Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 26)

For a long time, I thought I was a decent writer. But I learned more about writing today from Amanda Gorman than I have in 20 years of practice. I’ll find a full transcript at some point, but the San Diego Union Tribune has some of the prose. What a writer.

What a year. Like 1929, 1941, and 2000, this was one that will take up extra space in the history books of the future.

So what did we learn? I polled a few people and here were some responses.

1. I used to proclaim, “If there was just one more hour in every day, I’d finally be able to write a book.” Well, we all cut an hour of commuting out of our lives every day, along with about 3 hours of meetings. And I did not finish that book.
2. There is such a thing as “too much screen time.”
3. Some people we work with have WAY nicer houses than we could have imagined. And some people don’t.
4. There are a lot more incredibly gullible, stupid, and obstinate Americans than I would have thought.
5. The shift schedules for John, Alice, Margarite, Jane, and the other checkout clerks at my neighborhood grocery store.
6. For the last four years, we may not have actually had anyone running the country on a daily basis.
7. Many, many, many jokes and gags from movies made in the 1980’s and 1990’s that seemed hilarious at the time… did not age well into the 2020’s.
8. The single greatest thing you could have done with your stimulus check in March would have been to stick it in the stock market and spend it now.
9. There are still people who believe in the Bill of Rights. As in, my right to not wear a mask is more important than your right to not get sick from me not wearing a mask.
10. Cats religiously follow their own daily schedule in the house, and we were completely unaware of it when we went to the office.
11. The taste of a Starbucks cold brew from the $5 bottle that can be bought at the grocery store and lasts more than a week, is exactly the same as the taste of the cold brew we spent $5 a day on from the store by our office.
12. We own way too many clothes.
13. In retrospect, having to wait an extra 10 minutes to order food at a cool restaurant because the place was too busy and understaffed… really wasn’t that big of a deal.
14. Whether we like our neighbors or not.
15. “Urban hiking” is a real thing.
16. You really can fool some of the people all of the time.

I’m sure there are more lessons that we learned. Add yours below!

I cannot claim to be the world’s most charitable person. But if you are considering spending $133 on a DNA test for your dog while unemployment is still at a near all-time high due to COVID, may I suggest donating that $133 to a food bank instead. Or make a donation to an animal shelter or any organization providing needy pet owners with free pet food. Thank you.

It’s crazy to think how a person you never met could have a huge influence on your life.

It’s spring of 1988 and I’m a high school sophomore. It’s just about that time for me to begin thinking of where I might want to apply to college.

I knew I really didn’t want to go to UW (ironic since I ended up teaching there later), and WSU seemed really really really cold. Since I had grown up in New Orleans, schools in the south seemed like a reasonable option.

Somehow I got tickets to the NCAA Sweet 16 weekend in the Kingdome. My friends and I went to the games, and this school I had never really heard of was clearly the class of the group. Steve Kerr was lighting up threes. Sean Elliott was doing whatever he felt like doing. And leading the whole charge was this older gentleman with white hair named Lute Olson.

I don’t know what it was about that Arizona basketball team that made me look into the school as an option. Why would a New Orleans kid living in the Pacific Northwest want to move to the desert? But something took Arizona from obscurity to a front runner, and it all started with that basketball team. And years and years later, the friends I made there are people I still talk to almost daily.

So RIP Lute Olson. You personally had nothing to do with my life decisions, yet somehow the success of your team got me interested in the school I ended up attending and resulted in me meeting people I ended up having lifelong relationships with. Thank you.

Editor’s Note: I am not a doctor or psychologist. In fact, I’m not even a therapist with a degree from some private organization offering certificates from a mini-mall. So please do not take these recommendations as medical advice.

So…..how’s YOUR spring going?

Or are we in summer now, it’s hard to tell.

Well, we’re a few months into this now. Are you starting to realize that this is a long-term thing? Yeah, me too.

So let’s list the things we may be worrying about: Getting sick, keeping our jobs, managing our kids’ education, ever seeing friends again, ever seeing out-of-state family again, the stock market crashing and eradicating our entire retirement plan, our weight gain (maybe that’s just me), Proud Boys, Antifa, a presidential meltdown, and more. That’s a long list. How does anyone sleep at all?

I certainly am not sleeping through the night, so I’ve had to come up with a few ways to cure my 3:00 am insomnia or deal with it. Here are some of my solutions.

1. Read Marketing Whitepapers: In general, headlines and opening sections are exciting. But move to the body of these works if you need a literary sedative.
2. MasterMind online: I swear this website must have been built in 1996, which actually makes it soothing. But if you played this game as a kid with your family, you’ll like the one-player Atari-like version of this game online.
3. Read a book
4. Write a blog post: I may actually fall asleep while writing this.
5. vcaklvm ,dsca.V ;Q, VQ;L,.V ;L,V FLQV, e.sd
6. Sorry, fell asleep and my cat jumped on the keyboard.
7. Read job descriptions: Even if you aren’t looking for a job, you can learn a lot about companies by reading what they are hiring for. I will not call any companies out here, but some of them have wild wild wild expectations for their new candidates.
8. Watch CNBC: Remember when it’s 3:00 am in Seattle, the entire East Coast is ready to get rolling. The 3-hour CNBC morning show, Squwak Box, ventures between interviews that are mundane to fascinating. You either fall asleep or learn something.

What are your ideas to cure insomnia?