I got a wonderful, lavish present from my mom and my sister in honor of my upcoming Large Birthday Event. I’ll be 50 on the first of July, you see. It’s pretty nifty to have acquired half a century of time and experience—I’m stoked, as we used to say back in the far-off-times that were […]

I had a manager once include that sentiment in a performance review. I really liked it at the time; it helped convince me that, in the hectic swirl that is network management, I was picking the wise things and not merely the most obnoxious. Today that means that I moved a variety of initiatives forward—some […]

I received a lovely note from the owner of the beach-house we rented last month. He expressed that he’s very pleased with our feedback; I wonder whether he felt inundated by our thoroughness. Because not only did we (I, in this case) craft a review of our stay for the booking website, but I sent […]

My parents, and their parents before them, demonstrated how to be respectful to children. The skill’s not particular to interacting with the young and very young–listening that accepts is worth doing in any interaction. In fact, I wonder whether my mom honed her skills with the oldest of her relatives. Time has unmoored the reasons […]

My sister is going to the zoo today. In her case, I should say, “a zoo,” because she loves creatures and visits any handy zoo whenever she can. (Kind of like the way B & I visit libraries.) And each time I know she’s going, I sing to her—or send her—the song from the album […]

D K Ask an economist: can there be an oversupply of smoked meats? I mean, it seems like there’s infinite demand around here… (your dad and I just found another new trailer of bbq brisket.) No. Demand for smoked meats is perfectly inelastic. Similar to the demand for insulin. I’m not sure why the benchmark […]

“The poem is just what you can somehow bring back, but you yourself know it’s only a shred of a memory. Like beautiful wet stones from the beach, which dry.” —Jean Valentine, “What Remains Unseen,” collected in A God In the House: poets talk about faith, ed. Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler

Have you heard of “stereotype threat”? Big-deal psych finding, where being reminded of one’s socially disadvantaged position is enough to deep-six any subsequent (academic, performance) results for one? Turns out that research is “overcooked, overstated, and oversold.” I think this is such a big deal that I’m ceding my spot to the article above. Go […]

There’s nothing as focus-destroying for me as knowing something might be arriving, but not when. Five minutes from now? Five hours? Five days? How about now? Or now? Orrrr… now? That’s a day shot in the head.

Today’s the day I tell the story. It’s not, originally, my story. It was My Sweetie’s; he brought it home from work one day. It would’ve been perhaps as early as the year before A was born, because it happened in the waning days of this one particular glorious challenge of a project. These were […]