The patron saint of blogging

I started writing this blog in late 2007—for all practical purposes, in 2008. And early on I had an idea that I thought immensely cool. Like many of my cool ideas I never got around to writing or posting it. (I have notes to myself, on little scraps of paper, for dozens of posts that I have yet to write—some for here and some for the Patio.) Then a few years later (I think it was late 2011 or so) D made me a present of a book which captured the very same idea and explained it a lot more lucidly than I ever did. So with your indulgence. I will start with a quote.

The twenty-first century is full of people who are full of themselves. A half-hour's trawl through the online ocean of blogs, tweets, tubes, spaces, faces, pages, and pods brings up thousands of individuals fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention. They go on about themselves; they diarize, and chat, and upload photographs of everything they do. Uninhibitedly extrovert, they also look inward as never before. Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self. …

… The historian Theodore Zeldin has founded a site called "The Oxford Muse," which encourages people to put together brief self-portraits in words, describing their everyday lives and the things they have learned. They upload these for other people to read and respond to. For Zeldin, shared self-revelation is the best way to develop trust and cooperation around the planet, replacing national stereotypes with real people. … By describing what makes them different from anyone else, the contributors reveal what they share with everyone else: the experience of being human.

This idea—writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity—has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Périgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592.*

Hair, part 5

I've written about body hair here, here, here, and here, arguing in favor of leaving it where it is rather than shaving it off. No, I'm not a Sikh; but on this one point I sure agree with them.

Anyway, I just read a social media post (from LinkedIn) that picks a whole different kind of fight about hair, and good for them. This time it's about black women's hair, arguing that it shouldn't have to be straightened in order to present a "professional look" in the workplace. For the most part that's not a fight I have a direct personal stake in. But at a conceptual level, it is all about presenting the body as it really is, and not trying to force it to be something it ain't. So I'm all in favor of that. Three cheers!

           

Fun with health insurance, part 2

I don't quite know how to categorize this post. Is it a "diary entry"? Kind of. Is it about politics? No, not really. Do I think you want to hear it? Maybe—it's certainly crazy enough to be funny, if you have the right sense of humor.

Is there any kind of important moral in it? I keep thinking there must be, but I haven't found it yet. So let's go with "crazy" for now.

Part 1 is way back here.

Political unreliability

Marie was here visiting for a few days, and we started talking about politics. In one sense this is not surprising: Marie has strong political convictions, and considers herself active in their defense.

But in another sense it was unusual, because normally I try to avoid discussing politics with her at all. The subject usually makes her angry, and she already spends too much time angry. When I introduced her to meditation in a simple way, the point was to cool the fires of her anger. So in general I don't think there's a lot to gain from re-stoking those fires.

The consequence, in turn, is that there are a lot of topics we can't discuss. I tend to think about politics intellectually (shocker, that), which means I am open to rethinking my positions and changing my mind when appropriate. And as it stands I can't really discuss those things with Marie, much as I would like to.

So as an experiment, I tried to ask her what she thinks about the Ukraine War, because I thought that would be the simplest and least problematic topic we could find in contemporary politics. I didn't necessarily think she would agree with my thoughts on it. But I did want to hear what picture she used to frame her thoughts, and I figured that we could discuss the war pretty dispassionately because it's not related to any domestic or intramural political dispute (such as abortion rights or Black Lives Matter).

A webcomic agrees with me about the future of marriage

Years ago I wrote a post on "The future of marriage" where I argued (among other things) that marriage does not have to be restricted to dyadic pairs—and, indeed, that "raising children is so much work that there is a good argument for spreading the burden among more than two people."

Well, I just saw the same suggestion in a recent webcomic, which makes me wonder if the idea is seeping out into the larger culture? Am I going to become—ever so improbably—a cultural prophet in my own time? Wow, who knew?

Punishment for my sins?

Several times in the last year, most recently in my post last night, I have described my marriage as a "punishment for my sins." (See also here and here. I use the phrase in another context here.)

But there is another possible explanation for my marriage besides this one. I'm reluctant to explain what I mean, because I find it embarrassing. But surely the time is long past when I should worry about anything like that, right? We're all friends here. Besides, none of you knows who I am in real life.

Ways to evaluate character

This afternoon I ran across an article someone posted on Substack, … umm … two days ago, called, "My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character." You can find it here.

Of course, articles like this do come out from time to time. I remember writing a post here a while ago (nearly 12 years, now that I check) where I used one of these articles to itemize the things I should have been able to see about Wife before marrying her. I'm not going to do that now. You've all heard me complain plenty about Wife over the years, and where's the payoff? We met 40 years ago; we married 39 years ago. Hell, I moved out of the house nearly a decade ago. All of that is water so far under the bridge as to be completely irrelevant, except possibly as a source of self-understanding.

Self-understanding. Well, there is that.

And that's what I want to use this article for: to see how I answer its questions when I'm talking about myself. To see what the article says about me.

In what follows, I'll quote from the article, and then intersperse my own comments (indented). (In many cases the author introduces paragraph breaks that I ignore for simplicity.)