Welcome to the journal. This part of the site contains a reverse-chronological list of entries, a blog by any other name. You may also want to browse entries by tag or category.
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Rising with the Sun
Over the last few weeks I’ve been waking up at a reasonably early time, a little before 7am. This is also the time of year when, in the Northern hemisphere, the days are starting to get longer, with sunrise happening earlier and sunset happening later. Together these mean that I’ve been awake just as the sun has been making it’s way up past the horizon. Right now, I’m grateful to be living in an apartment with large north-facing windows that look out onto some woods, where the trees are still brown with their branches empty, and there’s still a gradually diminishing layer of snow on the ground.
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Sunday Selection 2022-02-27
It’s almost two months into the new year, and what an eventful two months it’s been! The winter weather continues here in Massachusetts. There are a couple feet of snow on the ground, and a dusting of snow on the trees. I spent the morning watching the sun come up and make the snowy trees glow. My north-facing windows means I get to see this light show twice a day. Today it’s bright and sunny and the sky is clear with some white clouds in the distance, and that makes the biting cold worth it.
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Sunday Selection 2021-12-05
I saw the first signs of ice on the local water bodies while on a walk today. It may not technically be winter yet, but it’s definitely coming. The days are getting short, uncomfortably short, and though I am a fan of brisk winter weather, I also like the sun being out. Thankfully it hasn’t been too cloudy yet, so I make it a point to get out at least for a walk every day.
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Sunday Selection 2021-10-10
Summer is saying goodbye here in New England, there are pops of red and yellow among the green and the weather is starting to get cooler (while staying more cloudy than I would like it to be). To me, summer felt like a long period of rest, and though COVID still abounds, life is more normal now than not. I have something of a social life again, I’m going out to restaurants (though preferably outdoors, while the weather holds up), and I’m going in to a physical office a couple days a week.
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Essays versus Monographs
A few days ago, author Austin Kleon wrote a post critiquing the growing culture of summarizing books instead of actually reading them. His critique is two-fold. First, if a book can in fact be adequately summarized, perhaps it is not worth reading in full in the first place. A corollary to that then is that books that are harder to summarize are more valuable. Having just finished Olivia Laing’s excellent The Lonely City, I find myself agreeing with this.
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Sunday Selection 2021-09-26
The Scholars of Night, by John M. Ford I’ve been a science fiction buff since I was child, growing up on classic writers like Heinlein and Asimov (yes, I’m excited about the Foundation TV series, no, I’m not getting Apple TV just to watch it**. But I admit this was the first time I ever heard of John M. Ford, even though he seems to be highly regarded by some of my contemporary favorites like Neil Gaiman, Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow.
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Sunday Selection 2021-09-05
Summer is drawing to a close in this part of the world, temperatures are starting to dip, and we managed to escape the worst of both Henri and Ida (though the ground is now thoroughly saturated with water). Meanwhile, the Delta variant continues to rage, though not as much as in some other parts of the country. Still, with college students coming back and schools reopening, numbers are probably going to get worse before they get better.
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The Plateau
Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve been mostly feeling a sense of neutrality. Definitely not unhappy, not quite happy, somewhere in between, better than ‘meh’. It doesn’t feel bad, but it does feel uncomfortable, at least sometimes. However, I suspect this is more to do with our cultural narrative surrounding happiness, than with the actual state of mind that I’m in. Culturally we’re conditioned to think that if we’re not happy, we’re unhappy, that happiness must be pursued, and unhappiness avoided (often at all costs).
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Sunday Selection 2021-08-01
We’ve had a couple days of actually good summer weather here, though we have a week of cloudiness to look forward to. I’ve been using the good weather to replenish my Vitamin D stores. Yesterday I ended up walking for 5 miles, got some ice cream, ate it outside and took a chunk out of my backlog of Brain Pickings articles. And that brings us to our first selection of the week: