Lydia Schoch

Locked up from Gabriel Grapperon on Vimeo.

Is the moral of this short film something like “don’t try too hard”?

I don’t think it is, but the thought did cross my mind while watching it. Ha!

Photo by Srinath66.

This summer is flying by so fast! I can’t believe it’s almost August already.

I haven’t sent out any more snail mail packages since my last update in this series, but I have been messaging and emailing other people more often than I did before beginning this experiment. Store-bought cards feel less personal to me than sending a tailored message to just one or two people. There are many other people who will be receiving that card, but no one else will ever get that specific note again.

Last month I said I was going to start trying to respond to every email within a week of receiving it. I’ll be honest – I completely failed to meet this goal at first. It’s so easy to let an email sit in your inbox for just one more day. Before you know it, it’s been several weeks…or longer.

I am slowly reducing my response time, though, which is good.

Along with writing back to people more quickly, my August goal is to assemble another care package. I sent a small one to my grandparents back in June. The package was filled with various types of candy that is sold in Toronto but not in the U.S.  It’s fascinating to see how people’s tastes in candy vary from one region to the next, and some of the stuff I sent was a big hit. This time I’m picking a different family member, but I’ll share the details of that next month.

In the meantime, how have you been keeping in touch this summer? (Also, what on earth is going on with the winged letter above? I’m so perplexed by it!)

See also:

How Do You Keep In Touch?

Keeping In Touch Update #1

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, short stories, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

My Life in Law (a short story). I love this.

Summer Is For Skinny People via mediocreventure. Do you agree? Disagree? I’ve always been skinny to average sized, so this is a new thought to me.

14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time it Takes to Eat Lunch. Would you believe that I’d only read about a third of these before stumbling across this list? It sure surprised me because I read so voraciously!

Staying Present and Grounded in the Age of Information Overload. Originally I was planning to quote something from this interview to whet my reader’s appetites for more, but the whole thing is incredible.

From I Can’t Even:

The other day, while reading some old horror stories, I realized that we’re sitting on a gold mine of such linguistic gambits. One hundred years ago, an American fiction author embarked on a mission of exploring precisely this aesthetic territory—the collapse of language in the face of an emotionally unhinging reality.

From Papers, Please: Why Human Civilization Makes No Sense via CantrellJason:

Let me see if I’ve got this straight.

If I want to become a part of human society and follow the prescribed path most people follow, first I need to fill out this piece of paper.

My reading list has grown thin this summer. What have you been reading?

Photo by Alex Furmansky.

I’ve known Bruce Gerencser for several years now. As fellow ex-Christians we have a lot in common.

He’s  jumped in and out of blogging over the years. Every time he goes away again I feel sad, but I’m also pretty sure that he’ll be back once he’s gotten a better handle on the things that cause him to step away.

Bruce has always publicly responded to his critics. Recently it happened so much that one of his readers told him to stop giving them so much attention. (No, that reader wasn’t me. I don’t tell other bloggers what to write about unless they specifically ask for ideas. 🙂 )

All of his posts make me think, but that one in particular has been rattling around in my mind this past week. My personality is quite different from Bruce’s. He (usually) enjoys jumping into the fray. I stay the heck away from it.

But even the angriest comments or emails are an invitation, not a summons.

You can respond to them in a public post.

You can write back privately.

You can ignore them entirely. (Well, unless it’s a Howler).

I don’t blame Bruce for responding to his critics. If I received as much hate mail as he does, I’d be really tempted to get sucked into it as well.

There’s real freedom to be found in exploring all of your options, though, and silence is always one of them.

One of my readers emailed me recently to see if I know anything about a film about Fred Sloman. It was made by Kodak and commissioned by the relatives of some of his students.

This is a long shot, but do any of my readers happen to know where to find this film today? If so, leave a comment on this post or use my contact form.  I’ll pass on anything you know to the person who was asking about it. If you both give me permission to do so, I’ll also get you in touch with each other.

I almost stopped watching this quiz in the first minute or so of it. The questions seemed nonsensical, and I was sure that they were only going to get worse. There’s nothing wrong with being silly sometimes. I just wasn’t in the mood for that sort of thing today.

You might feel the same way at first. If so, I encourage you to keep listening. At less than five minutes it’s an unusually short TED talk.  I actually listened to part of it while surfing the web and don’t think I missed anything at all by not seeing all of Ze Frank’s facial expressions.

What I loved about his talk, though, was how it used humour to make its point. (Almost?) Everyone has experienced the same worries and odd feelings at some point.

The part where he talks about making very small changes to a text message in order to convey complex emotions was especially funny to me because I’ve been quite guilty of it in the past. (I’m trying to get better at saying what I’m actually thinking in those situations…)

What about you? Which section of this talk made you laugh the most?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

10 Deserted Places and Why They Were Abandoned. I spent most of my childhood living in northwest Ohio. My grandparents also live there, and one of the things I liked most about the drive to their farm involved all of the abandoned farmhouses we’d see along the way. There was a two-story brick house that was particularly pretty. It was half-slumped over in the corner of a field. I always fantasized about parking on the side of the road, climbing over the fence, and hoping the cows wouldn’t mind if I went exploring. The last time I drove by the house had finally collapsed, so this fantasy will never come true. Nothing can stop me from daydreaming about the secrets it might have held, though!

You Are Going to be Perfect via LissyWrites. I like this.

Alien Contact. Try to guess what this comic is about (other than aliens) before clicking on the link.

Managing My Weiner via StephNeighbour. The funniest thing I’ve read all week. It makes me wish I wasn’t allergic to dogs so I could adopt a few of them.

From 50 Ways to be a Person via virtusetveritas:

3. There’s no such thing as “timeless fashion staples.” Buy the clothes you like, and if they’re not “in style,” well, “fashion” is nothing more than a cultural construct, and you can change that.

From To Hug or Not to Hug?:

It’s an unwanted sympathetic hug from a stranger that particularly creeps me out.  That intimacy, that “Let me share your pain,” that stretch of foreign arms and intent into my personal space and my most raw and fragile emotional territory: it all makes me feel like something icky is crawling on me.  And when it comes out of nowhere like that, it’s even worse; it’s like finding something icky that has crawled onto me without me knowing.

Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil is the most surprising book I’ve read so far in 2014.

What interests me the most about babies is how they figure out all of the unwritten rules of society. When my nephew, Aiden, was a toddler he tried very hard to understand his grownups. One time someone said something funny and we all threw our heads back and laughed. He didn’t get the joke (I don’t think…), but he threw his head back and laughed alongside us. It was adorable.

Imagine exploring the moral systems that develop long before an infant can walk or talk! The experiments themselves are every bit as fascinating as the results, and I heartily recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in how the youngest members of our species decide what is right and wrong.

What have you been reading?

Photo by Eddy Van 3000 from in Flanders fields – B – United Tribes ov Europe.

They say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but I’m not so sure about that.

I have an account on a site that allows users to send each other anonymous questions. For the past few days someone has been sending many of us some odd messages. I’d call them questions, but I don’t always know for sure what is being asked.

For example:

what even is sanity or post depression? Just words cos thers no singular way of feeling and ppl react to everything diffrently! So I’m not like mad or anything i dont think so

And:

Did you know men can have babies? Theres a womb in there knees so they can carry a baby like a woman ecept it’s in there knees not there stomoach.

The grammar, spelling, and punctuation is uncorrected and original. I know I make occasional errors on this blog, but as far as I know my readers can usually figure out what I intended to say without an issue. 😉

This isn’t something I’m sharing to make fun of the person or people who wrote them. There’s no way to for me to know their identity or what they’re really trying to say. I simply find it interesting to see how people react to questions that annoy them or don’t make much sense.

It’s not that they’re silly. I’ve asked plenty of silly questions there in the past, and they’re almost always well-received.

It’s not that they’re speculative. A lot of people ask and answer those.

Is it that they’re anonymous? Or that there’s so many of them? Or maybe that they’re often incomprehensible?

In some ways it’s nice to have this distraction. I’m finally getting over a cold that started over a week ago, and the Internet has definitely lost some of its appeal to me after not having the energy to do much of anything else for so many days in a row.

What do you think?

Photo by Infrogmation

A few days ago someone I know asked how we can know if someone is a moral person. Conversations like this are fascinating to me due to how much they reveal about the world views of everyone who throws in their two cents.

My theory is that moral people don’t brag about it.

Ever.

In fact, they don’t talk about it much at all. The more someone talks about having great morals they are, the less I’m inclined to believe them. Bringing it up over and over again makes me wonder why they’re so interested in making sure other people see them as a upstanding citizen.

Do they like the attention? Are they trying to subtly manipulate everyone into thinking of them as an authority figure? Is this an attempt to misdirect our attention from what’s going on behind the mask?

I completely understand the urge for recognition, but there won’t always be other people around when you’re debating what to do. Doing the right thing is its own reward. Maybe someone will notice your work. Maybe they won’t. Your words and actions are just as meaningful either way though.

One of the things I appreciate the most from my Mennonite grandparents is their overpowering reluctance to be the centre of attention. Any attempt to toot your own horn is considered prideful and rude. I may be a non-believer, but I’m still a bit suspicious of anyone who feels the need to point out what a good person they are.

It’s sort of like when recording artists brag about how much money they have or their prowess in the bedroom. Is it possible it’s all true? Sure, but I think it’s far more likely to be a marketing ploy.

And I want to know what they’re selling before I buy into it.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Crazy. This is a fantastic first-person essay about what it’s like to live with a rapid cycling form of bipolar disorder.

Lust via WilSenior. Everything I want to say about this link will give away spoilers. Ack!

How a Box of Knock-off Grape Nuts Taught Me About Relevance (And the Internet!) via 10minutewriter.  I love this.

The Slippery Slope in Business Ethics. I recently discovered this blog and thought this post would be a good place to start for anyone else who is interested in a secular approach to ethics. It’s really interesting stuff.

From Stop Being Strong via ohheynina:

I  typically think someone who is strong doesn’t have emotional baggage. She doesn’t let ANYthing get to her. She doesn’t act out of line. I’ve been wondering where I got this obscure definition of strength from until I read this quote via Twitter and instantly disagreed: “Don’t let your experiences break you.”

From Marcella:

Earth does not need you to reproduce. People are far from an endangered species. Earth needs your love and your talents directed toward getting us to a better and brighter future for all of us.

What have you been reading?