Tangible Life
Jellyfish
Effortless. Fluid movement. Graceful progress. Adapting to disruption.
Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash
Jellyfish are one of the most beautiful creatures to observe. When I find myself mentally “stuck” or unable to find a path through a problem, I will often pull up images like the one above or a video like this one. Getting outside for a walk or otherwise surrounding myself with nature in the real world may be optimal, but when there isn’t the time or chance to do that, observing imagery of jellyfish brings a calm and reframing to my thoughts.
Jellyfish as a framework for living is an interesting concept I plan to write more about. The movements of jellyfish are almost hypnotic. Even when something turbulent comes into their path, they flow through and around it. The ability to adapt to these disruptions and continue moving along is the personifcaiton of the popular Keep Calm, Carry On mantra. In our world of constant distractions and disruptions, remembering to keep your mind in a state of calm flow is key.
Watching jellyfish in motion doesn’t clear my mind due to a calming effect of the imagery itself, at least that alone. When I observe them, it serves as the reminder that they are the model. The way they exist is my model of existence. They are the teacher of that which we struggle to learn from our own surroundings and human mentors. Silently demonstrating the principles of life that we can’t hear through the noise of humanity. Beautiful simplicity that can be applied to anything you navigate. Never stopping; slight hesitations as courses shift and turbulence subsides. Movement is the way. Fluidity is the resolution.
Good Enough
This post is my entry for April’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Aaron Leonard.
As with most things in life, you can approach good enough from multiple perspectives. For the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on the two that come to mind most often in my current existence and outlook.
Good enough can be a mantra to fight against the never-ending pursuit of perfection; perfection being the enemy of good. In a world where perfection is constantly in our faces with photo filters and social media posts of everyone around us living their best life, it can feel like nothing is good enough until it is perfect. I call bullshit. Perfection seeking is a fool’s errand and evaluating anything with perfection being the success criteria of what is good enough has that fool doing cartwheels in our fragile and flawed human minds.
Adjust your scale and allow good enough to become any level of anything that both makes you happy and satisfies your needs. Not your wants. Not your warped perception of the world based on the Internet and all the generative AI tricks it hurls at your little glass house like a futuristic trebuchet. Let good enough become a weapon against anything that you know you’ve done to a level you’re satisfied with, yet still feel an obligation to continue to refine for refinement’s sake.
Good enough can also be the mantra of accepting the current state of mediocrity that we’re led to believe is modern success of industry and technology. Clothes that are so cheaply manufactured and cheaply sold that they feel cheap and wear like shit, but are good enough. I call bullshit again. The fact is that we’ve been conditioned, dare I say programmed, to believe this form of good enough is not only acceptable quality for life, but a quality of life.
Modern life. Where we have the technology, and convenience because of it, that we should subject ourselves to good enough meal from a convenient restaurant, conveniently brought to our doorstep by a delivery gig worker and every human in the chain of custody is aiming for that thin line below good enough to meet the margin and not an atom more. This form of good enough is a parasite to the tangible life and should be eradicated. This form of good enough is one that we should all take a stand against and say loud and proud we refuse to accept it or that it is a demonstration of our modern capabilities.
I frame good enough as an evaluation of the Dieter Rams concept of less, but better. In one way, the emphasis is on the less, because anything more would be more than enough vs. good enough. In other cases, the emphasis falls on better and the evaluation is that it may be less, but it is not better in any form and it is not (for me) good enough.
Too little, and too much, self-promotion
Manu frames his feelings so well:
Every time I need to do something that is marketing-related, I can feel the tension in my brain as if a part of me is trying to fight against it.
My discomfort goes a step beyond this. When I actually do get a Ko-Fi donation notification, I feel like guilt, shame and imposter syndrome made a stew in my inbox. There is no reason for me to feel this way. It passes and I then feel appreciated and supported, but damn if that first moment isn’t a bitch every single time.
There is some verbiage, that I don’t use myself in my small self promotion mention in my About page, that I see and sometimes consider importing. “If you enjoy reading XYZ, and you’re able to make a donation to support.” It’s subtle and I go back and forth on if it is something people truly would pick up on, the difference between “like to/want to” and “are able to”. Some readers may want to and aren’t in a financial position to do so.
My current self promo plug still uses want to. Sometime in the next couple of weeks I’ll decide to leave it as is and try to stop overthinking it, or I’ll update it and you’ll know it resolved that way in my brain.
Listenbox is Cool
When I wrote this post about switching away from Castro to embrace the Apple Podcasts app, I mentioned that one feature I was leaving behind was sideloading YouTube videos as podcast episodes. Castro did that as a simple Share Menu option, though my milage varied on how often it would work without multiple tries.
I’ve found that Listenbox is a great way to mimic this functionality while using Apple Podcasts as my player. The premise is simply that it will let you add YouTube videos as podcast episodes. It offers more if you want to subscribe to a paid plan, but my use case needs nothing other than the free option.
From any YouTube video, copy/share the URL and plug it in on the homepage of Listenbox. Once you click Listen, it will provide you with an audio or video version of the YouTube video with buttons to “subscribe” in Apple Podcasts and a slew of other popular podcast apps. Once you tap the player of your choice, it will open the “show” and you can follow/subscribe to get the episode in your queue for listening. That’s it.
The one paid feature that is enticing for how I use the service is a “Listen Later” queue where you could load as many YouTube videos as you’d like and still get a single feed to subscribe to in your podcast app. The only extra effort I have with my free tier method is that occassionally I go into the Shows section of Apple Podcasts and unfollow the shows, since there will only ever be one episode (that corresponds to the video I wanted to podcast-ify).
While ~$50/year may seem reasonable, I am not using any of the other paid features so the Listen Later single feed isn’t worth it to me. Maybe the developers will add an option that only enables that feature for a lower price.
This service reminds me a ton of the awesome Huffduffer. I still use my Huffduffer feed from time to time, but it doesn’t work well with YouTube videos since they aren’t an audio file natively. I wish Huffduffer would support transcoding YouTube videos to mp3 format natively, but I doubt it will get that enhancement.
Why Do I Have a Newsletter?
The expanded title for this post should really be Why do I have a newsletter and a blog? This question was posed to me by a new internet friend over email. He asked it without any intention other than to spark something for future discussion. His inquisitive prompt has been rattling around in my brain ever since. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it, which usually means I should write about it. Do I write about it on the blog, or in the newsletter?
Since you’re reading this on the blog, I’ll say that this is the version I’m writing for the blog. I may or may not write something related for the newsletter. I guess that gets to my current thoughts on why I have both. I don’t automatically assume that people who read one would necessarily read the other. I purposely avoid (this topic excluded) overlapping content. The “essays” that serve as the newsletter intros could easily be blog posts; however, I go into them thinking of them as a different thing. I have some ideas jotted down that could become either one or the other. Once they take shape, I usually know which of the two they’ll evolve into.
My newsletter follows a pretty rigid format. It’s 3 things I think are worth sharing with other humans, with a varying length essay at the beginning. The essay usually has some connection to the 3 things, but not always. The 3 things could be linkpost content on the blog, but for the same reason as the essay vs. blog post, I don’t repurpose them in either direction. Not overlapping the content means if they do choose both formats, there are no reruns. As a reader of other blogs and newsletters, that feels right. My newsletter isn’t just a blog “digest”. There are enough tools out there that solve for that need if someone wants to roll content up that way. If someone really wants to read my blog posts in their inbox vs. on the blog or via RSS, at the bottom of each individual post page, there’s an option to subscribe by email.
In the end, I’ve landed on the reason I have both is that I want to have both; it’s not more complicated than that. My want to have both as the author connects to the possibility that readers of my words may want to read one or the other or both or neither… but since you’re reading these words, you’re in at least one of the first three groups for the moment.
Everyday Zen
I find myself doing these little activities around the house that just make me feel very calm. Unexpectedly calm. They may sound odd, because they’re not thought of as things which would give that feeling. One of them is only satisfying during the last step, and gross during the rest of the task. The other is enjoyable throughout. I got to thinking more and trying to figure out why they make me feel this way. I think I have.
They are two tasks that fall into what I would consider everyday zen in my current existence. I have a huge family with so many tasks and routines. Some of those are tedious and just have to be done, but some have a real quality to them. Making coffee would fall into that second group, but there’s a whole post coming dedicated to that.
The first task is cleaning our cat’s litter box. This is the one that is gross for the first steps; scooping the waste and sifting it down to just the parts to place into a black “dog poop” bag to throw out in the waste can. The last step, though, is great! Smoothing the litter out, sometimes adding a bit of fresh litter first, is amazing. I feel like one of those zen sand artists for those mere 30-45 seconds. I find it so satisfying and mentally clearing.
The second is trimming off the new growth of shrubs we have in our front yard. This is something I do as often as I notice the new shoots coming up from the bottom. I trim them so that we have a clear view under the shrubs, but with the top full and acting as a bit of privacy screening for the front windows and porch. Trimming that new growth is so enjoyable. I do with with hand lopping shears. It is my everyday zen version of trimming a bonsai tree. I could see myself one day having a bonsai of my own that I meticulously groom and have reverence for the process. Until then, this is my suburban busy dad equivalent.
Finding your everyday zen tasks and routines is a cool process. I’d love to hear about what things give others the same type of feelings I describe above.
P.S. My mom’s everyday zen is folding clean and warm fresh-out-of-the-dryer clothes.
Weather forecasts have become much more accurate
Hannah Ritchie, writing at Our World in Data:
The first big change is that the data has improved. More extensive and higher-resolution observations can be used as inputs into the weather models. This is because we have more and better satellite data, and because land-based stations are covering many more areas around the globe, and at a higher density. The precision of these instruments has improved, too.
These observations are then fed into numerical prediction models to forecast the weather. That brings us to the next two developments. The computers on which these models are run have gotten much faster. Faster speeds are crucial: the Met Office now chunks the world into grids of smaller and smaller squares. While they once modeled the world in 90-kilometer-wide squares, they are now down to a grid of 1.5-kilometer squares. That means many more calculations need to be run to get this high-resolution map. The methods to turn the observations into model outputs have also improved. We’ve gone from very simple visions of the world to methods that can capture the complexity of these systems in detail.
As someone with two “armchair meterologists” in my life, I found this article fascinating. There’s so many extensions of this idea of more data capture and faster computing leading to increasingly accurate predictions at scale. One that comes to mind for me is crash detection in cars. It’s a stepping stone to the somewhat inevitable conclusion of full self-driving capability. The stones in-between are simply more data and better compute power. And oh, by-the-way, your vehicle will know if it’s going to rain and adjust for that too.
A Special Type of Hoarder
I lean towards minimalist tendencies as much as I can. In a very different set of life circumstances, I’d be someone with few physical possessions, in a tiny house in some lush remote location. The life that I find myself in, the life I’m happily living to its fullest potential, has both more people and more things in it. I try to ensure that the possessions I have serve a purpose. The older I get, the more aggressive I become about thinning those items to just the things that truly add value to my life. My goal isn’t number of items, but more that I don’t feel the anxiety that comes with having a life overburdened with stuff.
Then there’s the part of my brain that sees items that most would consider trash, yet I see future purpose. Future could be two weeks from now or two years from now. This characteristic demonstrates itself with some household need to fix, adapt or adjust some thing in some way and then me excitedly saying, “I have just the thing for this!” I then normally head to the garage and come back with a random part or component that was destined for the garbage can when I placed it into one of many little jars of future potential inventory.
This happened yesterday, which is when I got the idea to write this post. My wife received a lovely wind chime from a neighbor a few weeks back. We hung it on our back porch, where we already had a bamboo wind chime, and then we heard the problem. The bamboo one had conflicting tones from the metal one. I took the metal one down and told me wife I’d come up with a solution. I had just the thing and just needed a free moment to deal with it. Yesterday was that moment. After an oil change in one of the cars, I was putting my tools away and saw the wind chime hanging there on the shelves.
I took it down and reached for one of my containers. This container used to be filled with parmesan cheese. For the past several years, it’s been filled with various bits of plastic and rubber. I get this thrifty storage system from my mom and dad. Growing up, if you saw a Land ’O Lakes margarine container in the garage or anywhere other than the refrigerator, it contained something important. I have former pickle jars with machine screws. A former jelly jar has extra nuts and bolts that came with assemble-at-home furniture.
In the rubber & plastic parts container, I pulled out six rubberized corner guards. They came off the corners of the mirrors I used for a garage dance floor project. In an ironic twist, I often have not only just the thing, but also just the right number of said thing in these scenarios. The wind chime had six metal tubes. I trimmed the corner off the rubber triangle pocket and slide it into the tube. I took a screwdriver and gently pushed the material up in to the tube so that you could no longer see it. I repeated this with the other five rubber triangles and metal tubes. I lifted the wind chime to hear the result, and it was perfect. It now has tonal harmony with the bamboo one that hangs on the back porch and they sound lovely together.
I fully recognize that this behavior is “off brand” for an aspiring minimalist, however, if my goal is to keep only the things that serve a purpose… I’m not far off in the end.
A Life Item Inventory
Uses pages are awesome. You see them all around the web, especially the indie blog scene. I’ve had an itch to create my own ever since creating my Now page. Recently, I received a lovely email from Pete Moore. Upon taking a look at his site, I found his Uses page. What a gem it is. After being impressed by the aesthetic he has going on with the page, photography and the curated items he has in his life, I found the itch growing to join the club.
The ironic thing about starting a uses page is that it literally forces you to take inventory of items in your life. I always joke that if I didn’t have six children, I’d be more of a practicing minimalist. Documenting the things that I have in my home office and coffee equipment has me asking myself if the items belong in my life. I regularly perform decluttering exercises, and regularly write about them here. I think now, the updating of my uses page will serve as a moment of review, reflection and recommitment to not having things in my life that don’t serve a purpose.
The other nice thing about finally creating a uses page is that I’m further along the path of my submission to the awesome Workspaces newsletter. Ryan has been an “internet friend” for a long time and I can’t wait to have my space highlighted there.
While it will take some time to get it fully updated, I published what I had as a starting point today. You can access it from the links above, or from the nav link on my About page under the header image.