Welcome! My regular job involves writing, but with professional expectations and constraints that make this Bear platform feel freeing. I like stumbling ac...
As a 17-year-old intern coming into the office for a few hours after high school each day in the early eighties, I had one job. Listen to AM radio on my way in, and report to the older workers the price of gold and the Dow. They were all in their late forties and fifties, when a career job with one company was the norm, and they had opinions. Here’s a retrospective assessment of the advice they…
If you’re an aging surfer seeking a relaxed break on the south shore of O‘ahu and don’t mind a semi-long paddle out, Tonggs is for you. Look up and you see Diamond Head, to the left all of Waikīkī. Fun, consistent waves over a mix of reef, rocks, and sandbars. It fronts a sea wall, with only two entry points over about a half mile of shoreline. Sharks aren’t unknown there or anywhere in the…
We can probably agree that it’s better to be needed than irrelevant. At least when people are around you for you, not for what you can do for them. I’ve made mistakes both ways about people’s intent. There’s little better in life than being with someone who genuinely enjoys spending time with you. And little worse than reading or misreading them as just being interested in you instrumentally. I’ve…
I am in the strange position of possessing more of my father’s artifacts than my own. When he passed, I tried to piece together the parts of his story I didn’t know from items he left behind, and among them was his high school yearbook. It held many handwritten inscriptions, but there was one in particular. She’d written it by her portrait, and it spilled out onto the margins of the page. She…
When I want to be immersed in music, I usually listen alone, in those rare moments when life allows the kind of deep listening that evokes images, emotions and dreams. But like dreams, they're intensely meaningful to the person having them, and intensely boring to everyone else. Live music is supposed to be one of those rare moments. At least based on the ticket prices. You get the immediacy, a…
My book came out today. I finally get to write that sentence. Thanks to all on Bear who fight the fiction that metrics make creations matter. That metrics say what’s good, therefore who’s good. Bullshit. Every post here is an act of creation, self-expression for its own sake, and all the more inspiring because of it. On to the next!
Grad students hit a point about half to two-thirds of the way through their programs where they have to make a decision. They're done with required courses and they can start positioning themselves a little more precisely for the future they want--if they know. At this point they've sunk XXL time and money into whatever degree program they're in, so it's not a decision most take lightly. Some…
Swedish death cleaning is about discarding possessions before you die as a kindness. But in the smaller universe of personally meaningful objects, the ones you leave behind will be the last story you tell. And you shape that narrative by what you keep and throw away. If you’ve ever had to go through a late loved one’s physical possessions, you sometimes discover things they kept that didn’t fit…
I come not to bury this phrase but to praise it. I thought it was another content-free incoherence that could be mumbled in any context, like It is what it is, You already know, or that eighties classic, Whatever. I was a fool. Iykyk implies knowledge that only experience can bestow, that words can't fully describe, and that others without that experience can't fully comprehend. It communicates…
I had a few weeks relatively free, and plans for how I'd spend them. You're now anticipating the list of complications and distractions that prevented me from doing so, right? But...no. I did relax. Did have hours to focus, meander, scroll, think, get to the beach, sleep. I made progress on the projects I'd hoped, with the dog happily chilling beside me. Put some extra time and effort into…