2025-07-02 11:23:11
I saw this invitation to A Small Web July from small cypress and knew I wanted to join in.
Here are my personal guidelines:
I haven’t been blogging much lately. I want to post more often.
More reading blogs and responding. Maybe responding with my own post, maybe sending an email. More interaction via blogging.
Finish (or attempt to finish) a few small web projects. I like the “replace scrolling with building” idea so I’m going to copy that. Less time on my phone, less scrolling or aimless clicking, more building.
Stay on track with my physical goals. I’m trying to (re-)establish a few habits after dealing with health issues that left me fatigued through the first few months of the year. I’ve done well over the last 8 weeks with daily walking + lifting weights 2-3x/week. I want to keep it going and bump it up a bit. (But not too much! Baby steps.)
Accountability is helpful and fun.
If I post more (or don’t), that will be obvious from my blog.
Maybe I’ll do week notes for July to share how I did on blog reading/responding, little projects, and exercise.
2025-07-02 09:35:33
We can learn to make one-time decisions that make a thousand future decisions so we don't exhaust ourselves asking the same questions again and again.
— Greg McKeown
Here are a few of those big one-time choices I could make:
• Nothing matters or everything matters
• Tacos: soft or crunchy
• Humans are inherently good or inherently evil
• Life’s too short to fuck around or life’s too short to do anything but fuck around
• Do the thing every single day or do it when I feel like it
• Doubt myself or trust myself
• Dog person or cat person
• We are all sinners or “no one does the wrong thing deliberately”
• We are part of nature or we are above nature or we are antithetical to nature
• Paper or digital
• Free will or determinism
Some options combine well and that’s how we get creativity and connection and crunch wrap supremes.
2025-07-01 09:24:31
A wave is made of two parts: the crest and the trough. If you take away the trough, there is no crest. There is only still water. Calm. Undisturbed.
Happiness is like the crest of the wave.
A single point in an entire movement. A thin line on the vast spectrum of human experience. One tiny slice from an infinite pie.
But we chase happiness, we pursue it like something to be caught, captured, held. And all the time it’s like trying to run up a wave, trying to reach one particular point in the constantly moving water.
You can’t do it.
"Wave: a traveling disturbance that carries energy from one place to another."
Know what else is a perfect calm and undisturbed experience? Death.
No disturbance = no waves = still water.
No movement. Flat water, still water, unmoving, stagnant.
No disturbance = no experience. No unhappiness; no happiness, either. A picture of life, but not life itself. No movement. No energy. Flat-lined. Dead.
What if we sought aliveness instead? Experience? Awareness? Here-and-nowness? A kind of openness to life that is big enough to include happiness along with all the other emotions and experiences that make happiness possible.
A wave is made of a trough and a crest. You can’t have one without the other. All the parts of our life — the laughter, the tragedy, the hurt, the grief, the angst, the longing, the loneliness, the excitement, the delight, the hardship and the ease — give us the depth and capacity to experience those moments we identify as happiness.
Grief, for example: the inverse of gratitude. When you have grieved deeply, you have learned gratitude to an equal depth. What is grief but appreciation for something we no longer have (or never had)?
Our loss consolidates the experience of appreciation and adds sadness to it, longing, regret. That part is tough. It hurts, and so it teaches us. Perhaps you lost someone you love. You grieve, and in the grieving you learn how to live with even deeper gratitude for the ones you love who are still with you. You hurt, and you learn compassion. You feel loneliness, so you learn how to connect with yourself, how to comfort yourself. At some point you realize connecting with yourself is not so different from connecting with others, and the loneliness is eased; not just yours, but someone else’s, too.
The deep, underwater, dark trough of the wave makes the crest possible. Every part is essential.
2025-06-30 01:09:57
Today is my 44th birthday. Here are some things I want to keep in mind for the year ahead.
Things I never regret: spending time with people I love, trying something new, moving my body, getting outside, learning, writing, getting more sleep.
Knowing what I want to offer is more important than knowing what another person expects.
The best experiences of my life happen when I go for what I want with enthusiasm.
Some things provide a disproportionate amount of joy: Do more of those things.
When I am tired, I will do what is easy.
I can adjust my environment to make different things easy or difficult.
My life is better when I believe in free will.
Feeling safe is not the same as being safe.
I don’t want to reward myself with things that undermine my efforts.
I need both comfort and challenge.
Pushing myself through exhaustion leads to more exhaustion.
I don’t have to know everything about a situation to make a good decision.
Most people really are doing the best they can. This doesn’t mean their best is good enough for me.
My empathy extends beyond my capacity; therefore, my boundaries should not exist at the edges of my empathy.
Thinking about my feelings (or writing about them!) is not the same as feeling them.
Nostalgia is an indulgence.
Jealousy is an arrow, an indicator of what I’m not giving myself.
A good night of sleep changes my entire outlook.
Wanting something is not the same as enjoying it.
Grief is the inverse of gratitude.
Seeking to define my life’s purpose is a waste of time. Life itself is the purpose.
I should ask for help way before I feel like I deserve it. I should ask for help when I first have the thought, “I could use some help.”
Forgiveness is good. But it’s not good to rush into forgiveness to ease the offender’s discomfort.
Sometimes I seek approval when I want connection. This does not usually work out well.
Authority and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Getting one without the other leads to fucked-up situations.
The only opinions of me that matter come from a very small group of people.
Honoring my feelings does not necessarily mean acting on them.
When I feel self-righteous and sure of myself: tone it down about 25%. When I feel uncertain and hesitant: crank it up about 25%.
Everything is a spectrum. My starting point determines what feels extreme to me.
Death is in the room.
Disagreeing is a skill I can improve.
Growth does not require extremes or dramatic moves, just small steps in the right direction.
Good habits let me put more energy into what I enjoy.
Giving myself adequate solitude is not selfish.
Lack of clarity limits my ability to act because I can only choose from what I can recognize. Precise vocabulary helps with clarity.
When I am overwhelmed I tend to reach for more as a way of feeling in control. What I actually need is less.
Actions > words.
Proof > plans.
Creating > criticism.
Most of my decisions are either habitual or emotional. It’s good to keep this in mind.
Increasing my ability to tolerate discomfort (including embarrassment) increases my freedom to do more cool shit.
I am the only measure of my own success.
Happiness is a small-minded goal. A better goal: Experiencing life in all its pain and glory.
There is enough time to do what matters. I get to decide what matters.
2025-06-21 03:48:11
Two modes for learning. Both essential. Exploring is preliminary, faster, wider, and often more fun. Diving comes next. It’s slower, deeper, more difficult, but ultimately more satisfying.
Faster and wider.
Lots of open tabs, skimming, link hopping, following trails. Multiple books on the same topics, scanning the TOC, flipping to relevant chapters, scanning a glossary, looking up summaries. Grabbing definitions, comparing viewpoints. Making little notes and sketches (usually with lots of arrows).
The exploratory style is helpful when I want to quickly build a mental layer of context, grasp the basic vocabulary, and get a sense of the main issues and patterns involved in a topic.
It’s an essential part of learning.
It helps me filter and categorize and decide what’s worth exploring further.
Slower and deeper.
Reviewing all the little pieces gathered while exploring. Finding connections and thinking about what they mean. Questioning and collating. Reading carefully, annotating, with long pauses to stare out the window. Longer pauses to take a walk.
Thinking about different sides, perspectives, experiences and what they mean in terms of the topic. Looking for insights, commonalities, conflicts from different angles. Following one thread all the way to its end, or as far as I can go.
Expanding and examining. Starting, abandoning, going back to some previous point, following another trail slowly, finding the stuck point, unraveling knots of confusion, trying to get more specific and clear each time.
Doing something with it. Creating something out of it. Letting it change me.Diving is where the magic happens. The learning, the broadening of perspective, the shifting of mindset, the opening. Diving is required to reap the harvest of curiosity.
The trick is shifting from exploring to diving. Not letting myself live in shallow waters, which are fun to splash around in. But diving deep is how we find the treasure.
2025-06-20 06:10:01
A non-exhaustive list of how I, a middle class white woman living in the U.S., have benefited and am continuing to benefit from the racism built into our systems and embedded in our culture.
I get better treatment from my healthcare providers and I don’t even have to think about making sure I dress right or look right. I just show up!1
Pregnancy is less risky for me. Way less risky. 2
I have longer life expectancy. I’m less likely to get several serious chronic health conditions. 3
I’m more likely to get breast cancer, but I’m less likely to die from it if I do get it. That’s wild! 4
Going to college was easy-peasy for me. It was expected. My mom and her sisters all went to college. So did my sister. 5
But guess what? Even without a college degree, I’ll still earn more money than Black women in my lifetime. (It’s almost like it’s not even about education or competence but about, I don’t know, being white???!!!) 6
None of us women earn as much as the boys do, but the gender pay gap is smaller for me7 because I’m a white woman. That means I’ll get more retirement income. 8
I inherited some money when my maternal grandfather passed away years ago. And even though I’m not an affluent person (due mostly to my own dumb choices), I still benefit from having a familial financial support system.9
I am six times less likely to be murdered. 10
I’ve gotten a few traffic tickets but not as many as I would have if I weren’t white!11
And, even when I have been in a “police-initiated traffic stop,” I am waaaaaay less likely to end up being arrested. 12
Speaking of police, I have never been punched in the face or groped and beaten or shot to death in my own bed by an officer of the law. 13
That’s just a short selection from a long list. I haven’t even mentioned how I’m more likely to be seen as innocent and believable if I report abuse;14 how it’s easier in almost any organizational scenario for me to get a job15 or a leadership position or to at least get some kudos for my accomplishments. 16 The list goes on and on and on.
Today is Juneteenth. Seems like a good day for all of us white women (and white men, obvs) to think about how we can do better.
Racism isn’t over in America, and we’re still benefiting from it. Let’s recognize that. And let’s use our privilege, our voices, our bodies, our white-woman protected status, to call out bullshit and demand equity for all our sisters and brothers. Things change when we change them.
For example, Black women (21%) are more likely to say they have been treated unfairly by a health care provider because of their racial or ethnic background than are Black men (13%) and are seven times as likely to say this than are White women (3%). In another example, about six in ten (61%) Black women say they are very careful about their appearance or prepare for possible insults when seeking health care, similar to the share of Black men (57%), but roughly twice the share of White men (28%) who say the same. 🔗 Source
Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women. 🔗 Source
Black women continue to experience excess mortality relative to other U.S. women, including—despite overall improvements among Black women—shorter life expectancies1 and higher rates of maternal mortality.2 Moreover, Black women are disproportionately burdened by chronic conditions, such as anemia, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and obesity. Health outcomes do not occur independent of the social conditions in which they exist. The higher burden of these chronic conditions reflects the structural inequities within and outside the health system that Black women experience throughout the life course and contributes to the current crisis of maternal morbidity and mortality. 🔗 Source
While white women are more likely to have breast cancer, African American women have higher overall mortality rates from breast cancer. Every year, 1,722 African American women die from breast cancer—an average of five African American women per day. 🔗 Source
The college graduation rate of African American women for the 2004 cohort was 24.1 percent and has not increased at the same rate as the graduation rates of white women, Latinas, or Asian American women.Only 21.4 percent of African American women had a college degree or higher in 2010, compared to 30 percent of white women. 🔗 Source
According to Census data about work-life earnings, white women make more than African American women among full-time, year-round workers, regardless of what degrees they have obtained. 🔗 Source
Looking across racial and ethnic groups, a wide gulf separates the earnings of Black and Hispanic women from the earnings of White men.3 In 2022, Black women earned 70% as much as White men and Hispanic women earned only 65% as much. The ratio for White women stood at 83%. 🔗 Source See also this study.
As a result of lower lifetime earnings, women receive less in Social Security and pensions, having saved just 70% retirement income when compared to men. 🔗 Source
The typical black family has just 1/10th the wealth of the typical white one. In 1863, black Americans owned one-half of 1 percent of the national wealth. Today it’s just over 1.5 percent for roughly the same percentage of the overall population. 🔗 Source
Black women in the U.S. were, on average, six times more likely to be murdered than their white peers for the years 1999 through 2020, according to an analysis of racial disparities in U.S. homicide rates by researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. 🔗 Source
More specifically, Black women were about 17 percent more likely to be in a police-initiated traffic stop than white women, and 34 percent more likely to be stopped than Latina women. Among men, Black drivers were about 12 percent more likely than white drivers – and 17 percent more likely than Latino drivers – to be stopped. 🔗 Source
Police-initiated traffic and street stops sometimes result in arrest, and the survey data show that Black women were at least as likely as white men to be arrested during a stop. White women, meanwhile, were about half as likely as white men to be arrested during a stop. Black women were arrested in 4.4 percent of police-initiated stops, which was roughly three times as often as white women (1.5 percent), and twice as often as Latinas (2.2 percent). 🔗 Source
On July 15, a Chicago police officer punched 18-year-old Miracle Boyd in the face, knocking out her teeth while she tried to document police brutalizing other protesters. / it took a concerted effort to get people talking about Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old EMT in Louisville shot to death by police in her own home while they served a questionable no-knock warrant. / during the George Floyd protests in Indianapolis, when a white officer blatantly groped the breasts of a young Black woman. When she shook him off, other officers fired projectiles at her from close range and viciously beat her. 🔗 Source See also this article.
When abuse occurs, they are less likely to be believed and supported. A report published by Georgetown Law Center found that “adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers.” Black girls are perceived to be more independent, more knowledgeable about sex, and in less need of protection. 🔗 Source
For women of color coming into the workforce after graduation, only 17% are getting hired for entry-level positions, compared to 31% of white women. 🔗 Source
80 percent of the WNBA postseason awards won that season were won by Black players. Yet they only received half the media coverage of white athletes // Research has found that Black women in politics are given significantly less media attention compared to white women. 🔗 Source