I’m a 40-something living in New York with my wife and our dogs. I’m an imaginary web guy and once-upon-a-time SWE, still figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. By day, I’m a digital gremlin working in Big Tech. By night, I’m not so sure.
You’ll find me suspended in the pause between heartbeats and the beat of a worn drum. Searching for what was sacrificed to reach the complacency of tomorrow, to recollect the fragments of a youth spent wanting, yielding the better parts of myself in service of all I thought I needed to be. I’ve become that which decays—not from the frailty of my own humanity, nor from this shell of a body marked…
I managed twenty-eight weeks of notes until the habit crumbled in early October. Ever since, I’ve felt an urge to begin again, a missed opportunity slipping from my grasp, yet a call I’ve chosen to ignore. Mounting frustration made it ever easier to find distractions elsewhere. How is it already December? Perhaps it’s silly, but I have sat with this persistent feeling that I need to find an empty…
There’s something exhilarating about taking a shower and stepping out into the city, a light breeze whipping through your damp hair. You’re coming down from a weightlifting session—a disappointing one—but the subsequent shower has lifted your spirits. You’re breathing a bit more clearly, your skin awash in sensation, frisson aplomb on your mind and across the expanse of your arms. You inhale…
Life, Work et al This week has been a stress-fueled blur, with the end-of-quarter rush engulfing my attention. Every waking moment has felt torn between competing demands, and the line between home and work has all but dissolved. I’ve spent most of my time navigating an endless back-and-forth in code reviews on two projects I had hoped would be done by now. No such luck. It’s easy to lose track of…
I got to a point where I considered just skipping the whole week, or maybe posting a bare-bones update about giving myself grace when I couldn’t muster the energy to sit here, to think through these notes. Well, it turns out I’m unwilling to follow through, so here goes: probably shorter than usual, but enough to check the box and keep the streak alive. Life This week, I marked what would have…
The United States was founded on political violence and has been further forged by its flames throughout our history. To appeal to our better virtues and to hope for a brighter future is admirable, but cognitive dissonance is a deceptively sweet fruit, nurtured by the blood and tears of those who suffer under the false dichotomy of us-versus-them, where people are dehumanized and branded enemies…
Must blogging be lonely ? Must an author allow comments to meet some imagined framework? Does there need to be anything more than a space in which you share thoughts? The answer is no, not at all. What value is gained from blind adherence to arbitrary boundaries imposed by others? Your site can be a digital home, a place to welcome guests, but sharing space is not the same as occupying it. By…
Despite my best efforts, notification culture still permeates through every facet of my life. What we call “asynchronous” communication rarely is, not when the pull to react is immediate and insistent. From work, I’ve trained myself to send an acknowledgment first, a kind of placeholder reply, just so no one is ever left waiting. The toll is quieter but heavier: each ping seizes my attention,…
The following was originally posted as the 105th edition of Manu’s “People and Blogs” series. 1) Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Courtney . I’m a cishet white man and a perpetually tired netizen, a descriptor I’m confident hasn’t been used unironically in decades. While I don’t pay much mind to generational divisions, I’m of a particular age that witnessed a…
The routine and the ritual carried me through, but the week itself was a soft blur—not the kind marked by good times or fond memories, but of unexpected friction and disappointment. Work pressed hard, a tangle of concurrent deadlines looming before month’s end. It meant several late evenings at the office, nothing catastrophic, just the weight of it all. Life The garage renovation is in its eighth…
Unhealthy relationship with caffeine. An added feature of aging is wondering if a headache is from withdrawal or some kind of cancer. My right leg hurts when I rest the left across the right—am I dying? More quickly than expected, I mean. What’s the expected rate of death anyway? If eighty years is the average lifespan, rounded of course , and time feels like it grows shorter as we age, does that…
A fuzzy horde of bumble flower beetles has taken up residence in our herb garden, to such an extent that Amanda has all but abandoned the area. At least these are beneficial native pollinators and the plants appear unaffected. Still, what are they even doing in there? They’re so easy to spot—dark little shapes against the white enclosure—always tucked into the nooks and crannies near the top,…
It’s strange to realize my father is turning 80 next month. When I was born, he was 36—making me already eight years older than he was when he became a father of two. Though I’ve come to terms with the reality that I’m unlikely ever to experience being a father, there’s still, admittedly, a faint ember of longing. Eight years might not have seemed such a wide gap once, yet the older I get, the…
I encountered a post from Ning this week that offers a robust look at the organization system she uses to keep track of her life. I don’t mean a mere journal; this is far more comprehensive. Yet she writes, “It’s simply a matter of organizing the information [..].” That choice of words— simply —is utterly astounding to me, given the exceptional detail with which she captures her day. To be clear,…
On the screen to my right, I just noticed what amounts to an advertisement for AI. Someone uploads their resumé and submits the following prompt: “Can you make a storybook for my 2- and 4-year-old daughters explaining my career in the style of a coloring book?” I am not a parent and this might be an unfair criticism, but this seems so utterly hollow. Maybe at those ages, children won’t…