Happy Valentine's Day
- Notes
Will Anybody Ever Love Me?
Yes.
Friends
Rodeo
- Journal
Last weekend, I went to my first rodeo with my friend, and I had a blast. I had no idea what to expect, and I admit, I felt out of place, but my friend made me feel welcome. She walked me through the rules and strategies for each event, and the more I understood, the more I began to appreciate the rodeo and the entire culture and enthusiasm surrounding it. Rodeo’s are a big part of people’s lives where I live, amongst all my friends, and I, in hindsight, feel disappointed that it took me so long to enter this world.
A few things struck me the most. The first was how violent some of these events could be. The second was how young many of the participants were. There was one moment when a boy no older than twelve fell off his horse and hit his head on the ground, knocking him out for a solid ten minutes. There was a hush in the crowd as we watched the EMTs huddle around him and do what they needed to do to help. They strapped him to a gurney and carried him away, but one of the cowboys told the crowd that he heard the boy say he was okay and that brought a relieved crowd to cheer and clap. And the show went on.
One of my favorite events was the barrel race. These were fast and fun and I loved seeing these skilled people ride their horses with such command and grace. I’m hooked.
Mostly Happy
- Journal
Earlier this month, I woke up at around 2am and when I couldn’t fall back to sleep, I grabbed my camera and drove around. I pulled off at a place I had driven by a million times before but never stopped to explore. The sun was beginning to rise as I walked the dirt path and listened to the birds and the insects and the quiet, and I snapped a few shots of the sunrise, then I drove to the reservoir and snapped photos of the geese and ducks swimming on the water, and I stood there a moment and watched the sky change colors and the birds fly away from me and I thought, Wow. I loved every moment of this brief excursion, and I was happy.
Earlier this week, I went on a hike early in the morning, and I had my camera in hand as I snapped photos of the trees and the talus and the mountain peaks, and I broke a sweat as the slope steepened and the extra water in my pack began to feel heavy, and I talked to myself as I ascended the mountain and swore there was a squirrel or a sparrow stalking me in the trees as I hiked the trail, and I imagined getting mauled by a bear because I saw bear scat on the trail on my way down from the hike that I swear I didn’t see on my way up and I, of course, didn’t have bear spray on me so I made my peace with the Universe and savored every moment of whatever life I had left, and when I saw my Jeep I felt a tinge of disappointment that I didn’t get to see a bear. I took my boots off and changed into my sneakers, and I sat in the front seat with the AC at full blast and I felt my sweat dry on my face, on my glasses, and my back was throbbing, and yet, I still thought, Wow, I loved every minute of this hike, and I was happy.
Last night, I had dinner with a friend I had known for many years but had never asked out before. We were actually supposed to meet last week but since she couldn’t find a babysitter, she had to postpone by a week, and that was okay. We sat at the bar and I ordered a Cold Smoke and some street tacos while she ordered some multi-ingredient science experiment that I think had pineapple juice and Sprite and a plate of clams that reminded me of the ocean, and we talked about work and baseball and ourselves, and I asked questions and she asked questions and there wasn’t a lull in the conversation, and we smiled and laughed and when our meal was over, we walked outside and marveled at the beautiful Montana sunset and I lamented that I’ve spent all this money on my photography gear and I didn’t have any of it on me at that moment. She laughed, we hugged, and as I drove back home, I thought, Wow. When I got home, I saw that she sent me a message, and I read it and smiled, and after a few back and forth messages, we settled on hanging out again next week. There’s a rodeo, she said. Let’s do it, I said. Thinking of that makes me happy.
This has been a good summer.
How Friendships Die
- Notes
To continue the thought from my previous post, Robin Dunbar explains how friendships die:
Friendships die when we do not see the people concerned often enough to maintain the relationship at its former level of emotional intimacy—and especially so when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. So the tendency is for such relationships to fade quietly, almost by accident rather than design. The road to friendship is paved with good intentions to meet up again, and no doubt a good bit of guilt—we must get together sometime… but somehow sometime never comes because too many other priorities intervene.
There’s that energy I mentioned before. Friendships die when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. Don’t want friendships to die? Do something about it.
This reminds me of this New Yorker cartoon from this week’s issue:
How to Maintain a Stable Relationship
- Notes
In a chapter titled “Why friendships end” in his book Friends, Robin Dunbar writes about a study conducted by Michael Argyle and his collaborator Monika Henderson that examined the rules that underpin friendships. They identified six key rules which were essential for maintaining a stable relationship:
- Standing up for the friend in their absence
- Sharing important news with the friend
- Providing emotional support when it is needed
- Trusting and confiding in each other
- Volunteering help when it’s required
- Making an effort to make the other person happy
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been working hard this year to improve my friendships and my social network as a whole, and I have found Friends by Robin Dunbar to be an invaluable resource to help me understand what makes friendships work and how I can be a better friend to those I care about.
I’ve lost too many friends over the years from the simple fact that neither side devoted enough energy in maintaining the relationship. All it takes is a bit of energy, and that has been where I’ve been trying to redirect my attention and focus onto this year. I can’t say that I’m the most popular person in the world now or anything, but I can say that it has been fun to make plans with my friends, to hang out with them, to confide in them, and to share some part of our lives together.
This has been really tough, though. Even though these people are my friends, I still feel that fear of rejection, of cancelled plans, of maybe mistaking where I think my friends lie in my friend circles and where I lie in theirs. Calibrating that has been interesting. Keeping friendships takes a lot of energy, and I think I’m ready to expend as much of it as possible on them.
School’s Out
- Notes
School ended on Wednesday, and I saw all the kids head home for the summer. Yesterday I said goodbye to teachers and friends who are moving on to new jobs and new opportunities. I also said goodbye to a 6th grader who transferred to our school last summer and who was as shy and stubborn a kid as I’ve ever met in my life but who slowly opened himself to us throughout the year and became such a loving and overwhelming force in my life that I almost cried as I gave him one last hug and said goodbye to him one last time.
I believe the summer is a time for new beginnings and a time to experiment and have fun. I have plans and ideas and wants and wishes for how I want to spend this summer, and I know life usually has other plans for me, but I feel like I’m in a better place now than I’ve ever been in my life that I know in my bones I will go with the flow and live as best as I can, no matter what life decides to throw at me.
I will miss my friends and I will miss these kids I may never see again, but my life is better because we shared a bit of ours for a brief period of time. “He looks up to you,” a co-worker of mine told me a few weeks ago, referring to the 6th grader. “Doesn’t it feel nice to have someone that looks up to you like he does?” We talked about anime and manga and my love of black coffee and his utter disgust of it. We would tease each other relentlessly, and I’m simply going to miss him. I’m going to miss a lot of things here in the next few days and weeks, but life moves on and I have to, too.
Birthday Week
- Journal
It was my birthday earlier this week. I’m closer to 40 now than I am to 30, and I don’t know how to feel about that yet. I usually don’t like celebrating my birthday, mostly because it wasn’t something I celebrated much growing up, but this birthday was different. I felt very loved and very lucky. I have good friends and a great mom. My friends bought me a cup of coffee—a black Americano, naturally—and a delicious and very filling vegan chili pie. My mom bought me a Bookshop gift card.
Books, coffee, and vegan food: that sums me up pretty well.
On Thursday, I donated two units of blood to the Red Cross. It was a Power Red Donation, and it was pretty slick. The guy who did the procedure on me had recently gone to San Diego with his wife for their honeymoon, so we talked about my hometown, the Padres, the Dodgers, and good Mexican food. The older I get the more amazed I am at how small the world feels sometimes.
I wished my mom and a few of my friends a Happy Mother’s Day today. I’m just now realizing that most of my good friends are mom’s, including my own. It makes sense: mom’s are the best.
The Altar of Attention
- Notes
Om Malik, in a post titled Why internet silos win, writes:
It doesn’t matter whether it is Twitter, Instagram, or Mastodon. Everyone is playing to an audience. The social Internet is a performance theater praying at the altar of attention. Journalists need attention to be relevant, and experts need to signal their expertise. And others want to be influencers. For now, Twitter, Instagram, and their ilk give the biggest bang for the blast. It is why those vocal and active about Mastodon are still posting away on Musk’s Twitter.
If we didn’t care for attention, we wouldn’t be doing anything at all. We wouldn’t broadcast. Instead, we would socialize privately in communication with friends and peers.
I’m using Om’s post as a jumping off point for something I’ve been holding onto and thinking about for a while. I’ve written my thoughts on social media before, and I see these current thoughts as an evolution on what I’ve written before. Mostly: I’m not an online community kind of guy, and I need to finally accept that.
When I jumped on the Mastodon bandwagon a few months ago, I wrote that I had mostly been enjoying myself. And that was true, I guess, but that feeling didn’t last very long. It wasn’t really who I followed, it was the whole idea of a timeline, or the feed. The feed, this box filled with 280 characters or 512 characters or an unlimited number of characters; this box filled with cat photos or moss photos or pretty sunsets; this box filled with people trying to sell me stuff, to influence my behavior in some way, to convince me that their views are right and their views are wrong; this box can go to hell.
I don’t need it, I don’t want it, and I need to get away from it.
Last month, Robin Sloan had this to say about Mastodon, words that have stuck with me ever since (I’m quoting all of it):
Don’t settle for Mastodon
I suppose this is an anti-avenue, because: Mastodon is not it.
When you tell me about Twitter vs. Mastodon, I hear that you got rid of the flesh-eating piranhas and replaced them with federated flesh-eating piranhas. No thanks, I’m still not swimming in that pool!
I’m not saying you shouldn’t create a Mastodon account, or that you can’t enjoy fun, percolating conversations on that platform. I’m just saying that it does not, to me, represent a sufficiently interesting experiment, because it accepts too much as settled.
The timeline isn’t settled.
The @-mention isn’t settled.
Nothing is settled. It’s 2003 again!
Nothing is settled. But what I don’t want to happen is probably what Robin wants to happen, and that’s for people to create something new to replace what’s already here. A new social network paradigm or something similar. What I’m thinking is: no, no we don’t. I don’t think all of humanity was meant to connect to each other in this way, something M.G. Siegler wrote (and I quoted and wrote about) back in October of 2021; mainly, that the problem is us, human beings.
A few weeks ago I went to my friend’s house and we played Uno, Old Maid, and Go Fish with her son and husband, and I had a blast—we all had a blast. We joked around and told stories and I lost my “crown” to my friend because he won the last game of Old Maid, and it was genuinely and simply a lot of fun. What I’m arguing for myself is that I want and need my “tribe,” my smaller community of good friends and family that I can see and hear regularly, and not these formless, shapeless outlines of people behind a screen. I know social networks provide something different—especially for marginalized communities—but this is what I prefer, a real life community.
Aren’t you being hypocritical? I hear someone asking. You have a blog, you’re still on Facebook and Instagram, you’re a Bookshop.org affiliate and are trying to sell me something, so why should I listen to you? You’re right and you shouldn’t. Nobody should listen to me. Like I said, my thoughts on all this are still evolving and will continue to evolve. But I am still going to try and figure out what’s best for me. On the last day of 2022, for example, I collected my login information for my Mastodon, Micro.blog, and other accounts, I saved them in a CSV file (two-factor codes and everything), I deleted my login information from my password manager, I deleted all my cookies and history from all my devices, and I tucked away that CSV file deep in my Documents folder. I am still thinking about maybe printing this information instead, but for now, this is what I’ve done. My intention is to never again login to these services, to never again contribute content to these services, and to simply let them rot until the end of time.
I guess what I’m yearning for is a more genuine human connection with those I already know and will meet in the future, and a way to pull away from these boxes the Internet or tech companies or modern culture as a whole wants to put me in. And to do that, I need to reclaim my attention, to focus on my hands and what I can build with them, and less on those things sucking away at my eyeballs and stimulating my reptile brain.
But what about your blog? Aren’t you writing for an audience or for the chance to build one? Yes and no, I guess. Again—I don’t know. I have an unending physical need to write. I have had it for decades now, and writing online forces me to write something different than when I write fiction or when I journal in my notebook. I don’t think I would have ever written any of these thoughts if I didn’t have my website. They would have been short notes here and there in my notebooks, and maybe a throwaway line a character says in one of my novels. And besides, I’m guessing most nobody reads my blog anyway? So like who cares? But yeah—I don’t know.
I’m still trying to figure my shit out. I have a long list of ideas in my drafts folder I’d still like to write and explore, and I still enjoy writing and publishing things on my own website—more for myself than for others, honestly—so I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. And that’s a good encapsulation of what being a human is like, I guess, and that’s what I want to be doing more of, being more human.
Goodbye 2022
- Notes
May you burn in hell forever.
But also, not really because 2022 wasn’t that bad of a year. Here’s to an even better 2023. 🍻
Happy New Year everyone!
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