Snippets

I read this article at the New Yorker a while back - The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media - and it continued to haunt me. It made reaffirm my decision to leave Facebook; gave me great pause about Instagram, considering its ties to Facebook; and made me think long and hard about how I use (or am used by Twitter). My conclusion was that, despite how long I've used Twitter, I don't know what I want from it. Combined these thoughts with finishing this book over the weekend - Reader, Come Home (which discusses how the digital world impacts our reading brain - and I realize that what I want is to read Twitter less, so that I read other things more, particularly long-form journalism and books. Everything is still a work in progress on those fronts, but the desire to be active and engaged, as opposed to passive, is at the forefront of my thinking.

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In my desire to still be engaged in discussion but wishing to read less on Twitter, I "discovered" podcasts for the first time this week - from NPR, the NY Times, the Economist, the New Yorker, ESPN, discussions about politics, sports, and books. I'm hooked.

Now, I know one might say that listening to podcasts is passive, as opposed to active. But at least so far, it hasn't been. I listen to acquire information that is used in engaging in others; I listen to find the next book to read; in short, I think the podcasts will give me information (which I tend to crave) but that is curated better than the madness that is Twitter. We'll see where things go, but I have immensely enjoyed the past week due to this.

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One advantage of podcasts is that they line up well with our new household routine that is structured to give me time in the morning to hop on the treadmill. We started midweek, and I was on both Thursday and Friday mornings. I've a long way to go; but I feel like I have a clearer sense of what motivates me (perhaps a longer blog post later) and a structure that is designed around making that motivation evident daily.

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Lots of good quality time this weekend with Maia, even as she developed an illness over the course of the weekend. Couple things I do not want to forget ...

Playing cowgirls/cowboys with Maia, and I'm pretending I'm interviewing her to help with a cattle drive. I ask if she can handle the "West." She quips, "I was in the West, but moved to the Wild West." She has such a quick and humorous wit sometimes.

I constantly play music - my Pandora premium subscription is one of the things I hold most dear, and it knows my musical tastes so well after the decade I've spent curating my various stations and albums. Maia is getting to the point where she has her "own" music, consisting primarily of KIDZ BOP Kids (kids sing top hits and whatnot) albums she occasionally hears on her LeapPad. This week at the Library I blew her mind when she realized they had KIDZ BOP Kids CDs. She had such an excitement about her to share some of the songs with me; and she was over the top when she heard a song ("Keep It Still" by Portugal. The Man.) on the CD that was a song she has heard through my constant playing of music. She couldn't wait to share it with me. It was a sweet moment.

Alas, poor Maia developed a fever over the course of today, so perhaps the silver lining is that we have more of that quality time tomorrow.

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Started reading Jane Mayer's Dark Money, which chronicles the rise of the Koch brothers spending to, truly, change the way we discuss the very ideas of economics and governance over the last forty years. Truly fascinating thus far.

This piece from Longreads - Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes - was something I found a lot of value in reading.