Coming to Terms
Religion is one of those things that can invoke the ire of people if you bring it up in the incorrect way. That way is, of course, precisely the manner in which religious people will so often choose to bring it up. Put simply, this is when the boundary of respect for someone else's personal decisions and autonomy over their life is violated. Anger is aroused when boundaries are violated, and since religion is such...
Cultural Divides
One of my pandemic recreations has been to create profiles on some of the dating apps and then browsing the profiles of others. I'm honest about my temporary status in the Detroit area, and I've taken the trouble not to connect with a single person. It's less so I can find a date (in which I have no interest right now) and more a sociological experiment I can do while we're all under house arrest....
Drive
I came across a question on the Q&A site Quora a few years ago while browsing about how to assess candidates during interviews. We're limited in the information we can really know about a person in the context of most interview settings. People are usually not completely comfortable, they're not being fully themselves, and they're hyper on their guard to hide any character flaws they might have. Basically the observer effect is a massive barrier...
Simple Language
Usually writing and style guides on how to employ language in effective communication insists that a person should use the simplest words possible and not use excessively floral vocabulary terms. This advice is often, but not always, given to those writing in business settings or on social media. I think there's merit to telling people that they shouldn't carpet-bomb their writings with complicated and obscure words that will muddle the message for the majority of...
The Tarot of Me
I wrote about Tarot a couple of days ago, and I touched briefly on the idea of synchronicity. I've been doing not-quite-daily readings for myself for the last year or so, almost always a two-card draft with a peek at the card on the bottom of the deck as a bonus, overall energy card for the reading. In that time, I've noticed that there are certain cards that will fall repeatedly in particular windows of...
April Come She Will
Early on during the pandemic I did something I had sworn I would never do as long as I lived: I got back onto the dating apps and started browsing. A couple of months prior, I had gone on a date with a girl that I had encountered repeatedly in real life, but we only eventually connected for coffee, by happenstance, on one of the apps. It was clear from how that date went that...
In Defense of Tarot
To start with, and to borrow a line from the old television show "Lost": "I'm an ordinary man...meat and potatoes, I live in the real world. I'm not a big believer in magic." I'm a big believer in science and the scientific method, as I've written about at great length on here. But I also operate with an awareness of the limits of science, and I try to cultivate a healthy sense of curiosity about...
Mud of Spring
Today I had the day off of work. My company has this policy where teams get one day off per month, which they call a "recharge day", just to give people a free day to recuperate during this whole pandemic debacle. I personally find that the day off interferes with the flow of my week when it occurs on a Wednesday, and the workaholic in me feels that I don't really need a freebie day,...
Bite-Sized Journaling
Shortly before I relocated back to the Detroit area from San Francisco, I developed a keen interest in the city of San Francisco and its history. One of my COVID pastimes has been to browse for rare and out-of-print books about the city's history that can be scooped up on the cheap. While I've been something of a digital millenial for most of my life, taking it for granted that "history" is something that can...
The Epochs of Me
In my last entry, I was solipsistic enough to write about one of my own dreams, which featured symbolism from alchemical writings, in which I was in a place cloaked in a black cloud. To me, combined with the other details from the dream, this suggested I am in a state of melancholia and have to extricate myself from some aspect of my past. In the time since having this dream I have been working...