation laid. I didn't figure out what I was trying to say until I started writing while I was making dinner. Two-way chicken. I shit you not.

Rise, My Creation, Your Master Commands

You've probably figured out that tools are important to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about them, and I like to write about them too.

Problem is that most of the tools I rely on every day are, predictably enough, software, and there's already a big crowd of people who write about software and getting work done. There's Sven and there's Patrick and there's Sparky and there's Eddie and there's Drang and there's Brettsy von Terpington and there's Merlin and there's Merlin and there's Merlin and there's more besides. I don't feel like trying to duplicate their success.

I was ruminating on this the other day when I had made my third failed attempt at a post I still haven't given up on about how I use alerts and notifications to emulsify awesome sauce. I found myself slipping into doing some variation on the sort of thing I read in my RSS feeds every day, and let's face it, if I do that, there's really no point to this place.

That got me wondering what the point of this place is, and I was surprised at how difficult that question was to answer. I thought on that for days, and then a very scary career opportunity presented itself, and the answer tumbled out of my skull.

I was trying to get work done but had just finished one of those conversations that completely derails your brain with scary possibilities, and as a result, I was worse than useless. I was literally experiencing a mild fight-or-flight response thinking about it, swept up in a mix of exhilaration and the sort of terror one feels when confronted with the dead-eyed ghost of a six-year-old Japanese girl.

I had anti-focus. I knew I had to process it before I could get anything done, so I started typing, and eventually, the following came out.

A note before we dig in: Please pardon the grandiosity (and random perspective-shifting). I tend to tinge purple when I'm brain-dumping and I hadn't intended it for public consumption, but I don't think I should edit it too heavily, for honesty's sake.

This is what I wrote:

The thing is that you are meant to do something on this earth. You are meant to change things in some small way. That is why you were given hands and a mind and a heart and legs. You were meant to do things that make people's lives better. You certainly were meant to always be working to make yourself better. This [opportunity] is the devil you don't know, sure. But would you rather be impotent and underused?

This thing in me that wants to live, I want to let it, and I'm not sure of how. I worry about the costs. But I desperately want it to live. Sometimes it seems I can physically feel it burning in my chest, and I don't know if that's real or not, but I damn near don't care because it feels alive.

The job's not going to give me that. No job is, unless it's a very special one. I'm not sure that even necromancing my old dream of being a decently-paid writer would do it for me, not really. Once you're doing what you love, the trick is to keep loving what you're doing. And how many people get paid to write what they want?

That sense of being alive, I've found it in music and art and books and women and movies and funerals and Jennifer and the birth of my children and I'm hungry for more of it. I want to find it in me, in my life.

"Your life is coming to you," I hear that thing say, and I think, it's here. I'm living it. What else is there?

To build something, for starters. To feed and amplify wonder. To make others feel a hunger and longing for that feeling and to be lost in it.

You can write about OmniFocus. You can write about notifications. You can write about clutter and focus and tools and tricks, but it should always be connected to your heart and your fear and your life and your longing for something you're not sure exists. That is your blog. The intersection of tools and dreams, usefulness and impracticality, fear and longing and love and sex and giving and meaning and failure. A glorious Kurt Vonnegut butthole-shaped crossroads of life.

That is The Tool Shed. Looking for a way to build dreams and change out of the things of this earth. Talking about the stuff we all know but don't say. Finding a way to help that thing live. Not a whole lot of blogging about that.

Now look at notifications and OmniFocus and tools and your job in THAT light, fucker. Where are the angels and goblins in your contexts?

Woof. Is that Bill Shakespeare? I don't have my glasses on.

But I hope the gist is clear: that thing at the center of me lies mostly beyond my comprehension, but I'm pretty sure it is at least partly a call to do work. Not necessarily my job, not even necessarily an avocation like this place, but something that matters, something that changes things in some small way. I can't quite shake that loose.

I'm only now starting to get comfortable with the idea that all life is searching, that when you feel like you've arrived, it's pretty much all over. So if this site really does last and is to be anything, it is to be a chronicle of that searching, with a keen eye on keeping it bullshit-free.

I'm encouraged by the surprising level of reaction I've gotten from people who have read this site and the new friends I've made because of it, but the real reason I know this place is on the right track is that every time I write something like this, I'm choking down panic. That means it's worthwhile, because it means I'm selling my heart.

Now I think I'll call my shot: Spinning the Wheel of Topics, the next post will be about trying to spend more time acting and less time reacting.

Last One to Leave, Turn Out the Lights

The World Wide Web is nearing its 20th birthday, believe it or not. Those two decades have wrought countless changes on our culture, arts, communication, economics, even religion and cooking and sex. The Internet has changed everything it has touched. It has shown us such wonders, delights of which humankind had dared not dream.

On this day, in this moment, it has reached its pinnacle. It will do no better than this. Everything that follows this is merely commentary.

You must watch the whole thing. At the 4:00 minute mark, that's when things hit the stratosphere.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alan Rickman making tea in slow motion.

(via @flashboy.)

I May Be About to Make with the Schmoopy

As of this writing, the kids are finally in bed, lunches are made for tomorrow. Shirt's ironed. Jacket will be my newest, a summer-weight navy thing with stripes. Grey slacks.

Did that, cleaned the kitchen, took out the trash and recycling, then ran up to Kroger for some mascarpone cheese and heavy cream. Tomorrow they will be whipped together with some sugar and homemade bourbon vanilla extract. Protip:

1. Save old vanilla extract bottle from The Spice House.
2. Split a couple of vanilla beans and cram 'em in there.
3. Fill bottle with good bourbon.
4. Wait.
5. Sexyface.

This will then be splorped atop slices of red wine chocolate cake, which if made with good quality cocoa powder and cinnamon (see previous link to The Spice House) is asploding sexyface cracklin whiz biscuits. Protip:

1. Serve cake to guests.
2. Wait for facial expression showing revelation that their lives have changed.
3. Yell SPLA-DOW!
4. Mount guests on the dining room table in a manly fashion by order of height.

The cake is for my wife. The cake is for my wife because Thursday we will be celebrating the day of her birth.

I met her, oh, a dozen years or so ago. My roommate and I were in a bar. He was looking for someone to dance with, I was looking for a glass of scotch and a chair so I could sit and watch people have fun. It's a thing I do.

We were regulars in this place, friendly enough with the staff that a cocktail waitress felt comfortable asking for a little business assistance.

"See those two ladies over there?" Yes. "They came here to dance and it's slow tonight and nobody's asked them to dance and they're bored and about to leave. Help us out here?"

Roommate: "Sure." Me: "Fuck."

So we did. He got the short brunette with the curls, I got the tall blond with the total lack of interest in me. We danced. We had drinks and laughs. He had a thing for the brunette, so I figured she wouldn't factor into my future and turned my attention to the sound of the tall blond's vagina slamming shut when she looked at me.

It's a story I'll tell our grandchildren one day.

That night started a friendship with the brunette that turned into a deep affection that turned into lust that turned into fear that turned into the greatest damn decision I ever made in my life.

Now, I know I'm supposed to say that. You can't write a thing where your tone is more "marrying her was pretty good, I guess, I mean I'm not lonely and there's the whole having-boobs issue too". You are Not Allowed. But seriously, listen to this:

I was a fragment of a man-child when she came along. I was still wounded from the fallout of a long-dead relationship, was floundering in the pursuit of a totally impractical undergraduate degree, had no ambition, and was in fact one of those insufferable cockbags who writes overwrought blarf in coffee shops. I managed to shart out the first draft of a novel that in retrospect could have been titled No One Understands My Angst or Hidden Power. I was a flaccid summer shower of bullshit, the duke of peanut gallery wisdom, leaping from fling to fling like a methed-up bonobo with a bionic penis.

That's a robo bonobo boner, for those of you keeping score at home. And she sized me up and said "Eh, sure, let's give it a whirl." Can I get a whoop whoop.

Now look at me.

I'm thicker now, and balder. I get tired more easily. I drive a minivan. But I have two bachelor's degrees. I'm working on a master's degree in public health, with an emphasis in biostatistics. I have something approximating a vision for my life. I have ambition and drive. I meditate. I bake most of the bread that my family eats. I am using every tool at my disposal to build more awesome into my life, brick by brick by brick.

I found my voice as a writer, and I found it because I found her as my audience. I'm not writing this stuff for you guys.

I also made this:

I mean, come on. Look at that. I don't look like that.

Let me be clear: I would have none of this without her. None of it. I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd gotten what I wanted half my life ago, because it would have kept me from her. I cringe at the thought of what that would mean, what I would have missed.

You know how your pillow gets cold, and that feels nice to lie down on? In the winter, her butt does exactly the same thing, and it is Spooning Valhalla. The only problem is that, unlike my pillow, I can't flip her over to enjoy the cold butt on the other side.

My wife is the furnace of our home and family. She is its engine, its drive shaft, its beating heart. She understands that love means leaving blood on the floor. I do not deserve her.

I'm working on a fairly nerdy post that will get more into the details of this, but I have a running project in OmniFocus called "Marital Bliss" that I put things into that might make my life with her better. I started this recently out of the realization of just how much I fail her.

The thing about this project is that every time I look at it, I feel this faint tinge of sorrow. I feel this because I know that the day will eventually come when I have to go in and mark that project completed. And that will be the saddest goddamn day of my life.

She is as tough as overworked pie dough and she sobbed when a baby bird fell out of our attic and she is frazzled and she works too much and she gets seriously gassy when I make red beans and rice and she understands the importance of throwing up the horns when things are rockin' and she is a nerd and she is all curves and she is a god damned firecracker.

I send her every post I write here before I put it up, because I want her to be first in line. But not this one.

I have gone on too long. I am sorry. But I need to put up a marker. She has completed the first year of the fifth decade of her life, and no one on the internet has built a shrine to her. That is a problem I am correcting now.

I love you, Ferf. One day I will deserve you.

Blerfy Blumfy Blorgleberries

This is half test post, half blog-related heads=up:

RSS appears to have gone all hoppitamoppita for the site, which I have learned from alert reader Matthew Petty. Links in posts don't appear to work from Google Reader, and it doesn't even look like the most recent posts are loading in the feed, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, I've filed a ticket and am looking into it. The Squarespace guys are responsive and I'm sure we'll get it worked out soon.

Meantime, go look at Matt's blog instead, or maybe see if the Internet has any naked pictures of famous people. I bet it does.

I'm Only Half Joking Here

We are here today to celebrate the career and herald the retirement of a lifelong friend. We are here not just to wish her well, not to merely hand her some gold-plated accessory and pat her on the back, but to honor her.

To honor her industry.

Her dedication. 

Her steadfastness and her genius.

Her beauty? Yes, her beauty too.

To this day she stands clad in Harvest Gold, a shining symbol of an age when our tools and our workers were not meant to be disposable, but were built to last and priced accordingly. She outlived that era, and she is still standing, still working---at the end, harder than ever.

She is, let it be said, the John Henry of dough.

She came into my home before I did. I have known her and her loving care literally my whole life. I spent my boyhood "helping" her and my mom make all manner of batters and doughs. I watched her whip egg whites into meringue Kilimanjaros. I watched her turn cream into lust, a defiant reversal of the natural order. Bit by bit, she taught me how to conjure.

She gave me love and comfort beyond measure. She was part mother, part science teacher, part enabler. When I finally became a man and had a wife and children of my own, she followed me to my new home to give them that same comfort and joy.

But two loaves' worth of bread dough a week is simply too much to ask of someone who has already given so much for so long. Her paddle beater is nicked, the tines of her whisk dulled. These marks of use and usefulness only enhance her beauty, but I can no longer ask her to bear more scars on my behalf.

Yesterday I laid my hand on her as once more she diligently massaged life-giving gluten into a mass of hot cereal and flour and honey and yeast, and I felt the searing heat of her brow. She never complained, not once, just gave a small sigh when she laid that burden down for what I hope will be the last time.

When it was done, I washed her bowl and paddle and dough hook, wiped her down with a cool, damp cloth and left her to return to room temperature. I fretted over the strain I had forced her to endure. And if there was some excitement in my anticipation of Tuesday morning's trip to Tuesday Morning to arrange for her replacement, know that it was tempered with sorrow and conflict.

She will always have a place in my home. I will not toss her aside after so many years of loyalty and dedication and love. But her days of bleeding for my family are over. She has earned her rest.

Enjoy that rest, dear lady. Thank you for all you've given me.

Well right, naturally you should hate spirituality. →

Every last one of them was the heart of the heart of the tv dinner demographic. But then they get shot into space, tossed from the gravity of this planet, across a quartermillion miles of nothing, to be snagged by the moon after three days. Eighteen guys did this and twelve descended further to find out that moon dust smells like gunsmoke. Every single one of them came back irrevocably changed. America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans.

--Spirituality and the Apollo program

Found this via news.me. The internet needs a FUCK YES button.

Arrows and Options and Vomit, Oh My

Everybody in the world's commenting on this essay by Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, so I figure I might as well bumf around on it too.

I stumbled across it via the Radiolab iPhone app (which is excellent) in the middle of a pisser of a day: low focus, bad workout over lunch, and kicked off with this post from Rands in Repose in my RSS feeds. The Rands post announced that he will now start advertising jobs as a way of monetizing the site that might actually benefit his readers. He asked this question:

There are many forms to not being busy. You might just be getting your day started with a cup of coffee, you might be on your lunch hour, or you might have seven precious minutes to take a deep breath amongst your crushing responsibilities, but here’s my question: is the lack of busy more fun than your job?

And I was just getting my day started with a cup of coffee, but I thought, well...yeah. And then I went back to navigating my way through the best career advancement opportunity I've ever been handed. Yeah, I know.

I was feeling more than a little down on myself -- bad workout, bad focus, bad answer to that Rands question. Then I found Jad's essay.

It's about how Radiolab started and the deep existential dread Jad felt trying to get it off the ground and make it good. It's about the joy of not having a plan.

In it, he brings up three ideas that kept me standing still until I'd finished reading the whole thing: pointing arrows, the adjacent possible, and running toward things that make you want to vomit.

Pointing Arrows

I'm a messy person. My house is a wreck, and I'm lucky to have kids to blame for it, but it isn't their khaki shorts on the bookcase. Still, there are many places in my life where I crave order like it's oxygen, particularly when I am contemplating a new project or task. I don't need (or want) all my days to look alike, but when it comes to the important stuff, I do need to know the plan. I need an anchor point. An outline, a process diagram, a syllogism, something. That's what my brain craves: logic, sequence, order, plan.

That's precisely what frustrates me about living. I often grope for a plan for my life but have yet to grasp one. Truth, I normally can't see beyond the next move or two in my own career or personal life. And so my life has mostly felt like a chain of back roads I've meandered along. I was okay with that when I was young and immortal. No more.

My hope? Looking for that moment when something seems to shift, when a chance encounter illuminates a possible way forward.

My life has been pierced here and there by those pointing arrows, as I bet so has yours. Those little moments open up possibilities that make my brain pay attention for a change. They invite me to go left instead of right, often without a hint where I'm being pointed, just a glimmer that it could be important. Listen up. Pay attention. It feels like something important's happening.

This job and my last one were pointing arrows from the first interview. Falling for my wife, of course, was a pretty big one. So was that Back to Work podcast I wrote about before that completely changed my life. And so was Jad's essay.

I always follow those arrows. I never regret it.

The Adjacent Possible

I love that term. I love the concept more. It's the change right next door, the one you can make right now. I love it because it's what makes the uncertainty tolerable for me.

When I'm overwhelmed with frustration because I don't know where I'm headed or what my life is finally going to amount to, I am calmed with a simple thought: What can I do now? What can I change?

It usually ain't much. The answer is often "keep heading this way and see where it leads". Sometimes it's "you've hit a dead end and you should have planned for this weeks ago". But sometimes it's something new.

My adjacent possibles are easy to enumerate because they are few. I am a husband and father, which pretty much trumps all other considerations. That takes away a lot of sexy (and probably therefore illusory) possibilities. It means I don't have time for hobbies, let alone something like starting up my own business, but it also keeps me from doing anything truly stupid. It's one thing to do something that scares you. It's quite another to do something that could hurt your kids.

But that's another thing, too: my job is to protect them and provide for them, but it's also to lead by example, and that example has to include that you go for the thing you think you should be doing. Trouble is I don't know what that is. I'd love it to be doing something like this, but as of yet I have no way to monetize it. File it under "things I hope I work out one day" and keep writing stuff like this because I love it and I think it's important.

So I keep my eyes open. I look for what's next door and hope it leads to a good place.

Anthony Hopkins once asked a priest "Father, what is the shortest prayer a man can pray?" The priest replied: "Fuck it."

It's okay that I'm not a master of life strategy. It's easier to make choices when you're not surrounded by dozens of possibilities and terrified of getting locked into one. Speaking of terror:

Gut Churn

Fear's a tough one. Fear and self-doubt have been my most faithful companions in life. Making a step toward something that terrifies me is, well, terrifying. But.

I don't know if it's the need to be a good role model to my kids, my growing awareness of my own mortality, or simply that I'm getting to be too old to give much of a damn, but these days I find myself more inclined to push myself toward doing things I find scary. Or at least I find myself telling myself that I should.

I've been quietly working on a thing with a guy that scares the shit out of me, a thing that I very much want to see the light of day and may die if that doesn't happen, a thing that seems silly to care that much about and won't earn me a goddamn dime. No, it's not a thing I'm going to tell you about. Even you, Mom.

But it's a pointing arrow. It's an adjacent possible. It sure as shit churns my guts when I think about it. It may lead nowhere; it may lead somewhere merely pleasantly distracting. But I have to see.

I'm scared of it, and right now I kind of suck at it. If (when) you behold the first couple of efforts, you'll detect both that fear and the suck. But that's why I have to do it. It's the monster in the closet, and I'm not going to kill it. I'm going to ask it to dance.

On Losing Neil Armstrong →

Whenever I look at the moon I am reminded of that precious moment, over four decades ago, when Neil and I stood on the desolate, barren, yet beautiful, Sea of Tranquility, looking back at our brilliant blue planet Earth suspended in the darkness of space, I realized that even though we were farther away from earth than two humans had ever been, we were not alone.

Buzz Aldrin's statement about Neil Armstrong's passing

Just look at that picture. That is a ten-year-old boy with one thought looping in his head: This is the best thing ever.

Hi Again

It appears we are go for launch. Only weirdness I'm seeing in RSS is that everything loaded in the feed again, which, oh well.

New stylesheet, more minimal-y. This is because, as the Taoists tell us, the most important part of the blog is the part where there is no blog. I also confirmed that it doesn't look like fresh shaved monkey taint on a phone.

Minor bug: the tag links aren't working, which I am told is a known problem that they're working on and should have fixed soon.

My many thanks to Squarespace, host of this site and company of super-badasses. If you need web hosting, give them a peek.

This Blog, Impending Upheaval, and You

Heads-up to you RSS nerds:

This blog's about to be upgraded to Squarespace 6 from version 5, which is a pretty big move. Version 6 is a ground-up rewrite, which means moving over makes some stuff go whoopity-woo. I believe this includes effing with the RSS, so if you're a subscriber, you'll probably have to re-up.

It means a new stylesheet too, as this template isn't on the new system. But it's a nice one, and responsive too, so it'll be more readable on phones.

Otherwise, everything should be more or less the same. Toot me or email me if you experience any weirdness.

It may take a bit for the domain name to resolve to the new site. Hope you like it.

Bringing Out My Inner Pretty

Look at this motherfucker. I ask you.

I believe it's my new favorite. I got it a couple of days ago from the Put This On Gentlemen's Association, an ingenious business idea from Put This On, one of the cogs in Jesse Thorn's budding online media empire machine.

Yes, Jesse. Empire. You're a man now. Start lighting those cigars with that public radio money you're raking in.

Anyway, it's the Pocket Square of the (Every Other) Month (Plus an Extra One in the First Shipment) Club. Vintage fabrics, hand-rolled edges. Unlimited man-pretty.

This was the first shipment I got from them:

The white one's very nice linen. The striped one has stripes, which makes it go faster.

I finally got serious about dressing like a grownup a couple of years ago. I was 35 and had two kids and figured it was time. Out went the cargo shorts and ironic T's (mostly, anyway, as I've still got one or two), in came sport coats and neckties and selvedge denim and, yes, pocket squares. Put This On taught me a great deal as I navigated that change.

I quickly discovered that people tend to take dressing well as a sign of respect. People interpret the simple act of throwing on a jacket and cramming something in the breast pocket as saying "my time with with you is important enough that I dressed for the occasion". Mostly that means appreciative nods, sometimes that means perks. Whee!

Plus I've been called dapper, which is new. They don't call you dapper when you're in a baggy Reverend Horton Heat T-shirt and flip-flops. I have data on this.

Funny thing is that I've even learned a thing or two about myself in the process. One of those things may be that within me dwells a dandy little fop yearning to break free. I'm not prepared to say at this time.

Anyway, thanks, Jesse. You make the Internet better.

"Like" This, For the Love of God

So Facebook is pretty terrible.

I know a lot of you hang out there. I used to, briefly, but it got to be too much. I spent my time at Facebook like I do every church I've ever belonged to--with one foot out the door, the main reason for sticking around being the wonderful people I'd see there.

Sixty percent of my reason for leaving was Facebook's Josef-Mengele-with-a-chainsaw approach to my privacy and data security. They've been playing grab-ass with people's data for years, and it generally takes the threat of a federal investigation to remind them that scruples exist.

(Just as an aside, I wonder whether most people understand what can be at stake. Witness the Girls Around Me app shitstorm of awhile back, in which people's Facebook and Foursquare accounts were turned into a potential tool for sexual violence. That app's dead now, but the ability to get that data isn't.)

Anyway, there's still that remaining forty percent of the reason I left, and, paradoxically, it's identical to the reason I stayed: the people there.

I love Twitter, though it's slowly turning into Facebook. Someone once said that Facebook's the family you're born with and Twitter's the family you choose, and that's true, but don't take that to mean that I don't love the family I was born with. On the contrary, I adore them.

Family Is Hard

I love every person who I followed on Facebook, I do. And that's why it was excruciating to see the old high school friend parroting a facile stance on a complicated issue that they heard from some braying television jackass, the colleagues I hold in high esteem using idiotic phrases like "death boards", the people I would die for gleefully supporting policies that harm other people I would die for.

I die a little every time I see it, especially when I see someone swinging someone else's life around like a dead cat because they can, because to them it's not real, it's just an issue or a "stance". Sometimes I want to grab those people and shake them and ask them how they can dare be so wonderful and so necessary to me and yet be so glib about other people's lives.

There's the "hide" button, of course, and I've used it, but only for acquaintances. I can't bring myself to do it to people who have touched my life deeply, people who mostly post touching, funny, uplifting stuff. So I walked. Maybe that's a cop-out.

I'm just self-aware enough to be pretty sure that others among my friends and family likewise have shaken their heads in disbelief and sadness at things I've written online, and that's why I try like hell not to talk politics in public fora. I know some of them read my Twitter feed and this blog, and I'd rather not cause them that same pain. I frequently fail at this, though, when I get angry or feel like making a yuk-yuk or am otherwise irrational. It's hard, I get it. But I'm trying.

Boy howdy, am I glad I'm not on Facebook this month.

On August 1, the Best Babysitter in the World got the kids excited about going to Chick-Fil-A. This, midway through one shitter of a week--she wanted to take them there that day of all days. And that's not a conversation I wanted to be forced to have with a five-year-old boy who's excited about chicken and indoor playgrounds. How does one explain both human sexuality and otherwise good people supporting hate groups to a five-year-old boy in the same conversation? God bless my wife, who handled it with love and tact.

Parenting sucks sometimes. Okay, weekly. But mainly, all this just leaves me tired all over.

GRAR RAR (I'm a Scary Monster)

The Internet Rage Machine is powered by bile and lubricated with froth. It cannot wait to tell me every single day of my life who I should hate, who I should support, who is a hypocrite, and who is a saint. (Answer to that last one: Fred Rogers. Everyone else is suspect).

The net effect is that it strengthens my ambivalence and apathy more than my resolve. Don't get me wrong, the issue of equal rights for my LGBT friends and family is an important one to me, but I also shop at Target and still buy food that comes from ADM and Cargill and I'm sure that at least half of my income goes to moustache-twistingly evil places, because it's impossible to avoid them. They're running things, after all.

I can't do nothing, of course. I'm exhausted with discussions about which comedians supported Daniel Tosh and which didn't, but I'd like to see rape culture in this country be given herpes and set on fire, and I know that problems don't go away if we don't talk about them until everyone damn near starts rending their garments. Every now and then, someone actually learns something new. I know I do. Occasionally.

Still, it's all devolved into one big game of Issue Volleyball, and not the sexy kind of volleyball with the sexy athletes in the sexy panty outfits pulling the sexy wedgies out of their sexy bottom cracks.

And I'm tired. I'm tired of "winning" and "losing" and I'm tired of dragon fighting and I'm tired of outrage and I'm tired of a world in which I can't get a fucking chicken sandwich without punching a trans person in whatever genitals they have that are none of my business.

I'm also convinced, and I talked about it some in that last link, that at least some of this is a shiny thing dangled before us to distract us away from the more fundamental problems of money and power.

The one time I had a shred of respect for Karl Rove was an interview I read in which he admitted that he didn't want Roe v. Wade overturned. Why? Because he knew it would do to the GOP what the Civil Rights Act did to the Democratic party: it would destroy them for at least a generation.

I didn't put a link in that last paragraph, because I can't find one, so I'm beginning to doubt my memory there. But look to history: In the first six years of the Bush administration, with unprecedented control over all three branches of government, they did precisely zippo to re-criminalize abortion, which they claim to be one of the party's flagship issues. Nothing. What does that tell you about priorities?

I'm tired of that corruption, and I'm tired of those who profit from "us" vs. "them". Surely I'm not the only one. And just as I cringe at the growing political tribalism of modern-day Christianity and rolled my eyes clean out of my head at the presumption in the phrase "I'm a Christian" that the Best Babysitter in the World offered up in response to the Chick-Fil-A thing, I can't quite bring myself to carve up my loved ones into those two buckets and toss the one labeled "Them".

Nor do I think the accelerating trend of politics-as-blockbuster-movie is going to end well for any of us. Surely there must be some other way. Preferably one that no longer necessitates "Hide" buttons for anyone.

Hey, maybe this is a start.

Happy Birthday, Brett.

A very happy birthday to Brett Terpstra.

Who is Brett Terpstra?

I'm just delighted you asked.

This is a list of stuff Brett Terpstra has made.. Most of it he has given away for free. Don't know what that stuff is? That's okay. It's nerdy stuff, but it's important nerdy stuff. Stuff that has changed my workflow and vastly improved my life. Stuff that is so important for my writing that I actually lug my MacBook to work so I can write on it, then transfer the files to my Windows work laptop so I can give them to my bosses so they can be all oh, mct, you're so talented and handsome, and just look at your document formatting, can we do the sex now?

Brett's stuff is mostly related to plaintext writing and Markdown, which I've written about here before. Just as weaning myself off of fast food has decreased my tolerance of it, so has abandoning word processors for plaintext nerdery made me apoplectic with rage after five minutes in Word. Brett is basically the Whole Foods of dorks.

More accurately, he's a mad scientist. A really, really nerdy mad scientist who makes awesome things that help people. He's a toolmaker, and so he has my love. Personally, I can't imagine writing without Marked, I use his OS X services to clean up my work, and since I discovered his tools for my favorite text editor, things have gotten even better.

I use his tools every day. That's what she said. Where's the beef?

Brett, happy birthday. Congratulations on your work and your new podcast. You make the internet and my life better.

I mean this in the nicest way imaginable, Brett: you are my Tool of the Week.

Shillin' Like a Villain on Penicillin

So what good's the internet, if not for product placement? Let me lay a couple of totally unsolicited recommendations on you. I sometimes do this when I've had an exceptional customer service experience, and in the past couple of weeks, I've had two good ones.

First, Yurbuds.

I have really fucked-up earholes. They're big, they look kind of like Robert De Niro's mouth when he laughs, and they don't have that little divot thing in the bottom that you can hang traditional earbuds from. The kind of buds that you jam into your ear sort of work, but not terribly well, and they hurt.

Yurbuds are designed by atheletes and guaranteed not to fall out, even during rigorous exercise. Me, I was skeptical, but I needed earbuds, so I picked up a pair at a Best Buy and tried them out.

They...mostly worked. Once I got good and sweaty on a run, one might want to shake loose, and they really wanted to fall out if I leaned forward to stretch while sweaty. Still, they worked okay-ish, they didn't hurt, and the sound quality was really good.

On a lark, I did some looking and discovered that you can get different size covers for the Yurbuds, so I emailed their customer support and asked if there was a way for me to buy the larger covers. Within an hour I got a reply asking me to send them photos of the buds in my ears so they could evaluate fit. Two days later, there was a new set of large earbud covers sitting on my porch. For free. They even sent me a replacement set of the smaller size, just in case.

The big ones fit beautifully. They don't hurt. And I can literally yank on the cord and they don't come out. I believe for Christmas, I'll be asking for the iPhone model (with the big freakhole covers, natch). If you're in the market, give 'em a shot.

Second, Spark and Spark.

Another hell yes: my wife went lunchbox shopping for our kids online. She found their super-wonderful and customizable astronaut lunchboxes. You see how they have different hair colors and even races for the kids? You notice how none of them are girls?

Yeah. I have a daughter. She would be a kick-ass astronaut. She would find moon dragons and fight them with SCIENCE and then walk away saying something cool like "I guess I cut you monsters...down to scale" and then Prince would do a guitar solo (because Prince lives on the moon) and something would explode.

Where's her fucking lunchbox, I ask you?

That's what my wife asked them, because this gender norm stuff pisses us off. I'll be goddamned if my daughter is going to soak in Disney princess bullshit. She is going to arrest intergalactic outlaws using math. (To their credit, the girl lunchboxes include things like doctors and scuba divers and lawyers.)

Within two days they emailed her back, saying they'd be happy to make a custom girl astronaut lunchbox for her, just let them know and they'll get it done.

You know who sends an email like that? Awesome people, that's who. So yes, we're buying that lunchbox. And you should buy things from them too, because I believe that people should give their money to people who are awesome.

Stuff We Don't Suck At: Healthcare Edition

So the Affordable Care Act got upheld by the Supreme Court. I don't know what your opinion of that was. Mine, if you care, was some relief that we are at long last on our way (if still not quite there) to no longer being the only industrialized nation on the planet that denies some of its citizens access to care.

I am also stunned that it happened. As I bet you are too. Roberts?

My job involves supporting people who work in the healthcare field, people who are working hard to improve the quality of delivery and create healthier populations, which in turn keeps costs down.

Right now, by the way, is the part where I have to tell you that I'm speaking for myself and not my employer. This is an annoying thing (again, my opinion only!) that's partly PR and partly on the order of those DVD warnings in which the movie studios beg you not to sue them over the commentary tracks, because movie studios and I and my bosses live in an absurdly litigious country.

Point being, if I were to point out my belief that even Dick Cheney looks upon Antonin Scalia from his throne of deformed baby skulls and thinks there walks a man who might eat a kitten just to taste the mew, that's not reflective of anyone's opinion but mine. Also, I'm blogging pseudonymously. I'M A PHANTOM OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Now let's move on.

Anyway, I bring up my employment because part of what we do involves evangelizing about fancy terms like patient-centered medical home and the chronic care model and meaningful use of electronic health record systems. These are important words. These are words that just might help fix some of the problem.

And so, in the context of that mission, and in the wake of this history-changing decision, I'd like to share a video I watched recently that you might like. It's about an hour long but, regardless of your political leanings, it will almost certainly show you a few things you didn't know about healthcare systems that (mostly) work. I am on my way to becoming an expert in this field, and it showed me things I thought were about as likely to exist as sexy mer-lady underboobs. So, without further ado:

The Good News in American Medicine

In Which I Put My Thing Down

The race went well. Better than expected.

Said expectations were low due to high heat, as the race organizers scheduled this in a June Arkansas evening, which is to say on top of a hotplate set inside of Satan's anus, which was situated on another very hot thing which was also hot. I have officially pleaded for morning races henceforth.

Still, I hydrated like a motherfucker beforehand and clung to what shade I could find during the race. I did not run barefoot, because I've run barefoot on exposed blacktop in mid-90s heat precisely one time. It was a sensation I like to describe as "oh Jesus, I would murder a grandmother to make this stop".

So, toe shoes. Toe shoes and practically drive-by dry-humping what trees grew near enough to the course. And then there was the fire truck with the hose at the end. Did I tell you about that part yet? There was a fire truck. With a hose. At the end. And also beer.

There were no chip timers, but their measurement has my pace at being a few seconds under a 10-minute mile. Nothing to write home about.

Except.

Except I'd run in similar conditions a week prior and got heat exhaustion. Except I'm trying to push to a nine-minute mile so I can build up my distance and kick ass with a sub-four-hour marathon when I'm trained up in The Year Imaginary Christina Hendricks Unicorn Fellatio. Except I nearly cracked the top third of runners. Except I paced myself well enough that on the third mile I very much enjoyed blowing by The Gym Bros.

You know who I mean. Men twice my size with tribal tattoos and Bowflex muscles and 4% body fat. I smoked more than a few. Li'l nerdy old "let me check my bag of holding for my +5 Helm of Feynmaning" me.

But then I checked the results and saw that I was crushed in turn by a 65-year-old man. Just to clarify: I had my ass handed to me by a Medicare patient. Mr. Howell, you are my sworn nemesis.

I saw my family in the home stretch and grabbed my son by the wrist and had him jog to the finish line with me, which was one of the smartest personal PR moves I've ever come up with. You could hear the ovaries exploding along the way.

But in all seriousness, here's the thing:

Years ago I was in a great job surrounded by brilliant people in a department mere years away from being destroyed by morons with MBAs (not bitter), and a coworker challenged me to train for a half marathon. 18 months later, I'd run two halves and a full.

18 months from my couch to a full marathon.

Four-point-five years from that marathon to this 5k.

The Race to Remember 5k, even in my current shape, even in that heat, was far easier, but the road to this finish line was infinitely longer. Guess which one means more to me right now.

Hey, so I told you a story. That story was a story of personal triumph. So don't be a dickhole! Donate to Mamie's Poppy Plates, because you basically owe me at this point.

We Stopped Dreaming

I've written about my deep abiding love for Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson previously. For those of you who aren't familiar and may be wondering what the big deal is, watch this:

​And then watch this:

​That's what.

Swiss Krissly

If I ever in my life receive a letter this wonderful from a person half as wonderful and as necessary as old Satchel Mouth, I hope I will die after reading it, because everything is downhill after that.

The punctuation? Hoo boy.