and my godfather Uncle Jim too. Cancer sucks.
November 2024
Caturday.
Truman enjoys staying close, but not too close, when I’m working. He is not one for sitting on my lap or jumping on the desk or anything like that. If he’s not on the floor, he’s on the cat tree in my office, which gives him a nice view out the window and to all the strange humans on a Zoom call.
Madera Canyon.
Earl and I had a nice walk around Madera Canyon this afternoon. I decided to use up some of my remaining vacation time; this was a great way to do it.
Verb.
“Doing the verbs, not trying to be the nouns.”
This phrase in this video by Ryan Holiday really struck me in a motivational way when I heard it this morning. I have followed Ryan Holiday’s work for some time. I was happy to see his video come across my feed from BigThink on YouTube.
Let go of the labels.
Tribeless.
I’m sitting on our “ampitheatre”. The view looks like this:
Those two photos turned out better than expected, considering I just spun my MacBook Air around and pointed the webcam at the view. Hmmm.
Anyway, I’m out back, looking over our 2 1/2 acres, and hearing coyotes making a ruckus on the other side of the wash. This, in turn, is getting the dogs at the neighbors worked up. So there’s barking from them and a yip yip party from the coyotes. A bird to my right is making some noise as well. Lucky and Jinx are silent on the matter. They’re content in the house.
I think about these coyotes that have their yip yip party together, doing the whole ‘travel in packs’ thing. Good for them.
Today I remarked on Mastodon that I’m feeling like I don’t have a tribe. Oh, I have a wonderful family, both here at the house and back East, but outside of that, I don’t really have a lot of folks I would consider part of a tribe in these parts.
I attribute this feeling to growing older and my expectations of and approach to life changing as time passes. My politics are left of center but nowhere near the “far left”. For going out and socializing I’m content in a quiet beer and/or sports pub enjoying that sort of thing versus going to a gay bar and thump thump thumping my way through a sweaty crowd in time to a remix of a song from the ‘80s that the boys think is da bomb. I don’t vape in any flavor. I don’t identify as “queer”; in truth I identify as “fatigued”, but if I had to put a label on my sexuality, despite my Uncle Arthur like antics on my videos, I’m “more guy than gay”. I feel like mainstream entertainment like television shows has been dumbed down to Lippincott Reader K, and honestly, I have little patience for the willful ignorance that has plagued this 2020s society.
Boy I sound cranky. Small wonder I don’t have a lot of friends.
I talked to my friend Matt back east yesterday and it was so wonderful to have a conversation with him. I’m hoping to make a trip to see him some time next year. He’s the older brother I never had.
I get that I have a good life. I actually have a great life. And it’s not like I’m no longer a loner. I’m still very much a loner, I’m just a loner that wants to be around likeminded people once in a while. The digital connections are enjoyable but not a replacement. Maybe I need to talk to a therapist or something. It’d be like a paid tribe, I guess.
I attribute some of these feelings to the head cold I’ve had this week. I’ve been going to bed early and we haven’t done much of anything. Plus, the holidays are looming and for the past decade or so I haven’t really felt the excitement of the holidays. Earl has insisted we light up the Christmas decorations even though it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet.
I’m too fatigued to stand my ground so let the rest of the family have some extra holiday joy.
Maybe it’ll be contagious.
Truthfully.
Kevquirk recently shared a blog post highlighting A Nun Answering Questions in a YouTube video. I watched the entire video and found it absolutely fascinating.
I have always found nuns a little scary because I’ve heard the stereotypical stories about knuckles being slapped in Catholic School and in other anecdotes they’ve always been described as so stony and hard.
This video changed my perspective quite a bit. I am happy to have watched this video.
Regroup.
I’ve been working my way through Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”, as translated and annotated by Robin Waterfield for the past several months. This activity has been an effort for me to find a stronger center during this second half of my life. I have received the daily emails from The Daily Stoic for a few years. When we lived in Chicago I studied the “Enchiridion” by Epictetus. Reading and thinking around these teachings have helped me find, grow, and solidify my moral foundation. Never stop trying to better yourself.
I never studied philosophy when I was in college; my two social sciences were sociology and psychology. Sociology was mildly interesting but I didn’t get into psychology as much as I thought I would. In some ways I wish we would have explored these topics in high school as I feel like these studies would have motivated me to be a better person earlier on. Since I was in my late 30s when I went to college the second time around, I already had a good idea of who I was and what I believed in. These studies just helped me find a deeper understanding of the subjects.
I should have studied philosophy. One of the things I’m always asking is “why”. I want to know why things happen, not just that they happened. This drives my husband a little crazy, because he’ll be telling me something about politics or that an acquaintance has done this or that and I’ll usually ask “why”?
I always want to know the why.
Non satis scire, which is Latin for “to know is not enough”.
Another bonus of reading is that it’s distracting me from the news and the social media conjecture around the news. Whether it’s Bluesky or Mastodon or Threads, there’s a lot of gnashing going on around the U.S. government, and rightfully so.
I don’t have the mental capacity to deal with any of that right now. I can’t help but think about how grounded my father was and it seemed like very little fazed him. I very much admired that about my dad and it’s a goal I still have on my personal growth list.
One small step at a time.
Just Think.
If there was ever a video that articulated my feelings about LLM, or Large Language Models commonly known as “A.I.”, it’s this video by Bridget Carey at CNET.
Apple Intelligence, and all its brethren like ChatGPT, is basically a very smart Magic 8 Ball when it comes to giving you the answers you’re looking for. It’s all a probability game. The GPTs are very good at determining the next word that comes after the current word, and hopefully the context will be correct.
Apple Intelligence, and all the tools like it, uses information from smart people to make people too lazy to think look like they actually took time to think.
I know I’m a middle aged man that sounds like he’s yelling at folks to get off his lawn, but there’s a certain beauty in being able to think for yourself.
This morning one of my HomePods announced, “Sure, I’ll play some music selected just for you” and started to play “Everything She Wants” by Wham!
No one had said anything and I was just sitting at my desk doing my morning reading. I wasn’t even using a computer or my phone. I was just sitting there reading a book. I have no idea why Siri decided I needed a bit of George Michael at that moment, but I promptly unplugged that HomePod to stop the music. I put in the Goodwill bin.
Whatever Apple has done with improving Siri with Apple Intelligence is a mystery. I prefer to step away from the mystery and just think for myself.
Extra.
Our friend Josh was in town this weekend and we met up to go on a hike. We drove up near Mount Lemmon to Mount Bigelow. It was 35°F and cloudy, but enjoyable. There was a bit of snow on the mountain.
It was my second hike of the weekend. After yesterday’s 14 mile hike I didn’t think I’d have it in me, but our little hike was quite enjoyable.
Afterwards he stopped at a cafe in Summerhaven for a little bit of lunch before heading back down the mountain. The snow started falling during lunch; it was fun to see snow for the first time in a very long time.
