by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 17, 2017 | Blog
This has been a difficult week for sleep.
For all my big talk about being a loner and needing my
space, I have slept about 3-4 hours a night since Barbara and Max have been out
of town. I am doing this weird thing where I sleep until 2 and then get up and
do stuff until around 5, before going back to bed. It works fine until I have
to be at the office early and can’t get any extra sleep.
It just feels weird here at the house without them or Tyler
around. It’s all empty and echoey and haunted. My body is going into this weird
tailspin, but they got home last night so it should start getting better.
Shifting gears.
I’ve developed a serious interest in plants and stuff for
some reason, and I am working on planting native species around the house.
Barbara and I are going to grow some vegetables next year too, which should be
fun.
We had a great trip to the mountains, I got to see some old
friends and spend a lot of good time with my family.
Tyler and I did some backpacking and spent the night in a
cool little meadow. Max spent every day throwing rocks in the river, possibly
enough to have shifted the geography of Northern New Mexico. I really enjoy
traveling with my family and just getting time to hang out and talk with
Barbara. She’s a pretty cool chick.
I really enjoyed Netflix’s Castlevania series this week, it
was kind of a bummer that it was only 4 episodes long. Really odd to see a
video game adapted well, they are usually a disaster. I would like to take
Barbara and Max to see Despicable Me 3 because Max really likes the Minions. He
likes them enough they have actually grown on me. Moana is our current favorite
though.
“You’re Welcome” and “Shiny” are my favorite songs right
now.
My life is in no way my own.
The theme for this next week seems to be exploring
intoxication as of right now.
The theme of the blog, not my life.
I may change it if it doesn’t pan out though. I am sure I
can get at least one blog out of it though.
Have a great day.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 15, 2017 | Uncategorized
I am continuously surprised at the lengths people will go to
in order avoid responsibility for the things that are clearly their fault.
I do it.
We all do it
It’s like taking the time to damage the heating element in
your dryer so that you don’t have to do the laundry without feeling like you
are being lazy, and then somehow having the nerve to complain when you don’t
have anything to wear to work.
It would be so, so much simpler for us to just acknowledge
what we did wrong, fix it, and move on by simply not doing it again, but we
often take the more arduous route of fabricating a complicated façade of reasons
why we are not at fault.
We may even spend more time concocting these reasons (and
making ourselves believe them) than we would fixing what we did, even though
doing this ensures that we will have to deal with the same problem again.
It’s repainting a house with a cracked foundation or doing
the makeup on a corpse instead of burying it.
It looks okay for a while but it will fall apart eventually.
It is inevitable. It’s math. Anytime we choose image over substance things will
go wrong.
There is some truth to Occam’s Razor, and when we catch
ourselves doing mental gymnastics in order to explain exactly why something
isn’t our fault, there is a really good chance it is exactly our fault. Many
things are as simple as they look, and they are our fault.
This isn’t the end of the world.
It isn’t even necessarily a bad thing.
It’s an opportunity to own it and keep it from becoming a
long term trend that brings suffering into our lives and the lives of those we
love.
Own it, clean it up, and don’t do it again.
It’s amazing how many things this fixes.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 14, 2017 | Blog
I lived a very orderly life for a long time.
I had a porch swing and a chair in my living room, and a
television I kept in a closet to pull out every so often. It was one of those
old blocky ones, I didn’t get a flat screen until 2012. I slept in the living
room on a yoga mat and a small rug that I rolled up and put away in a cabinet
each morning. I had a CD player with big speakers.
Tyler (now 16) had the master bedroom where I had pulled up
the carpet so his action figures could stand up on the floor with a queen-sized
bed that had a tent over it. One room was completely empty except for a rabbit
named Bebop. He had a lot of room to run. There was rarely a mess, and since it
was me and a toddler who didn’t have much say, I got to do whatever I wanted,
whenever I wanted.
This is no longer the case.
The living room is full of furniture and pictures and little
statues of people without faces. We have nice book cases and dressers and there
are toys everywhere. There is a big rug in the center of the room I am not
supposed to walk on unless I am barefoot, and every room has some sort of
coordinated bedroom set in it. We have dishes and chairs and nice towels. There
is always a mess to pick up, always something to do. I rarely do what I want,
when I want.
And I have never been happier.
We can live clean, clear, pure lives where nothing gets out
of place and everything goes the way we want it to, or we can let go of the
selfishness that tells us that what we want is the most important thing and
live real lives with people we love.
Our lives will be messy if we have other people in them, but
they will be empty if we don’t.
There are things more important that getting what we want,
when we want it. In fact, we often aren’t even smart enough to know what it is
we really want or what would be best for us. We are probably happiest when we
are letting other people complicate things for us.
At least I have been.
by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 13, 2017 | Blog
I’ve been listening to the audio version of William
Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” because, as I’ve mentioned, I do not like my
writing. Apart from the practical advice, I like his clarity and his disdain
for the convoluted (and dishonest) ways we often speak.
Using a lot of words to say absolutely nothing is a modern
art form.
A politician or corporation regrets that an unfortunate set
of circumstances led to people being hurt. A pyramid scheme seeks to help
people achieve financial independence through direct peer to peer sales.
Companies restructure and reduce the workforce to maximize efficiency in the
market while they leverage their brands to create synergistic flow across
multiple platforms. Gurus of all sorts want to help you reach next level
empowerment through innovative techniques of self-actualization.
Don’t even get me started on LinkedIn bios.
It seems to just be part of our culture now.
Words are meant to help us share ideas, to be as precise as
possible, and this is a hard job. Abstractions are difficult to communicate. We
don’t help things when we twist and torture the words into meaninglessness, and
the people who use meaningless jargon know this. They know that by forcing us
to chase them through an obstacle course of nonsense they can lose us around a
corner, and trick us into thinking they have said something when they haven’t.
It’s dishonest, and they know it.
For some reason, we accept this as part of our culture, and
we do it too.
We use half-truths and semantics to avoid responsibility,
often even inside our own heads. We get so caught up in the jargon of what we
do that we forget that we may not be saying anything at all.
I do it. Thanks to Zinsser I am trying to remove the jargon
and unnecessary words from my vocabulary. This is proving to be harder than I
thought it would be.
Is there a simpler way to say things?
How quickly could you say something if you spoke plainly and
without jargon?
What is it that makes us want to pad our speech with words
that didn’t exist even 15 years ago?
Can one strive to minimize the output of potentially
unnecessary phrases and modes of speech that may, however unintentionally,
obscure the communicated understanding of what you are saying?
by Jamesscotthenson | Jul 12, 2017 | Blog
I talk to people all the time who wonder how everyone else
has it together and they don’t.
I think we all do this, it seems like everyone else has it
all figured out.
I still haven’t hit the age or the level of maturity where I
feel like I am one of the 39-year-olds who were around me when I was a kid.
They had good jobs and were debt free and never fought with their families and
paid cash for everything and always kept their house clean.
Except that none of that is true.
They had all the problems that everyone else has, I just
didn’t notice because I was a kid. A few turned out to have more serious
problems than the average person has.
This is still true of the people around us, except it’s on
steroids with social media where people can post all the best moments of their
lives without allowing us any access to the nights they drink too much and
throw up on the dog.
We are always seeing the highlights of everyone else’s life
because it is human nature to hide the embarrassing or socially unacceptable
aspects of how we live.
Even the worst movie would look good if it was only the
highlights.
Except The Notebook.
It’s terrible.
Just admit it.
What would your life look like if you only saw the
highlights?
Recent Comments