The Thinkulum

On Caring

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Andy

Over the past few years I’ve watched my social skills decline from neglect, and I’ve decided that this year I want to start reversing that course. But I want to do it in the context of a larger project that’s been on my mind, a study of the nature and methods of care. That includes topics like listening, hospitality, etiquette, condolence, love languages, Nonviolent Communication, and any other practice that expresses a concern for the well-being of other people. Way too ambitious, like most of my projects, but I at least want to start exploring that territory.

For my first steps down this path, I read a little book with big ideas called On Caring by Milton Mayeroff. I didn’t want to spend months on it at this point, so I just wrote a summary and put it here (here’s the version from the time of this post, if the article has changed a lot by the time you read this). If that looks interesting, maybe you’ll want to pick up the book. It’s only 100 pages, though it’s the kind of book you’ll want to read slowly.

Meanwhile, as usual, other projects have been pushing their way up my priority list, and I will immediately be dropping this project for those. I’ll come back to it later. That’s just how things go with me.

Posted in Caring, Projects, Site updates | 2 Comments

Death and life as usual

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Andy

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. They’re mostly Let’s Plays, footage of video games being played while the player talks. I let the videos run in the background while I do other things. It’s my version of listening to talk radio while I work.

One of the Let’s Players I used to watch went by the name of SlainMagic. His real name was Alex. He was British and mainly played Minecraft. I liked listening to him horse around with his friends, and I admired the organized way he ran his channel. It was one of my inspirations for getting back to work on my site last year.

Around the middle of last year he quit YouTube to concentrate on school. Fortunately, he left his channel up with all its videos so people could still watch them. I was sorry to see him go, but his reasons were good, and he still posted on Twitter here and there, so to a degree he was still around.

But a few weeks ago I was catching up on one of his friend’s videos, and at the start of his latest, he told us that Slain had died in a skiing accident. Disturbed, I paused the video and did a search, and it seems it’s true. It happened in early March. I found tribute videos with comments that explained the situation (“Remember Slain Magic, R.I.P” and “#RememberSlain,” and the related videos include others), then later some messages on Twitter. In these posts I saw a mix of sorrow, affection, acceptance, and even a kind of hope.

I felt sad, though somewhat distantly. I’d interacted with him a little through YouTube and Twitter, but I didn’t know him very well. For all my positive regard, I considered him an Internet acquaintance. Still, especially in the first couple of weeks, his death invaded my thoughts at random times. I felt bad for his family. I can barely imagine having a family vacation turn so abruptly to tragedy. And I felt bad for him. The violence of his death weighed on me, and his life was so short–17 years. Occasionally I do feel tears welling up.

Even though I was an ocean away, and I only barely knew him, and almost no one I know has watched even one Let’s Play, somehow it felt wrong to let my life go on normally when something this wrong has happened in it. I wanted to post something to tell the story so someone I knew would know. Sometimes someone just needs to know.

* * *

If this were a eulogy, I would stop there. Sometimes a life that has ended deserves to stand on its own without extra commentary. (A eulogy would also be more about Alex and less about me.) But a main purpose of my site is to let me think out loud about the parts of life that confuse me, so I have more to say.

In spite of this event and my feelings about it, my life goes on. I work, watch TV, read comics, laugh with my friends. I’ve posted something on this before. But especially in the week or two after I learned about it, whenever I thought about Alex, I wondered if life as usual is really allowed.

This happens whenever life hits me with a personal tragedy or a deeply felt problem. I look at the bad that I feel in contrast with the good I felt before, and I land on the same question: Joy or pain–which is more real? This is another way of asking a more practical one: Given that bad things have happened and they can’t unhappen, is there a reason I shouldn’t give them all my attention for the rest of my life? I always have the sense that the happiness I felt before was a veneer I layered onto life. It was based on an illusion that nothing too bad was happening or would happen. Then the problems broke through that layer and went on to strip it all away. This feeling is accompanied by a sense that the goal of life is a state of utopia, and so if any problems arise that interfere with that state, eliminating them becomes the highest priority.

But I think my choice of words in that first question isn’t quite right. I’m not really comparing pain and joy. I’m comparing pain and ease. In ease I’m including everything that makes life feel light, whether in a fun sense or a restful one. The answer seems obvious at first glance. My veneer-of-happiness image is correct, and pain is more important and lasting than ease. Pain sinks to ground level, where we live, and it pushes ease to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, out of our grasp.

But the past few years have given me a different answer. When we introduce the twin emotions of actual, deep joy and rest into the picture, the contest has a new winner. We can call this new molecule of emotion well-being, though I’ll call it joy for short. It’s like oxygen. Unlike the helium of ease, it descends to our level, and while it doesn’t completely displace the carbon dioxide of pain, it makes the air breathable.

How do we access this well-being? I think a simple starting point is gratitude over the things in life that are good, especially the life-giving parts of our relationships with other people and with God. Along with gratitude we can intentionally spend time with those good things so we’ll have more experiences to appreciate and so those experiences will be recent. I think nature and people are especially good choices, things that are deeply real and supportive. Being in the middle of those good experiences can give us space to be ourselves without the fear of rejection. That means we can do the grieving we need and process our pain until we can make sense of it enough to keep living.

What does this say for ease or even the mundane activities of life as usual? Do they still have a place in a world of such weighty pain? I think they do. This question becomes more complicated the more I consider it, but I’ll save the detailed analysis for a later essay and give you my basic thoughts so far.

My first thought is that joy, pain, and ease all relate to each other, so ease isn’t an extra thing that’s out of place in life. First, ease is the goal of grieving, to a certain extent. The pain of a loss never completely leaves, but over time it recedes enough that life can go on more freely. Second, ease and joy support each other. You can draw on the small enjoyments of life to exercise gratitude and build joy, and joy counteracts pain enough that you can forget about pain from time to time and enjoy life’s more superficial pleasures. Third, ease eases pain. It gives you a break that can give you space to breathe and recover a bit and maybe gain a new perspective on what’s troubling you. It’s like taking a hot air balloon ride to feel the exhilaration of flight and look at the ground from the sky for a while. Fourth, pain can enhance joy. Part of your enjoyment of life’s good things might come from the fact that other parts of life aren’t going well, making the parts that are better more precious, or the fact that you didn’t have this good thing before, and now you do. It’s true that this relationship between pain and joy can be twisted into something harmful, but I think that done right, the relationship can be beneficial.

My second thought is that given that everyone encounters both joyful and painful events, a healthy and caring perspective on life will involve being in touch with both pain and joy and addressing them in appropriate contexts. Actively ignoring one or the other would have some harmful side effects. For yourself, it clearly doesn’t help to live in pain all the time, and it also doesn’t help to deny that painful things have happened to you. And for other people you interact with, it’s at best thoughtless to ignore their pain or joy (unless your pain is greater). A much better approach is attunement, joining people in their joy and pain in a way that strengthens both them and your relationship with them.

Societies have ritualized some of our expressions of pain and joy to give them a definite time and space–funerals, weddings, anniversaries, and so on. They’re like niches in the walls of life in which we put shrines to its important events. But they don’t cover everything, and people are free to create their own practices to attend to joy and pain. For my part, I’ve written this post, and I’ve started a list of people in my life who have died. That way I can look at it every once in a while and remember the place they had in my life and in the lives of others who cared for them.

I’m planning to think and write a lot more about these and related issues when I do my caring and coping projects, which will have many phases and subtopics. That will probably be the subject of my next post.

Posted in Caring, Coping, Death, Life Model, Life updates, Projects | 4 Comments

Pregnancy is weird

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Andy

Until it happened to one of my friends in college, I didn’t think much about pregnancy. Before then the most I did think about it was the two other times my mom was pregnant, and then I was just looking forward to having a new person in the family. After that I only had occasional contact with pregnant women. But in college, I was around my friend more often, so it gave me more chances to ponder it. And what I remember observing is that pregnancy is a really bizarre idea.

Most of the time when we encounter another person, we know we’re addressing one person. But when that person is pregnant, we have to throw out that assumption, because no: The person we are confronted with is in fact enveloping a whole other person.

Now, you could argue that pregnancy is not weird because it happens to millions of people every day and is necessary for the survival of our species. But I would reply that just because something is common and essential doesn’t mean it isn’t weird. Weirdness comes from taking one state of affairs to be normal that’s different in some fundamental way from the weird one. In this case the normal condition is having one person contained in one body. The weird one is having more than one person in a body.

I think that most people secretly know that pregnancy is weird, because with only some small changes, the idea of two people in one body can be used in a narrative for dramatic effect, usually to disturb the audience. For instance, when the extra person (or creature) is a murderous parasite or when it has a fully developed mind of its own, especially when it’s hostile.

As much as I would like to believe my emotions reflect the objective truth about life, I grudgingly admit it’s important to note that weirdness is completely subjective and relative. Something feels normal to you when you’re used to it and comfortable with it and maybe you take it for granted. With enough imagination and effort, you can probably get yourself to see anything as normal or as strange. For an easy example, if you pick any word in your native language and say it many times in a row, it’ll temporarily lose its meaning for you and seem like merely a strange clump of sounds. And if you’re exposed over and over to something that’s outside what you’re used to, over time it can feel normal.

This is especially important because sometimes people’s everyday lives will seem weird to you, but you have to treat them like they’re not. Take conjoined twins. Some people in real life share part of a body long term, and these people should be shown the same care and respect as every other person. It’s worth the effort to learn to see them as normal, or at least not the kind of strange that would lead you to mistreat or neglect them.

Along those lines I would like to point out that weird doesn’t always mean “bad.” Weirdness usually comes with some other quality. I see the strangeness of pregnancy as a funny type of weird–interesting and kind of surprising but harmless and even good. Those science fiction examples were a creepy weird–you might feel threatened by them. And sometimes the weirdness is wondrous, such as most things that happen in astronomy and theoretical physics. I think a little of that kind shows up in pregnancy too.

All of which is to say, happy Mother’s Day!

Posted in Holidays, Thought, Weird stuff | 6 Comments

This Saturday is Free Comic Book Day

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Andy

Around the beginning of March I innocently clicked on a related YouTube video and discovered a friendly little channel (okay, it has almost 111,000 subscribers) that reignited a recurring interest of mine–in a big way. The channel was NerdSync, and the interest, as you may have wildly guessed from the post title, was comics.

I’ll save my history with comics for another time. I’ll just say that this time around I’m trying to get a little more involved in the community side of comics. Things like finding other fans to talk with, listening to comics podcasts, and supporting local comics stores, if I can convince myself to spend money. I might even go to a convention. You can see some of my developments in my recent tweets.

So even though the term “free comics day” had floated by me in previous years, I didn’t pay any attention until this year when NerdSync brought it back into view. The host, Scott Niswander, spent this week’s podcast episode interviewing the founder of Free Comic Book Day, Joe Field. It’s an interesting interview that covers the history and purpose of the day and the benefits of comics in general.

One point they made that I hadn’t thought about is that reading comics is a very active process that uses both sides of your brain. I thought back to my comic reading experiences and noticed that the activity of interpreting the text and images by each other and stringing the panels into a coherent narrative really is work sometimes. But it’s fun work. If you’re interested in the dynamics of comics as an art form and medium of communication, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is a good place to start.

Back on the topic of the post, Free Comic Book Day is an industry-wide promotional event that takes place each year on the first Saturday in May. It sometimes coincides with the release of a comic book movie. This year it’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. Basically you can walk into any participating comics store and pick up some of a selection of free comics. Some stores have other events going on the same day. Half Price Books is also participating, though I’m not sure if their free comics selection will be the same as in a regular comics store (also at HPB you have to buy something to get a free comic).

The FCBD website gives more details, including a list of the official free comics with descriptions and some previews, a search engine for finding participating stores near you, and a set of brief articles that survey the comics industry for people who are new to it.

Now don’t tell Joe Field I said this, but if you aren’t ready to brave an actual comics store, there are other ways to read comics for free. If you aren’t even sure comics is a medium that would interest you, by far the easiest way to check it out is by reading some webcomics. You can also sign up at comiXology and read some of their free comics. ComiXology sells digital versions of print comics by the major publishers. And the next time you’re at your local public library, take a look at their graphic novel section. If it’s anything like the libraries near me, it’ll offer an interesting variety of genres that will give you a good idea of what’s out there.

Posted in Comics, Life updates | 2 Comments

Home makeover, Thinkulum edition

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Andy

You may be wondering what my excuse is this time. I have a semi-good one, I promise. The past few months I’ve been plowing through the gargantuan housekeeping project of purging my possessions and reorganizing my apartment. The clutter was getting too hard to live in.

Here’s what my place looked like a couple of years ago. Prepare to be horrified. It still looked about the same when I started cleaning up–the mess had just moved around.

My goal was to open up floor space by getting rid of things, using more vertical space, and giving everything a home. I’d say it worked pretty well!

The biggest task was dealing with my books. Weeding my book collection involved a lot of nuanced, intuitive decisions that balanced various factors. To help myself make the tougher decisions, I paid attention to the questions I found myself asking and made a sort of flowchart, which I’ve posted here. Maybe you can adapt it for your own purging projects. In the end I took about twenty storage boxes to Half Price Books.

I planned my new furniture arrangement by cutting out bits of graph paper to represent the furniture and placing them on a graph paper map of my apartment. The next time I rearrange, I’ll use home design software, like Sweet Home 3D.

But that probably won’t be until I the next time I move. Nearer term phases of this housekeeping project will involve replacing the storage boxes in my closet with nicer containers, scanning and purging my papers, and decorating.

Looking back at this whole process shows me something I hadn’t really believed, that a simple decision (and a lot of work) can make a substantial difference in one’s way of life. Normally I think of people’s life patterns as consequences of their fairly stubborn strengths and weaknesses, so changing an external factor, such as moving to a new city, won’t typically solve their problems, unless they’re moving out of an abusive environment. But this project has turned my apartment from a frustrating, depressing place to live into one that can inspire me with few obstacles. It’s been several weeks since the majority of the project has been completed, and my apartment has stayed in its new orderly state, so I have hope that it will continue.

Ordering my apartment has also helped me order my project work. My books were the catalyst. People own books for different reasons. Mine are mainly tools for my projects. While I was sorting through my hundreds of books to decide which ones to keep, I was faced with a fundamental truth about my projects: I have unlimited project ideas and only limited time. Often when I come up with an idea, I imagine myself blissfully working on it with loads of uninterrupted time sometime in the unspecified but relatively near future. Well, I don’t have overlapping futures in which to actually do that for every idea. While I’m better at working through my projects than I was, if I want any chance of completing all the ones I care most about, I’ll need to tighten things up more.

So I cycled through another iteration of my overall project strategy. To make sure I knew which projects I really care about, I started a list of my top 40 projects. I assumed each one would take a year, and I made a conservative estimate of my lifespan. So far I’ve filled in almost 30, and I’ve covered most of my main topics, so the prioritizing is going well so far.

I also came up with a better project workflow. Organizing my apartment helped me identify the typical contexts in which I work on my projects, and that led me to think about them in terms of an assembly line. For example, I usually do some work in my car during lunch, and there it’s easy to read or write when I only have to consult my head. Taking notes on books is harder. So when I get to a notetaking phase, I move the project to my computer at home. To get through the projects faster, I’m trying to limit myself to one at a time per context.

My transformative housekeeping project has made this winter a good one, despite the bone-chilling cold. But the next time I get wrapped up in a long project, I don’t want to neglect the website like I did this time. I’d like to post at least once a week. Fortunately, my current writing practices are making this more likely. So I’ll see you in a few days on a completely different topic!

Posted in Books, Housekeeping, Life updates, Projects | 2 Comments

Food Matters

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Andy

The project for the past couple of weeks has been nutrition and cooking. A few weeks ago I went in for a physical, and I brought up the subject of my cholesterol, which regularly comes back high in my bloodwork. My doctor gave me his latest general diet recommendation, which is a low-carb diet. I was kind of surprised when he listed some examples–Atkins and the Paleo diet stood out to me–because I considered these to be fad diets, and I’d always been skeptical of such things. But I like my doctor, and I’d been wanting some kind of change in my diet since at least the beginning of the year, so I put myself on it immediately.

It lasted two days until I ran across T. Collin Campbell’s The Low-Carb Fraud and my skepticism returned. The book was short, so I read the whole thing that day. It reminded me that like many important issues, nutrition is complex and controversial, and it wasn’t something I was going to resolve in a few days.

So instead of drastically changing my lifestyle on shaky premises, I decided to make some less disputable changes that were more modest: I’d limit my consumption of sugar and bad fats, which I learned were saturated and trans fat. I’ve also tacked sodium onto the list, but I’m less concerned about that.

Although I ended up deciding against a low-carb diet for the time being, even seriously considering it was enough to shock me out of my complacency and fling nutrition to the top of my project list, especially since it involves controversy, which usually piques my interest.

The diet I settled on was a whole food, plant-heavy diet along the lines of Michael Pollan’s work, another favorite of my doctor’s. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Mark Bittman has hoisted the same banner and has come out with the Food Matters Cookbook. I have his How to Cook Everything, and for the most part I like his style and approach to cooking. He’s down to earth, inviting, and instructive, and he tries to keep things simple. So I was glad he’s on Team Pollan. I’m not sure what else to call it yet.

My main goal at this point is to see if this diet will reduce my LDL. I’ll have another blood test in a few weeks to see where things are.

I’ve had many thoughts about cooking and nutrition during this experiment, but this much has taken me long enough to write, so I’ll end it there for now.

Posted in Cooking, Nutrition, Projects | 6 Comments

Project scheduling and mnemonics

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Andy

So, it’s been three months. I’ve been working on stuff, but I got thrown off of posting by changing my project schedule to the week-oriented approach I mentioned in the last post. That quickly melted into no real schedule, which isn’t any more satisfying than the daily rotation I was on before. So I’m going to try the weekly schedule again but be more disciplined about it this time, with actual goals and assessments.

After I posted the first stage of my math relearning project, I returned to the memory project I started a few years ago. I read another book, Mnemonology: Mnemonics for the 21st Century, and analyzed the research presented in it. Next I’ll import it into a database and run some queries to see what I can learn. Then I’ll come up with some recommendations for studying and put them in an essay.

But all of that’s on hold while I work on this week’s project, which I’ll tell you about in the next post.

Posted in Memory, Productivity, Site updates | 4 Comments

Almost ready to count!

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Andy

After many weeks of thinking and writing, at last I have posted the first major chunk of my math relearning project. The result: I now know what a number is. I still need to write about place value and some fundamental math concepts, but after that I’ll learn how to count. (That’s why I couldn’t tell you how many weeks it’s been.)

I’ve decided that rotating through my subject areas one per day wasn’t satisfying enough, so now I’m trying a week per area. At the end of each week I decide whether to continue with that area or switch to another. So far it’s mostly been math every week, but I’ve also been reading about Eastern Orthodoxy. I don’t know if or what I’ll write about that or when. The problems with one area per day were that I couldn’t get much done in one day, and some days I’d have other things to do, so I’d have to wait a week to get back to that subject.

I’m hoping the rest of this math project won’t take so long. I think the reasons this first section did are that I was analyzing concepts I normally take for granted, I was translating the methods for teaching children into the underlying concepts those lessons implied, I was reorganizing the material I read to create a new synthesis, which always takes forever, and I wasn’t thinking much about how I could do all that in shorter iterations. But hopefully for the rest of the project the analysis will become more straightforward as the topics progress.

This week I’m going to try to tie up the loose ends on some of my other projects, so I’ll be doing my daily subject rotation again.

Posted in Math relearning, Productivity, Site updates | Leave a comment

Some rethinking, a trip to Chicago, and a workshop

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Andy

Last week I added a chapter to my Pychyl summary, posted my first chunk of epistemology notes, posted some of my drawing exercises to DeviantArt, and began reviewing my project choices.

The epistemology notes are for the book’s introduction, and I’d written them ages ago when my agenda for the project was different, so I wanted to revise them first, but I only got halfway through and decided to just post what I had. So I’ll finish those revisions and then continue adding chapters.

I haven’t felt very enthusiastic about my drawing exercises, so I surveyed my project ideas for the arts, asked myself some evaluative questions, and was reminded that one of my wishes is to contribute insights to my fields of interest. So I’ll probably prioritize projects that express my own ideas rather than summarizing others’. I don’t know if I have much that’s truly worthwhile to contribute at this point, but I’ll let other people decide that.

Along those lines, the procrastination book is going to take too long if I keep going at this rate, so I’d like to try something different, highlighting the parts of the book that stood out to me rather than summarizing everything in it.

Last Tuesday I took the day off of work to hang out with a friend from out of town who had a long layover in Chicago. He was pretty tired, so we didn’t do much, which gave the day a nicely laid back feel. We had lunch scheduled with some local Debian users, so we headed downtown and wandered around the office building we’d be eating in. At one point we descended a moving escalator to the second level of the basement, only to find that there was construction blocking the up escalator, and the only other place to go was through a security door into the office area. So we had fun running up the down escalator toward freedom. It was harder than I expected. After an animated lunch conversation with interesting people, we headed back to the airport, where we found a very cushiony bench to wait on next to the security line. One thing I’ve noticed about pursuing all my areas of interest at once is that it seems to give me a lot more to talk about. It’s nice to find conversation partners who can engage with me on more than one of them. Especially when I have six hours to kill with them! Not that we only talked about the things I’m doing, of course.

On Saturday I attended a workshop for the Immanuel mentor team. One of our trainers is being ordained this week, so the head of the training program was in town and wanted to make good use of her time here. I’m glad, because not only is it always good to see her, the workshop clarified some key themes of Immanuel prayer for me. One facet of integrating the dissociated parts of ourselves is verbalizing those parts together and sitting with the conflict to see what arises from it. In Immanuel we start by establishing a loving connection with the Lord, and we return to it often throughout the session, but at times it serves the recipient to let them experience the pain they’ve been avoiding. It’s part of sharing the truth about ourselves with the Lord so he can address and heal it. I came away from the workshop with a renewed sense of the value of this kind of prayer.

Posted in Immanuel prayer, Life updates, Projects, Site updates | Leave a comment

Accelerating

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Andy

I haven’t gotten as much done in the last week as I wanted, mostly because I’ve been trying to finish a freelance project and because my sleep schedule is still wobbling, which leads to naps, which throws off my productivity. But I did post my first few notes on Timothy Pychyl’s procrastination book. This is a practice I hope to continue, releasing my projects as very rough works-in-progress and then growing and refining them over time. That way they’ll at least have some presence in the world in case I have to put them on hold or drop them. They’d still have some potential for helping people, and maybe I’d be more likely to pick them up again.

As for other projects, I’ve pretty much decided how to organize my epistemology notes, and I’m getting there with my math notes. In my math reading I’ve nearly made it to addition! That’ll be this week. I’m having to skip around in my book because it isn’t organized the way my project will be. In the realm of people projects, I’m sprucing up my social media profiles, and last week it was YouTube and Google+. And I’ve been continuing my basic drawing exercises, exploring ways to draw circles.

A couple of social issues have caught my attention in the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if I’ll post to the wiki about them, but I wanted to at least write a few thoughts here.

The first issue was the #YesAllWomen hashtag from a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t read many of the tweets, but I read a few good articles about it (by Rob Fee, Zaron Burnett III, and Phil Plait). I’ve been encouraged over the past couple of years that the issue of sexual assault has been getting more attention, and it’s very important for people to tell their stories so others will know the problems are real. But these days when people (I’ll call them the advocates) speak out about social problems, what draws my attention is the negative reactions of other people, in this case men, and then the advocates’ reactions against those reactions. I think some bridging would help. If the advocates asked what legitimate concerns could be behind their audience’s reactions, such as a fear of rejection, they could nuance their message and maybe broaden it. In this case one helpful direction would be, alongside the stories of harassment, to talk about the men they appreciate and why, and they could take it further by talking about how they’d like to be treated (especially by male strangers). That would make the safer men around them feel better (and maybe more cooperative) and also give the repentant ones new behavior to aim for. Maybe some advocates are already doing this.

The other issue was the problems of YouTube celebrity (Charlie McDonald’s video is a good starting point, and TheThirdPew’s is also good). Several threads weave through the issue, including the theme of sexual abuse, but what I’ve been thinking about most is the false intimacy some fans feel with the YouTubers they follow, a problem fans of Hollywood stars face but which is made worse on YouTube because the video creators are often speaking informally and sharing parts of their lives on camera. I asked myself what motivates viewers to look for this intimacy or to idolize their chosen celebrities and how those motivations could be reshaped or redirected. Maybe they’re looking for more stable or fulfilling or easier relationships or to raise their self-image by associating with someone they see as higher quality. I wondered if it would help for someone to offer guidance on building real life relationships. But chances are these fans already have a few friendships in person, and it could be worthwhile to build their appreciation for those relationships, such as by writing living eulogies. This is an idea I’ve had before, but I didn’t realize it was an established genre until I searched for it this weekend. I may write about it on the wiki sometime.

On Friday I attended my coworker Brooke’s wedding. It was elegant in the sense of accomplishing its purpose with a minimum of excess. The ceremony was held in a small, picturesque chapel surrounded by farmland, and both the wedding and the reception were short and simple. I imagine the cost was modest, but I suspect they’re making up for it on their overseas honeymoon. As someone who has a low tolerance for ceremonies, I appreciated it. I also enjoyed the feeling of nostalgia I got from sitting in the old-fashioned chapel and seeing the kind of art on the walls my grandparents might have owned.