Give Thanks
Grateful.
My wife and I have raked and bagged all the leaves, and they are waiting for the city to pick them up. The grill is covered. I removed all the hoses from the house and placed covers on the spigots. I moved the deck furniture to the shed, and the cushions and deck rug are drying in the garage.
For all intents and purposes, our yard has finally transitioned from Spring/Summer to Fall/Winter. To be fair, our Fall interior decorations have been up for a while, but they were quietly put away this past weekend in anticipation of Christmas décor.
But first, Thanksgiving.
As I write this, Thanksgiving is tomorrow. The family will be heading to my parents. It will already be in the past when you read this. Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorites. Its sole purpose is togetherness, gratitude, and good food—no elaborate gift-giving required.
Part of me resists the push and pull of another busy holiday season. I want to cling to the coziness of fall before everything gets swept up in cooking, cleaning, and planning.
I drink my coffee and try to relax before the oncoming tornado of putting up all the Christmas decorations and our family’s eight trees. In the meantime, I’m still trying to concentrate on Thanksgiving and all the things I’m grateful for this season.
My wife and I are grateful most of all for our health, our home, and our happiness. For steady work and food on the table. For our family and friends. Her constant nurturing presence anchors me. Without her, my life would lack color and warmth.
Divisiveness and hardship fill the news, but I choose to turn toward hope. Like Fred Rogers said years ago, I’d rather focus on the helpers. Volunteers giving time and money. Doctors healing the sick. Teachers nurturing the future. Millions of quiet heroes we can be grateful for. The world will always have darkness, but there is light if we look for it. In my opinion, the light’s winning.
Soon, we’ll go around the table sharing what we’re grateful for this year. Some will be humorous, some heartfelt. All will be small points of light to appreciate for this moment and this imperfect but beautiful life. The year to come brings uncertainty, but there is turkey, laughter, family, and hope right now.
For all of this and more, I give thanks.
Be seeing you.
Brad Underwood made his famous meme come to life
Kudos to the Illinois Basketball social media team. I’m actually pretty surprised he just went ahead and did this because it is so amazing and funny and I’m just in shock. Man, I hope Illinois beats UConn. Also, I’m jealous of that Rolex Submariner he’s wearing.
The realities of being a pop star.
Charli XCX on how cool it is to be a pop star. “One of the main realities of being a pop star is that at a certain level, it’s really f-cking fun. You get to go to great parties in a black SUV and you can smoke cigarettes in the car and scream out of the sunroof and all that cliche shit … You get good free shit like phones and laptops and vinyl and trips and shroom gummies and headphones and clothes and sometimes even an electric bike that will sit in your garage untouched for the best part of 5 years. You get to enter restaurants through the back entrance and give a half smile to the head chef (who probably hates you) and the waiters (who probably hate you too) as they sweat away doing an actual real service industry job while you strut through the kitchen with your 4 best friends who are tagging along for the ride. You get to feel special, but you also have to at points feel embarrassed by how stupid the whole thing is.”
Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images
I feel like I’m on the precipice of this. I definitely relate to the people who close their eyes and basically just see the back of their eyelids.
College Football Playoff bids are great. Making your rival miserable is still better
I’m with Will Leitch on this one. I’d rather beat a rival than get beat as the last College Playoff team.
Requiem for Early Blogging
Elizabeth Spiers longs for old-school blogging today. “I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.”
Karen Chronicles
Sean Bonner has a slightly amusing story about a “Karen,” the Karen meme, and food truck ordering. It’s the kind of story that the “uh oh, people” meme comes from.
Every Decision Has Three Costs: Time, Focus, and Optionality
I’ve been thinking lately about how I come to decisions. Joan Westenberg outlines it thusly, “Identify which decisions actually matter for your goals and values, then allocate your three currencies accordingly. For decisions that don’t matter much, minimize time and focus costs even if that means accepting suboptimal outcomes or reduced optionality. For decisions that do matter, invest whatever combination of time, focus, and optionality the choice genuinely warrants.” Of course, I’m terrible at this.
Don’t Let AI Ruin the Em Dash
Non-writers don’t know how to use them, and when they do, they immediately get called out, even if they didn’t use ChatGPT or some other LLM to help. Personally, I’d like to reclaim the em dash, but it’s far too late.
“The Little Movie That Couldn’t”: ‘Mallrats’ Turns 30
I remember thinking Mallrats wasn’t very good, but it wanted to be so, so bad. I haven’t seen it in years, but I imagine it screams 90s. This paragraph from the piece encapsulates my feelings: “On the eve of Mallrats’ October 1995 release, MTV held a splashy premiere party hosted by the veejay Kennedy and featuring live music from Sponge, a sentence so perfectly ’90s that it just Rocked the Vote for Ross Perot. It would be the last time anyone celebrated the film for a long, long while.”
How Jacob Collier Reimagined the Acoustic Guitar
I’m a huge Jacob Collier fan. However, I’m not a guitarist. Still, this conversation with Paul Davids is riveting and enormously generative of musical ideas. It really makes me want to start playing guitar.
