Here's the easy way (I'm a Mac/iPhone user; if you're not, sorry/not sorry!):
Open Photos on Mac
Select photos
Command to Print
Choose "Fill" in right sidebar (or whatever you want)
Hit Print again, and choose "Save PDF".
Voila, a ginormous PDF with all landscape photos rotated to portrait.
Here's how to do it right:
Using an image editing app (I use GraphicConverter), set up a batch job (or go
one-by-one if you're patient...it might be faster if you're not
well-versed in the app) to:
1. Scale the photos to 1500 pixels long edge (ie. make the longest
side 1500 pixels, so landscape and portrait photos scale equally). If you see an
option, make sure it's set to scale horizontal and vertical proportionally.
2. Save as JPG. Even if they're already JPG! Because as you do this, you're
offered a quality slider. Set it to 70 or 80.
3. Change Color Profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. In GraphicConverter, choose
"Relative Colorimetric", and then, in Settings > Open > Color Profiles, set
everything but greyscale to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. If you're a professional photographer or designer with terribly complicated and specific needs, you know not to do this. Otherwise, go ahead.
4. Remove Metadata
Run the conversion. Quality should be pretty close to original, at a small
fraction of the file size.
Drag reduced photos into a new album in your Photos app.
Select all photos in the album, hit Print, choose "Fill" in right sidebar (or
whatever you want), Hit Print again, choosing "Save PDF".
Here's the clever move. Open the PDF, and choose File > Export. In the
"Quartz Filter" scroll menu, choose "Reduce File Size". Rename the file (so
it doesn't overwrite the original, and save. There are other means of compressing
PDFs, but they all affect photo quality. Note: Nothing in this whole workflow
significantly reduces photo quality, though your PDF will be shockingly
small.
Open the PDF, and choose View > Thumbnails. Scroll down, and click (in the
sidebar) each landscape shot that's been forced into portrait and type Command
R to rotate it back to landscape. Repeat for every such photo (go slowly, it's a
clumsy process).
I got a few useful chunks from my father. Here's one: Somebody who kills a bunch of people? You can be friends with him. But somebody who suddenly kills his wife after 35 years of happy marriage, now that guy watch out for.
I always liked this way of thinking. And I've been slow-boiling a corollary, which I've finally managed to articulate:
There's no reason to be scared of a hitman. A hitman is as unlikely to randomly kill you as an accountant is to randomly do your taxes.
I once described my dad's breakthrough idea, empowering him to paint despite having no facility for colors. That was an even better chunk.
So few people read here that posting feels like peeing into the wind. So I sometimes post stuff on Facebook that I don't bother cross-posting here. Which is awful of me, because the diehards reading along here are the most important people in my world, and it's unconscionable that I'd sell you short.
I once wrote a weekly diary for Slate (here's Monday, here's Tuesday, here's Wednesday, here's Thursday, here's Friday), and in the "Monday" installment I noted how unusual it was for a distressed restaurateur to maintain quality once hope's lost. Well, I'm ashamed to admit that I'm the disappointing sort of restaurateur.
I'm feeling particularly low because I reread yesterday's entry with fresh eyes, and can see that my signature shtick - explaining complicated, counterintuitive, esoteric stuff with the easy informality I apply to chocolate pudding - didn't work. The posting, to my shame, is nearly unreadable. Too much to swallow, force-fed with eerily relentless casualness. Yeesh.
The points are good and apt, but my breezy tone just doesn't work with the subject matter. I'm not sure what to do. It's far too late to affect gravitas, signalling how frickin' deep it all is (and I am), talking down to people and making them feel like what I'm proposing is entirely out of reach without HARD WORK and CAREFUL STUDY and A FIBER-RICH DIET.
None of that is true. Everything I write here is low-hanging fruit, immediately ripe for picking. But it's so different from conventional framing that I need to work hard to explain why a fresh view is even warranted! Perhaps I ought to go old school, writing with weighty pomposity, and blizzards of words, to make you feel like you need to learn stuff rather than merely reconsider entrenched assumptions. Idunno. I'm sort of at a loss.
Anyway, I just posted the following tip about pillows to Facebook. Feel free to befriend me there, but I'll try to remember to cross-post here, too, in future. I don't know what's wrong with me, taking you for granted. It's irrational to spurn 25 attention-payers just because they're not 25,000. Thanks for reading, seriously.
You can't imagine the degree of research I've invested in pillows. It started with an early realization that no purchase is more important, given that we spend 8 hours every single day nuzzling one of these. Economizing on pillows is insane. Most people, for reasons I don't understand, sleep on compacted hard cheap ones that are 97% dust mite feces. It's no wonder most everyone proclaims their life to be shit.
I'm well-schooled in goose down. I've carefully researched luxe $$$ options. My attitude has been "here; take my wallet, just give me a pillow that will make 1/3 of my life pleasurable!" But I've found that that's not the answer. You can't spend your way to pillow satisfaction.
All-down pillows are wonderful (and exorbitant), but they will never work for side sleepers, because their nature is to compact. This one has enough down for comfort and enough feathers for loft. You'll still need to swap out a new one after a year or two (this is critical: only full-down pillows last longer than that, and, again, full-down doesn't have enough loft for side-sleepers). But at $49, a new pillow every year or two is viable. You can also wait till they go on sale.
Oh, and also buy a normy pillow to stick between your knees if you sleep on your side. Whatever's on sale at Target.
Don't expect comfort that calls attention to itself. It's not a luxe experience. It's just exactly what you need. It's The Missing Piece. Life is now viable. Thank you.
With so much news lately, my “Must-Read” Twitter list (which I’ve spent years carefully honing) has held up quite well. It offers a range of smart, non-extreme, not-the-usual-crap voices, and covers headlines pretty thoroughly.
In yesterday's posting, "The Unsolved Mystery of Storing Notes and Data Scraps on Computers", I mentioned that MacSparky was about to release a huge guide to the app. That seems to be a week or so away, but, meanwhile, he's released this generous free 43 minute preview video explaining the app, comparing it to other tools, and demonstrating the basic set-up process. It's shorter and considerably less irritating than the epic 2 hour tutorial I also linked to.
I recently bumped into the hardest question in current day personal computing. I needed to store two chunks of data somewhere:
1. FedEx International Connect Plus has the best international shipping rates.
2. Santa Susana is the darkest place for stargazing on the Setúbal peninsula.
Where do I put them???
In olden days, they'd have wound up scrawled onto sticky notes. But we foolishly expect computers to liberate us from such hell.
I certainly didn't want to create new folders on my Mac titled "Shipping Rate Tips" and "Portuguese Astronomy Tips". I've been down that road. Because my interests are very broad, I've built immense arrays of virtual filing cabinets stuffed with folders each containing exactly one moldering, forgotten item. It's a horror.
This stuff's non-heirarchical and non-linear. Much of it connects, but only in a helter-skelter web style of connection that doesn't lend itself to tidy conventional filing schemes.
Programmers, trying to solve this, have created a class of app with many names. "Gutbucket" apps. "Shoebox" apps. "Personal information managers". Options range from baroquely complex, expensive, feature-stuffed, unusable software like DEVONThink or Roam Research to dauntingly free-form, open-source unusuable software momentarily championed by geeks who, despite their raves, inevitably soon move on to some other trendy competitor.
Really, developers are damned if they do or don't. Sleek easy apps lack the power to tame huge hairballs of info. And the more the app tries to assist me, the more assumptions (inevitably false) it's making about the help I need, so I feel pushed around. So there's got to be a learning curve. And if you give me an open playing field to do as I like with, I'll throw up my hands in confusion. We users are impossible!
Obsidian is starting to win the war, at least for non-Geeks. A high learning curve is inevitable (per reasons above) for any powerful/flexible information manager, so I'm resigned to it. And this category of apps only prove their worth after months of dogged use (which explains why the crowd keeps moving on). So this is like recommending a binge watch of a TV series that gets good in season 8...but you have to watch it all to follow the plot.
Like all these apps, Obsidian requires dogged tagging, which does not come naturally to me. One day, shortly before I expire, AI will be empowered to suck down all my notes and make ordered sense of it all. But I'm starting to accept that, barring such help, tagging and all the other laborious aspects are necessary hurdles for a gutbucket app to work - to integrate my stuff so it doesn't wind up forgotten and inaccessible, filed, one-item-per-folder, in a jillion virtual filing cabinets. Or adrift on a curling sticky note.
References
I follow MacSparky, who's about to release (this week or next) a "field guide" to Obsidian with a slew of video tutorials. Worth watching for (here). Here's a generous free 43 minute preview video explaining the app, comparing it to other tools, and demonstrating the basic set-up process.
Note that Obsidian is VERY aggressively developed...so it keeps changing. Aside from general overview (like the older MacSparky material in the previous link), avoid any tutorial or guide over six months old. This two hour epic tutorial is pretty recent, and only somewhat irritating.
But I get a feeling that TiddlyWiki might be the best of all. Maybe a notch or two over the geeky line for most users, but the extra power/flexibility seems worth the learning curve. For one thing, while Obsidian, under the hood, generates thousands of text documents (easily exported, but only Obsidian owns their context and connections), TiddlyWiki (if I understand correctly) builds a single-paged wiki, so your stuff is really really consolidated. Also: much stronger and more flexible interlinking.
I'm sullenly un-wowed by apps claiming to offer a graphical layout representation of YOUR MIND, man! Sure, babe. So I almost discarded Tangent, but took one last look, and had to admit this implementation might be useful in an info manager app. And Tangent, itself, looks interesting, at a glance.
Have you ever found yourself propping up a smartphone against a dashboard or car radio or cigarette lighter or whatever, so you could use it for the GPS directions? And suffered the pain of hitting the brake or making a turn and seeing the phone go tumbling around the cabin?
The standard solution is a cumbersome and unsightly suction cup stand like this:
Dreamy, no?
Unsightliness aside, it's an over-engineered solution. It's overkill - and looks like it! You just need some stickiness where it counts.
The aforementioned tape is like flattened soft silicon gel with tacky top and bottom. Adhere one side to any sort of horizontal surface, e.g. the skinny plastic ledge beneath the speedometer. And set your phone down upon it, for some modest grab on your phone.
Is it perfect support? It is not. The phone, lightly stuck just on the bottom, might still tumble over. Just not nearly as easily. It's like 90% better, and you don't have to live with a stupid plastic extensor arm suction-cupped to your windshield.
The tape is admirably reusable. If you pull it up, it won't leave residue. I always bring a little roll with me when I rent a car, and have used this in every car I've ever driven (that doesn't have CarPlay), replacing it every six months or so as it loses tackiness.
Ok, so I know how this lands on contemporary ears. Good-enough quasi-solutions seem shoddy; fumbling; weak. They might even elicit class prejudice. "I'm not someone who puts cheap tape on my dashboard to hold up my phone. I'm not that person. I do things nicely. I do things properly."
There was a time when only aristocrats expected their domain to be uniformly Nice and Elegant and Solid. Then this became a bourgeois expectation. Nowadays, it's everybody. I recently tried to give old clothing to an unemployed friend, who looked at me like I'd offered a wad of snotty tissues. Just because he incessantly complains about his oppressive poverty doesn't mean he's some hobo! He's a nice person (implication: poor people aren't nice people) experiencing temporary setbacks, that's all!
A "good-enough" solution wreaks of lower class. Mrs. Howell does not seek workarounds. Mrs. Howell tears out the wall, or the whole darned building, if necessary, to ensure it's right! She's a nice person with nice things who does things nicely! And Jim's stupid tape idea is NOT NICE. NOKD!
The young couple who bought my house want to add HVAC (central air) first thing, to evade the shabby tyranny of wall unit air conditioners (the house came with a slew of them).
I told them that HVAC is indisputably great if you can afford it. Totally smart move! But why not live in the house for a year, and suffer a bit from the inadequacy of imperfect comfort? That way, when you finally install the HVAC, you'll be relieving something. It will feel like an upgrade!
And, by waiting, they might discover that the wall units work well enough. No one has ever stood in a house where HVAC replaced decent and plentiful wall units and said, "My God, that's so much better!" Despite the lofty price tag, it's just not that sort of life improvement. So why not experience the baseline first?
They listened patiently, but I could hear their thoughts. Dude. Well-intentioned shabby old dude. We're getting central air. We are not farm animals.
Being aristocrats, we've lost all touch with the notion of "good enough". The phrase evokes poverty. Grubby. Not-nice. Like someone offering you their shabby sweatshirts.
Indeed, I can read the above while visualizing myself as a stubborn old coot futzing around with plastic tape to mock up his stupid smartphone, which still falls over a bunch of times. Jesus Christ! Then setting his calendar to remind him to REPLACE THE TAPE every six months. So grubby! So suboptimal! So poor!
Web site creation got legit easy, and I only just heard about it (thanks to friend-of-slog Paul Trapani for the tip). Google Sites is the 300 billionth attempt to make web site creation simple. And it's the first one that actually works.
It snuck up on me. We've had so many junky tools for this for so long that no one believes a good one is possible. What's more, companies like Squarespace have been hyping so loudly for so long that anyone claiming easy web site building comes off sounding like a Squarespace ad. And Squarespace sucks.
I learned HTML in 1997 (thanks, Lynn LeMay), but, alas, everything I build still looks like 1997. I didn't keep up. I've puttered around with "modern" easy site creation tools over the years, but all were excruciatingly awful and spat out super ugly HTML - gobs of crappy, buggy code for every decision. I never managed to build anything with any of them.
My stopgap solution - which I used, for example, on my homepage and on the page for my app, Eat Everywhere - was to get a non web designer to design a look and a flow, and then hire hardcore devs to replicate the design in HTML/CSS.
But with Google Sites, I was able to build a professional-looking and modern site in two hours flat. And, yes, I realize this sounds like a Squarespace ad.
The tools make sense, the whole thing "just works," and while I did need to dive into the manual (and, for a few issues, into previous user discussion), the answers were always findable. It can't do absolutely everything, but what it can do it does well and results look good without needing to make a zillion fine-tuned design decisions.
You're dictating to your smartphone, trying to get it to write "See you at 4:30", and you're getting "See you at 430".
Here's the trick. Add "AM or "PM". You'll get "4:30 am" or "4:30 pm" properly formatted. And while those extra characters are unnessecary, your recipient's eye will gloss right over them.
I'm really bad at any sort of visual stuff, especially house/design/decor stuff (I nonetheless managed, veeeery slowly, to make my house reasonably attractive and comfortable). So my interior painting project has been fraught. I don't know which colors to pick. But I just absolutely nailed one room. I wanted a light, tasteful, gender-neutral peach, without being cloying or girlish. Just a touch of peach in an otherwise classy, neutral color. This is hard. Really hard. And I got lucky.
Cameo Rose (071), baby. Cameo Rose. If you're feeling peach, but don't want it to look like the baby changing room at your community Family Services center, this is what you want. Seriously. Use this.
Don't trust the color you see at that link. Your screen is not a wall. And don't trust a sample painted on your wall, either. A sample is not a room. So how do you choose colors? Pray to your god...and always favor lightness and neutrality.
My other paint success was exterior. I wanted a burgundy red that didn't look like diseased gums; neither fire engine red nor sickly/dark. I settled on Caliente AF-290 (my Guatemalan painters and I got endless merriment from calling it "Caliente As Fuck"). Check out this before/after shot. I think I got my money's worth:
Exterior paints photograph more faithfully than artificially-lit interior rooms, so this is pretty accurate. Caliente as fuck, no? Important note: I bought (and really wanted) a cream trim color, but discovered that it clashed with the white of the windows, which I was stuck with. I had to repaint some trim. Don't repeat my mistake! Go neutral white for exterior trim, or else be solidly aware of how your windows will affect the result.
Have you found a tasty-looking paint color online from a company in, like, Sweden, which you can't buy here? No problem! This site lets you enter the name of any house paint from anywhere, and it will show you the closest matches from Benjamin Moore, Sherwin Williams, etc. You can also enter RGB values to find close matches, and other tricky paint color tricks.
Finally, got lead? Don't abate, encapsulate. No hazmat suits or tented sandblasting are necessary. They just chip away roughly (creating no harmful lead dust), encapsulate in thick primer, and paint over it. This is great for flaking nightmares like my place. Results aren't quite baby's-bottom smooth, but the neighborhood kids won't get sick, their parents won't sue you (your legal exposure from lead poisoning is potentially infinite), and you'll spend half the price of full-on abatement. Do make sure your painting company has an unexpired license for lead work (you can look it up online).
I rarely rent cars outside the US. Even domestically, big-name rental companies seem sketchy and predatorial, and I don't understand all the gotchas (e.g. returning your car early can cost hundreds extra). Renting abroad is far worse. It can feel like a back alley drug deal.
But I needed a car for my recent Portugal trip, and someone highly recommended EconomyCarRentals.com. It's an online platform for discount worldwide bookings which appears to be run by a woman in Belarus. What could go wrong?
Absolutely nothing. I got a great car from a great local Portuguese company at a great price. Every aspect of the transaction was a delight. I did have one nerdy local issue early on: The Portuguese EZ-Pass is a thingee called "Via Verde", and I needed one, but it hadn't been offered during booking. So I called the lady in Belarus, expecting to confuse her. What would she know about Portuguese EZ-Pass? But she answered immediately and authoritatively: "Yes, you definitely want Via Verde, and you can ask for it when you pick up the car for just a few bucks, no problem." That was good enough for me, but, five minutes later, she emailed an exact price (indeed, a few bucks).
EconomyCarRentals arranges rentals worldwide, and I don't think I'll ever rent another car anywhere without going through them.
I have more thoughts than I can remember (not necessarily a good thing), so I really depend on voice recorder apps.
I'm a big fan of RecUp, an iPHone app that gives you a big red button to hit for on/off, and that's it. When you stop a recording, it automatically uploads an MP3 to DropBox. The simplicity is fantastic. (I've heard NetMemo+ is similar for Android). I also rigged up an IFTTT process that watches the RecUp folder in my DropBox and sends me an email whenever a new recording arrives. FYI I first mentioned RecUp in this iOS app survey.
Transcribing can be a chore. You can do it yourself (using this Mac transcription app to fastforward and rewind or this free web app which does the same). Or you can pay a service gobs of money to hire people to laboriously transcribe your stuff, which takes days. Or you can settle for semi-crummy automatic translation, which will be riddled with mistakes.
Automatic is the sweet spot, because while you'll need to edit the transcription against the original audio, a decent transcription will be accurate enough to completely fix in one single pass, with very little pausing. It's viable.
Having carefully tested/compared all major automatic transcription services, I've discovered they're definitely not all the same. Best and cheapest by far is TranscribeMe. They offer pricey human translation, but I use their automatic service, which costs 7¢ a minute, and doesn't add up much even if you use it extravagantly (I bask in the delights of The Future).
Other services make you pre-buy bundles of expiring minutes, but TranscribeMe lets you micro-pay as you go. Easy-peasy. And it effortlessly handles dumps of multiple audio files (I let them pile up and then blitz through all at once). Sole problem: their site loves to show you forever-spinning cursors as you upload and order transcription. Just reload the page!
A few months ago, I posted Memory Trick #1, a method for adding new slots to your brain’s memory via a reframing trick (I also posted this followup explaining how to add still more extra slots).
The following works the other end of the equation: remembering things you’ve forgotten. Prerequisite is faith that everything’s recoverable. It's true. I can affirm, after using this technique for years, that remembering is always possible. It doesn't always work quickly, but it never fails.
Like many topics here on the Slog, it's a stupendously simple matter, but so counterintuitive that I must go to some length to explain. If the following is more conceptual than you can stand, cut to the bottom section for an easy shortcut that delivers immediate remembering improvement.
The Remembering Process
Most people are extremely bad at retrieving forgotten information because successful remembering requires going against instinct. If you can control your reaction to forgetting, you'll greatly ease the process of remembering.
I remember reading an article mentioning an aboriginal group in Japan which still has a few surviving members. And there was lots more interesting stuff, which I made a mental note to read up on sometime. The note just flashed back to me...but I couldn't remember any details. I was stuck!
Web searching might yield further information on the aborigines, but not the article that had piqued my curiosity. So I needed to power through remembering unassisted by the Google machine.
Let’s replay this minor crisis in slow motion. My mind was operating normally, fluidly passing from thought to thought in a more or less straight line (with some digression and haziness). A particularly strong thought - “I must read up on aborigines in Japan!” - flashed, and was followed by....nothing. A sheer cliff, leaving my train of thought trackless.
My mind tried stubbornly to plow ahead, backing up repeatedly to the thought ("aborigines in Japan") and then trying to push forward, like spinning the wheels of a car stuck in snow. Nothing!
At such an impasse, there are three options:
1. Blunt force Back up and go forward again and again in a helpless loop, hoping the missing data magically appears. Bash your face, again and again, against the dead end. This is a very popular move.
2. Think something...anything!
Emotions arise, steering the mind into a new (but unhelpful) train of thought. We cue up the familiar "GOD DAMN IT I CAN'T REMEMBER!" script, which at least provides a sense of forward momentum, leaving us more comfortable than we were hovering at the edge of blankness. I can't remember the thing I forgot, but at least I'm doing stuff! I'm complaining and stressing over the fact that I forgot! We scowl, tighten up, slap our foreheads, and make a dramatic display that does absolutely nothing to help us remember. In fact, it's hard to imagine a better way to push away the forgotten chunk.
#1 and #2 are full of stress. Why do we behave that way? First, it’s what people on TV and in movies do when they can’t remember. Second, anything beats standing around like some goof with mouth stupidly agape and no thoughts forthcoming. You've reestablished dynamic forward momentum, regaining the impression of control by bashing away (#1) or by turning it into a drama (#2).
3. Abide in the Brain Fart Nobody does this, though it's the only move that actually works: Relax into the blankness. Rather than repeatedly try to ram through, per #1, or conjure up emotional tizzy, per #2, the gap is accepted (what choice is there, really?) and you begin to gently probe and nibble at its edges.
Choosing #3, I sit back in my chair, choosing not to furrow my brow or tense up or curse the gods. I don't make the slightest attempt to pry loose the memory. Rather than demand that the missing information present itself, I gingerly explore the gap. My attitude is relaxed, playful, curious.
First, I dip my toe into the part I did remember, re-experiencing the surprise and curiosity I'd felt upon learning that aborigine culture still exists in Japan. Cool! Without grasping, I continued to brood lazily/dreamily about where such culture might be situated...certainly not in the more populous central zones. No...it would have to be at the northern or southern tip. Southern tip immediately rings a bell for me. But I remain comfortably poised in the vacuum - the not-remembering - resisting the urge to tug at dangling strings.
I picture the south of Japan, and since this isn't a place I often visualize, the same vague mental image arose that had arisen while reading that article. Lots of water all around...someone rowing to Southern Japan and being met by aborigines...all in the past, back when that group was more intact. I settle into a lazy, expansive revery about rowing through the sea....to Southern Japan.....a long time ago. Shipwreck. Adventurers. Sneaking into Japan. Aha! I remember! It was an article about how the West tried to penetrate the insular nation at the end of the Shogun age. I suddenly re-experienced the same curiosity to read up on the subject. Deja vu means you're close!
The remembering has gained momentum, so it’s particularly important to restrain my mind's eagerness to reach for the prize. A mind derailed is a delicate thing, and unless the knot is fully untied in a state of mental relaxation (i.e. "abiding in the brain fart"), it will only tighten further. I sense, without forcing the issue, that the name of the publication would elude me if I directly seek it out.
So I sit back again, loftily immersing in the flavor, the smell, the feeling of an adventurer sneaking into Southern Japan via rowboat, claiming to be a shipwreck victim. I paddle oh-so-lightly around the hazy coastline of my memory. With great patience (constantly soothing my eager mind with the assurance that there's no hurry), I passively collect more fragments as they appear: the Shogun's hard-line prohibition of contact with foreigners; the strong currents transporting hapless Japanese mariners all the way to the North American west coast, laws requiring boat builders to intentionally cripple ships in order to prevent citizens from wandering off to other lands...
In a flash, it all spills from beyond the veil: I’d read about this in The Economist. At this point, the article was a snap to find.
Let it Go to Get it Back
The moment you become aware of an impending derailment - that a memory is about to elude your grasp - just relax into it. It's counterintuitive, like learning to steer into a skid. Get in the habit of loosening up, slowing down, and resisting the impulse to bash through via endless rewinding/fast-forwarding. Pause, amiably, in the fuzzy zone. Exist in the vacuum. As your mental train of thought stalls, begin to languidly paddle around the shadowy ambiguity, starting with whichever detached shards are available.
And keep your emotions out of it. Anger, exasperation, stress, and helplessness prevent remembering. Remain calmly aloof as you probe the edges of the gap. Have faith that the knot will unwind under the sustained light of patient curiosity. Don't expect a flash; invite one by letting it appear whenever it will. Loosen the deadline, but don't look away. Don't check your email or think about lunch. Hover weightlessly within the bubble. Remain non-insistently curious.
The sharp emotions aren’t really about memory frustration. The level of consternation is normally far out of proportion with the value of the forgotten data. How many times have you waited while an older relative painfully struggled to recover some absolutely insignificant dab of useless trivia? They're upset not about the missing information but about the gap in their mental narrative.
The brain's spigot normally gushes effortlessly. Information simply arrives. When it doesn't, deep-seated issues of control and identity arise from the subconscious. If my thoughts stop, where does that leave me? A curtain has pulled back to reveal my impermanence!
But that's wrong. You're not your thought stream. You're not the data, or the memories, or the words or deeds. You are pure subjectivity. As thoughts pause, you're the awareness that notices. By noticing, you’ve demonstrated your existence. Rocks never notice that they’re not thinking!
Since people are terribly confused about who they actually are, these gaps freak them out.
This explains the counterproductive impulses. Feeling as if we've crash-landed in an eerie silent abyss of non-existence, we flail for a sense of control, trying to reboot our mental continuity like a smoker frantically flicking her empty lighter. We’re engaged not in data recovery but in a struggle to restart the ticker tape of mental narration that establishes our sense of continuity.
Since we falsely think that we are this narration, the struggle feels existential! This is why people won't easily abandon the chase, even for garbage information. Losing continuity leaves you nowhere. A scary place.
Unless, that is, you blithely relax into it. Our thought stream is something we do, not what we are. We can easily abide in the pause. Mystics spend their lives trying to quiet their minds to experience pure awareness...and you've just had a free pass! (I'm not being glib. Brain farts - senior moments, et al - are identical to mystical states. We have only to relax into them.)
Focusing on Forgetting
Emotions reengage our sense of continuity. We flail, and the flailing becomes the new momentum. I'm no longer lapsed; my mind’s back in gear, grousing about how annoying it is to forget! I'm back, baby! I'm me!
You can opt out of all that. Don't flail. It won't help you remember. On the contrary, it buries the evidence, because what you're searching for lives in the gap you’re fleeing from! Relax into the gap, opt out of struggle, and remembering will be strangely easy.
On-the-Fly Forgetfulness
You'll be amazed at what you're able to recall. There is literally no limit to how far you can take this. No detail will escape your memory if you're able to fully relax into the gap, setting no deadline.
The only problem is that it takes time, and you can't zone out of a conversation to bask in the psychic gap. When trying to remember under inescapable time pressure, options are slim. You can make the standard brain fart jokes, or shrug, or steer the conversation elsewhere. But even under pressure, the way you react makes a critical difference. Your body will sense the gap before your mind does. Learn to relax into the inevitable, rather than contract and harden against it. Resist the urge to frown and tense up. Your odds of graceful recovery improve dramatically when you embrace rather than recoil.
To be sure, a placid response to forgetting will make you look a little weird to others ("Why did he stop talking? Why does he look so relaxed about how he stopped talking?"), but you can adjust those parameters (looking normal vs increasing your odds of remembering) to suit specific situations. Maybe pretend to grimace a little, just for the sake of social signaling.
Pity the Artists
Artists have a better feel for this. The creation of a symphony, novel or painting involves a multitude of mental stalls as you try to materialize the next note, brushstroke, or sentence. Sometimes that chunk arrives, but often it doesn't, and you must keep backing up and trying again.
Artists learn to expect dry spigots, and to proceed gently, never forcing. They become intimately familiar with dead ends, and take them in stride. In fact, they had no illusions about controlling the process to begin with. Truly creative people find gaps exhilarating, because they’re the very wellspring of creativity (we all know what happened the moment after the earth was without form and void). A tight vacuum sucks in inspiration...if we allow it.
But even artists grow weary when a certain chunk keeps defying their grasp. So if you’re exasperated about having forgotten some trivia, consider the plight of artists, who spend their professional lives in that fuzzy realm.
Remember Like a Dream
Here's a cool shortcut.
Failing to recall a fact - a name, a date, a word - we instinctively strain and bash against the block. But when people try to recall a dream, they go about it very differently. They get a faraway look in their eyes and slip away a little, almost as if falling lightly asleep. We recreate a hazy dream state to access dream information. No one ever flails in frustration to remember a dream. We don't force or rush the remembering. We relax into it! We do it the right way!
(Why? Because there’s no interruption involved. And since we don’t actually mind the forgetting - it’s the interruption that freaks us out - we apply a more effective, more relaxed approach to dream recollection.)
So do that! Frame a forgotten chunk as having occurred in a dream. And then do what you naturally do to remember dreams.
Kudos to the chowhound known as Limster for a fantastically helpful chowhounding tip. It's very specific in its usefulness, but if it suits you, it's a game-changer.
I can't keep everything I know about food in RAM. I'm not Rain Man. I will never have every fact at my fingertips.
Sometimes this becomes painfully obvious. If I haven't eaten, say, Chilean food in a while, and I find myself in a conversation with a Chilean, I might be unable to recall one single thing about the cuisine. It's embarrassing!
Less extreme, but even more mortifying, I'll be ordering at a counter and suddenly blank out the name of the cuisine's most important dish. If I had a dime for every time I've stood before a Gujurati clerk trying to remember the name of the yellow spongey stuff that looks like cornbread and is covered with black mustard seeds and cilantro, I'd have enough money to treat you to a nice dinner of whatever the hell the Japanese call the small, intense square of braised pork in the bottom of the large bowl.
The amnesia also works the other way. Here's an embarrassing secret: I don't recognize roughly half of food terms. Many sound so utterly unfamiliar that I carry a visceral feeling that I've barely eaten at all. I'm a rank newbie. Larva-like and blankly blinking.
Of course, such scenarios drive us to our iPhones for salvation. Wikipedia isn't a great food resource, and web search will mostly cough up results from restaurant menus, which are only occasionally helpful. I (with the aforementioned Limster and others) created an app, "Eat Everywhere", which offers expert guidance in restaurants of unfamiliar cuisine (or familiar ones where you want to go deeper, or order for kids, or for vegetarians, or endear yourself to the waitstaff). But the app was never intended as an encyclopedia of dishes and dish names.
So a few minutes ago, like an idiot, I forgot what agedashi tofu is, even though I've had it a zillion times. So I did what Limster does: a Google image search. And it's like, oh yeah. A total flooding back of memory. I once again own agadeashi tofu, in about two seconds flat:
The best tips in life are gut simple. They're "duh". And this is one of them.
Of course, if you haven't eaten widely, a bunch of photos will only help so much. You still want to know what exactly the dish is. But if you're on the other end of the curve, having eaten widely, and need to briefly cut through the fog of Chowzheimer's, Google image search is salvation.
It also boosts my confidence, reminding me that I've eaten pretty much everything. Even the most unfamiliar-sounding dishes, when I actually see them, always look at least somewhat familiar.
ParkerVision, Inc (PRKR) is a company protecting its patents via litigation. It sounds a lot like patent trolling which is disgusting, but my favorite financial writer, Andrew Tobias, insists that this isn't what's happening here. Also, the company has more than patents going for it.
In February, ParkerVision's multi-billion dollar trial against Qualcomm was imminent, and the stock (which I'd bought at 40¢/share) zoomed up to $1.86 in anticipation. If it won the lawsuit, it would pay off like a lottery, and if it lost, it would plunge some, but there's other big litigation on the horizon, plus, as a sweetener, the aforementioned other stuff.
But the trial was delayed to late 2021 at the earliest. So of course the price fell, and continues falling, because investors are twitchy and NOBODY (except ratty little me) wants to tie their money up for 6-12 months waiting around like dopes (patience is my superpower).
I do not recommend investing in PRKR in the hope they'll win their litigation. First, it's speculative, and I'd hate to see you lose your money. Second, at it's current price ($1.08) it's no longer the cheap lottery ticket it was at 40¢/share.
However....
At some point the trial will reschedule. And as that date draws near, interest will perk up again, raising the stock price again. And I just can't see how anything fundamental will have changed. Either the patent was previously violated or it wasn't, and the market has previously priced that question at $1.86. So it should go up to somewhere near $1.86 again, give or take, as the new trial date draws near. It will almost certainly rise from $1.08. So what I’m suggesting is: buy now (or in the near future), and sell before the trial.
If it does hit $1.86, that would be a 72% gain over today's price. That's beaucoup. And it doesn't hinge on the trial result. The company could lose at trial, at every trial. It could crash and burn miserably but you'd be out and counting your money long before that happens. And while I could devise sci-fi scenarios for disasters between now and the trial (Congress legislates a completely new canon of patent law? Management caught operating a white slavery ring?), I can't see the risk.
But risk is there, whether I can see it or not. It always is. Only invest what you can easily afford to lose. This is one of the safest, surest ≈70% profits I could imagine, but please be careful, as I've been wrong before!
The following are Tobias' writings about the company, in chronological order. They assess its litigation chances, and, again, I'm not suggesting you bet on that litigation (though you may want to let a few shares ride, as a lark; $50 might turn into like $500. Or be sucked into a gaping pit of judicial pain and never seen again).
I've been a big fan of Andrew Tobias' writing (I copy his style sometimes) since college, and have followed his blog for almost 30 years, and also know him personally a little bit, and he's not just super smart, successful, and dialed in, he's a sweet guy incapable of deception or manipulation. And even if he wanted to manipulate, his sleepy little blog is too sparsely read to move markets, and he knows it. So (just like me right now) he offers tips as a gift to his small circle of faithful readers. You might want to bookmark him. But this side play isn't something he's pushing. It's my big idea.
Here's the catch: the timing will most likely compel you to take a short term capital gain, which is taxed highly (depending on your bracket). But this level of profit should still be well worth it (check with your tax person).
Also, you may want to wait to buy, because the price keeps falling (markets hate a becalming, and there probably won't be meaningful PRKR news until the new trial date is announced). But if you wait too long, the announcement might come before you can get in, and the price will have begun rising. My wild guess is trial won't be announced until September, so I plan to buy shares for this side-play in late August, hopefully for 85¢ - 95¢. OTOH the current $1.08 is already plenty low. (Edit: now it’s $1.05!)
After my first vaccination shot, a friend urged me to move and flex my arm. But that left me in an intellectual bind. What does "move your arm" mean? Do I watch the news, sipping tea with one arm while doing arcane David Byrne tribal movements with the other one? I did some haphazard arm waves and my arm was sore as hell for 2-3 days.
This time, I took it seriously. I went the full Byrne, right in the waiting room post-shot (half the room watched CNN, the other half watched me, but fuck 'em). I continued en route to my car. And I gave myself some booster arm movement before and after supper. Nothing obsessive, maybe 5-7 mins in total.
Next day, my arm hardly hurts at all.
Do every sort of move you can think of. Pete Townsend wind-ups, extensions, bend at elbow while pushing back of head forward with your hand. Thermometer-reset-style shakes. Pet the full body of an imaginary very very large dog. Do all these moves with your hand/wrist/arm rotated left, then right, then centered. Do them fairly vigorously. The moves that hurt a little (in the shot area), do more.
Telephone numbers are 7 digits long because psychologists determined that this is the longest string that can be quickly/easily memorized. Try it:
3428921
Close your eyes. Got it?
You can probably sense that you couldn't juggle too many more bits of data; at least not without investing some effort. But you can use framing to give yourself a memory expansion. I'll show you a trick.
Below is another seven digit number, with some more numbers to the right. Ignore those numbers! Do not memorize them! Invest all your memorization capacity into the seven numbers on the left. Don't be distracted by the rest. Pretend they're not there.
Then, once you've memorized the seven, casually look at the other numbers for a couple of seconds. Don't memorize them. Don't make the slightest effort to process them, or to think about them. Just stare stupidly at them for a couple of seconds. Lay your eyes on them, nothing more. Ok, here goes:
2556298 - 4427
Close your eyes and recall the seven. Then see the remainder. Don't remember them, just see them.
Congrats! You've added four new (fast/easy) memory slots, a 57% upgrade. This is available to you always, in any context.
Want to keep going? Add yet another four by speaking some aloud. Memorize the first seven, visualize (without memorizing) another four, then speak (without memorizing) another four, not just speaking but listening to yourself speak. No furrowed brow or disciplined concentration; just listen, period, while holding on to the previous memorization. Don't drop that package!
The key is to let go of memorization. You can only memorize seven. For more numbers, you need to do something other than memorize.
I'm always working on something. There's always some something I'm grinding away at. I can't always list these things for people, because they're deep inside, like a burp not quite ready to express.
Grown-ass men don't usually work on stuff. At least not the sort of stuff I do. Maybe they work on their cars, or build a deck, or add to some collection. But they don't travel down unfamiliar streets, and, if they do, they don't go very far, much less to the end.
Kids are always eagerly exploring some new street, and I've been eleven ever since I was eleven (I saw no reason to swap in an adult persona, because "mature" people never much impressed me). We work on ear wiggling or hand shadows or dinosaur names or zillions of other things. Ask a kid what he's been working on, and he won't easily pipe up with a list (e.g. "Whistling, tying slip knots, and juggling oranges"). These pursuits are always on his mind, but not on the tip of his tongue. A grown-up will report lengthily on his progress with French lessons or wine tasting, but kids' pursuits don't make for snappy dinner party repartee. Hell, it's barely fit for a blog...but here we are.
So here's what I've been working on for the last while: falling asleep on command. It started with my quest for a full night's sleep despite a reflux problem that won't respond to medication.
I've written previously about this quest (e.g.
here
and here),
but I've refined my technique. Here's where I'm currently at. I go down
this checklist:
1. Un-smile your mouth
2. Yield your body fully to gravity (not just a corny "relaxing" gesture. Use muscle memory to recreate what you find your body doing when you wake up in the morning).
3. Let your benevolent pillow suck out all thoughts and mental narration.
4. At this point, all that's left is breathing. Observe the breathing, but don't interfere. Let the bellows pump.
Until I was 50, I felt that I couldn't breathe naturally while paying attention to it. Eventually I realized that my body wouldn't let me asphyxiate. I proved this to myself by paying attention, letting breath stop, and watching it return on its own. The issue was just a story I was telling myself, which had bloomed into needless anxiety. So I let go of this, very quickly learning to pay attention to my breath without touching it.
5. Slide into whimsical irrationality. You can create an off-ramp you habitually go to. Here's one I've used since childhood: I exist in a lightbulb, reclining comfortably against the curve of the smooth glass.
6. You are now asleep, whether you know it or not. If self-consciousness intrudes - i.e. you notice yourself grumpily commenting on your sleep progress - don't assume it's all ruined. That's just another head fake! Rather, remind yourself that you ARE asleep, so the preoccupation is happening in a dream. You are dreaming of insomnia!
I believe this is actually what's happening! It's well-documented that insomniacs who
report getting no sleep at all are often getting hours and hours of it. My theory is that they are dreaming of insomnia. The antidote is to simply remind yourself you're actually asleep whenever doubts arise. All is fine, you're just having an anxious dream about falling asleep. So return to whimsical irrationality - the lightbulb, or a raft in a peaceful lake, or a friendly tribe of magic giraffes, or some other dreamy/stretchy mental scenario (this is why counting sheep is popular!). And be prepared to repeat this self-reminder whenever in-dream insomnia anxiety returns. Like all reframings, it gets easier with practice. You become familiar with the flip of perspective.
Meditation helps with these shifts by lubricating your shifter, making it easier to relax your body, to pass thought processes off to your eagerly awaiting pillow, to slip into easy irrationality, and to
reassure the interruptor that the interruption is happening inside a dream. FWIW, this is the stripped-down, non-dogmatic, non-religious meditation technique I use (skip the web site, and most of the other lessons, except this one).
I've learned to fall asleep in a snap. But there are downsides. We live in a zero sum world with (despite the legends) no clean upward trajectory in any realm. Every “advance” brings ironic deflations (I first discovered this as a small child with my very first attempt at an insomnia cure). So here's the downside with this one:
Having taught myself to fall asleep on command, I'm now always a fingersnap away from falling asleep. I can feel it, waiting for me. Dreamland no longer lies across a vast sea; a separate realm for darkness and p.j.s and quiet horizontality. Sleep feels clammily, disquietingly accessible while shopping at Trader Joe's or washing pots. And this sleep adjacency feels like sleepiness! I've cured my insomnia only to feel perennially sleepy!
Sleep has become an omnipresent choice. Much as an alcoholic chooses - moment by moment by moment - not to have a drink, I must choose not to nod off. Which is weird and takes getting used to and I'm not sure I like it.
If you sawed a hole in your floor - large enough for a body to pass through -
you might live many years without falling through the hole. But you would never again walk freely in your house. You will always be proactively not falling in the hole. Everything would seem different.
Choices are good. We feel like we want as many as possible. But we don't live a cartoon life where choices are candy-colored power-ups we keep in our fun knapsacks. A choice means it can happen. A choice means it can happen, and that reframes everything. This is yet another reason we unconsciously fear/resist change, and try to lock down our natural reframing facility (i.e. our freedom). We sense the potential for holes to open up unless we shrink ourselves into tiny cells of banal familiarity.
This explains why I'll never carry a gun. First, I would surely kill many, many people. But even if I surprised myself with my self-control, I'd spend my days studiously not killing many, many people...which doesn't strike me as a productive use of my attention. So no gun for me. I don't want that choice.
I just saw yet another friend complaining on Facebook about insomnia. That does it. I need to share some hard-won knowledge.
I've been a devoted yogi for nearly 50 years, having started out as a child prodigy. So I know a few things about consciousness and body processes. Sleep, in other words, is right in my wheelhouse.
I have extreme gastric reflux (I'm on the strong pills, and even they can't control it...though I'm not looking for advice....I've tried everything and am gradually losing weight, which is my best hope). Even mild reflux can keep you up at night, and if it wakes you up it's super hard to get back to sleep with what feels like a stomach full of gurgling fabric softener. If anyone can learn to sleep through this, it should be me. Yet I've struggled. Yup, even the 50-year yoga prodigy.
So I've been working on this for a while, applying deep skills to a hard problem. What I've learned can help you with the much easier problem of sleeping amid mere worries and stresses.
Note: you are stressed, even if you don't realize it. There are emotional connections to the other birds in one's flock, and this is a stressed and discombobulated world right now. So even if you feel calm and happy - as I do - you are nonetheless unavoidably affected by secondhand smoke.
Obvious countermeasures first, and then the tricky tricks:
Normalize Your Cycles
The body doesn't lead us. We lead it, and it aims to oblige, like an eager dog. If you snack or nap at 2:30pm three days in a row, on the fourth day you'll wonder why you're famished or exhausted at 2:30pm. Simple! So, for one example, your body doesn't crave sugar. It's that you've programmed it to expect sugar... and the body seems to demand what it's been programmed to expect. Cut the sugar, and it will reprogram within three days. Seriously.
Quarantine has us off our normal schedules. And the most common issue will be insomnia. So, even as unstructured as you may be, make a point to eat and sleep at exactly the same time every day. Then give yourself three days to accept the programming.
Exercise
The air does not sizzle with homicidal microbes. You can go outside. I know you've read about edge cases where viral clouds linger, or sneeze particles travel for yards, but what's theoretically possible isn't probable enough to concern yourself. Go outside, stay 6 (not 30) feet away from people, don't touch your face, and get yourself some sweating/heart-pumping exercise for at least 45 minutes at least 3-4x/week. Preferably daily especially if you're insomniac. If there's a hill nearby, great. Walk up it, over and over. Walking (fast and strong) is the ultimate statement of survival. You'll be amazed how good it feels.
Meditate
Your car's engine may race, but if you don't put it in gear, it can't drive anything. Same for the noise in your mind.
Whoever first told people they needed to learn to silence their mind was a sadistic bastard who's messed up generations. The thoughts can stay; you just need to recognize that this noise is not you. You are not the narration; the mental tickertape. Meditation opens some space between you and your noisy mind (I do this stripped down, super efficacious practice, plus this breathing practice, and I steer well clear of the rest of the web site) and each micron of additional separation is like creamy dreamy bliss.
With some space between thinker and thoughts - aka perspective - we remember that we're here to enjoy immersive entertainment. We never needed to carry the pain of the world around with us (for more on carrying burdens, read this, plus the articles linked at the bottom of that page).
Meditate and you'll never be more than a breath away from easily/comfortably abiding in the moment. It doesn't make you lazy. Do I seem lazy?
The Mechanics of Falling Asleep (the real yoga stuff)
Memorize this sequence, to be repeated every time you go to bed. But (important) don't think about it or practice it outside of bedtime. Reserve this and protect it.
Once you've lied down and turned out the light:
1. Un-smile your face
2. Droop into gravity. Then droop some more. Then recognize that you're hardly drooping at all. Contemplate how your body would have drooped if you were to wake up in this position, and droop that much. Emulate what your body's doing when you wake up. Don't obsess over this. Limit it to 10-20 seconds. Don't let it be an "activity", just bake it into your going-to-sleep protocol.
3. Add an imaginary 5 pounds to your head's weight, and let it drop squarely into your pillow. Notice how the pillow tenderly accepts the weight. Your pillow is there for you.
4. Let your thoughts drop into your pillow. Don't try to quiet or silence them, let them percolate, but simply let them drain down into the pillow (and from there, into the bed, the floor, and the earth). Notice the pillow's tender receptivity. It wants to suck out your thoughts. It's eager to do so. It's like a vacuum.
5. Briefly and lightly test yourself. Think something mildly stressful. Some task you need to do or some person you're mad at. When you see stress approaching a few hundred yards away, let it drain into your pillow. Again, do this "briefly and lightly". Don't turn it into an activity. Keep it under 10 seconds (5 seconds with practice). All of the above steps are doable in under 30 seconds, total. Do them rotely, like tooth brushing.
6. At this point, know that you ARE asleep! You only assume you're not out of pure skepticism. Let your skepticism, along with the other thoughts, drop down into the tenderly receptive pillow. The "I'm still awake/I can't sleep" thought is just another thought to drain into the pillow and into the earth. It's not some higher, special-case thought. You ARE asleep. All you need to do is let the skepticism gently drain.
If necessary, repeat the sequence. But don't expect that to be necessary, because, again, you ARE, at this point, asleep (the only problem is lingering skepticism). As a last resort, mentally intone your mantra (assuming you've been meditating, per suggestion above).
Nearly every positive result in my life came from taking notes.
I walked into a Colombian restaurant at age 19 and was overwhelmed. Still, I managed to order and eat. And it grabbed me. So as I left, I took a takeout menu in order to study dish translations, to note the ones I'd tried, and to circle items that sounded good. On my way home I jotted down the names of a couple other good-looking places nearby.
So that's how that started.
To this day, when people tell me about great places, I don't just make dead eyes while fake-perkily intoning "Ooh, that sounds great!" as if it was of no personal interest to me. I write it down. Plus, I actually go. I get in a car and drive and go and eat - and note good-looking places nearby (following up on those, as well). That's a lot of activity for a member of a species incapable of action! As I wrote here:
Most people do nothing. If they sign on, they won't show. If they pledge money, they won't pay. If you hire them, they'll sit in their cubicle and sip coffee. You know how most soldiers never actually shoot at people? How as few as 30% perform all the kills? I've decided that this isn't a saving grace of humanistic morality. It's just another example of how most people do nothing.
I'm not saying they're lazy. I'm not saying they're liars or deadbeats. Just that they do nothing. Most people do nothing. I think of them as the Zombie Army.
One day a musician friend, who I didn't particularly respect, told me about a jam session he'd gone to, which wasn't particularly great. And it was an hour away, in a dangerous area. I didn't just nod my head. I got out my pen. And the very next week I went to this jam session (because I was looking for opportunities to play and to network), where I impressed the crowd.
25% of my lifetime musician earnings stem from that night.
If I hear about a great movie or book or CD, I write down the tip, and I actually search (sometimes waiting years to find a bargain - I organize libraries and wish lists via the "Pedia" series of Mac apps, as described here).
To most people, this all seems obsessive. If you idly drop a movie name into conversation, you'd never expect me to actually go see it, much less launch upon a long-term quest. I seem like Rain Man! Jesus, Jim, don't you have a life?
Yeah, I do. This is it. This is my life. I'm the guy who pays attention, and takes notes. Why? Because the stupidity and the drek and the cruelty and the shiny crapola are directly in my face, 24/7. I don’t need notes for any of that. But if I'm to enjoy my residency on this planet, I'll need to work for it...by treasure hunting. Not just with food, but in every realm I care about (and even a few that I don't).
To most people, my meticulous follow-up seems eccentric and ludicrous. But if I were to search my house, my computer drive, my memory, and my thought stream, most of it is fruit from the note-taking tree.
It's not "obsessive" if it improves your life. Pejorative terms ought to be reserved for failed tactics.
Are we all obsessive breathers?
Naturally, when offering tips to others, I'm very careful with what I recommend and to whom I recommend it. The last thing I want to do is send someone on a wild goose chase. That would violate professional courtesy.
But when I do, almost no one takes notes. At best, I'll elicit a perky "Ooh, that sounds great!", as if it were of no personal interest to them.
I worry about whoever put these astonishingly beautiful trees here which we ignore and cut down and pee on and walk right past with our heads down like they were nothing. All the myriad unappreciated lasagnas and concertos over the eons pale in comparison to our arboreal ingratitude.
We humans shuffle through our blinkered existence, lost in mental drama, amid this gorgeous paradise planet, a miraculously lush sanctuary in a coldly inhospitable universe, blessed with trees (if trees had never existed and sprung up overnight, people would be driven insane by the beauty) and life-giving oxygen and sunshine and delicious food and refreshing water and all the immersive storylines we could dream of, all of it tailored to our every need (including our need for challenge, violence, and heartbreak) and permeated with heartbreaking love. Yet we scarcely notice. We're jaded, bored, and impatiently awaiting Something Better. We live in eternal anticipation - of our next big win, of momentary gratification, and of the arrival, finally, of "The Answer". We pray for help and then spurn the responders. We even actually have the gall to demand a messiah.
Yet not once have I heard a voice blasting down from the skies: "Attention ungrateful shitheads! How about taking a look at those trees for just like two seconds?" There's never a trace of whining about our endlessly oblivious lack of appreciation. God (or whatever) is like a stoic silent grandmother perpetually serving insanely delicious soup to ungrateful family members lost in fake mental drama who distractedly trudge out of the kitchen with nary a word or smile....yet she quietly feels deeply satisfied knowing that, at some level, they've been nourished.
Until you or I produce anything remotely as wonderful, we have no right to feel harumphy when our offerings fall on dead ears. I bear this closely in mind.
Still, when I offer someone a tip - tacos or whatever - and they they don't take notes (just dead-eyed stare + ”ooh, that sounds great”) I find people as eerily inexplicable as they find me spending hours tracking down some book my dentist said maybe I'd like. Why aren't they writing it down?
I certainly wouldn't insist. Nor can I feel slighted, because trees. But it puzzles me. I'll never understand why people don't take notes.
Speaking of "pejorative terms should be reserved for failed tactics" (an idea I explained from a different angle here): if you do something - anything, really, from mopping to talking on the phone to building bookshelves - while some immense mooing cow stares at you, said cow will deem you "manic". To the multitudes of phlegmatically complacent pud puds, engagement seems like mania. It's imperative for engaged people to dodge that gaslighting.
Same for "over-intensity", a term used by the flaccid to gaslight those who give a damn.
