30279

Thursday, Jan 2, 2025 at 8:42 PM It just hit me that I'm so old that I remember having to write a letter to a friend in another state to let them know I wanted to come visit, because telling them via a long distance call would have been too expensive. While I'm quick to embrace the convenience of being able to simply text someone when I'm planning to breeze through their town, our ability to send paragraph-long messages and talk for hours on the phone with no danger of extra charges has, as f...

I think my neighbor upstairs bought a 3D printer At first I thought it was a video game, but now I’m almost 99% sure it’s a 3D printer. He runs it around the clock and it’s driving me bananas. I probably won’t complain though. ...

Am I the only one who has noticed the Etsyfication of everyone's hobbies? Not one to be a hypocrite, I'll admit I've done a fair amount of this myself: why? One: because most unskilled or soft-skilled jobs today don't pay enough to live on, and two: you don't have to be on any social media platform for more than five seconds to see everyone in your feed promoting their service/product/creation. There's no shame at all in being excited about something you're doing or making, on the contrary! Let'...

So I passed this little free library as I took a walk today. I actually pass two of them when I take my usual route through Los Feliz, and this one said "BOOKS ONLY" plainly on the outside of it. I had to pause for a minute and ask myself: What did someone do to make them feel that they had to put that on the outside of a little library? Like what happened that caused them to need to do that? What did they put inside that library that wasn't a book? Of course, my mind instantly went to shit. L...

So, how's it going? (asked no one, ever...)What I did:-removed all social media apps (except BeReal) from my phone-removed email apps (except Gmail, which I couldn't delete because I switched back to an android)-only posted on social media on the weekends-only viewed social media for 5 mins in the morning and 5 mins at night (no posting)-downloaded the Opal app for my other devices (iPad, laptop)-started using a lightphone 2 part-time, and a Kindle for reading-used a gift card to buy a paper pla...

...and here's why (or: The Case for Not Clicking "Like") Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work and many other books, lays out his idea of a life in a utopian digital age in Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World : "Our current relationship with the technologies of our hyper-connected world is unsustainable and is leading us closer to the quiet desperation that Thoreau observed so many years ago...we require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in ch...

I swear I will never ask a friend who is a doctor or a friend who is a lawyer for free advice again. I know what it must feel like, because as a former English teacher and current copy editor, I get asked to read people's shit ALL. THE. TIME. Sometimes, they don't even ask me if I'll do it: I just get documents or a google drive link sent to me in a messaging app (IG or Facebook, usually) like I have nothing better to do than read your paper/essay/manuscript/ screenplay/resume/application/thesis...

I'm addicted to the internet. Not as bad as some other people seem to be (not that I'm trying to feel superior), but it's at a point where I feel like I'm headed in that direction. Mostly social media, but just internet distractions in general. It's affecting my sleep (yes, I take my smartphone to bed), my ability to concentrate at work (my job requires tremendous mental focus and attention), my posture (hello, tech neck), and my creativity (not cool when I sit down to write or make art and I s...

100Days Day 16: my job I think 22-year-old me would have been thrilled with this job I have now. I wonder what I would have said if someone told me then it would only take 36 years to get it. When I graduated from college with a BA in English (and a dual concentration in creative writing and publishing), I had no idea how to go about getting a job in my field. My dad, a graphic artist, had some experience in advertising; my mom was insistent on trying to get me to be a teacher, which was the l...

#100Days Day 11: my paintingWhen I was a sophomore in high school, I took an art class. It was pretty good: the teacher, who was about seventy (or that's how old she seemed to me) let us use a very wide variety of media, including acrylic paint. We had just been studying abstract expressionists; and of course, being the rage-filled teen that i was, I fell in love with that style. So, I took every color of paint I could, covered a large canvas in black, and attacked it with these short, furious s...

#100Days Day 1: my recent trip back to NYCIn October, I traveled back to New York for the first time since January of 2020; in other words, the first time since pre-pandemic.(For context: I was born and raised on Long Island, just outside of NYC; I went to university there, and aside from a short six-year residency in LA, lived there all my life up until 2012 when I returned to LA)I was fully aware that I would be coming back to a changed city; I just didn’t know how changed it had become.The ci...