Projects and Updates, 2023Q3

Playlist of music in this post: Spotify

Writing By Hand
I used to write by hand. It's something I've lost over many years and I want to find my way back to it.

I've spent too much time typing. So much, I now disengage entirely when typing. Once, I would be present and focused while typing... especially when writing words for my own enjoyment. Not anymore.

My hope: writing by hand engages my brain in a way that recaptures some departed joy and stimulation.

Designing Better Gatherings
Some thoughts from recent parties.

One
People are everything. If you have the right people at your gathering, your gathering will probably be fun. In almost all cases, I focus on people who are kind, willing to engage with others, generous in sharing themselves and taking care of the people around them.

Two
We've recently done a good job matching board game parties with board game people, tequila parties with tequila people, serious wine parties with serious wine people, silly wine parties with silly wine people, etc.

Three
A note for future me: Hanging with my friends is more important than having freshly cut fruit or just-out-of-the-oven food. The timing is never perfect, and too often I spend the party's first hour splitting my attention between friends and making guacamole. It isn't terrible, but it's definitely a suboptimal way to do either.

Fun?
A friend asked me a weird question, recently -- he asked what I was doing for fun.

I had no answer.

My friend noted that, at some point, fun had stopped being fun... perhaps once we were unable to have fun all the time.

I can see it. Things I once did for fun, I now do for stress relief, relaxation, decompression, rejuvenation. Things I once did for fun now have a job.

Can fun have a job and still be fun?

It feels like fun is limited to slices of my days and weeks. The fun needs to count, because if the fun isn't fun, my next chance for fun isn't for a few days.

I'm not sure fun can be fun if it's responsible for being fun. Fun just needs to be.

Maybe fun is like happiness... could it be something we look for externally and it's something we need to be internally?

The Best Science

Five Albums

Spotify playlist
Five Albums library