Anodyne

Well, I’ve done it. Fully entered my forties. It’s the exact moment of my forty-first birthday and I’m sitting at home after being over in Poway for MTV Challenge. Somehow we hooked AMR into playing fantasy with us this season. Cheers to small victories! A year ago I was celebrating my birthday in New York with a dream karaoke and then dance party. Many of my favorite people were there. The SF crew came out and we rented a gorgeous house in Brooklyn. It was the best! A year later, we can take stock of my fortieth year, in brief. I guess the biggest immediate change from then was that I was dating someone at the time, and when I returned from that New York trip, I shifted straight into book mode. In a sense that relationship was doomed from then, as I turned all my attention into cranking out a first draft before we headed to Asia in November. I could document the injustices I did -- I think we had three or four conversations over the next six weeks -- or the huge fight we got into...

I woke up to the news that my long sought after tattooist, a Paris based artist, would be able to see me come November. He’ll be in Mexico City and I confirmed an appointment over Thanksgiving. Note: I last had an appointment with him years ago but that was cancelled due to visa issues. My original plan was to spend a few weeks in Mexico City this year anyway so this would dovetail perfectly. If all goes well, I'll be done with the final draft of this book by then and returning from Taiwan, so money willing I can just rent a place for awhile and invite friends to drop in. I made a short list of people who had experience with Mexico City and am excited to have a new place to visit at the end of the year. Tacos everywhere! As I lay in bed, I texted with a friend about her fear of having her parents see her many tattoos, even though they live on an entirely different continent. The things we still do as adults to hide things from our parents… Somewhere along the line I had the ...

Awhile back Facebook killed the ability to scroll through your feeds via custom lists, thus eliminating my ability to focus on the fifty or so people in my tier one list — I had it organized in three tiers, in terms of interest level and closeness I guess. On Sunday evening, while I was laying around in bed, I started to unfollow people to see if I could make my Facebook feed a useful place again. Everyone has a mea culpa about why they haven’t left Facebook but broadly speaking, it’s useful to me as a minor keep-in-touch tool and ever since living in Asia, Facebook is a must — although I was scoffed at recently for asking to exchange Facebook info so maybe it’s Instagram now for the younger set. But mostly my retaining Facebook is its primary use case as a way to vet potential friends. Stalkers gonna stalk. So what I’m basically asking myself as I go through this most recent round of Facebook culling is to ask: Does this person’s posts add value? It's like the Kondo method bu...

We watched an episode of Netflix’s Our Planet, episode two I believe. In one stunning scene, Attenborough narrates along as walruses leap — okay roll — to their deaths from tremendous heights after scaling rocky cliffs they had no business climbing. It’s all in slow motion and pretty impactful. (See link below. I can’t decide if I’m going to bother linking out from this blog, but for now I will!) Tangent: This site, Convert Case , seems handy, it converts your text to sentence case, lower case, upper case, etc. And most importantly, aLtErNaTiNg case to really bring back that Nineties website flavor. I was also considering doing this entire blog in lower case to really throw it back but since I became a real writer that part of me died. Also I read somewhere that people who have the desire to write in all lowercase are really just compensating for something. In my case, sure, but I wish I knew what... In Singapore a few months ago, we went to a friend of a friend of a friend’s holi...

Tumblr is dead, blogging is sort of back, and so am I, with the effort to blog semi-regularly because otherwise I won’t get myself to a keyboard to type and hypothetically everything I should be doing involves a keyboard. There’s a lot of people who subscribe to the idea of morning pages and I guess that’s what I’m trying to do, but instead they’ll be late night pages. Stream of consciousness, no editing, no real intent to make coherence. In addition, I’ve been reading about the idea of “stock and flow,” which I took from Austin Kleon’s post and he took from Robin Sloan’s idea. Writing day should, in theory, get your brain spinning over the stuff that you want to review, and one of the things I want to do this year is try to sit on ideas more, instead the quick ingest and rinse cycle. "'Flow is the feed (“It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.”) and stock is the durable stuff (“It’s the content you produ...