Notes

If I were more organized — and if everyone in my home wasn’t sick — I might write a “year in review” blog post. Instead, a half-hearted note will have to suffice.

When I did my annual performance self-evaluation at work, I found that I accomplished a ton of important things but made very little progress on some of the goals I had set in January. Many of those goals aren’t really relevant anymore, either, which maybe says more about the corporate culture of goal-setting than anything else. I’m incredibly proud of the things I did this year, they’re just mostly things I couldn’t have anticipated before they happened.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions so I don’t have any goal-setting document to compare against for my non-professional life. But I think it’s very much the same story. The things I am most proud of in 2024 are largely things I wouldn’t have been able to predict at the start of it.

I realize this isn’t an original observation, that life is unpredictable. That’s still where I’m at, cliche as it is.

This has been a difficult year for so many reasons. I expect 2025 to be even harder. But I’m so grateful to the kind and loving people in my life, and for the extraordinary place that is Chicago.

Nothing like ending 2024 with strep!

“Hard to Tell You” lyrics

Warpaint is a band that I find myself returning to all the time, and “Hard to Tell You” is one of my favorites — telling someone you love that the life you’ve built together, the life you’ve helped to define, just isn’t working for you anymore. (I’m fine! We’re fine! But, you know, relationships are complicated sometimes.)

This is a song that gets played on gray and gloomy days like today, melancholy music for melancholy days.

In reply to: Tech bro missing the point

My 5 year old and I spent a big part of yesterday building a car out of K’nex, 100% a product of our own imaginations. He needed some help and at times I had to take the lead, but he was very engaged the whole time.

This morning within a few minutes of waking up he told me he had ideas for changes to the car and wanted to work on it more.

Sometimes parenting is exhausting! Sometimes it’s nice to have the kiddo watch a movie so I can check out for a few minutes! But I just fundamentally don’t understand the mindset of someone who would look at playing with their kids and say “can I make AI do it for me?”

I spent some time recently setting up an RSS reader app on my phone, which I really should have done ages ago. Besides news and classic blogging, what prompted me to do this was the discovery that both Bluesky and Substack support RSS feeds.

Substack is its own kind of problematic, but a lot of people whose thoughts I’d like to read currently publish there (and I am a paid subscriber for a few of them despite my reservations). Bluesky seems less problematic so far, but after the Twitter debacle I’m not about to give my heart to another social media company.

But RSS? That’s where it’s at! I can read what’s being broadcast free to the world in an app on my phone without having to put myself into someone else’s membership ecosystem!

I don’t think anyone has really figured out how to be an ethical user of the web, and every day I feel like this thing that I’ve built my career on might also be destroying society. But this feels like a tiny little way to maintain some ethical distance.

In reply to: Microblogging again

The biggest downside I’m seeing right now is that my current Notes setup might make it harder to ditch WordPress, which I hear is kind of eating itself thanks to the vanity and hubris of the problematic rich dude running the show.

Am I microblogging again? This feels like a mistake, yet here I am!

Sometimes I feel like the 30% of what I do at the VA is bother people to think about how controls will work for people who say things out loud to their computers. So I wrote a blog post about it!

Will this be the beginning of regular blogging? Almost certainly not.

It’s the Max Fun Drive, so I wanted to share a few words about one of my go-to podcasts on the Maximum Fun network, Jordan, Jesse, Go!

As Jordan and Jesse regularly remind their listeners, this is an absurd and pointless show. But the most recent episode with Elliott Kalan featured a lovely and sincere defense of the pointless goofiness of this and other shows. Not everything needs to have meaning. It’s okay and healthy to have fun, empty calories in your media diet.

But there’s something that’s particularly special to me about JJGo. In that conversation, Elliott Kalan says the show has an “innocent vulgarity” to it—which I think is what’s so alienating about the show to some people and so compelling about it to others.

It is a vulgar show. But it’s not “locker room talk” in the way some men excuse the offensive misogyny and homophobia they think they can get away with when it’s just the boys. Even when JJGo is offensive, it’s inclusively vulgar.

And I find that so extraordinary, so unique, and so important. Two straight cis dudes and a guest make a show with genital jokes and naughty words that somehow is still a welcoming space to women and LGBTQ+ listeners who would never be welcomed into the performative vulgarity of male-coded spaces. In some strange way, this pointless show with no premise is a radical assertion that this kind media belongs to everyone.

I’ve been a JJGo listener for years, but it’s been incredibly important to me more recently. The last year has been one of the hardest years I’ve had—which is kind of surprising to say, given what 2020 and 2021 were like. And as I’ve struggled with (waves hands around) and tried to find a new understanding of who I am and who I want to be, JJGo has been such an important place for me.

Over the last few days I’ve read a number of reflections on the 20th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. I don’t have anything particularly meaningful to add, except this:

A few days after the war began, my small hometown organized a parade in support of the war. I was in middle school at the time, and we were notified that the whole school would be attending the parade—during what would normally be school hours, instead of attending class.

When I expressed that I wasn’t comfortable being required to attend a political event in support of a war I opposed, the middle school principal (and future school district superintendent) told my parents that my concern was ridiculous. It wasn’t going to be political, you see. It was just about “supporting the troops.”

Nevertheless, I was humored. Students were subsequently notified that we could opt out, and while most of the school attended the parade maybe a dozen of us stayed behind in a classroom and wasted an afternoon watching a movie or something.

As the photos in the local newspaper would demonstrate, it was—of course—a political event. Never mind that “support the troops” was and always will be a political statement. Kids were taken out of school to go cheer for a war and for explicitly partisan message.

In so many ways, I had a good experience growing up in an idealized small-town middle America, in one of the more affluent towns in the county. The schools were good. The people were friendly. I was safe. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to live there.

But my high school health teacher told the class that AIDS was caused by “sodomy.” I could count the number of Black people I knew on one hand. And one afternoon in March 2003, all the kids in the middle school were taken out of class to go to a war rally.

That town and that time in my life feel so incredibly far away. It’s hard to process that dissonance sometimes.