Mind

My phone is really hard to use.

by

I realized today as I was going through the finger jujitsu of finding my music app in between chat conversations and remote controlling the television that my phone is really hard to use.

It’s powerful, sure. I’m confident there are absurdly awesome comparisons of my iPhone 14’s capabilities to the total computing power of the U.S. Navy in 1972 or something. I should find one

Power, you might argue, means there’s capacity to add and manage lots of stuff in your phone, making the finger can-can necessary. You’d be right, but that’s beside the point.

Wait! Before you retort (you interrupt like a poorly timed Uber notification), you should also consider the relative size of everything in your phone were it a real thing, compared to the relatively small portal through which you’re interacting before you critique the clunky finger square-dance of app navigation. Again, right but irrelevant.

Are you finished…? Let me help.

– The design challenge inherent in making something this complex simple is staggering? Sure.

– You could have less on your phone and thus have a simpler experience? Ok, to a degree.

Those are all beside the point. The interface is hard to use. And we (I) accept that and the subsequent burden on my cognition and joints in order to fully utilize and, presumably enjoy my phone.

But, like kerning or alcoholism, once you see it, it becomes impossible to unsee. I find myself increasingly angry at the designers and builder of things on my phone.

The fact is, I often think of my phone as a large-ish room full of all these things. In my imagination I interact with them through a seriously adept but super-awkward robot arm with which I sort and rearrange and so forth. I find that I do a lot of phone cleanup in these moments—deleting apps and wondering why I even use this as much as I do.

Brains are weird, their ability to adapt to complexity and make it seem normal (let alone simple) is astounding.

Fundamentally, my phone is hard to use. I’m just good at it. It’s strange what we are willing to normalize.

A wizard should know better.

Treebeard

Too windy to go boating?

by

Someone close to my family committed suicide Saturday morning. I don’t know how to process this fact.

We were close a long time ago. We haven’t spoken in a decade or more. He was an implicit constant in my life—I simply didn’t think about him. Now he’s an explicit and permanent constant—forever etched into the stream of moments and memories.

So here I sit in a place I hold most sacred, surrounded by the clan that I hold most dear, and I keep glitching out because I don’t know how to process this fact.

Fuck you.

That’s what you get from me today.

Fuck you for staining these things.

How can I even consider starting to heal when I don’t know the damage yet. The blast is still forming and the shrapnel has not taken flight.

Someday I’ll get through all the serenity and understanding forgiveness and restoration that comes from time.

But not today.

Fuck You.

Me

The big helmets are back at the Mall.

by

My weeks are completely screwed up, which happens every several years due to whatever happens to the calendar that brings my annual cabin trip into the week adjacent to Labor Day weekend (week 35) as opposed to the week it normally occupies in the calendar (week 34). Or maybe Labor Day moves and I’m always on vacation in week 35. Whatever the reason, it’s throwing me off.

There are several things that happen in the week we are on vacation that I’m used to processing from the comfort of a cabin

  1. Lakeville North High School schedules are released so my son spends the day texting his friends to collaborate/commiserate.
  2. There’s a gap week between the cabin trip and the start of school.
  3. The weather is hot and humid but fall arrives just as we are leaving the cabin.
  4. The state fair kicks off as we are heading home.
  5. Football makes an appearance sometime while we are gone so we leave in not-football time and return home in yes-football time.
  6. It’s still August so the year isn’t almost over yet.

1 and 3 are net positive changes and easily handled. Elijah has spent quality time with his friends and fall-like weather at the cabin is like winning the lottery.

2 and 6 feel like a scam for Elijah and me respectively due to the shift. Vacation will turn into school rules and homework too quickly for him, and September is basically Halloween making Thanksgiving plans to buy Christmas presents. It’s practically next year.

4 is hard to measure. I don’t go to the state fair but people do and that changes traffic. We will see.

5. That’s the actual problem. I’m not a football fan or watcher though I do keep up to make conversation. Years of being a Huskers / Oilers / Steelers fan before climate change and expanded league schedules taught me that football is part of the fall when it’s cold. This is clearly no longer true.

Even if you combine 5 and 3 by giving me a cold weekend at the cabin with football starting, it’s still wrong because the mall got the big helmets out so it’s football in the humidity.

I’m not sure when the calendar course-corrects but I look forward to things going back to their proper order, just in time for Elijah to start college… likely during cabin week.

Happy vacation to me!

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a bananas.

Groucho Marx

I listen to Don Henley radio now.

by

Aging is weird. It seems like yesterday every part of me was elastic, flexible, resilient. Now getting out of bed wrong can be a day limiting event.

I’m mostly ok with it. It mostly has more rewards than drawbacks. And truthfully, the gestation period for aging is long enough for me to come to terms with any particular change as long as I do the daily work of processing.

But some days the processing includes all the stages of grief but particularly denial. That and bargaining. I bargain a lot with my aging.

So when I open Spotify on any random day and find myself listening to Phil Collins, Glenn Frey, Genesis, Toto — the “Don Henley Radio” mix — I try not to think about it as the loss of my musical elasticity, of which I have some but much less than I did.

I chalk it up to acceptance of aging. And I am content.