Westley Winks

Weeknotes 2025W08

2025-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

This week, I launched my first client website! This is the first time I got paid for doing development work. It took a few weeks and I learned so much about how to work with others and what my process will look like moving forward. On the technical side, I started from a public domain template built with 11ty and vanilla CSS. From there, I implemented features and elements the clients wanted, went through a few rounds of revisions, and shipped it. They were really happy with it and are excited to get their new business moving with a fresh new home on the internet.

I also started another client website using what I just learned from the last project. This time, I’m using Astro and Tailwind to optimize for speed and quality-of-life improvements for me. Things like optimizing images took a bunch of time in the last project and Astro does a lot of that stuff without me really thinking about it. I used Tailwind a long time ago but opted to really dig into vanilla CSS since then. I like the speed, I do not like how messy it makes the HTML.

I switched from Todoist to Tweek for my task management. I really took advantage of all of Todoist’s features (and their student discount) during college and just got back into it a few months ago. There is a lot going on there that I don’t need. Tweek is ultra-simple and really good-looking. It’s a simple weekly layout with tasks under each day and that’s about it. You can create custom lists (e.g. Someday), use colors to differentiate tasks, and set reminders as well. It has just enough features without bogging me down and it also fits nicely into my weekly review process. Excellent find, thanks to ner3y.

For fun, we celebrated AM’s birthday by going out for cocktails and charcuterie. It was a quirky little venue with great drinks and friends. After that, we went to a dive bar for some cheaper beers and called it a night.

Weeknotes 2025W07

2025-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

More website edits for that client project. It should be ready to launch soon and I’ll be doing a write-up of my process and what I learned later.

I took a shot at drafting a contract to use for client web development work. I went the informal route in this last project because it was a friend-of-a-friend and learned that I wasted quite a lot of time doing revisions and edits. For future projects, I’d like to use a contract less for actually protecting against legal action and more for defining scope and a process to avoid endless revision loops. I think the whole process would be more efficient if we settled on a design before actually building anything.

I helped a friend build some sound panels for a podcast studio. They already did a lot of the work but a bunch of small boards needed to be sanded and prepped for stain. So, we stood in a cold shop with headphones on and went to town with an orbital sander. Haven’t done that in a while. Similarly, I helped AM build something in the shop for her upcoming project. I have mostly forgotten my wood-building knowledge but we pieced something together that is functional but not that pretty.

Links

The Lean Product Canvas by Jeff Gothelf. Similar to the business model canvas that I really like, this one focuses on mapping out products. It lays out what you have now, what you want, how to get there, and how to find out if you were right (testing/experimenting).
Taking RWD To The Extreme by Tomasz Jakut. Responsive web design now focuses on telling the browser what to do instead of how to do it. It “moves the power from the web developer to the browser and, effectively, the user.”
Image manipulation with ImageMagick by Wavebeem. I recently learned about image optimization on the web and ImageMagick is an easy tool for that. For a recent client project, I first used cwebp to convert to a .webp file and resize it to its rendered size in the layout. It wasn’t the nicest setup. magick is a much better tool for me.
Understanding the trade-offs of using Tailwind CSS by Scott Boyle at Measured. I’ve been thinking about doing future web project using Tailwind. Tailwind is great for smaller projects where speed is a priority. Vanilla CSS is good for readability, maintainability, and scalability.
Make life possible by Mandy Brown. Using Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott as a jumping point, Brown adapts four patterns for building more human-centric worlds. Take small steps, be ready to shift direction, anticipate surprise, trust in creativity, and go with friends.

A Wizard of Earthsea

2024-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Favorite quotes
(Minor) spoilers ahead

After reading The Lathe of Heaven, I had to have more from Le Guin. I kind of like fantasy but they are usually too complex or whimsical for me. A Wizard of Earthsea was neither—I really enjoyed this one. The plot was simple enough that it was engaging and the world-building was really great. If you’re into easy fantasy with beautiful prose, I highly recommend it.

Favorite quotes

He looked down at the pebble again. “A rock is a good thing, too, you know,” he said, speaking less gravely. “If the Isles of Earthsea were all made of diamond, we’d lead a hard life here. Enjoy illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks.”

He glanced at Ged and said without welcome, as if Ged had never been away, “Go to bed; tired is stupid.”

And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but…had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

(Minor) spoilers ahead

I appreciated the relatively simple plot in this book. A proud young boy wants to impress others with his power but instead releases an evil shadow onto the world that follows him. Ged follows his quest to rid himself of the shadow, learning and discovering who he really is along the way. While simple, it was incredibly engaging to watch Ged become this powerful wizard that is smart with how he uses his talents and begins to understand the consequences of using his power.

The tone for the majority of the book was pensive, almost like there was a puzzle that I (who is, sadly, not a wizard) could figure out. The Master wizards said wise, wizardly things that had some deeper meaning that added to the effect. As the book progressed, Ged, on the advice of his first master, listened and thought more as he tried to puzzle out a smart way to end the thing he started. It made me want to keep reading and I blew through the whole thing in just a few days. That doesn’t mean there weren’t gripping scenes, though, and they didn’t all involve magic. But when Ged or anyone else did pull out their staff or use a rune, it was enchanting.

Earthsea as a setting was fun to discover. There were different islands, languages, and cultures that each influenced how Ged interacted with people there. I could feel how cold it was in the sea and the snow in the colder regions. Language is a major theme in this book and even Ged experienced language barriers whenever he strayed from home.

Ged’s arc from proud, careless boy to wise, traveled wizard was good. He is an authentic, flawed character even though he was incredibly powerful. As a boy, he didn’t understand that every action has a reaction, that “to light a candle is to cast a shadow.” I was rooting for him the whole journey.

I love Le Guin’s prose—it’s mostly why I wanted to read another one of her books after reading The Lathe of Heaven. It really helps the characters and the settings feel real and like I was sitting right alongside Ged.

One thing that Le Guin did that I liked were the flash-forwards. Ged would have some side quest or down-time and after he was gone, Le Guin described what happened to that area or person as a result. One specific example is when he got some help from an outcast couple on an uncharted island. To say thanks, he made their brackish well fill with plentiful clear water that stayed long after the couple was gone:

The water rose up through the sand as sweet and clear as any mountain spring in the heights of Gont, nor did it ever fail. Because of it, that place of dunes and rocks is charted now and bears a name; sailors call it Springwater Isle. But the hut is gone, and the storms of many winters have left no sign of the two who lived out their lives there and died alone.

Overall, I highly recommend anyone to read A Wizard of Earthsea. I’m looking forward to continuing with the rest of the series.

How I journal

2024-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Five points—Location, win, tension, gratitude, and values
Why this system works for me
What it looks like in practice

I’ve had a seemingly typical journaling experience over the years: try journaling because someone smart told me it’s good for me, white-knuckle my way through how I should be doing it, it doesn’t stick, I don’t journal for a while, and repeat that endlessly. Last year, I finally landed on a journaling system that works for me.

I’ve been out of the habit for over a month now¹ so I wanted to write about my system to get me excited about it again and restart the habit. Here we go.

Five points—Location, win, tension, gratitude, and values

I’ve tried physical notebooks, morning pages, stream-of-thought writing, bullet points, and basically everything else recommended by the journaling gurus. What finally stuck was a framework I learned from Sahil Bloom—the 1-1-1 method. I’ve adapted it for myself such that I write down five points each night (in a perfect world).

Location. The more specific the better. It’s fun to read old entries and remember exactly what hotel room I was in or whose house I was staying at.
One win. The highlight of the day. Something that made me smile or feel proud.
One point of tension. Something that caused anxiety, stress, or anything else I struggled with or am dreading.
One piece of gratitude. We all know by now that writing down things you’re grateful for is good for the soul.
One behavior that connects to my values. This is an addition that I made to ensure that my values and behaviors are aligned. Did I do something today that I say is important to me?

Each of these is usually just a sentence but the door is open to expand where I want. If something really great happened that day, I’ll savor it by writing a paragraph or more. If I was feeling particularly anxious, I’ll explore that further.

Why this system works for me

The thing that made journaling hard to do consistently—like any habit—was that there was too much friction. I never really knew what was worth writing and what wasn’t, what future me was interested in remembering and what he didn’t care about. Journaling always became more of a chore than anything else, something I felt like I should be doing but didn’t want to. Like eating vegetables or going to the gym.

On the days when I can’t be bothered to do anything, I only need to write five things. Sometimes they aren’t even full sentences—it takes me about 30 seconds minimum. But this system is also flexible enough to give me space to dig down when I want to.

Besides being easier to write, it’s also more interesting to read back entries later on. When I was semi-consistent with just writing down what I did for the day, reading them back the next month was so dull. I journal partly to document my life and I don’t really care that I bought bread on May 8th, 2023. This system does a fantastic job of capturing the meaningful highs and lows of my life without cluttering my journal with the boring stuff.

What it looks like in practice

I’m on my computer quite a lot and typing has always been easier than handwriting for me. Not to mention my abysmal handwriting that can be hard to read sometimes. So, I do all of this in a digital journal.

Herman Martinus wrote about the many benefits that come from plain text journaling. When my journal is One Big Text File, it is easy to back up, move around, search, edit, and store. I use jrnl to add some “sugar” on top of it, though.

jrnl works through the command line and I can just type jrnl to create a new timestamped entry in my text editor of choice. Again, I really try to reduce friction when it comes to journaling and this is about as frictionless as it gets. It also allows templating, searching, tagging, and tools to view specific entries. My favorite feature is jrnl -today-in-history that returns all of my previous entries for the given day.

When I’m not at my computer, I usually handwrite my five points in my Moleskine notebook that I use for tasks and notes. When I’m back to my computer, I transcribe it into jrnl. In a pinch, I can also write myself a Signal message to copy and paste later.

With this journaling system, I am recording, analyzing, and remembering the important bits of my life in a way that is easy and sustainable for me. Now I just need to go out and get started—yet again.

Due to a major life transition. I probably should have been journaling more but it ended up on the back burner for one reason or another. ↩

Childhood's End

2024-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Favorite quotes
My (spoiler-free) review

I heard about this book from Joel Chrono and his leading question immediately drew me in: “What if aliens invaded the planet, but they actually helped us build a utopia? Why?”

Childhood’s End was a mysterious and reflective read that I enjoyed. The (seemingly) benevolent Overlords kept their motives a secret from humans and I kept turning the page to try and get a glimpse into what they really wanted. I was engaged the whole time and was thinking about some of its concepts when I wasn’t reading. I’d recommend this book to anyone. It doesn’t go very deep into the science, opting instead to lean into the philosophy. What’s the point of life? What do we do when we have abundance? What’s larger than ourselves and is there something even bigger than that?

Favorite quotes

The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

“Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges-absorbing but never creating.”

It was slightly disturbing, however, to discover that there was a kitchen. In a community of this size, one would normally expect to dial Food Central, wait five minutes, and then get whatever meal they had selected. Individuality was all very well, but this, Jean feared, might be taking things a little too far.

Life was more leisurely than it had been for generations. It therefore had less zest for the few, but more tranquility for the many. Western man had relearned—what the rest of the world had never forgotten—that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.

…George began to wonder, in capital letters, just What Was Going On.

He had been deposited, not very gently, on the lawn, where it was hoped that a hyena would give him a rude awakening. For all practical purposes he could, therefore, be regarded as absent.

“However, I’d like to carry out the experiment in these rather—ah—peculiar circumstances.”
The Peculiar Circumstance sat watching them silently, but doubtless not with indifference. George wondered just what Rashaverak thought of these antics.

My (spoiler-free) review

The human race is frightened and in awe when they realize their childish Space Race is lost and spaceships descend on Earth, waiting in silence. The so-called Overlords usher in a new era of prosperity by ending war, animal cruelty, and poverty. In doing so, they also stifle true progress and innovation.

This was a thoughtful, pensive book. I was constantly thinking about what I would do if I lived in a utopia where my every need was taken care of. Would I do the same things I’m doing now? Would I be writing this very post? Or would be all just be so bored that life isn’t worth living?

It also had an ominous feel to it. All I wanted to know was why the Overlords came and helped humanity prosper. It seemed like there was nothing in it for them and they were there out of the kindness of their hearts (if they have them). There was definitely some foreboding joy there that wouldn’t let me just enjoy all the good that was being created in the world.

Childhood’s End was written in 1953 and at that time, it had futuristic themes—flying cars, interstellar travel, machines doing things for us. What’s interesting is that reading it now, I’d put it in the retrofuturism genre of science fiction. There is the retro appeal of technology from the 50s combined with ideas of a once imagined future. We’re seeing a vision of the past future from our present future.

For example, the world becomes a utopia where travelling to any part of the world takes mere hours and there is world peace yet information still comes from radio broadcasts and printed papers:

“My work here is nearly ended,” said Karellen’s voice from a million radios. “At last, after a hundred years, I can tell you what it was.”

One had to be very old indeed to realize that the papers which the telecaster printed in every home were really rather dull.

“Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels?”

That is what Clarke thought the future could look like and now we’re looking at that prediction from a future that is obviously not that. If this same book were written today with the same concepts, the technology would obviously look different. It reminded me of The Matrix. They can download knowledge but that knowledge is stored on floppy discs and they’re using flip phones. It’s a really fun juxtaposition that I love.

I was hoping for better physical descriptions though. I still don’t really know what the Overlords, buildings, or cars look like. While Clarke was explaining these cool concepts, I kept wishing for better physical descriptions so that I could become more immersed but it never came.

I’m happy with how the book ended. Everything got tied up nicely and—finally—the Overlords motive was revealed. Everyone’s got a boss.

How I solved an online treasure hunt

2024-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Sitemaps helped me find all the letters
Searching for Latin phrases was much harder
Random old website to the rescue

My friend foreverliketh.is shared a link to a treasure hunt hosted by Suntup Editions, a book publishing company. The challenge was to find 16 colored letters scattered across their website. Once you find all the letters, you unscramble them into a three-word Latin phrase. The potential prizes were awesome. The grand prize was a custom-bound edition of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, a piece of art in and of itself.¹ Even if I didn’t win anything, I can’t say no to a puzzle. Here’s how I solved it.

Sitemaps helped me find all the letters

I love a good puzzle. I do not love doing busy work. The first thing I needed to do was figure out how to find all the letters without manually clicking through every single possible page.

So, I went to the sitemaps. Sitemaps are very common pages that list every page and its location on a given website. They’re made for bots to look at so Google can properly index websites and make all its pages searchable. Suntup’s sitemap was conveniently sorted by last modification date. It told me the exact pages that were recently changed. I manually clicked through each of these and, sure enough, there were 16 pages and they each had a blue letter. In maybe 10 minutes of work, I found the following, sorted by letter frequency: R (4), A (3), E (3), O (2), B (1), L (1), S (1), T (1).

Searching for Latin phrases was much harder

I don’t know any Latin so I couldn’t even make a guess at this point. A Google search quickly got me a list of Latin phrases sorted by letter on Wikipedia. I had no idea there were that many common Latin phrases. Again, I don’t like busy work so I tried to come up with a smarter way to comb through these lists.

First, I noticed that there weren’t actually that many letters available to me: RAEOBLST. That meant I only needed to look at the tables for those eight letters, removing more than half of the possibilities. Then, I manually went through each phrase in each table and looked for these requirements in order:

Is it exactly three words?
Does it only have the letters in RAEOBLST?
Does it have one and only one B? L? S? T?

I went through the relevant lists with this method a couple of times. I didn’t find anything. As I was sifting through, I began noting down full words that fit the bill: ARTE, TERRA, LABORE, ASTRA, RES. This turned out to come in handy later.

My next algorithm was technology-assisted. I downloaded each table from Wikipedia and opened them up in Excel. I created a new column that calculated the length of each phrase. The one I was looking for was 18 characters long—16 letters plus two spaces. From those 18-character phrases, I asked my questions from before. Still no luck. The phrase I needed definitely wasn’t in these Wikipedia tables.

Random old website to the rescue

In the “External links” section of the Wikipedia page, I found a list of notable idioms on an un-notable website. This list was comparatively short so I scanned the whole thing using my questions from above—nothing here either.

I did find more links though. One of them was Simply Latin, another boring website. It was much more comprehensive and I knew there had to be a smarter way to look through these lists. I started looking for whole words—the same ones that I jotted down while going through the Wikipedia tables earlier. LABORE was calling to me² so I went to the L table. Four entries down, there it was: LABORARE EST ORARE.

Work is prayer. What a rush. I checked to make sure it wasn’t a mirage: R (4), A (3), E (3), O (2), B (1), L (1), S (1), T (1). A perfect match!

I submitted my answer and the drawing took place a few days later. I had the right phrase but it was a random draw and my name didn’t get pulled. Even so, this was a fun little challenge that I enjoyed solving. Congratulations to the winners!

Or a paid trip to tour their headquarters and go to Disneyland. I probably would have (controversially) taken the book. ↩
My thinking here was that the company puts lots of work into their products and value high quality work. Maybe they’d choose a phrase that had something to do with labor. ↩

If You Can Read This, You Can Learn Anything

2024-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

لغة البرمجة بايثون
مهارات الحياة
تقوية المرأة اقتصاديا
Bridging information-language gaps makes knowledge more accessible

Note: this is my submission for the IndieWeb Carnival October 2024 blogging challenge Multilingualism in a global Web by Richard Zin.

It was One World. The old names of the old countries were still used , but they were no more than convenient postal divisions. There was no one on earth who could not speak English, who could not read, who was not within range of a television set, who could not visit the other side of the planet within twenty-four hours.
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

لغة البرمجة بايثون

It’s hard to take a grown adult seriously when they have the vocabulary and grammar structure of a 4-year old—especially when they are your teacher.

That basically summarizes my professional life for the last two years. My first taste of teaching (almost) entirely in Arabic was during my first Ramadan when I held computer coding classes for youth. This is already a difficult topic for complete beginners and it requires nuance to explain. I took the “draw pictures and make it interactive” approach instead.

There are fantastic resources for teaching any programming language in English, especially the one I was using, Python. There’s comparatively next to nothing in Arabic. I had to make all the resources and activities myself, typing in Arabic in my phone and copy-pasting it on my computer. You can’t even type and run Arabic letters in Python so my examples used Arabic words written with English letters. I would bounce back and forth between the two when necessary, rolling my Rs in one sentence and abruptly hitting students with my Pacific Northwest accent the next.

The students did end up learning something and, to my surprise, actually came back each session for the whole month! But I can’t help but imagine how much deeper their understanding and interest in coding would be if they could work fluently in their native language.

مهارات الحياة

My next bout with trying to teach something in Arabic was with a comprehensive life skills curriculum called Passport to Success. It’s a thick manual full of lesson outlines for skills like leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, and how to study. I thought teaching coding concepts was hard. Try talking about “what would you feel if…” and “how might you…” alongside abstract concepts like emotions, values, and workplace dynamics.

This time around, I had my host sister Hajar to co-facilitate sessions with. All of the resources and activities were outlined for us in my English manual and her Arabic one. We would meet a day or two before each session to plan activities, practice role-playing scenarios, and, mostly, teach me the language that I needed. I was in charge of making slideshows, “chicken pecking” my Arabic keyboard stickers one-by-one.

I’ve been using “Arabic” loosely here. For most Arabic-speaking countries, there are two different versions—the Arabic taught in schools and the Arabic that people actually speak at home. In Morocco, these two are wildly different. The colloquial version that is spoken in daily life (called Darija) is a mix of Arabic, French, Tamazight (indigenous language), and a little bit of Spanish. All of our slides, resources, and scenarios were in Arabic instead of the participants’ first language, Darija. I imagine it would be similar to a rural New Zealander teaching an American. Recognizable, coherent even, but not perfectly understandable.

It was difficult even for Hajar to understand the Arabic version, usually opting to read from my English manual instead. During the sessions, we’d usually have to translate the Arabic into Darija for the point to really get across.

تقوية المرأة اقتصاديا

The project I’m most proud of was a two-day workshop that two other volunteers and I spent months putting together. We brought ten volunteers and ten Moroccans from their communities to the capital to talk about digital literacy and women’s economic empowerment. We did have Peace Corps staff support and we had a volunteer do the English version and staff do the Arabic version right alongside each other.

Nobody had really done a project like this before so we were on our own with creating an outline, coming up with activities, and finding appropriate resources. I’m sure you can guess what happens next—there were plenty of resources in English, very few in Arabic.

One session was about misinformation. We gave the participants tips on how to identify it then provided them with an article to use what they learned to decide if it was real or fake. There were lots of such articles to choose from in English but comparatively little in Arabic. And that was just the start:

The ratio of Arabic to English Google search results is incredibly low for the same search terms.
There are thousands of examples of well-formatted CVs and résumés in English—not so much in Arabic.
Templates and guides for applications like Canva or MS Office are in English.

It’s near impossible to learn something when you can’t even see an example or try to do it on your own.

Bridging information-language gaps makes knowledge more accessible

In all of these cases, there is a gap between available information and the linguistic ability to understand that information. Take the subheadings in this article for example—they provide information for what each section is about but you probably don’t understand it. You can bridge that gap by either: 1) understanding the language the information is in or 2) finding the same information in a language you do understand. So, there are two ways to make the world’s knowledge more accessible:

One-to-one. Each one resource (video, document, podcast, etc.) is in one language. Everyone agrees on the digital lingua franca and everyone has equal opportunity to learn it. This creates bridges because people will be more likely to understand the language a given information is in (1).
One-to-many. Each one resource is translated or interpreted into many different languages. All people have equitable access to the same information in their native language that they understand deeply. This creates bridges by making it easier to find any given information in a language people understand (2).

The current digital landscape has some features of the one-to-one scenario. An estimated 50% of websites on the internet are in English. Spanish is the second most popular, taking a mere 6% of websites on the internet. Internet culture has collectively accepted that English is the lingua franca. And that makes sense. English has the most speakers in the world of any language, if you include non-natives.

There are benefits that come with standardizing to one language. It creates a positive feedback loop caused by the network effect—the more people using English, the more value comes from you also using English. If this essay were written in Japanese, 121 million people would understand me compared to the 1.5 billion that understand what you’re reading now. It’s also amazing that I can talk to strangers on the internet from all across the world and we automatically understand each other by speaking a common language.

I don’t think everyone has the same opportunities to learn English, though. When we all use English to create content on the internet, we put the billions of non-English speaking people at a major disadvantage. They have notably less access to coding classes, life skills resources, and economic opportunities. Those of us in the English-speaking “in-group” have wildly disproportionate access to information that gives and empowers. Defaulting to English also removes important cultural context—cantinfleada in Spanish means something culturally different than “babbling on without a point.” ان شاء الله means something culturally different than “hopefully” or “God willing.” Some things don’t have direct English translations.

The hard part, of course, is actually converting all of our collective information into many languages. How would a native Thai speaker read exactly what I’ve written here? In an ideal future, there would be an internet where every resource has many interpretations and languages attached to it. Like how software projects crowd source their translation work, it would be for the entire internet. Maybe there’s a button that says “Want to translate this page? Click here!” Online spaces would no longer need to be “English only.” But that’s a monumental endeavor that doesn’t scale and would have its own set of problems.

Equitable access to information is the ideal case. Maybe we can have it in a few decades when computer translation can better convey meaning for a variety of media. Or maybe we can get closer when there is equitable, free access to English learning. For now, I think it’s worthwhile for people to create content in their native language.¹ It will take time and less people will understand what you put out. But those that do understand have likely been unrepresented in the digital world since its inception. It’ll be one of a few pieces of information available with no language gap for a handful of people. It might just help those مساكن Moroccan youth and their linguistically 4-year old teacher.

Yes, I understand the hypocrisy here. It’s easy for me to say that when my native language is already the dominant internet language. ↩

Introducing the heyjohn Forum

2024-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

heyjohn is now mainly a forum
um.heyjohn.social logistics
Conclusion

A few months ago, I started an experiment to run a private community platform for my friends called heyjohn. I laid out my vision for what I wanted it to look like and how I was going to do it. In short, I envisioned a small, private, and highly interconnected community free of ads, algorithms, and performativity. An online space where people can be themselves and use that as a tool for connection and belonging. A place built on core values of authenticity, empathy, and trust.

Recently, I’ve been hanging out on a forum called the 32-Bit Cafe after being invited a few weeks ago. My time there has been incredible. I’ve never really felt belonging in an online community before but I fit right in on this one and have been warmly welcomed. That’s exactly what I want heyjohn to be for people. It made me realize that I chose the wrong platform for my community.

heyjohn is now mainly a forum

While the motivation and values that were the foundation for that original vision haven’t changed, the tool has. For the last several months, I have been running a private Mastodon instance that was closed off from the wider internet. I chose micro-blogging because I felt it had a good “pace” to it. It’s slower than instant messaging and faster than a forum. I specifically didn’t choose a forum because I thought it would be too much of a burden for people to actually use compared to quickly checking their Mastodon app.

I was wrong about that. I only had a few friends on heyjohn but they were only checking and maybe posting every few days anyway, about the same pace I’ve seen on 32-Bit. I think that because it is such a small group, the pace is going to be the same whether it is micro-blogging or posting on a forum. The only difference is a forum provides more space to breathe and explore.

Some forums (like the one powering heyjohn) even provide instant chat that sits right alongside the forum. That further bridges the gap between fast and slow by providing both in the same place. I can write a 1,200 word essay and also have someone ping me a quick thought about it all in the same interface.

Forums are much more advanced these days than what I expected. I’ve only ever seen those old forums that have some niche car knowledge that somehow perfectly answers my question. The forums with the weird animated smiley emoticons. Forums today are much more modern and polished. You can customize the colors and code as much as you want too.

Another feature I’m excited about is groups. In the original vision, I couldn’t (still can’t) give a good answer to who is in and who is out. It’s a private community after all but how private? Who decides who is invited to heyjohn? Groups solve that. It can be pretty inclusive because members can create a private space if they want. Rather than the party being in one big room, it’s now in a big house with rooms available for separating from the big group every now and then.

I think a word-of-mouth model is best here. To keep the community highly interconnected, heyjohn won’t be open registration. Instead, I’ll invite my friends who will invite their friends who might be a good fit.¹ This, I hope, will keep it small and exclusive while still being engaging.

The other reason I’m excited about groups is that it will reduce friction for me to invite people. I was (still am) nervous when the time came to actually invite my friends for some reason. Yes, I can totally justify and believe in what I’m doing but it feels strange asking people to join my club. I was always scared that people wouldn’t like it or my two wildly different friend groups wouldn’t get along. Again, groups can now have their own places to go if they get tired of the big group.

Overall, a forum feels right and will be a much better tool for creating the kind of community I want. This is still an experiment, however, and it’s bound to change as an actual community forms.

um.heyjohn.social logistics

The forum is operating at um.heyjohn.social which I gave myself a pat on the back for being so clever. “um” is obviously the last two letters of “forum” and as a whole it reads something like “um, hey John?”

In place of the heyjohn.social domain, I spun up a cute landing page. It has the quick version of the vision, a link to the forum, and looks like it was handwritten on a legal pad. Most of my ideas start as an outline on a legal pad and I wanted to convey that heyjohn is still just a scribbling from my brain and we’re figuring it out along the way. It will adapt as the community develops and as I sketch more ideas on my notepad.

For some quick technical details, I chose NodeBB as the software instead of Discourse or Flarum. It runs much lighter than Discourse while feeling snappier. Flarum looked really good but it wasn’t nearly as mature or fully featured as NodeBB. I liked that I was able to get up and running in about 20 minutes and fully understand it along the way. It’ll make maintaining and upgrading much more friendly for me.

Conclusion

I may have chosen the wrong tool to begin with but I learned something and I’m excited to continue learning and serving the people around me. I still hope heyjohn can be a pleasant respite from the performative and predatory online communities and “social” media that dominates the internet today.

If you know me in real life and want to join, shoot me a message! ↩

Lure, Résumé, Detail: The 3-Tier Job Search Cake

2024-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Everyone is already too busy, most of the time.

This is a core idea and frustrating truth in The agile comms handbook by Giles Turnbull. If you want someone to pay attention to you and the information you are sharing, you have to make it frictionless. People don’t have time. To deal with this, Turnbull suggests presenting information in three layers, like a cake. At the top is the lure for attracting attention. The middle layer is the context that gives just enough information for the reader (or viewer or listener) to know if they know enough to stop there. At the bottom is the big detail layer, where all the nitty gritty details of the project live.

But what if I, Westley Winks, am the information that I want to share? What if I want people to know about me? I’m starting the job search soon. I need to bake my own three-tier cake and that’s exactly what I did.

My three-tier job search cake

The detail layer is my entire professional life. It’s the skills, how I treat my co-workers, long-term achievements, and credentials that shape my professional identity. If people really want the details about who I am professionally, they can look at:

GitHub profile with all of my coding projects
The presentation I did for my senior project in college
Stories, projects, or achievements shared in an interview
Website with posts going back years
Other social media like LinkedIn or Mastodon
Transcripts, diploma, language proficiency scores, and the like

This is the default material; it already exists and no extra work needs to be done to “create” this stuff. Of course, not all of it is relevant. I don’t think anyone, me included, is interested in my two and a half days of trying to do a 30-day coding challenge with R in 2021. On the other hand, this is the place to tell some of the important stories that can’t be reduced down to bullet points.¹

But hiring managers don’t want or need all the details right up front to know if they want to hire me or not. They don’t need to hear about that time when I was in Morocco and there was a wedding and I didn’t know what to wear and I showed up at the wrong time so I expertly leveraged my problem-solving skills and resilience to—I don’t even have the right degree that the position requires. Since, most of time, hiring managers are already too busy, they don’t have the time to hear all that when they know they’re going to hire someone else who has what they are looking for. Context layer items shouldn’t be too much of a time burden and should let the reader know if they want to know more.

A résumé is the main item but it could also be a LinkedIn Profile, cover letter, or recommendation letter. Typical items in an application package. My paper résumé is black, white, and boring and it fits onto a singular 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper. Not that it will ever be on a physical sheet of paper. It’s 2024 and résumés get sent as PDFs in an email. If they’re already being looked at on a computer, why not create a digital version that I can link to and, importantly, style how I want? So, I built a page on my website for the digital version. Both give a summary of who I am professionally in a format that people can scan with their eyes if they have ten seconds or fully read if they have a couple of minutes. Again, much of a time burden and by the end they’ll know if they want to know more.

A good functioning context layer should draw people into the detail layer if they want to. Maybe they see “Python” a few times in my résumé and they want to know just how good I am with it by looking at all my projects on GitHub. The beautiful thing about the internet is the ability to link to other things. Add links to your detail material where you can; it should be effortless to dig deeper.

Lastly, how can I capture people’s attention, how do I make going deeper into my professional cake as easy as possible? I think there are lots of opportunities here:

Button on my website that goes to my digital résumé, colored differently and maybe moving a little bit
Elevator pitch already prepared
QR code that links to my digital résumé as my phone wallpaper to quickly show at a networking event
Link in my social media bio or in a short post
“Summary” section at the top of my résumé or LinkedIn profile
Email sent to hiring department

Like the layer below it, a good lure automatically brings people into the context layer. The context layer will tell the reader if they want to know more. After that, hopefully I am called in for an interview where I can plate up my detail layer as much as I want.

In summary, I want to lure hiring managers into looking at my résumé and make it easy for them to go through the detail, if they want. Each layer takes more time than the previous but provides more information in the right doses.

Employers have cakes too

Similarly, I’m also sampling employer’s communication cakes when I’m job searching. I’m too busy trying to get a job to do a deep dive on the vision and culture of every company I come across. Just like how they don’t need all the detail up front, neither do I. In this case, I’m looking for:

Lures. Job titles on job board, word of mouth, social media posts.
Context. Job listing, “about us” page on their website.
Detail. Interview, deep dive online research, informational interviews with employees.

Just like my job search cake, these should be distinct items. I don’t need the nitty gritty details about the entire company in the job listing. I just want to know if I can get behind the mission and if I’m qualified. Later, I will want to know about past projects and company culture but only when I am ready.

Everyone is too busy, most of the time. Most people don’t want their face pushed into a giant detail-cake and this includes both employers and job-seekers. Use items in that detail layer to make your information (i.e. you) more digestible and relevant. Add some tiers to your cake.

That’s a reality I don’t think I’m ready to face quite yet. My last two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer have changed my life and reducing the richness of my experience down into a one minute elevator pitch or a couple of bullet points is frustrating. I do understand, though, that not everyone is going to think it was as important as I do. ↩

How I Rebuilt My Website with Bridgetown

2024-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Applying a face lift
Redesigning the home page
Creating a tag system
Pulling in content automatically
Redesigning the URLs
“Is there some kind of competition or something?”

Just three short months after rebuilding my website with Astro, I rebuilt it again. This time, I am using Bridgetown as a site generator. It’s written in Ruby (which I’ve been looking for an excuse to learn) and strives to optimize for developer happiness and provide everything needed to build a great website. This is how I built my great website and what I learned.

Applying a face lift

The visual design is the biggest, most obvious change that I am most excited about. No more monochrome! I was reminded in the last rebuild that I’m not much of a designer. I’ve always liked and wanted to do a “neobrutalist” site design but quickly got overwhelmed with picking colors, border widths, and box shadow thickness.

To solve this, I used Open Props to load in a bunch of useful and well-thought variables. Instead of creating my own CSS variables and design system, I can just write var(--purple-4) to get the right shade of purple that I want. If I want it lighter, I lower the number and if I want it darker, I increase the number. As frictionless and simple as that. If I wanted to do the same thing by scratch I’d have to go to some color picker website, hope I choose the right shade of purple that will look good, and paste the hex code into the CSS file.

This same principle applies to font sizes, spacing sizes, borders, and more. It really took the overwhelm of choosing the right variable names and colors out of the equation and let me quickly experiment. It’s like Tailwind but you don’t combine your HTML and CSS. Each short keyword maps to a longer CSS variable:

var(--size-px-6) becomes 28px
var(--font-size-4) becomes 1.5rem
var(--cyan-8) becomes #0c8599

I combined Open Props with the power of SCSS to randomly choose some colors. For the landing pages that list content (like posts, weeknotes, or book notes), each item in the list gets a random color. The following SCSS code colors list items randomly while keeping the tag buttons and title that sit on top of it the same color, just two shades lighter.

$colors: red, orange, yellow, cyan, indigo, pink;
$repeat: 20;

@for $i from 1 through $repeat {
  $color: nth($colors, random(length($colors)));

  .list-item:nth-child(#{length($colors)}n+#{$i}) {
	background: var(--#{$color}-4);

	.list-item__title {
      background: var(--#{$color}-2);
	}

    .list-item__tag {
      background: var(--#{$color}-2);
    }
  }
}

For the cherry on top, I made heavy use of :hover() and transform CSS features so that elements pop out a little when you hover over them. Basically every panel, button, and link do this. It makes the website a bit more squishy and fun to use.

A huge thank-you goes to Alessandro Muraro for the design inspiration. Check out their website, it’s a thing of beauty.

Redesigning the home page

I’ve never really known what to put on the front page of my website. Taking inspiration from Alessandro Muraro again, I have the following sections on my home page, arranged using CSS grid which I’ve never used before as a bit of a flexbox fanboy:

Latest posts. The last ten things I posted, automatically generated and listed in a long, skinny column.
Recent links. Manually updated list of links and commentary that I thought were worth sharing. Probably going to be updated weekly along with posting my weeknotes. This section creates the bulk of the front page.
Elsewhere. Links to ways to contact me or otherwise find me on the internet.
Browse tags. Bank of links to all available tags on my site, automatically generated from my content.
Who am I? My version of an “About” page with ideas taken from Simone at Minutes to Midnight. I list my core values and how they show up in my life as I think that is a better representation of me than my job title or other superficial points in a typical bio.
Colophon. Credits and gratitude for the tools and people that helped me make my website.

Combined, these sections do a pretty good job of giving the user a good idea about who I am while also letting them immediately start clicking and exploring.

Creating a tag system

Tags are something I’ve never really taken advantage of. I prefer folders and collections to group my content, using tags for just a few very specific cases. Now, tags are first-class citizens on my website.

Using tags makes jumping around my website easier and more enjoyable while making the whole thing feel like a more cohesive, interconnected entity. This does require thoughtful and consistent use of tags, though, which I’m not quite good at yet. I’ll be thinking about how to do this better in the future.

Each tag has its own page at /t/<tag-name>/ that lists all posts from across my site that have that tag. These pages are generated automatically via a plugin that was surprisingly easy to write. In just a few lines, I had a plugin that pulls all the tags I’ve used and generates a page for each of them:

all_tags = site.tags
all_tags.each do |tag, resources|
  add_resource :pages, "t/#{tag}.md" do
    layout "page"
    title "tag: #{tag}"
    template_engine "erb"
    content "<% resources = site.tags['#{tag}'] %>\n<%= render Shared::List.new(collection: resources) %>"
  end
end

Pulling in content automatically

Bridgetown and Ruby make it really easy to manipulate, gather, add, or convert content. In my past websites, I’ve used a script that pulls in notes from my Obsidian vault and converts all the wikilinks to a format specific to the framework.

This time, thanks to Ruby, Thor, and a simpler algorithm, it was much cleaner. I can definitely see why people who like Ruby really like Ruby. I thoroughly enjoyed learning and writing it. Watch out, Python.

My new script walks my Obsidian vault and looks for notes with a tag in the front matter called copy_path. If that tag exists, it copies the note to the path given. The title of the note and the path that it was copied to are stored for later when converting the links.

After all notes are copied, the script scans each one and finds wikilinks based on a regex and parses them out into the linked note and the text to display. The linked note gets looked up to check if it was copied over according to the information that was stored earlier. If so, it gets converted end plugged into following helper, specific to Bridgetown: <%= link_to "text to display", "linked-note.md" %> Otherwise, just the text to display is written without a link. This lets me link to anything in Obsidian and only what is published gets linked to in Bridgetown.

Images that are linked are not automatically copied over. The script spits out a list of images that were linked to and asks you to manually copy them over to the /src/assets/ folder.

Lastly, my Kindle highlights are stored alongside my book notes under a Highlights header. The last step of the script is to lop these off so my messy highlights don’t get displayed.

Redesigning the URLs

I’ve wanted shorter, cleaner links for a while. They are easier to look at, type, copy, write, and say. They weren’t really long to begin with but compare these:

wwinks.com/writing/wellbeing-tools/ vs. wwinks.com/p/wellbeing-tools/
wwinks.com/writing/weeknotes-2024w36 vs.wwinks.com/w/2024w36

Much cleaner. The /writing/ path is a vestige from the very beginning when I didn’t want to call my blog a blog. Here are all of my current content URLs:

Standard posts: /p/<title>/ (was /writing/<title>/)
Book notes: /b/<title>/ (was /books/<title>/)
Peace Corps posts: /peace-corps/<title> (unchanged)
Tags: /t/<tag>/ (new)
Weeknotes /w/<YYYYwWW>/ (new)

Many blogs include the date or year in the link (e.g. example.com/2024/a-blog-post/) to make the posting date quickly evident or to avoid naming conflicts from two pages being titled the same thing. I chose not to do that because it lengthens the URL without really adding any value. The posting date and last modified date are in the post itself so it doesn’t need to be in the URL too. I’m not worried about naming conflicts; if Derek Sivers who uses just a few characters in his URLs doesn’t have that problem, I certainly won’t.

Yes, I committed a cardinal sin and broke some links. I think it was worth it, though, to get shorter, more intuitive, and more sustainable URLs. To prevent too much link rot, I switched hosting providers from GitHub Pages to Netlify.

With Netlify, you can specify server-side redirects to redirect users from one URL to another. If someone visits an old link that goes to wwinks.com/books/upgrade/, they will now be redirected to wwinks.com/b/upgrade. Same with all of the above changes. I will likely change /peace-corps/ to /pc/ in the future but wanted to test out the redirect functionality first. These posts are very important to me and I want to guarantee that anyone trying to read them will be able to.

“Is there some kind of competition or something?”

What’s the point? Why did I put in all this time and energy and stay up too late some nights just to make my website look cooler?

Besides learning so much, as that is always worth the effort to me, I love my website again.

It makes me smile. I’m proud of my site and I’m excited to show it off. I know exactly what’s on every page, yet I still enjoy looking, browsing, and clicking around. I really like the tooling, much more than my last site, and I’m looking forward to the next time I can hack on the underlying code to implement more features. It’s my site and it represents me well.

Wellbeing Tools or, A Long Overdue Apology

2024-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

DFCR is my first line of defense
Healthy Mind Platter for sustainable wellbeing
VSPIRED for longer-term direction

This is my submission for the IndieWeb Carnival July 2024 - Tools by James. I know what James was looking for in the prompt but I took some creative liberties and talked about some more meta (and more important) tools that I use.

What feels like forever ago, a friend told me about some tool that she learned in her therapy sessions. I don’t remember exactly what she called it but it was something that she was using to improve her mental wellbeing or to regulate an emotion.

I do remember snickering and thinking how ridiculous it was for someone to need to have mental “tools” to live their life. Still in high school, I was light years away from any shred of emotional awareness after shoving any and all issues down and out of view for my entire life. I thought I’d never be so weak as to need tools or therapy for anything in my life.

This sentiment followed me throughout the rest of high school and college. Like everyone else, I had struggles to get through. There were times when I wasn’t happy or thriving, just putting one foot in front of the other, wading my way through life. Whether it was a school holiday, final exams, or a summer job, there was always something in the near future that if I could just get there, I’d be OK. What else could be done besides just grin and bear it?

My perceptions finally started to change when I became a Peace Corps Volunteer. For two weeks, we sat under a scorching hot tent outside and got training on, among lots of other things, resiliency tools. After that, we met every two weeks or so to learn more. Throughout those three months of training, there was still a part of me that thought it was silly that US taxpayer dollars were paying for these tools to be developed and taught across the organization.

Finally, I set out to live in rural Morocco and start the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. That was over a year and a half ago.

I now recognize that I wouldn’t have gotten where I am without a whole rolling chest full of relationship and wellbeing tools, skills, frameworks, and systems. I wouldn’t have the relationships and experiences that I have and I certainly wouldn’t have made it this far living in Morocco. Who knows where I’d be.

I need to use my VSPIRED tool to check-in with my wellbeing each week or else I feel out of touch with myself. When I inevitably find myself in a mental slump, I make sure and do activities from every part of the Healthy Mind Platter, lest I slip deeper into it. I need my Feelings Wheel, Mood Meter, and Atlas of the Heart cheat sheets to identify what exactly it is that I am feeling. My younger self would be in stitches if he heard this.

Using these tools, though, is what allows me to become the person that I want to be. They give me a foundation to create, show up for others, and fully engage with life. Most importantly, they allow me to have the agency to take control of my own wellbeing. You don’t have to wait for things to get better.

This post is part public apology, part gentle nudge for whoever may be reading this to do something to make themselves feel better, and part documenting some of the tools that form the foundation of my wellbeing.

Firstly, to my friend: I’m sorry for making fun of you when all you were doing was trying to live happier and healthier. I’m proud of you for doing what you needed to do and I’m happy that you’re happy now.

DFCR is my first line of defense

I picked this tool up from a Mastodon bot. It aligned so well with my own personal observations that I made it into an initialism.¹ Usually, I can feel myself slipping into what I call a “slump” and the first signs are neglecting to do one or more of these four basic things:

Dressed? Get out of the NASA-themed basketball shorts you’ve been wearing for two (or three, or four…) days and put some jeans on.
Fed? Eat something nourishing. Oatmeal is an easy one.
Clean? As embarrassing as it is, showering is usually the first thing for me that goes when I am in a slump.
Rested? Take a nap if you’re tired. Leave your phone in a different room.

DFCR is where I go first when I’m not feeling good mentally. It sounds simple but I have days where doing even these is difficult. Then, once I finally get the gumption to do them, I’m always surprised how much better I feel when I do these simple things.

Healthy Mind Platter for sustainable wellbeing

The Healthy Mind Platter (HMP) is usually what I go to next when I am trying to get out of a slump or avoid slipping into one. I learned this one from a Peace Corps training.

The HMP is basically the Healthy Eating Plate but for your brain. It has seven daily activities that ensure that you get a healthy and balanced brain “diet.” There’s no specific amount of time that you should spend on each activity each day because circumstances and needs change. The important thing is to note what activities you might not have been getting enough of recently and make an active effort to engage in them, even if for a short amount of time. The seven categories are as follows:

Sleep time. Are you getting enough rest? Have you been sleep procrastinating or doom scrolling too late into the night?
Play time. Have you done anything creative or novel recently?
Down time. Down really means down here. When was the last time you let your brain just wander without needing music or something to focus on to occupy it?
In time. In stands for introspection. Reflect internally by meditating or journaling. What exactly are you feeling or thinking?
Connecting time. Have you actually talked to someone or shaken someone’s hand recently? Sometimes you need just that bare minimum and sometimes you need some proper connection time with people you belong with.
Physical time. How much have you been moving lately? We all know exercise is good for the brain. Take a walk, stretch, or do some housework. Even a little bit is way better than none.
Focus time. Make the effort to focus on and complete a task. Is there something you’ve been wanting to learn or a project you’ve been wanting to make progress on?

Again, there’s no rule here for how much time you spend on each activity. Go through each one and recognize which you are lacking in. What matters is that you are proactively putting in effort to maintain healthy mental balance. Some of these can be harder to do than others. It’s hard to get any tasks done when all I want to do is lay in bed and scroll on my phone. This is where DFCR comes in; it’s a prerequisite to doing anything from the Healthy Mind Platter.

I have a sheet of paper on my wall with these seven categories each in their own box. I stuck a sticky note in each box with some specific activities that I can do for each one. This minimizes the friction between recognizing I need to do something and actually doing it. For example, play time usually gets thrown out pretty quickly when I’m in a slump. The last thing I want to do then is think of something fun to do. Instead, I look at the list of fun activities I already thought about (do a crossword, play Marvel Snap, read a fiction book, etc.) and choose one.

VSPIRED for longer-term direction

Another acronym and another tool that I learned from Peace Corps. This tool is more proactive than the others. I do this journaling activity once a week as part of my weekly review and it helps me see, from a higher level, the bigger trends in my life. Each letter represents an area of wellbeing.

Vocational. Having an occupation that provides a sense of fulfillment and is aligned with your skills and values.
Spiritual. Having a sense of purpose and meaning in the world.
Physical. Exercising regularly, eating well, sleeping enough, and using substances responsibly.
Intellectual. Engaging in deep learning or novel experiences.
Relational. Nurturing healthy relationships with yourself and others.
Emotional. Accepting all emotions and reaching towards resiliency.
Digital. Using technology in a way that adds to your life rather than distracts from it.

For each area, I ask myself: “To what extent have you felt this principle in your life during the past week?”

I answer on a scale of one to ten and write a few sentences as to why I chose that rating. These are subjective ratings so don’t overthink them. There is no right answer.

The areas are flexible so you can pick and choose which ones are important to you. I originally learned this as just SPIRE and later realized that “spiritual wellbeing” had turned into “how work was going.” So, I added the V to give me a space to write about my vocation separately from my spiritual wellbeing. I also sometimes fall into the trap of being on my phone too much. I wanted to reflect on that each week and so I added digital wellbeing. These pillars are all inter-related and affect each other. Harvard has a center that lists other dimensions to pick and choose from.

The three tools I laid out here are parts of a system that all work together to help me thrive and stay healthy. When I am in survival mode, DFCR is the only goal. After that, I maintain a balanced mental diet from the Healthy Mind Platter. Then, I check-in weekly on the overarching themes and factors of my wellbeing.

This isn’t the only system that I use to live a better life but it is the most foundational. It is the baseline everything else stems from.

I tried coming up with a mnemonic device to remember the letters but the best I could come up with was “Don’t Feel Quite Right” and pretend that the Q is a C. ↩

heyjohn: A Vision For A Better Social Media

2024-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

My Vision For heyjohn
What heyjohn Actually Looks Like
Why Not Insert Some Other Platform Here?
Questions, Uncertainties, and Ideas
Conclusion
Gratitude

I miss my friends.

In high school, I had a small group of friends that I did everything with. We were at Jacob’s house nearly every day after school, even if it was eight miles out of the way. We learned, played, created, and grew together and I love them dearly to this day.

As everyone’s lives started, we had to physically separate. John and I went a few hours away to go to school. Garrett went across the country. Until this point, we never had to connect without being in the same physical space. We tried our best, usually playing video games together and waiting for Christmas break to come when everyone could gather again.

Over time, we tried a few different tools to maintain the level of connection that we had built over those formative years. We tried creating a Discord server with different channels for different topics. We tried gaming regularly, creating a book club, and a bi-weekly newsletter. Nothing really stuck except for semi-regular individual phone calls and our three-or-four-messages-at-a-time group chat on Snapchat. Everyone always had other responsibilities and relationships to take care of that left nurturing our small community on the back burner.

And now I am 5,600 miles away and eight (sometimes nine) hours ahead of home. I’ve met some incredible people here that I’ve made relatively deep connections with. I’m afraid of the impending disconnect in these relationships that I know is coming once it’s time to sprinkle ourselves back across the United States.

Maybe I need to embrace that people grow as do my relationships with them. Maybe I should just let Lady Time work her magic and let things happen naturally. Relationships can be deep and temporary. But these people really mean a lot to me. They are people I can go to and be myself and trust wholeheartedly. They are relationships worth nurturing and putting effort into.

For a long time, I’ve needed a tool, a platform, a community that facilitates and fosters meaningful connection between people that I care about. So, I decided to run my own social media website called heyjohn.

My Vision For heyjohn

I know that this community is going to grow and develop as we do but I want to make clear the purpose and vision I have for creating and running heyjohn.

I imagine heyjohn to be an online space where people can be themselves and use that as a tool for connection and belonging. It’s a small, private, and highly interconnected social platform that is free of ads, algorithms, and performativity. It’s a living and breathing entity that sticks to some central values:

Authenticity: People should feel supremely comfortable being themselves on heyjohn. We are all human beings and that alone is a beautiful thing. We all have experiences and stories that make us who we are and we shouldn’t need to explain ourselves or our needs. No one should have to change their true selves or hide an identity.
Empathy: People just want to be heard, seen, and understood. Empathy is not putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Instead, empathy is believing other people’s stories about what it’s like in their shoes, even if it doesn’t match your perception of reality. It’s also not sympathy, comparison, minimization, or unsolicited advice.
Trust: Some trust is inherently required in any social network. In this case, we all trust that others will practice non-judgement, respect our boundaries (don’t forget to set them!), and act with integrity.

I know these can feel awkward and vulnerable, especially online, but they are core tools in building connection and belonging. They are the base that all of my meaningful relationships are formed from.

What heyjohn Actually Looks Like

So, how do we actually achieve all that?

heyjohn is a fork of Mastodon, a popular federated microblogging platform. Without getting into the weeds too much, it is very similar to X in look and feel. The only functional difference is that heyjohn is closed to the outside world. The only people that can see our posts are people that I have personally invited and onboarded.

The basic functionality is people post (also called a toot) a short thought, update, question, or anything else that they want to share. Other people on heyjohn will see posts of people they follow chronologically and reply to them.¹ Posts and replies might be:

A poll asking what book you should read next
A status update on the project you are working on
A picture of you and a loved one on a trip
A link to an interesting podcast and what you learned from it
An open invite for people to come over for a barbecue next Saturday
An announcement that I’ll bring beer to that barbecue

Beyond that, there are the normal things you’d expect. You can tag others, use hashtags, follow others, and block content. The underlying code is being constantly updated by a large non-profit with resources behind it so features will get added and updated as they develop them.

I’m also maintaining my own version of the code so that we can make changes as needed by the community. I’ve only made one small change that is hardly noticeable. However, if the community wants a new feature, we can add it. Features could range from small visual changes to custom bots to fundamental restructuring of the program. We are limited only by the collective imagination and coding ability of the group.

Community events and group activities are also important for feeling connected to the whole. We can use heyjohn to organize a book club, a question of the week thread, or something else. Again, we are limited only by our collective imagination.

Why Not Insert Some Other Platform Here?

I spent a long time doing research and testing things out before I landed on microblogging as the concept and Mastodon as the implementation.

Firstly, I’ve noticed that group chats are too “fast.” You have to be there when the conversation is happening or else you miss out. The content of the conversations have no staying power. Great for quick updates and logistics, poor for meaningful connection.

When there are more than a handful of people in a group chat, one or two people tend to dominate and crowd everyone else out. It makes participating feel scary unless you have a big “presence” which I certainly don’t. It’s also hard to create an identity for yourself in that kind of environment.

Microblogging has a good pace to it. It’s asynchronous but posts stay relevant because they are so short. I’m not expected to reply immediately because the post will still be there in a few hours but I’m not going to reply to a 150 character comment from three months ago. This leaves space for thought and empathy in both posts and replies. Everyone also has their own profile so I can peruse a specific person’s posts to get to know them or catch up with their lives.

Secondly, I’m not going to let some Big Tech platform vacuum up every single message we send and sell that data to ad companies or feed it to an AI training system. That is out of the question for privacy and quality-of-life purposes.

Considering all that, I was left with a few different federated microblogging platforms. I tried most of them out but kept coming back to Mastodon for its maturity and polished look. I got it set up following their documentation and they are actively developing the platform. They have an official app and email notifications just work.

There are some other Mastodon forks that add big, new features like local-only posting (alongside public posting) and better formatted toots. I really like these features but I wanted to start off with completely closing off the community. It is a simpler start (and keeps server costs real low). Again, I am maintaining the heyjohn code. If people want to open it up and have those other features, we can.

Questions, Uncertainties, and Ideas

The technical part of heyjohn was fun and easy for me. The more difficult part of this project is the social component. I keeping coming back to analogy of heyjohn being like a party. To start, I will be the party host that makes sure everything is going well and adding “social lubrication” when needed. I want people to use this tool and benefit from it.

As the community develops its own culture and tradition, I’m expecting people to take ownership of the party. It will no longer be Westley’s party and we’ll all play a role in making our party an inviting place to be. This could come in the form of running a group activity, brainstorming new features, or chipping in for server costs.

One question that I can’t yet figure out is who is in and who is out. I want to be inclusive and have everyone involved but exclusivity is a feature in this case. So, who do we invite to the party? Of course John is in but what about his aunt that he swears is cool? I think this will be easier to answer once the actual culture of the community is developed. It will become more clear who would be a good fit and won’t.

I’m also quite scared that this project will end up like so many before it and fizzle out due to a lack of participation. Again, people are busy and have much better things to do. It has to be lightweight and inviting enough that people want to participate and make it their own. I’m hoping it’s like a flywheel. Once it gets going and people start feeling like they belong and take ownership of the community, it should sustain itself.

Finally, I have some ideas for features and bots that may or may not make it in someday:

Logo contest. This is the first order of business once we get a few more people. Open up submissions for a couple weeks then everyone votes for a heyjohn logo.
GuillotineBot. Each week, someone gets randomly selected and their profile picture gets deleted.
Merch. Once we have a logo and a proper community, we can get stickers and pins. I love pins.
Book club. I’m not quite sure how to implement this but I’m thinking we could use hashtags. Have a weekly thread about a certain portion of a book and filter out the hashtags to avoid spoilers.
Groups/Events. Some kind of system for further privacy designed around specific purposes. Maybe there is a temporal component so that people don’t stay in their little bubbles. There are lots of ongoing discussion about how to best implement groups.

Conclusion

I set all this up for selfish reasons: I miss my friends and I want a sustainable platform to foster connection between people I care about. At the same time, I really want this to be a positive force in everyone’s lives who uses it. There are plenty of places, online and off, where you can’t be who you are or have to don some kind of identity that isn’t really yours.

I hope that heyjohn can be a pleasant respite.

Note: I wrote a follow-up to this after replacing Mastodon with a forum. The vision hasn’t changed but the platform has.

Gratitude

Garrett, Jacob, John, and Levi for being my best friends and giving me a space to grow and be. I love you guys.
Darius Kazemi for writing up a wonderful article that really formed the foundation of this project. It came at a perfect time.
Mastodon contributors for putting in the work to make software that is clean and open to everyone.
Brené Brown for teaching me the skills and language to express myself accurately.

I will write out a proper onboarding/users guide at some point. The official documentation isn’t that fun or useful to read. Plus, some of it doesn’t apply since heyjohn is a private server. ↩

Creating Something

2024-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

Leaving Hugo
Framework Agnosticism
Styling
What’s Next?

This is my submission for this month’s Indieweb Carnival. The topic of the month is DIY - Something from (Almost) Nothing. A huge thanks to Andrei for hosting.

I’m not a naturally creative person. Curious, yes, but not creative. I’m consumptive, constantly on the hunt for more information and interesting ideas. Most of the time, I don’t actually “create” anything with my learning, in the traditional sense of the word. I prefer keeping things in the abstract rather than the concrete. It’s much easier thinking “yeah, I could do that” rather than trying to prove that I can, in fact, do that.

There are two things that I create these days and both of them are on my computer: articles and software. I’ve been looking for a proper coding project to do recently and I’ve been eyeing Astro to rebuild my website with. I took Andrei’s prompt as the sign I needed to actually do it.

Leaving Hugo

I built my first website at the end of 2021 using a Hugo template. I was just getting into coding (outside of using MatLab and Julia in college) and I wanted to test out my web development skills. It went through a few different revisions over the years, but they all used Hugo in the background. I was learning HTML, CSS, and git with Hugo always cheering me on from the sidelines.

From my research, Hugo was pitched as a simple and fast framework for getting started. I wanted the easiest thing possible since I was just getting started and testing the waters. Since I didn’t know anything else, I accepted that even though Hugo had its quirks, I just needed to write good enough code to work around it. I thought all static site generators would have the same issues.

Then I started hearing chirps about the new kid on the block, Astro. Like Hugo, Astro pitches itself as a framework for “content-driven websites.” The difference is that Astro can be as simple or as complex as you like. For my simple use case, both perform the same basic functions of reading in my Markdown content, putting that content into templates, and rendering that to HTML. However, I found the templating and components in Astro to be much easier and more intuitive.

Part of the reason is that I am more comfortable with JavaScript (JS) than I am with Go. Astro components allow you to write any JS you need for that page to render then strips it away when you build the site. It felt much less rigid and awkward than Hugo’s system. You can pass information about the pages between Astro components which adds even more possibilities and flexibility.

I’d summarize it as Hugo being “content first” while Astro is “pages first”. At build time, Hugo goes one by one through your content, finds the appropriate template (according to its complicated lookup tables), plugs your content into the template, and builds the site page by page. In comparison, Astro starts with all the pages that you want your site to have, generates them with templates, then finds the content and components needed to fill in those pages.¹

Another huge benefit of Astro that I didn’t know I needed is type checking with TypeScript. It makes sure that the data in my content is consistent and in a predictable, predetermined format. This means that I can guarantee that every page will have a date in the form YYYY-MM-DD to use. It prevents typos and I can reliably query a collection of content knowing that all the metadata is the same.

Like I said, Astro can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. Mine is pretty simple but if I want to add more later, I can. If I want to use Tailwind for styling instead of vanilla CSS, it’s as easy as running npx astro add tailwind and adding utility classes. There are also integrations for UI frameworks like React and Vue. I never tried but apparently they don’t work quite right in Hugo while they are first-class citizens in Astro.

Framework Agnosticism

Even though I completely changed my website, I didn’t actually have to change any of the really important stuff, my content. I write all of my posts in Obsidian, my notes app of choice, which saves them all as Markdown. Because I do all my writing in one place, I have one point of truth for all my content that my website then pulls from.

Pulling from that content is more complicated than it sounds though. For my last website, I had a pretty clunky Python script that read all my Markdown files, copied them to the website, then deleted the ones that didn’t have a publish: true tag in the frontmatter. There were so many different cases that dictated how a particular piece of content should be copied that the script was really just layers and layers of if and for loops inside of each other. It worked but it wasn’t pretty.

This time around, I found someone else’s script. It seemed like the author’s content structure was relatively flat while I’m a folder fanatic so I had to adjust a few lines. Now, I can run the script and it updates any content that has changed in my Obsidian folder while maintaining links and images.

Sometimes I get a little wary about using a framework like Hugo or Astro because I can’t guarantee the longevity of them. Even though they are open source and the source code will be around forever, support for them could theoretically be dropped anytime.

My theory is that enough people rely on this framework that if it does get shut down, another good one will pop up. This already happens with all of the JS frameworks available. Worst case scenario, I learn a new framework. At the end of the day, my content is completely independent of how it is displayed on a website and tools will be built to adapt to that.

Styling

Making a website look good is way harder than I thought. In my last website, I used a classless framework called new.css. It greatly reduced the complexity of my website since I didn’t have any classes in my HTML and minimal custom CSS. It looked great and I didn’t have to do any work besides make sure my HTML look good.

However, since the time I started using new.css, I’ve seen a lot of really cool and creative personal websites. I wanted my website to be mine too. I also didn’t want to add too much complexity with a styling framework like Tailwind. So, I opted for regular ol’ CSS.

Astro makes this pretty easy. It uses scoped styling that allowed me to write CSS for a component right alongside that component. Yet again, I avoided having to mess with class names for all my HTML elements. This system is like the best of both worlds between vanilla CSS and utility classes. I get the “CSS alongside HTML” that utility classes provide without the clutter of adding a bunch of class names.

Taking inspiration from others, I set out to make my website functional and personal.

I started with the table of contents and I love how it turned out. First, I followed a recipe to get all the headings and subheadings formatted correctly into HTML from Astro. I modified this CSS to make it look like a tree. Then I made it sticky so that it stays on the left side of the screen as you scroll, allowing you to jump around from heading to heading really easily.

Then, I dove into the inner workings of flexbox to get it to wrap at just the right time so it looks good on every size screen. I added a button to hide/show the table of contents on mobile-sized screens so that you don’t have to scroll through a big list before actually reading the content.

Next came designing the pages that hold lists of content (/writing, /books, etc.). I went back and forth between the “date + title” format and the “card” format. I also knew I didn’t want to use a <details> dropdown block because I didn’t like the “click > scroll down slightly > click again” functionality on my last website design. Eventually, I opted for the card format so that I could display additional information and context before clicking into a post. The normal list was a bit too simple for me this time around.

I really wanted the cards to pack densely, all butted up against one another horizontally and vertically like a mosaic. Getting things to stack in one direction is easy but not both. I tried using flexbox and grid but they both only allowed items to stay in their row, preventing them from being pushed up against the card above it. I later learned this is called a masonry layout and it currently takes JS to work properly. According to the MDN docs, native CSS support for it is not compatible with any browsers right now.

Coloring my site was last and the hardest. It was easy to pick out a really good looking color palette only for it to look clunky once actually applied to the whole website. I used coolors to generate random color palettes until I found one that sort of worked. The colors were adjusted and applied according to this guide by Anthony Hobday. Adding a few shades to each color really helped the website as a whole look more cohesive.

The Atkinson font came preloaded when I created the Astro project and I liked it enough to keep it.² To finish, I added some bells and whistles like hover actions and called it good enough for now. There are a lot of little tweaks that I might like to make in the future but there are bigger things I’d like to add first.

What’s Next?

I’m currently looking at a list of to-dos ranging from small tweaks to large additions. That’s not even counting the “ideas” list.

For now, I am happy with it and I am proud of myself for creating it. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without others creating lots of stuff before me though. The people whose links are littered throughout this post all contributed to this creation. Like I said at the beginning, I’m much more consumptive than creative. Still, I made something with my own hands that I can appreciate and maybe others can too.

I don’t know either of these well enough to know if that is actually how the code works. This simplification is just what it seems like happens based off of how the templates are built and how the routing is done. ↩
I love fonts. I’ve now got Atkinson on my Kindle to try out. SN Pro is just too good to stop using it in Obsidian though. ↩

Not Even Water?

2024-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

I experienced my second and final Ramadan (رمضان) in Morocco. Ramadan is such an important cultural event here and across all countries with a Muslim population. It is a special time that brings people together all across the Islamic world.

It’s difficult to put all the feelings, experiences, and essence of Ramadan into one piece of writing, especially as an outsider that is still learning about it. To try and get close, I sat down with my host sister and counterpart, Hajar, and asked her questions about her story and relationship with the holy month. That interview, along with my own experiences and American viewpoint, informed what follows.

I feel quite proud learning culture and writing stories like this. I am honored to have the duty to untangle preconceptions and stereotypes that Americans have when thinking about Arab and Islamic culture. This is where the real power of human-to-human connection lies.

For Hajar, Ramadan is an exciting and thankful time. Even before Ramadan begins, she is filled with a sense of gratefulness that Allah gives her a chance every single year to live Ramadan again. It’s a shared feeling across the community. In the weeks leading up, people are more positive and you see a lot more smiles. There is a sense that people have more energy during the day. As you walk down the streets and alleyways, there is a smell of shabakiya¹ in the air. Everyone is stocking up on the essential treat that is at every breakfast table in Morocco.

The thing that most Americans associate with Ramadan is fasting. It’s the most visible part of the tradition and a large departure from our own culture. Fasting during Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam and is written directly in the Quran:

O believers! Fasting is prescribed for you—as it was for those before you—so perhaps you will become mindful of Allah. (2.183)

Fasting, in an Islamic context, means abstaining from eating, drinking, having sex, chewing gum, and smoking while the sun is up. No, not even water. Not everyone is required to fast, however. Children, elderly, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, menstruating women, sick people, or people travelling are all exempt. Basically, if fasting harms someone’s wellbeing, they are not required to fast. They should, however, make up those missed days of fasting later.

Ramadan is the month in which the Quran was revealed as a guide for humanity with clear proofs of guidance and the decisive authority. So whoever is present this month, let them fast. But whoever is ill or on a journey, then let them fast an equal number of days after Ramadan. Allah intends ease for you, not hardship, so that you may complete the prescribed period and proclaim the greatness of Allah for guiding you, and perhaps you will be grateful. (2.185)

To start the day, there are people that dutifully wake up and walk down each street with drums, jostling everyone up about an hour before the fajr call to prayer (around 5:45 am by the end of the month). This gives everyone a chance to have suhoor which is the last meal before starting the fast.

Luckily for me, they didn’t come around my neighborhood (that, or I’m a really heavy sleeper)². This left me free to wake up if and when I wanted. For the first few days, I would get up and eat a light meal with yogurt, fruits, and maybe some eggs. I’d also chug a big bottle of water because I knew I wouldn’t have any for the next 14 hours. As my sleep schedule got more and more bent out of shape as Ramadan went on, I started staying up later and later. In that case, I would just eat before going to bed at around two or three in the morning.

Once fasting begins, people go about their normal lives, doing as they normally would. Fasting gives Hajar energy. She, of course, feels thirsty, hungry, and tired throughout the day but she doesn’t mind it one bit. For her, the time flies during the day. She is excited to go home and do even more work. Hajar recently had a baby, a sweet and easy-going little girl. After spending the day at her office, Hajar comes home to help prepare “breakfast” with her family and take care of her daughter. It’s not work for her.

I can say with utmost certainty that I did not have the same experience.

The days were a slog. I’d try and get work done on my computer with no coffee or food to fuel my brain and nothing would get done (hence writing this months after Ramadan ending). Then, I’d go try and be social and present while breaking the fast with my host family. I tried my best but I couldn’t help being irritable most days. A volunteer friend said it best:

My sleep schedule is completely destroyed and I’m tired all the time which makes me irritable.
Adam Kerkman

Each afternoon, I would walk across town to my host family’s home to break the fast with them. As I walked, I’d see families congregated outside, parents watching their children play soccer or older men talking amongst themselves, waiting for the sun to disappear. When I arrived, the women would usually be working in the kitchen getting everything ready to eat. My host dad would have the news on, watching it curiously with Hajar’s daughter by his side. Piece by piece, the breakfast spread would get assembled; two tables were required to contain the sandwiches, msmen, srraq zit³, juice, and dates. It sounds like a lot of work but I know my other host sister, Souad, truly enjoys providing for and caring for her family.

In the last few minutes before the maghrib call to prayer marked the end of that day’s fast, we all wait in anticipation, wondering if we had actually missed the voice from the megaphone that echoes down every street. Once the time finally comes, everyone grabs a plump date from the small hill on the table and whispers to themselves a recitation, telling Allah that they have fasted for his sake and thanking him for the food. My host mother grabs the big aluminum ladle from the pot of harira and starts filling up bowls. She can usually intuit what kind everyone wants (red or white) but still asks to make sure before passing them around. My signature move was to have two bowls of harira before moving onto the rest of the feast.

While I love my host family and always feel welcome, I rarely felt like I truly belonged there during Ramadan. It felt like sitting down for a Thanksgiving meal with someone else’s family. The air had an energy in it that made everyday feel like a holiday that I couldn’t really participate in, like the feeling of not having any presents under the tree with my name on them.

Fasting is more complex than simply not consuming during the day, though. It’s a commitment. It is an opportunity to physically feel what millions of people who live with food insecurity feel every day. It is a reminder to stop and appreciate what you have in your life. Fasting, counterintuitively, adds more to your life in the form of empathy, gratitude, and connection to something bigger than the self.

And I appreciate all Allah gave us…the gifts from Allah like our health, the food, the water. When you stop [doing] something, you appreciate it more. When you stop [having] something, you appreciate it more.⁴
Hajar

Deeper down and for Muslims across the world, Ramadan is a time to become closer with Allah through self-reflection, community connection, prayer, and giving. Everything is done with Allah in mind. Hajar’s favorite part of Ramadan is becoming closer to Allah more than she normally does outside of Ramadan. After spending Ramadan with Hajar, it is abundantly clear to me that she really values the connection she has with her family, too.

Normally, there are five prayers per day for Muslims. During Ramadan, there is a special one called tariwih that is done after the final isha call to prayer at night. While not mandatory, it is highly recommended as it is seen as having high spiritual power and virtue.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t see a tarawih prayer myself. According to Hajar, you walk into the mosque and men take their places in the front and women in the back, separated by a thin piece of fabric. The mosque becomes much more full than normal. Shoes are scattered in disarray just outside the door to the mosque. Hajar feels proud to be a Muslim when she is surrounded by so many others engaging in a shared activity so important to their religion and identities. High-level students from the mosque read the Quran while everyone prays, bowing, reciting, and standing in unison. Tarawih is also a good physical practice. Like taking a walk after dinner, it is good to do some light moving and stretching after eating so much to break the fast.

In Islamic belief, the night when the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) by the angel Jibril (or Gabriel, in English) is called Laylat al-Qadr, or Night of Power, and is celebrated towards the end of the Ramadan month. The exact date is not mentioned specifically in the Quran but scholars believe that it most likely occurred on one of the “odd-numbered nights of the last ten nights of Ramadan.” It is celebrated on the 27th night of Ramadan in Morocco.

On this night, the mosque is open and active until the sun comes up. The whole Quran is read. It is believed that worshiping Allah this night is more powerful and rewarding than a thousand months of worship.

The Night of Glory is better than a thousand months.
That night the angels and the holy spirit descend, by the permission of their Lord, for every decreed matter.
It is all peace until the break of dawn. (97.3-5)

The mosques usually have couscous ready to go for everyone to eat while doing their prayers. Some people will also go home for a few hours to take a nap and come back to the mosque later in the wee hours of the morning. In my community, there is an Islamic school that has someone reading the Quran that night and it is a magical feeling, even for me. It is dead silent aside from the voice that covers the town as I sit on my roof and just listen and be.

For me (who is not Muslim), I took the month to expand my own spiritual practice while also challenging myself by participating in the fasting tradition. I journaled more consistently, meditated, and read a few spiritual books that have been on my “To Read” list for a while.

Giving and charity are huge aspects of Ramadan and Islam in general. It is up to ability, though. Like fasting, if you don’t have anything to give, you are exempted. It also doesn’t need to be money.

In the week leading up to Ramadan, my hanut (little shop where you buy pretty much everything) was organizing a Ramadan basket. They were taking donations to fill boxes with groceries, food, personal care items, and house supplies to give out to people who needed them. There are also big tents put up by local associations where people who don’t have anywhere to break their fast go and eat for free.

Hajar spoke passionately about giving (zakat, in Arabic), fervently jabbing the table with her index finger as she explained. In her eyes, giving doesn’t decrease from her assets as it wasn’t her money to begin with. She is just the middleman between Allah and whoever needs that money. Giving is a duty for Muslims. If you have extra money, it is your duty to give it away to those who need it. It isn’t necessarily out of kindness.

Here’s the thing that zakat [is] all about: zakat will never ever ever [detract from] your real money or real thing that you have…[For example], I have 500 dirhams and I give 200 dirhams, it didn’t [detract] from my real money. It isn’t mine from the beginning…And if it’s mine, I’ll get it back from another way

I think this is a departure from our ideas of giving as Americans. In my experience, most Americans give for personal gain and I am not exempt from this. Personal gain ranges from tax deductions, social approval, feeling good about yourself, or maybe getting at least a T-shirt out of the deal. That’s not to say, of course, that Americans don’t give. They absolutely do give money and things and volunteer their time. It’s just extra. Nobody is telling you to give. It’s an intentional good-faith action.

For Muslims, it’s just something you do. As Hajar put it, giving and sharing resources is like brushing your teeth. You just do it without much thinking.

Zakat ma-kat-nqs mn f rzqk walu
Giving doesn’t remove anything from your blessings (translation mine)

Zakat Al-Fitr, the mandatory donation at the end of Ramadan, is a small amount of money that is set by the Kingdom of Morocco. This year, it was set at 20 dirhams (about 2 USD) for each person. It is up to the head of household to make sure that everyone in his family has donated so my zakat was wrapped in with my host family’s. This money goes to ensuring that everyone can participate in the Eid festivities celebrating the end of Ramadan.

In the days leading up to Eid, there is a buzz in the air. The souq (weekly market for buying groceries) is full of people and the small bakeries start pumping out sweets in every color and pattern imaginable.

Hajar told me that when she was a child, she would be ecstatic on the night before Eid. Her and all her siblings would put their new, unworn Eid clothes next to their beds so that they could jump into them right when they woke up. It sounded to me like the feeling of knowing you finally get to open your Christmas presents the morning after Christmas Eve. When the morning comes, everyone is up early.

The first order of business for most is to go to a big group prayer called msalah. This prayer is an opportunity for Muslims to ask Allah to accept their duties done during Ramadan. Early in the morning, around seven, people start filing in to a big open area in the community. In my town, it was a flat area of dirt by the highway that is untouched for every other day of the year. I put on my nicest jellaba and followed the crowd. When I arrived, there was already a large block of men in nice clothes with their mats to pray on. They stood in front of a small stage with a tall chair and microphone set up and on either side of a line of four large speakers. There was a gap of about 100 yards behind them before there was a large block of women standing in a similar fashion.

I navigated to the side, out of the way, so I could watch. There was a small group of local authorities (called gendarmes⁵) there that were curious as to what the hell I was doing standing around.⁶ I watched as more and more people of all ages and abilities came to pray together, the array of motorcycles in the so-called parking area growing. People who were unable to stand for long or couldn’t bow to the ground sat and did the best they could. Children shared their praying mats with other children who left theirs at home, turning it sideways to fit them both.

The person leading the prayer climbed onto the tall chair and started reading from the Quran. In his short pauses, there was dead silence. No cars passed by and the air was still. Once the actual praying started, the entire group was in perfect unison. They said Allahu Akbar together and it boomed off the walls of the nearby buildings as everyone bowed their heads to the ground in front of them. I felt it in my chest. The collective effervescence gave me goosebumps.

A man was praying next to me and the local authorities. He had a little girl with him who was not thrilled to be there. During the praying, the little girl started crying and tugging at the man’s clothes to pull his attention to her. The one gendarme that was keeping an eye on things and not praying immediately pulled out his phone to distract and comfort the little girl until it was over so as to not disturb the man’s prayer.

As soon as it was over, those same people that filed in started filing out. I said hello to a few people that passed by me before running into my host father. We fell into the wave of people and started walking home, people peeling off as they made their own way home to eat while the sun was up for the first time in a month. This is when the festivities start.

As you may have guessed by now, there is a huge spread of breakfast items and sweets. It isn’t just for one meal, though. During Eid, families are expected to go around town and visit people important to them. Every single house has an open door policy. You bounce around from house to house and wish them a happy Eid while they try and force even more food down your gullet.

After a couple days of Eid, life slowly returns to normal but with a renewed sense of faith and an eager anticipation for the next Ramadan to start.

For me, it’s unlikely I’ll get the opportunity to really experience Ramadan like that again. It was incredible to be in it, experiencing and living this holiday that is so important to billions across the world.

Shabakiya is a Moroccan pastry that is fried then soaked in a spicy, sweet honey. The dough gets rolled out then cut and folded into a twisted flower shape before being sprinkled with sesame seeds. ↩
I did finally get to hear these in real life while I was visiting another volunteer. It was a group that sounded like they were having a blast out there waking everyone up. ↩
This literally translates to “cockroaches.” They are like shabakiya but are rolled differently and taste a bit brighter. ↩
A note on the quotes taken from Hajar: she speaks English very well, I speak Arabic at an intermediate level. When we talk, we usually mix the two and take words and phrases that make the most sense to us. I’ve taken the direct quotes and translated the Arabic phrases to English and this is indicated by the square brackets. I’ve also fixed some of Hajar’s grammar mistakes for clarity. ↩
I describe gendarmes as the sheriffs of Morocco. They exist in small communities where a police department isn’t necessary. ↩
One of them knew who I was, though. He was scolded by his boss one time when I was getting some paperwork done. I awkwardly sat there in the middle. But that’s a story for another time. ↩

Culture Matters

2024-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Understanding Culture
Fundamentals of Culture
American Culture and Diversity
Communication Styles
Culture in the Workplace
Adjusting to a New Culture
Footnotes

To have your eyes widened and your organ of belief stretched, whilst remaining discreetly submissive, seems to me a faculty the [traveler] ought to cultivate. When you have submitted to looking about you discreetly and to observing with as little prejudice as possible, then you are in a proper state of mind to walk about and learn from what you see.
Philip Glazebrook, Journey to Kars

I didn’t expect a Peace Corps manual to be so enlightening. While it is, of course, geared towards those serving in other countries, I think it is still a useful tool in cultural self-awareness. It is a workbook so some of the activities will be a little strange, though, if you’re unfamiliar with Peace Corps.

It’s wildly interesting (to me, at least) to look at such an intangible, incredibly complex concept and condense it down into a small enough amount of words to fit inside a book. Culture Matters makes different, usually invisible, aspects of culture visible. You start to see behind the curtain and really understand why people act the way they do in nearly every aspect of life.

Understanding Culture

Culture includes abstract concepts such as the underlying values and assumptions of a society. It also informs concrete behaviors that are derived from those values and assumptions. Culture is a filter through which we make meaning of events in the world. What makes cross-cultural encounters so difficult is that people from different cultures can view the same behavior differently.

Culture can be modeled as an iceberg; part of it is visible and apparent while some (the majority) is submerged and invisible. Surface behaviors are things we can observer like facial expressions, literature, gestures, and food. Beneath-the-surface aspects of culture are things like concept of time, values, or work ethic. The behaviors and relics of culture that we see are informed by the underlying values and assumptions.

The reason any behavior makes sense is simply because it is consistent with what a given person believes in or holds dear. Conversely, when we say that what someone has done “makes no sense,” what we mean is that that action contradicts what we believe that person feels or wants.

Not every human behavior or value is cultural, however. It is just one dimension that explains it along with two other dimensions, universal and personal. Some behaviors are shared by us all, while others are unique to individuals.

Universal. Ways in which all people in all groups are the same. Because of universal behavior, not everything about a new culture is going to be different from your own.
Cultural. What a particular group of people have in common with each other and how they are different from every other group
Individual. Ways in which each of us is different from everyone else, including those in our group. Not everything you learn about a new culture is going to apply to every individual from that culture.

People get their culture through a process of cultural conditioning. This is how we all learn what our culture believes is right and wrong. We usually learn cultural behaviors but we are also learning the underlying values and beliefs that inform those behaviors. The process for childhood and adult cultural conditioning is the same but adults usually require unlearning and relearning an already acquired behavior:

Observation/Instruction. You are aware of a particular behavior but haven’t tried it yourself.
Imitation. You try the behavior but it is awkward and you are conscious of what you’re doing, trying to avoid mistakes.
Reinforcement. People encourage you when you do it right and correct you when you do it wrong.
Internalization. You now know how to do the behavior without needing reinforcement. You may still need to pay attention to what you’re doing but not nearly as much.
Spontaneous Manifestation. You no longer need to think about what you are doing and naturally begin doing it.¹

When we observe reality, what is really happening is that our mind is interpreting what the eyes see and assigning meaning to it. And because our minds are shaped by culture, the meaning that gets assigned can be completely different for two people. Any behavior can then be interpreted in two ways: the meaning given to it by the person doing the action and the meaning given to it by the observer of the action. Successful communication happens when these two meanings are the same. In other words, communication is successful when the meaning that was intended by the doer is what was understood by the observer.²

Fundamentals of Culture

There are many dimensions and aspects of culture but this book looks at the four most important ones separately. How societies view these four concepts explains the most significant ways they differ. Note that each of these are a spectrum, not a dichotomy. No culture is exclusively one or the other (and especially not the individuals within the culture) but most tend to lean towards one end of the spectrum.

Concept of Self – Individualism vs. Collectivism

Concept of self refers to how individuals see themselves in relation to others. One pole is individualism:

Individualist— The individual identifies primarily with self, with the needs of the individual being satisfied before those of the group. Looking after and taking care of oneself, being self-sufficient, guarantees the well being of the group. Independence and self-reliance are greatly stressed and valued. In general, people tend to distance themselves psychologically and emotionally from each other. One may choose to join groups, but group membership is not essential to one’s identity or success.

Individualist cultures are more likely to be meritocracies, be more confrontational as a means to clear the air, people switch jobs frequently, and people hold cocktail parties and potlucks.³ On the other end of the spectrum is collectivism:

Collectivist— One’s identity is in large part a function of one’s membership and role in a group, e.g., the family or work team. The survival and success of the group ensures the well-being of the individual, so that by considering the needs and feelings of others, one protects oneself. Harmony and the interdependence of group members are stressed and valued. Group members are relatively close psychologically and emotionally, but distant toward nongroup members.

Collectivist cultures are more likely to have separate words for mother’s brother and father’s brother, have arranged marriages, and answer the phone with the name of the organization rather than their own name.

Personal and Societal Obligations – Universalism vs. Particularism

This fundamental of culture refers to balancing obligations to family and friends on one hand and the wider society on the other: in-group vs. out-group. The two poles of this dimension are universalism and particularism.

Universalism— Certain absolutes apply across the board, regardless of circumstances or the particular situation. Wherever possible, you should try to apply the same rules to everyone in like situations. To be fair is to treat everyone alike and not make exceptions for family, friends, or members of your in-group. Where possible, you should lay your personal feelings aside and look at the situation objectively. While life isn’t necessarily fair, we can make it more fair by treating people the same way. [emphasis mine]

Those in universalist cultures are more likely to generally trust everyone, very rarely offer exceptions, and write contracts even if it’s between friends.

Particularism— How you behave in a given situation depends on the circumstances. You treat family, friends, and your in-group the best you can, and you let the rest of the world take care of itself. Their in-groups will protect them. There can’t be absolutes because everything depends on whom you’re dealing with. No one expects life to be fair. Exceptions will always be made for certain people. [emphasis mine]

Those in particularist cultures are more likely to hire people if someone can vouch for them, take personal relations into account for work performance reviews, and have ethics that change depending on the given circumstances.

Concept of Time – Monochronic vs. Polychronic

Time isn’t a constant; it’s a cultural phenomenon. On either ends of this spectrum are monochronic and polychronic.

Monochronic— Time is the given and people are the variable. The needs of people are adjusted to suit the demands of time—schedules, deadlines, etc. Time is quantifiable, and a limited amount of it is available. People do one thing at a time and finish it before starting something else, regardless of circumstances.

People in monochronic cultures are more likely to interpret being late as rude, hold schedules as sacred, be more individualistic, see interruptions as bad, and stand in line.⁴

Polychronic— Time is the servant and tool of people. Time is adjusted to suit the needs of people. More time is always available, and you are never too busy. People often have to do several things simultaneously, as required by circumstances. It’s not necessary to finish one thing before starting another, nor to finish your business with one person before starting in with another.

People in polychronic cultures are more likely to see waiting as normal, be more collectivist, view deadlines as an approximation, and digress from the set agenda.

Locus of Control – Internal vs. External

Locus of control refers to the degree to which people can control or manipulate the external world and shape their own destiny. Do you have control over what you do or do things instead happen to you? These two poles are also called activism and fatalism, respectively.

Internal— The locus of control is largely internal, within the individual. There are very few givens in life, few circumstances that have to be accepted as they are, that cannot be changed. There are no limits on what I can do or become, so long as I set my mind to it and make the necessary effort. Life is what I do.

Characteristics of internal locus of control (activist) cultures include doing something to improve your unhappiness, making your own luck, and usually equating new with better.

External— The locus of control is largely external to the individual. Some aspects of life are predetermined, built into the nature of things. There are limits beyond which we cannot go and certain givens that cannot be changed and must be accepted. Life is in large part what happens to me.

Those in external locus of control (fatalist) cultures value stoicism, seeing life as it really is (instead of having a positive attitude), and believe that the external world is too complex of a mechanism to ultimately be known.

He would come, he meant, if Allah willed it. His wanting to come and his being permitted to come were not one and the same. In Morocco, unlike America, where there’s a will there is not necessarily a way.
PCV Morocco

American Culture and Diversity

It seems strange to learn about a culture that you come from. Because we are part of that culture, it is often difficult to really understand it instead of simply embodying it. Here are 13 aspects of culture and a summary of how the average American views each.⁵ These are often the direct result of American geography or the nature of the immigrants who first settled here.

Attitude towards age. Americans are focused on doing and achieving so age isn’t highly valued. Newer is usually better.
Concept of fate and destiny. Americans believe in self-determination. As children, we hear that we can become whatever we want, we just have to go and do the work.
View of human nature. People are assumed to be good and trustworthy. If someone detracts from that, we want an explanation for what “went wrong.”
Attitude towards change. Things can always be improved and newer is usually better. Making progress pushes us closer and closer to perfection. Traditions may be useful but aren’t always superior.
Attitude towards taking risks. There will always be enough opportunity to go around so you can always start over. Experimentation and being entrepreneurial are important ways to improve. No risk, no reward.
Concept of suffering and misfortune. We are in full control of our lives and destiny so being depressed is basically a choice. Do whatever it takes to be happy again.⁶
Concept of face. People can take care of themselves so saving face isn’t important. We appreciate directness and honesty.
Source of self-esteem/self-worth. You are what you achieve and you create your own worth rather than it being handed to you. You’re judged by markers of success such as your job title, how much money you make, or material possessions.
Concept of equality. American culture is egalitarian. We’re not all the same but we are all of equal value.
Attitude towards formality. Americans tend to be casual and informal because of our culture of egalitarianism. We don’t use titles or ranks when addressing each other in normal social situations.
Degree of realism. Bad things happen for a reason. Americans are generally optimistic because individuals are in control and there’s no reason not to be.
Attitude towards doing. Walking the walk is more important than talking the talk. Concrete results are valued more than other pursuits like academia or the arts. Practicality is valued.
View of the natural world. The natural world is something that can be studied, predicted, and manipulated. It is not to be feared.⁶

Americans ignore history…. The national myth is that of creativity and progress…. They believe in the future as if it were a religion; they believe that there is nothing they cannot accomplish, that solutions wait somewhere for all problems, like brides.
Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake

Communication Styles

There are many different styles of communication but one of the most important is the direct/indirect spectrum:

Indirect/High Context— Context refers to the amount of innate and largely unconscious understanding a person can be expected to bring to a particular communication setting. In high context cultures, … which tend to be homogeneous and collectivist, people carry within them highly developed and refined notions of how most interactions will unfold, of how they and the other person will behave in a particular situation. Because people in high context cultures already know and understand each other quite well, they have evolved a more indirect style of communication. They have less need to be explicit and rely less on words to convey meaning—and especially on the literal meaning of the spoken word—and more on nonverbal communication. People often convey meaning or send messages by manipulating the context. Because these cultures tend to be collectivist, people work closely together and know what everyone else knows. The overriding goal of the communication exchange is maintaining harmony and saving face. [emphasis mine]

People imply or suggest what they mean and you have to read between the lines to really understand. They might use a qualified yes to mean no (putting a condition on the yes), tell a story to say no delicately, change the subject to avoid saying no, or return to a previous point to signal disagreement.

Direct/Low Context— Low context cultures, like the United States, tend to be more heterogeneous and individualist and accordingly have evolved a more direct communication style. Less can be assumed about the other person in a heterogeneous society, and less is known about others in a culture where people prefer independence, self-reliance, and a greater emotional distance from each other. They cannot depend merely on manipulating context—not doing or not saying something that is always done or said in that situation—or communicating nonverbally to make themselves understood; they must rely more on words, and on those words being interpreted literally. Getting or giving information is the goal of most communication exchanges. [emphasis mine]

People here say what they mean and value telling the truth over hurting someone’s feelings.

Nonverbal communication is also important. This includes gestures, eye contact, conversational style, facial expressions, and personal space. Each of these can mean completely different things in other cultures and between different people within that culture.⁷ Again, these should all be interpreted from the other culture’s perspective.

Culture in the Workplace

Culture also shows up heavily in the workplace. Specifically, it manifests as feelings towards power distance, uncertainty, and status. Power distance refers to how people of different levels of power and status treat one another.

High Power Distance— People in these cultures accept that inequalities in power and status are natural or existential. In the same way they accept that some people are smarter than others, people accept that some will have more power and influence than others. Those with power tend to emphasize it, to hold it close and not delegate or share it, and to distinguish themselves as much as possible from those who do not have power. They are, however, expected to accept the responsibilities that go with power, to look after those beneath them. Subordinates are not expected to take initiative and are closely supervised.

In high power distance cultures, people are less likely to question the boss, workers prefer precise instructions from superiors, and the chain of command is seen as sacred.

Low Power Distance— People in these cultures see inequalities in power and status as largely artificial; it is not natural, though it may be convenient, that some people have power over others. Those with power, therefore, tend to deemphasize it, to minimize the differences between themselves and subordinates, and to delegate and share power to the extent possible. Subordinates are rewarded for taking initiative and do not like close supervision.

In low power distance cultures, students question teachers, the chain of command is simply for convenience, and interactions between bosses and subordinates are more informal.

How people react to and how much they avoid uncertainty is also cultural and shows up in the workplace. Normal responses to uncertainty are laws, procedures, regulations, technology, and religion.

High Uncertainty Avoidance— Cultures characterized by high uncertainty avoidance feel especially anxious about the uncertainty in life and try to limit and control it as much as possible. They have more laws, regulations, policies, and procedures and a greater emphasis on obeying them. They also have a strong tendency toward conformity, hence predictability. People take comfort in structure, systems, and expertise—anything that can blunt or even neutralize the impact of the unexpected. The unknown is frightening.

In high uncertainty avoidance cultures, the chain of command should never be bypassed, conflict should be eliminated, people accept authority readily, and people rarely change jobs.

Low Uncertainty Avoidance— People in these cultures do not feel quite so threatened nor anxious about uncertainty, and therefore do not have such a strong need to limit or control it. They seek to legislate fewer areas of human interaction and tolerate differences better. They feel boxed in by too much structure or too many systems. They are curious rather than frightened by the unknown and are not uncomfortable leaving things to chance. Life is interesting but not especially daunting.

In low uncertainty avoidance cultures, risks are seen as opportunities, people change jobs more often, and authority is seen as limiting.

Lastly is where people get status (in the workplace and in society) from. It is somewhat related to power distance and individualism/collectivism. The two poles here are achieved and ascribed status, “doing” and “being.”

Achieved Status— In these doing cultures, people are looked up to and respected because of their personal and especially their professional accomplishments. You get ahead into positions of power and influence by virtue of your achievements and performance. Your status is earned and not merely a function of birth, age, or seniority. You are hired based on your record of success, not on the basis of family background, connections, or the school you attended. People aren’t particularly impressed with titles. Education is important, but not the mere fact of it; you have to have done something with your knowledge. Status is not automatic and can be forfeited if you stop achieving.

Ascribed Status— In these being cultures, a certain amount of status is built into the person; it is automatic and therefore difficult to lose. You are looked up to because of the family and social class you are born into, because of your affiliations and membership in certain important groups, and, later, because of your age and seniority. The school you went to and the amount of education you received also confer status, whether or not you did well in school or have done anything with your education. Titles are important and should always be used. You are pressured to justify the power, respect and deference that you automatically enjoy. While you cannot lose your status completely, you can lose respect by not realizing your potential.

Adjusting to a New Culture

On occasion, the behavior expected of you by the local culture may conflict with your own personal values and beliefs. Do you adopt the behavior and think less of yourself, or do you resist it and risk being considered insensitive?

When adapting to a new culture, we go through four levels of cultural awareness.

Unconscious Incompetence. Blissful ignorance. You are unaware of cultural differences and you probably don’t even know that you are making cultural mistakes. You are likely misinterpreting a lot of behavior and you don’t know it.
Conscious Incompetence. You now realize that cultural differences exist but you don’t really understand what those differences are and how significant they are.
Conscious Competence. You understand some cultural differences and try to adjust your own behavior accordingly. It still takes a conscious effort to behave in culturally appropriate ways but you are much more aware of your behavior.
Unconscious Competence. You no longer have to think about what you’re doing in order to do the right thing. Culturally appropriate behavior is natural now.

Similarly, as our awareness of a culture develops so do our attitudes towards cultural differences. We move in phases from ethnocentrism (seeing your own culture as central to reality) to ethnorelativism (seeing your culture in the context of other cultures) as described by Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity.

The stages for ethnocentrism are denial, defense, and minimization. After that, ethnorelativism includes acceptance, adaptation, and integration:

Denial. Don’t really believe in cultural differences. People here tend to impose their own value system on others, knowing that they are “right” and that the other culture is “confused.”
Defense. People in defense start to realize that their value system might not actually be absolute and they aren’t happy about it. They accept that there are cultural differences but are threatened by it. Other cultures are seen as inferior to theirs.
Minimization. People in this stage are still threatened by differences (thus try to minimize them) but they don’t think other people are inferior or misguided. Instead, they don’t see cultural differences as significant or deep. They insist that we may be different on the outside but deep down we all share many of the same values and beliefs. Instead of denying or demonizing difference, they try to trivialize it.
Acceptance. Differences are accepted as deep and legitimate. They accept that there are other value systems and norms that are just as valid as their own. Some of these values might still be difficult to accept but they are no longer threatened by them. They are generally neutral about differences.
Adaptation. People here are positive about cultural differences and start to adopt the perspective of another culture. They are relaxed and authentic when interacting with the other culture. They become bicultural or multicultural and adjust their behavior to suit the people they are with.
Integration. People begin to incorporate values, beliefs, and perspectives of other cultures into their own identity.

Footnotes

As an example, when I was living with my first host family, I didn’t know how to eat with my hands. I watched them and tried to do the same. I wasn’t very good at it and all I could think about was their judgement about how childish I must look not even being able to feed myself. My host brothers kept showing me how to do it. Now, it’s completely natural and eating with a fork feels strange. ↩
For example, if you gave a Moroccan the OK sign, they would not interpret that as meaning OK. They would think you mean “zero” as in something is bad. Communication would be unsuccessful because you meant “the food is great” but the Moroccan thought you meant “the food sucks.” ↩
Cocktail parties? Collectivists associate strongly with a small group of people. They don’t value superficial contact with lots of people. Potlucks? Collectivists would take care of everyone and later expected to be taken care of. Everyone bringing their own thing signals independence and self-sufficiency. ↩
One of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with in Morocco. Nobody waits in line. ↩
You probably aren’t going to agree with all of these and every American is unique. These are just the overarching views that are evident from mass culture. See the above note on cultural vs. individual values. ↩
This manual was originally published in 1997 and reprinted in 2012 so these might be changing with advances in mental health and climate change awareness. ↩ ↩²
Men, if you’re standing next to a Moroccan man, expect to be held onto by the elbow, bicep, or hand. It’s completely normal here no matter how uncomfortable it feels. ↩

None Of This Is True

2024-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t normally venture into this genre but this Goodreads Choice Awards runner-up for Best Mystery and Thriller 2023 intrigued me. I’m glad it did because it was such a fun read. It was fast paced, creepy, and had me on the edge of my seat. I highly recommend this book to people who want an engaging read and are prepared for some difficult and heinous topics.

Favorite Quotes

“She was really very odd. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”

Roxy had once existed in three dimensions; there is no reason why she shouldn’t exist in three dimensions still, and no reason furthermore why those three dimensions should not be here, on Salusbury Road, inches from where she sits.

(minor) Spoilers Ahead

The central concept in this book is that a semi-famous podcaster is collecting elements of a documentary that she will unwittingly become the main topic of. Snippets of Netflix trailers, interviews, news reports, and podcast recordings from the documentary about the events currently taking place in the book are sprinkled in throughout the chapters, Inception-style. It’s kind of hard to explain but the recursive nature of the whole things was really fun to read.

This book was a real thriller and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. Some of the really creepy parts I mistakenly read at night made me look over my shoulder to make sure that Josie or anyone else weren’t spying on me. As things got weirder and creepier, I wanted to stop reading but just couldn’t look away.

The author’s writing style is very easy to read (besides a few British references that I didn’t get). It was vivid and conveyed emotions really well. There’s a wonderful quote where Jewell wants to show that Josie is excited and she does it with this long, rambling sentence:

Then she tries on one of the dresses that Alix chose for her, soft floral jersey with a V-neck, fitted to the knee, and she checks the price tag and sees that it is £49.99 and that she can afford it and then feels a shiver of excitement because the dress is exquisite and because it makes her look pretty and shapely and young and because it is not made of hard-wearing denim but of a soft, silky fabric that feels beautiful to touch, and she takes it off and then tries on another and another and another and all of them make her look like a woman she has never met before and would like to know better, and she takes all three dresses, both pieces of knitwear, and the red cotton blazer to the till and watches in breathless awe as all six items are rung through by one assistant while the other assistant wraps them in tissue and the total is £398.87 and that is more than Josie has ever spent in one go on anything ever in her life but the atmosphere feels celebratory, somehow, as if Alix and the sales assistants are all cheering her on, as if the purchase is an achievement of some kind, a reward, an award, a prize for good behavior

This was also the first time I’ve ever seen “I’d’ve,” or really any word with two apostrophes, written out:

“Oh, lucky you. I’d’ve loved a sister.”

Speaking of Josie, what a manipulative character. She manipulates and tries to control everyone in her life, the reader included. At first, I fell for her sob stories and felt bad for her. Some parts of her story started to fall through and I got really weirded out by her before hating her. By the end, I couldn’t decide what was true and what was lies and I don’t think she could tell either.

I was so curious about Erin, Josie’s daughter, the whole time. The only information we got was that she never leaves her room, it’s disgusting in there, and all she eats is baby food. The author, and presumably Josie, didn’t seem to care and just mentioned her in passing even though it was really strange. It caused a lot of suspense.

None Of This Is True was a snappy and engaging read that I really enjoyed reading. I’ll be dipping into the psychological thriller category more often.

A Love Letter to my Laptop

2024-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

This is my first ever time taking part in an IndieWeb carnival and this is my submission for February, hosted by Manuel Moreale. The topic this month is Digital Relationships.

Obviously, technology has greatly improved and enabled how we interact with other people in digital spaces. Instead, I wanted to write about my direct relationship with the digital world. Specifically, my laptop is my main tool and entry point to digital worlds, both public and private.

I purchased my laptop the summer before I started college in 2017 and it was a gift from my grandparents. My summer job didn’t quite give me enough money to buy the one that I really wanted. At the time, one of the best laptops on the market was the Dell XPS 15 9560 and that is what I got. It had many great reviews and I knew it would hold up to the heavy use of engineering school. It even had a touchscreen, fingerprint reader, and a better graphics card than my friend John’s who bought the same one the previous year. I remember opening the box to reveal its lightly textured, matte silver finish. It was the nicest physical thing I had ever owned up to that point, including my used Subaru Forester with the giant dent in the driver’s side door. I didn’t know it at the time but this laptop would become one of the most important tools of my life, right up to me writing about it right now.

For my first year of school, my laptop allowed me to complete assignments, check out books at the library, do career/school research, and entertain me when I was feeling anti-social (which was most of the time, admittedly). John and I would also play PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS and Call of Duty: Warzone at his townhouse. It would get hot to the touch as the small but mighty fans tried their best to cool it. But, it did everything I expected it to do. I had never really learned much about computers growing up besides how to use them to do the basics.

I really started using my laptop to its potential when I decided to learn Python on a whim during the winter break. At Oregon State, I had a whole month off and only a week of that was dedicated to going home to see family. I worked through the ubiquitous Automating the Boring Stuff book and learned how to install Python and how to write and run programs. There were times when I would get frustrated with my laptop, through no fault of its own. I now know that it usually isn’t a computer-problem when it does something unexpected. It’s usually a human-problem, as much as I hated to admit it.

As I progressed in my engineering school career, I threw more intensive programs at it. It plugged through thousands and thousands of mathematical calculations in MatLab during a Numerical Methods course. It spat out the homework answers after running a meticulously crafted Julia script. It slowly but surely calculated flow rates, pressures, and temperatures in Aspen, a chemical process modeling software. It opened up giant Excel spreadsheets with pages and pages of poorly labeled calculations that made sense when I typed them in but definitely didn’t now. My laptop enabled me to get so much rigorous learning done.

After graduating, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. It was during COVID, I was burnt out and mildly depressed, and had no direction. I had picked up a pretty strong interest in computing and programming at that point and I kept reading about needing to know Linux if you really want to upgrade your skills. So, having never done anything like it, I installed a completely new operating system on my laptop. I wanted to be able to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu 20.04, just in case Linux wasn’t for me. I was sweaty mess while installing it, as I wrote in April 2022:

If you want to install Ubuntu for yourself, avoid doing it on the only computer you have. It is absolutely terrifying when it inevitably doesn’t boot on the first try if it is your first time doing this sort of thing…installing it on your only job-searching/coding/working machine is not for the faint of heart.

I did that and was having a lot of fun learning more deeply about technology. My next interest turned to this whole data science and AI thing that was all the rage. I thought I’d try my hand at that so I went through a few Coursera courses and did all the work. My poor laptop would sit in my room for hours at a time, the fans whirring as fast as they could, while doing numerical calculations that should really only be reserved for servers dedicated to the task. But that was economically prohibitive at the time so I used what I had.

At the same time, I was doing a few other small projects on my laptop in the name of fun and learning. I built my own website (a wildly more complex version of this one), wrote some small programs for a local business, built a Discord bot that flung insults and pleasantries at my friends, started a newsletter with my friend Jacob, and estimated how profitable it would be to create a solar farm down the street.

Finally, in May of 2022, when I was really lost and at the peak of my depression, Peace Corps finally emailed me, extending an invite to be a volunteer in Morocco. This was The Big Thing I was waiting for. COVID ripped it out of my hands but the time had finally come. I wrote at the time that “I did a fist pump, had a small joyful cry on the porch, and accepted the position” but I now recognize that to be an understatement. I was bawling in the lawn hugging my dog Apollo because nobody was home to see me. The relief of finally having a purpose after so long without one was overwhelming.

Then, my laptop became a research machine. I googled everything there was to know about Morocco, Peace Corps, and youth development. There are also so many legal and medical tasks to complete before you actually get on the plane so I filled out all kinds of forms and appointment requests, too. I’m sure it was grateful for the lighter workload.

As I packed all my bags to go live in Morocco for the next 27 months, my laptop had a special padded slot in the backpack Jacob loaned me (yes, I’m going to return it). On December 12, 2022, my laptop’s first time on a plane and my third, we headed to Washington D.C. to start the next chapter of my life.

Now, my laptop continues to do so much for me. I have added stickers to the keycaps so that I can type out slideshows in Arabic for life skills lessons. It sits and listens as I type all my thoughts, feelings, difficult times, goals, and ideas into notes in its file system. It pushed through the Moroccan summer heat with me. It runs a Python script every Friday morning to generate a weather report for all the volunteers and new friends of mine in the country. I’m using it to collaborate with other volunteers and Peace Corps staff to empower women in Morocco through their own digital literacy. I share Moroccan culture and posts like this with tens of people on the internet through my website because of this laptop.

As I’m writing this, I can’t help but think maybe this relationship is strange. Maybe I have too much dependence on my devices and that I shouldn’t rely on technology so much. I shouldn’t be so materialistic or be so attached. But when you spend that much time during some of your most profound years with any one thing, living or otherwise, it is bound to become sentimental.

But, more than anything, I feel grateful for this little machine. I wouldn’t be where or who I am today without my laptop, this laptop. It opened up so many doors for me and continues to be a crucial tool for learning, creating, connecting, working, writing, and growing.

My Weekly Review Process

2024-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Inbox Processing
Getting Current
Upcoming
Wellbeing Check-in
Goals

One of the most important and valuable activities that I do consistently in my life is a weekly review. It allows me to regularly refocus and recenter all aspects of my life from the day-to-day all the way up to life trajectory. Having this review system/structure in place forces me to collect everything that accumulates during the week, reorganize, clear my plate, check-in with myself, and make sure I am headed in the direction I want to be.

My process was inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done weekly review checklist. Over time, I have adapted it to my own life and what I want out of it. The following checklist is the result and it takes me about an hour every Sunday morning.

Inbox Processing

Review open browser tabs

I’m one of those people that is prone to collecting and hoarding open browser tabs on my phone. They may be interesting articles that I want to read later, new books that have been recommended to me, or other random input items. By reviewing and closing them all each week, I make sure that nothing gets lost and I start the week with a blank slate.

For articles, I either read them right then and there or I put them into my “Read/Review” list to look at later. Lots of browser tabs fit into the “may or may not be useful to me” category. I’ll usually scan these and either just trash them or read later. For books that I’d like to read, I add them directly to my “Books to Read” list. I add quotes or other interesting tidbits to either my physical journal or my digital one.

Collect sticky notes

I always have a pad of sticky notes on my desk. These are great for quickly capturing little notes, ideas, or reminders. Again, I have a tendency of hoarding these instead of putting the thoughts into their proper places. During my review, I check if each sticky note is still applicable and, if it is, put it in its rightful spot depending on what the thought is.

Collect Google Keep notes

Google Keep is basically my digital sticky note pad. It serves the same purpose as my sticky notes but for when I am not at my desk.

Review pocket notebook

Another spot for writing down small thoughts, reminders, notes, or ideas. I carry a cheap little notebook in my pocket as well as a nice pen. This notebook is also where all of the new Arabic words I hear out in the wild go. Each week, I go through it and add new words to my flashcard deck and transfer everything else to their more permanent homes.

Clear Obsidian Inbox

I use Obsidian as my notes app. Usually, I put notes in their proper folders on creation but sometimes I need to think a little bit harder about where the note should go. The weekly review is the time to do it.

File or delete items in Downloads folder on desktop

Again, this is another place where “stuff” tends to pile up and get lost. I go through the folder file by file and either delete or properly file every item until the folder is empty.

Getting Current

Fill out brag document

Inspired by Julia Evans’ blog post, I write down all of my important accomplishments and activities I did in the previous week. I wrote in depth about this system.

Balance ledger

I use beancount to track where every dollar or dirham of mine comes from and goes. I usually send myself a WhatsApp message whenever I buy something that includes the price and what it was. I collect all of these messages and properly put them into my ledger each week. I also check the balances on all of my accounts and make sure they agree with my ledger. I wrote about this system in depth as well.

Backup files

I keep a local backup of all my important files on a hard drive, just in case my laptop dies (she is getting old). By doing this weekly, I will only ever lose a week’s worth of work, at most. This gives me such a huge boost to my piece of mind because I have a lot of important things on my computer.

Upcoming

Make new week in journal

I recently changed my task management setup and went back to my physical Moleskine notebook. I generally live life one week at a time. On one page is my calendar for the week that has all important time-bound tasks and activities on it. Things like birthdays, holidays, classes, or meetings go here. I also use each day space to track my habits and goals.

Evaluate and move tasks forward

The other side of my weekly planner is a big task list. No, there’s no further organization than that. The page is titled TASK LIST and each task is a bullet point. When it is done, I draw a big horizontal line through it. Obviously, I don’t complete every task every week and things need to be moved forward to the current week.

I go through each task and ask, “is doing this still important to me?” If so, I strike it out with an arrow at the end, and rewrite it in the new weekly page. If not, I strike it out with an X at the end to indicate that it was cancelled or abandoned. Writing out each task multiple times certainly isn’t efficient but it makes me think about whether everything on my task list is really something that I want to spend time and energy on.

Capture actions about preparations for any upcoming events (from calendar)

On the new weekly page, I look at my online calendar and transfer important tasks over to the journal.

Review Someday/Maybe lists. Check if today is someday.

I keep a big list of things I might like to do one day but I don’t want them cluttering up my to-do list. Things like ideas to write about, places to visit, tattoos to get, or other random ideas go here. I review this list each week to see what thing I’d like to work on if I have any leftover creative energy during the week to explore something new.

Wellbeing Check-in

Do a VSPIRE check-in

I was introduced to this framework by a previous Peace Corps Morocco staff member, Oumaima Elghazali. I’d like to write a more in-depth piece about this but the gist is that I see how I am doing on multiple wellbeing fronts: Vocationally, Spiritually, Physically, Intellectually, Relationally, and Emotionally.

I go through each pillar and rate myself on a subjective scale of 1-10 based on the previous week. I write a few sentences about why I chose that rating. Then I think of one or two actions that I can take to increase one element of my wellbeing. I highly recommend this activity to others. I’ve learned quite a lot about myself by doing this over several weeks.

Goals

Take a look at your Goals list and Personal Logic Model. For each shift:
- How is it going?
- Did you accomplish your Process goals? How come or why not?
- Are you making progress on your Outcome goals? How come or why not?
- Do any goals need to be adjusted?
Answer: Do any shifts need to be ended? Added?

This is another one I’d like to write more at length about. I have one large document for my current goals. It lists all of my shifts that I am currently undertaking. Shifts are medium to large changes that I’d like to make in my life. Each shift is supported by Process goals, Outcome goals, and/or Output goals.

Process goals are shorter term goals for how I am going to make progress on a particular shift. These usually include a phrase like “I will [do something some amount of times] every [time period].” Outcome goals are traditional SMART goals that support the larger shift.

By looking at my goals each week, I can see if I am moving towards or away from them and why. From this, I can make adjustments into the new week.

The Afternoon Slump

2024-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

It’s a typical, warm, sunny day around lunchtime. The streets are empty and even the banging of the men working on the mosque is gone. There aren’t any children kicking around a flaccid soccer ball in the street. The office store is closed so I can’t print out the paper that I need. There is only an eerie stillness where the normal hustle and bustle of town normally is.

This is a daily phenomenon in my town and in Morocco in general. People close up shop to pray and go have lunch with their families and loved ones. Nothing is open, not even the small hanuts that are available until nearly midnight every day. After people finish up lunch, they usually go to take a nap or do small tasks around the house. Things won’t open up again for a couple of hours.

This struck me as odd for the first couple of weeks. Don’t people want to just take their 30-minute prescribed lunch break and get back to work? Daily life basically taking a stop for a few hours a day goes against everything I have been taught. In American culture, we go to work for eight hours and only think about work for those eight hours. After that, we leave it completely behind (or at least try to) and move into our personal lives for the rest of the day. Napping is for the weak, you can sleep when you’re dead.

Then I got accustomed to the Moroccan concept of work. Rather than tying their job title and achievements to their identities, the average rural Moroccan views work more as a functional necessity. Work here is just income for doing things they want to do, namely caring for their families. Similarly, the line between personal and professional lives gets blurred. Instead of thinking of them as two separate boxes, there is inevitable overlap between the two. It is widely understood that personal/family matters take precedence over trying to schedule those matters around work. As such, stopping the workday to go spend a few hours with family is a no-brainer.

As I often allude to in my stories on this blog, lots of people use this afternoon slump to take a nap. Not only is midday napping a cultural phenomenon, it is also a religious one. In an article sent to me by RPCV Connie McClellan, Professor Ahmed S. BaHammam notes that sleep is an important topic in the Quran and the Hadith.¹ Not only did the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) give copious guidance on best sleeping practices for Muslims, he also specifically encouraged napping. While this isn’t a “visible” or primary reason for the afternoon slump, it certainly informs it.

Take a short nap, for Devils do not take naps
- Sahih Aljamie. Alalbani 1647

This afternoon time period looks much different based on the season. Right now, during the winter when it is cool during the day, it only lasts for a couple of hours. Most people just go home for a bit to pray and eat then head back outside to continue the rest of their day. During the summer when it is consistently over 100 °F, being inside during peak heat is a welcome respite. The stillness of the town lasts for much longer, usually until it is cool enough in the afternoon to (somewhat) comfortably be outside.

A general rule-of-thumb time for when things start moving again is the Asr call to prayer, currently at around 5 o’clock in the afternoon. After that, I can go see friends in town, go shopping, and get that paper printed.

Bahammam, Ahmed S. “Sleep from an Islamic perspective.” Annals of thoracic medicine vol. 6,4 (2011): 187-92. doi:10.4103/1817-1737.84771 ↩

Why and How to Keep Track of Your Accomplishments as a PCV

2023-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

What’s the Point?
How I Do It
Extensions

Among the myriad of career advice out there, one that I have adopted as a Peace Corps Volunteer is to keep a brag document. This is a single document that contains all of the projects, accomplishments, and impact you have done in a specific role. I have seen many spins on this in the software engineering/developer community but the definitive guide comes from Julia Evans’ blog post.

Usually, these brag documents focus on the business value that you create: What accomplishments did you achieve that helped grow the business? As Peace Corps Volunteers, our goal is a bit different so I tweaked this tool to fit my specific needs. It still contains all of my accomplishments and impact but doesn’t indicate how I raised the “bottom line.”

What’s the Point?

I am certain that I am not alone in that one question often comes through my mind during service: What in the hell am I doing here? Especially at the beginning of my service, I felt that I was taking so much more from the community than I was giving. I felt like a fraud that just happened to be lucky enough to get this opportunity.

It is so easy to downplay the value that you provide or forget all the things you are doing in the name of promoting world peace and friendship. That is where the brag document comes in. It is a list that reminds me of exactly what the hell it is that I am doing here.

It also helps for when people ask what you have been up to. I’ve had people reach out to ask about my service and what kinds of things I am doing. Like I said, it is easy to forget all the cool things you are doing, especially the small ones. It’s nice to be able to pull up a document and say “I’ve done this, this, and this.”

The other thing that I am expecting the brag document to do for me will happen at COS. It will be much easier to build a resume for whatever the next step is when I have all of my accomplishments and bullet points all in one spot, waiting to be copy-and-pasted in.

And don’t forget about that damn VRG. It makes life easier when you have all the numbers right there to punch in.

I’m not a huge fan of the term “brag” document but that is what the majority of The Internet calls it. Having a list of all of your accomplishments is simply a tool to help you during your service and shouldn’t serve any hubristic purposes. Maybe a better term would be “Accomplishments and Contributions Document for Self-Kindness and Reflection” but that doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

How I Do It

Each week, as part of a longer review session, I update my brag document. I ask myself what I achieved in the last seven days that I would like to write down. Then, I will list my contributions and the impact that I had for each item.

There are many ways to do this but I keep one text document in Obsidian that is split up into categories and projects. You could use a Word document, a spreadsheet, video, or anything else. The point is that you have all of your accomplishments and activities in one place. Formatting isn’t particularly important here.

Work Projects

I split my brag document into four main categories. The first category is the obvious one, Work Projects. Under this heading, I list all of my projects that contribute to the Peace Corps first, second, and third goals. Each project or activity is a heading and underneath each is a bulleted list of my contributions and the overall outcomes. These projects could include classes taught, trainings attended, or blog posts done as long as they all contribute to Peace Corps goals.

For example, my most recent completed activity was a blog post that contributed to the third goal. I put the name of the blog post as a heading and make a bulleted list underneath of what I contributed and the impact that it had:

### 2023-11-12 Posted [We're All Family, Strangers and All](https://westleywinks.com/peace-corps/we-are-all-family/) blog post

- Wrote 1,599 words about how Moroccans call each other (and me) a family title 
- Sent via email to X people and was visited Y times on my website

The same logic applies to any other work project, especially first goal activities. Just list the activity, your specific contributions, and an estimate of the impact (with numbers, if possible).

Committee Work

My second category is Committee Work which may or may not apply to you. This one is just a bulleted list, not broken into specific projects since most of them are ongoing with no clear ending. If there is a specific project with clear goals, I’ll make that a subheading and apply the same rules as above. Otherwise, I simply list the date and my specific contribution. I also note the more “fuzzy” stuff like writing meeting notes. As a partial personal example:

- 2023-11-16. Attended staj 103 swearing in. Took pictures, helped with interviews, and took videos of the event.
- 2023-10-29. Completed Halloween social media post.
...

Collaboration and Mentorship

The third category I have titled Collaboration and Mentorship. Again, this is just a simple bulleted list with a date and a contribution and an impact, if it makes sense. This is sort of a catch-all for things I do with other volunteers. Things like mentorship, times that I have helped with a training, my weekly weather report, safety warden activities, and blog posts like this one (i.e. those aimed at other volunteers) go into this category.

Outside of Work/Personal Development

Last is stuff that is Outside of Work/Personal Development. These are any other activities or projects that I have completed that aren’t necessarily related to Peace Corps. This is mostly my book notes and other blog posts. I’m also working on some career development things and some coding projects that I make note of. Basically, what would you say if someone asked you what you have been up to?

Extensions

This is just my system and how I developed it for what I need. You could add all kinds of categories as you see fit. One common thing that I have seen is to use it as a reflection tool. You can look at all the things you have done and use it to reflect on that work. What things might you want to change in the future? How could that project have gone better? Other ideas:

Add in things that you have learned
Copy down any praise or positive recognition you have received (I might actually implement this one, now that I am thinking about it)
Use it to set goals and see your progress towards them
Write down positive language encounters you have had to keep track of your language progress
Keep track of interesting experiences you’ve had, traditions you have participated in, or places you’ve traveled

This could also be a group activity. Maybe at your next training, you could get a small group together to list and celebrate each other’s accomplishments. You could also meet up with other volunteers every so often to update your documents together to stay accountable.

Good luck out there and let me know how it goes.

Upgrade

2023-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

Logan Ramsay is the son of the infamous Miriam Ramsay, the biologist who caused The Great Starvation with her genetically modified locusts. After getting out of prison for his connection to the crimes, he finds a job as an agent at the Gene Protection Agency. Him and his partner track down and capture rogue geneticists who are messing with DNA for nefarious purposes.

In one raid, he gets exposed to a biological weapon and is subsequently quarantined. He makes a full recovery with no obvious tinkering done to his genetic code. That is until he starts feeling growing pains, can memorize anything he reads, and has an IQ well above what can be tested for.

Logan is the first domino to fall in a much larger plan orchestrated by his dead mother. The plan to advance the evolution of the human species.

Favorite Quotes

There was a thin line of calligraphy below the photograph: It’s okay to be who you are in this moment.

The only sound was the icy wind rattling the last leaves on the branches above us—skeletons of once green things.

“Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.”

Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

And I was struck, again, as an outside observer, by how much the members of our species needed one another. All these people out in the cold rain. To laugh and drink. To talk about nothing. It was almost as if that need for connection and touch was our…their…lifeblood.

The urge to wall myself off from the ache is acute. But I want to feel it. If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy—those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.

Spoilers Ahead

Characters - 4/10

The characters were kind of forgettable. Across his novels, I think Crouch relies heavily on the plot and setting and doesn’t put much work into the character development as I would like. I appreciated Logan’s integrity and drive to always do the right thing. Kara thought she was doing something good but in the end wasn’t the right thing to do. Same thing with their mother.

That said, they fit the same character archetypes from beginning to end and didn’t go through any real transformation or development even though their brains and bodies changed significantly. They could have been replaced by anybody and I wouldn’t have particularly cared. I would have liked to know more about Logan’s internal struggle, having been transformed and unable to go back to his family but knowing they are out there continuing on without him. The fate of the world rested on his shoulders. Instead, he uses his new cognitive functions to push down the emotions and that’s about all we get.

Atmosphere - 9/10

I enjoyed this future dystopian world. It is beat-up and bruised from climate disaster and genetic tweaking but it is still recognizable. I like how Crouch describes the futuristic setting by casually putting it into the dialogue rather than explicitly tell me what is going on. For example, Crouch subtly mentions how quick it is between major cities by taking “the loop”, a nationwide train system. He casually mentions getting into the “Google Roadster coupe” and stopping at a “charge station” to suggest that vehicles in this future are all electric and the infrastructure is there to support it. Major cities are only accessible by boat because of flooding. It is a nice way of letting us know that a lot has gone on and you are discovering the world piece by piece when it is relevant rather than just getting it all in at the top.

This world felt very real because it isn’t too far of a stretch from a potential near-future in our world. The world in the book experienced catastrophe in the form of climate crisis and unforeseen consequences as a result of genetic modification. We are currently seeing the effects of climate crisis and genetic modification via CRISPR has been a thing for a while and is making advances every day.¹

Writing Style - 8/10

After now reading three of Crouch’s novels, his writing style is very familiar to me. It is punchy and to-the-point without being too unrealistic or “quippy.” This book in particular had a lot of specific gene codes that were written out and accurate which I appreciated. He also uses numbers quite often to remind us of the mental capabilities that Logan has once he is upgraded (almost exhaustingly so).

I am glad that this was written in the first-person point of view (whereas Recursion was written in the third) because Logan was the only person in the world that could have stopped his sister and his mother’s plans. He was one of two people that were upgraded and I enjoyed seeing it solely from his perspective.

Plot - 7/10

This was a familiar plot line but had some twists to make it less predictable. The beginning was strong in pulling me in and providing context for Logan and the world in general. The resolution was a bit underwhelming, even with the James Bond-esque escape sequence.

The ending was lovely. It has a lesson in it that I completely agree with: we need more compassion in the world. While I’m not really sure where compassion falls on the nature versus nurture scale, it is irrefutable that more compassion and love would make the world a better place. Sometimes (most of the time, I’d actually argue) it isn’t best to simply reduce people down to numbers like GDP, poverty rate, or churn rate. It dehumanizes and only serves to devalue the real struggling endured by real people.

One child dies in a well, the world watches and weeps. But as the number of victims increases, our compassion tends to diminish. At the highest number of casualties—wars, tsunamis, acts of terror—the dead become faceless statistics. They call this compassion fade, but in reality, it’s our genetic inheritance—old adaptations from our ancestors persisting in our DNA.

Intrigue - 6/10

This one wasn’t as intriguing for me as Crouch’s other novels, and I’m not really quite sure why. At times, it was tough to pick the book back up whereas I blew through Recursion in a few days. I don’t think the premise was as interesting and I wasn’t as invested in seeing what was going to happen. The plot was more predictable and the logic often pulled me out of the story.

Logic - 4/10

For some reason, this book didn’t feel as “real” as Dark Matter or Recursion by the same author even though those stories had time and interdimensional travel. I wasn’t as convinced that the science fiction parts of Upgrade could actually happen.

For one, I really didn’t like that they could instantly remember every single memory in their lives. The idea that memories get stored in some hidden place in our brains and aren’t immediately garbage collected while we sleep seemed too far-fetched. I, of course, am not a neurosurgeon but the logic isn’t there especially when there is no explanation as to how it works.

I didn’t buy the physical transformation of the upgrade. Could a muscle really grow that fast or a bone gain that much density that quickly? Maybe it could but Crouch didn’t convince me.

The dodging bullets part also seemed too far out there. I did the napkin math for a particular scene. Logan was aiming at Kara’s thigh from ten feet away. With my assumptions that the bullet moves at 1,200 feet per second (referenced in the book), her thigh is six inches wide, and air resistance is insignificant, her thigh would have to move laterally at about 30 miles per hour. Maybe a little slower if she started moving before the bullet was fired by detecting when Logan was going to pull the trigger. I understand that she was upgraded and could slow her perception of time but I don’t buy that a leg could physically move that fast.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it and need to just have some fun.

I understand logically that these bits that define the science fiction genre couldn’t really happen. My point is that I need to be convinced that they could to really get sucked into it. I totally bought that a human could communicate with an alien in Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I believed that we could go back in time via our memories in Recursion. This book just didn’t sell the premise to me.

Enjoyment - 6/10

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book. Would I recommend it to others? Not unless they have already read Crouch’s other books. That said, it was still an interesting read and I am glad that I did try it out.

This article about CRISPR advancements came up the day after I wrote this sentence. ↩

We're All Family, Strangers and All

2023-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

One of my favorite things about Moroccan culture is the tendency to call people your family, even if they are complete strangers. If you go to any market or souq and ask for a price, they’ll tell you “180 khoya” (my brother). Jump on the train and an older lady will ask her wldi (my son) to help her lift her luggage into the upper storage compartment.

It is incredibly comforting and never fails to give me a sense of belonging. It reminds me that we are all human and we are all connected in one way or another. It reminds me that I am always surrounded by people who will treat me with the care and respect they show their family members.

What follows are three short stories of times when I was endearingly called someone’s brother, son, or uncle.

nta khuna

I eat too much msmen. It is easily one of my favorite Moroccan foods and I eat it just about every other day. It is a flatbread that is made by flattening out the dough with lots of oil until it is see-through thin, folding it up to create layers, then frying on a hot griddle. The women that make it regularly make it look way easier than it is. Then, it is a blank slate to put whatever you like on it (I prefer them with cheese and olive oil).

When I arrived to my final site, one of my first priorities was to find a reliable msmen dealer to satisfy my cravings. I found some women near my house that open their doors and turn on their griddles at around 6 o’clock every night. They are very kind (and will get their own dedicated blog post one of these days) and I go there a few times a week to chat with them and, of course, get my msmen to take home with me.

On this particular occasion, I showed up late. The woman making the msmen was getting the last of some delicious filling out of a container and plopping it inside some spread out dough. It is a mixture of meat, onions, and spices that get folded into the msmen and it is my absolute favorite. They were all gone and so I asked for the usual; two plain ones, please.

wesh baqi shi msmen 3mmr? (Is there any filled msmen left?)
La, mabqash (No, there’s none left)
Safi, array juj khawin 3fak (Ok, give me two plain ones then please)

Another woman, Farah, heard the exchange and came out from the back to say hello and add some other sweets to the front display. She pulled out two hidden pieces of filled msmen, one for her and one for the woman actually cooking them. She ripped hers in half and handed it to me. I, of course, didn’t want to impose and declined. They, of course, kindly insisted that I just eat the damn thing if I wanted some. I said no again and they started wrapping up the half msmen to take with me anyways.

Can’t argue with that. I took it and it tasted incredible. It was spicy and savory, perfect for how cold it was that night. As Farah finished setting up the front display, she turned to go back to the back room. Just before she disappeared, she yelled over her shoulder, “kul, nta khuna” (eat, you’re our brother).

I stood there eating my filled msmen until the others were done and I went home with a (half) full belly and a full feeling of connectedness with my community.

bsaha U Raha wldi

Friday is a special day in Islamic culture. It is the day of the week when people congregate and pray together. It is even apparent in the language where the word for “Friday” and the word for “mosque” and the word for “gather” all share the same root¹. A common greeting for the day is jm3a mubarka meaning blessed or happy Friday.

It is also, importantly, when couscous gets served. The men get home from the mosque about 30 minutes after the dhuhr call to prayer, around 1:30 in the afternoon. Families come together and eat from the same pile of couscous, vegetables, and meat until everyone is full and ready to take a nap. I go to my host family’s home every Friday to take part.

Last week, I went over unannounced (as is customary) and sat down to watch the news and draw something with my host sister’s toddler, Khadija. The women were in the kitchen preparing the couscous, dumping it into the serving platter and topping it with all the fixings. After my host father came home from the mosque, we got to work. As we ate, we talked and made jokes. We talked about the ongoing wars in the world, we talked about my host sister Maryem’s studies, and we laughed at how big of a mess Khadija made by flinging couscous everywhere.

The table was cleared and one-by-one, my host family members went to either take a nap or go about their day. The last ones were me and my host mother. I got up to leave and said thank you and that I’d see them later. My host mother said, “bsaha u raha wldi” (to your health and comfort, my son) and I gave her “Lah y3tik saha” (Allah give you health) in response and went home to take my well-deserved afternoon nap.

3fak Khali, Shi dirham?

At the end of the holy month of Ramadan, there is a holiday to mark the ending of a whole lunar cycle of fasting, giving, and worshipping Allah. Families travel from all over to eat and see family that they don’t normally get to see throughout the year. It is also a time for generosity. Before you can break your fast the morning after Ramadan, you have to give a donation to someone in need or a charitable organization (this donation/almsgiving is called zakat). Little kids are also given small gifts and money. The kids accept it as a cultural tradition and they are not shy to ask.

I was leaving my home to go for a walk, a bit later at night than normal. Because of the fasting, everyone’s schedules are off-kilter and people are up later than normal anyways. The group of neighborhood kids were outside kicking a football around and having fun. I didn’t get far before I heard one of them running up behind me yelling “khali, khali!” (my uncle and, more specifically, my maternal uncle)

I turned to see what he wanted. “3fak khali, shi dirham?” (please, my uncle, do you have a dirham?) I counted how many kids there were in the group and gave the kid one dirham for each, making sure to remind him to distribute it among his friends. They got excited and immediately ran to the little store to spend their hard-earned money.

In my last post, I mentioned how “I often feel like Morocco is just one big family.” That rings true in the face of adversity and just in everyday life here. I’m reminded that I belong nearly every day, even on the days when I don’t necessarily feel like it.

You might have also noticed that in all of these cases, people always add a possessive “my” to the title. It adds some authenticity, like they are proud of the fact that you are their family member. They don’t shy away from it. Sometimes in the US, men call each other “my brotha” but the intended meaning is “my friend.” I’m not usually convinced that these people will actually treat me like their brother and my best friends who do actually treat me like their brother would never call me their “brotha.”

Religious texts in Islam make the point clear that all people are equal, coming from the same creator and descending from the same parents. The Prophet was reported as saying, “I bear witness that all human beings are brothers and sisters to each other.” The Qur’an² also supports this by reminding mankind that all people are one, independent of linguistic, national, or racial identity. The only dividing line is moral excellence.

O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may get to know one another. Surely the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous among you. (49.13)

And while Moroccans call nearly everyone their brother or aunt or child, it doesn’t ever lose its genuineness or power. I still feel valued and connected to those that call me their family. It fills me with a sense of belonging, like I’m actually part of their family. I feel thankful and honored to be considered a brother in a place so far from home.

mosque = jam3 (جامع)
Friday = jm3a (جمعة)
association = jm3iya (جمعية)
univerisity = jami3a (جامعة)
commune = jma3a (جماعة)

To the dismay of Arabic learners everywhere, these words and others like university, association, commune, etc. all sound similar to the untrained ear, differing by just a vowel or two: ↩
I am using the translation by Dr. Mustafa Khattab in the Clear Quran ↩

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

2023-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

Sam didn’t have the easiest or most typical childhood. Growing up as half-Korean in Koreatown, he never felt like he fit in. He wasn’t social and had trouble making connections with other people. That is until he connects with a girl at the hospital that he is recovering at. Luckily, the game room had a Nintendo and Sam and Sadie both love video games. They are both at the hospital often (Sam recovering from a car accident and Sadie supporting her sister) and become best friends who connect on their deep love of gaming.

While Sam is attending Harvard and Sadie is attending MIT, they coincidentally meet in a subway after not talking for years after a falling-out. Neither are particularly content with their potential futures after college and decide to reconnect. Again, they connect with games but this time instead of just playing games together, they go all in on creating one. They work relentlessly and, with Sadie’s coding prowess and their friend Marx’s house, they finish building their game. It is a wild success and a company is formed.

The trio goes through the ups and downs, the successes and failures that come with running a gaming company. They become blinded by fame and appearances at times while also dealing with personal challenges and shortcomings. All the while, Sam and Sadie tell their unique stories through the video games that they make together, chasing that old feeling of those days of gaming together at the hospital.

Favorite Quotes

He had tangled curly black hair, a puggish nose, glasses, a cartoonishly round head. In Sadie’s art class at school, she had been taught to draw by breaking things down into basic shapes. To depict this boy, she would have needed mainly circles.

“Her parents can buy her anything she wants. Why would she want some dumb thing I drew on the back of an envelope?” Sam said.
“I suppose,” Dong Hyun said, “because her parents can buy her anything she wants.”

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?

Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

Spoilers Ahead

Characters - 7/10

I enjoyed the long story and arc of each main character. I feel like I am part of the group because I have watched everyone’s hardships, both communal and personal. Each main character was unique in their strengths and flaws. Because the story spanned such a long time, the growth in each character was present and vivid.

Sadie went from an ambitious young woman dedicated to her work to a normal middle-aged mom who recognized that that period of her life was over. She struggled with depression and bad relationships but seemed content with her life after everything. Sam went from a private and closed-off individual to someone who outwardly cared deeply about those around him. He became more comfortable and confident with cards of life that he was dealt. While Marx was a bit of a wild child, he eventually settled down and remained thoughtful and gave so much to people around him, especially Sam.

Speaking of Marx, he is such a lovely supporting character. He, of course, has his flaws but is overwhelmingly generous and selfless. This contrasts Sadie and Sam who are usually focused on their fame, their side of the story, their game, etc.

I really liked the platonic relationship between Sam and Sadie. They love each other so deeply and it is such a unique relationship. They connected based on their shared love of gaming and while they don’t always get along, they managed to build a gaming company and release games that were meaningful to them. This love of gaming is what kept them together and maintained the unique love between them.

The secondary characters, while fairly interesting, didn’t really add much. Sam’s grandparents were a nice light of wisdom in the lives of Sam and Sadie. The rest were mostly just there for filler material.

Atmosphere - 4/10

The setting for this book was very normal; college campuses, office buildings, people’s houses, etc. Each location felt familiar and I could picture myself in them. There wasn’t much to note.

I didn’t feel like I was in the story with them. I felt like an outside observer, like I was watching the story on TV instead of being sucked into the story and being emotionally engaged.

Writing Style - 5/10

I enjoyed the tone of the writing. It was relaxing, familiar, and comfortable. I liked how the characters used actual technical language that they would use in the gaming industry without dumbing it down. Overall, the writing style was very natural, flowed nicely, and was easy to read.

There is one admittedly minor thing that I couldn’t get over. On multiple occasions, Zevin uses long lists where she basically says the same thing over and over to convey one idea without really pushing the story forward. For some reason, it pulled me right out of the book and made me not want to continue reading. If it happened one or two times, fine. I wouldn’t even be talking about it. But it came up enough to be of note.

She donated her winter coats to Goodwill, and she started wearing floppy hats and maxi dresses. She went to flea markets with Zoe, and they shopped for vintage vinyl and long necklaces and artisanal pottery. She burned incense and gave up caffeine. She grew her hair long, down to her waist, and parted it in the middle. She started doing Pilates, and she threw Dov’s handcuffs into the sea. She dated—a scruffily handsome guy in an indie rock band, a scruffily handsome actor who was mainly known for indie films, a scruffily handsome tech guy who had sold his dot-com to a bigger dot-com. She threw elaborate dinner parties and prided herself on knowing the new bands before anyone else did. She bought a used VW bug the color of the California sky. She had brunch with her family every Sunday. She woke early, slept very little, and routinely worked eighteen-hour days.

Plot - 6/10

The plot flowed very nicely. There was a clear plot and its trajectory had a clear path. It was pretty predictable, though. It was the normal story of some young ambitious people with profound skills working themselves into the ground to get their project off the ground. They get noticed and become famous so they start a business. Then they start to divide and fight because they have opposing views. It was still entertaining with some new bits thrown in that made it less monotonous.

The book resolved nicely. It felt like watching the last episode of Friends. Sam and Sadie are in their thirties and both got over Marx’s death and all of their hardships. I am glad they made up and are able to move forward with their lives, probably apart but possibly together.

The subplots were fine but I don’t think they added much to the overall story. They helped build some character narratives and gave me an understanding of the more general context of the world.

Intrigue - 3/10

This book felt like a slog. I almost didn’t finish it. Maybe I am used to more intriguing books or maybe I just didn’t get it but this felt so boring to me. Even so, I pushed through to the end. Each time I closed the book, I wasn’t really looking forward to the next time I was going to open up it back up.

Logic - 9/10

Nothing of note here. Like I said, everything felt familiar and comfortable. I appreciated that the technical jargon of software development was accurate and the technology was fitting for the times they were in.

Enjoyment - 3/10

This book was not for me. It felt very underwhelming and I didn’t really get much out of it. I like to be sucked in and want to really engage my emotions when reading a book, and this one just didn’t do that. To continue with the analogy, it was like watching Friends but without the jokes. I wouldn’t recommend this.

Self-Compassion

2023-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Why Self-Compassion?
Three Doors of Self-Compassion
Emotional Resilience
Self-Esteem
Motivation and Personal Growth
Compassion for Others
- Romantic Relationships
Openness
Self Appreciation

Why Self-Compassion?

Self-compassion is the antidote to the harmful self-judgement and self-criticism that we all fall back on. We tend to compare ourselves with others and think about how we should be better.

The Lake Wobegon effect is used to describe the tendency for people to think of themselves as superior to others in desirable personality traits. The character traits that people self-enhance are those valued by their culture. For example, Americans think that they are more independent and self-reliant than the average American because that is valued in American culture. On the other hand, Asians tend to think that they are more cooperative and self-sacrificing than their peers. Not only do we self-enhance but we actually use downward social comparison to see others negatively so that we feel superior by contrast. It is common to look for flaws in others so that we can feel better about ourselves.

We even do this to ourselves. We are often even harsher on ourselves because our critical self-talk is an internal monologue with no social consequences. Furthermore, we criticize ourselves in front of others to try and say “I’m going to beat you to the punch and criticize myself before you can. I recognize how flawed and imperfect I am so you don’t have to cut me down and tell me what I already know. Hopefully you will then have sympathy for me instead of judging me and assure me that I’m not as bad as I think I am.”

Culture and our upbringing plays a role into how we criticize ourselves. Individuals that grow up with highly critical parents are more likely to be critical toward themselves as adults. American culture emphasizes independence and individual achievement so people start believing that when they don’t reach their ideal goals, they feel that they only have themselves to blame. We think that self-criticism will prevent future mistakes or blunt the force of others’ criticism.

A verbal assault doesn’t have quite the same power when it merely repeats what you’ve already said to yourself.

We use harsh self-criticism to try and gain some control in our lives. We learn that self-control is possible and all we need to do is not fail. We learn that failure is an option box that doesn’t need to be checked and that falling short of perfection is something that can and should be avoided. We also use harsh self-criticism to punish ourselves when we inevitably make a mistake.

By taking the perspective of the one holding the whip as well as the one quivering on the ground, we are able to indulge in feelings of righteous indignation toward our own inadequacies. And righteous indignation feels pretty good.
“At least I’m smart enough to see how stupid that comment I just made was.”
“Yes, I did treat that person in an unforgivably bad way, but I’m so just and fair that I will now punish myself without mercy.”

Self-verification theory¹ asserts that people want to be known by others according to their firmly held beliefs and feelings about themselves as a way to add stability to their lives. When we harshly criticize ourselves, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, when we truly believe that we suck, we do things that suck so that we are known by others that we suck.

Self-criticism is a form of self-care and a natural but unhelpful way to keep ourselves safe and on track. The way to counteract harsh self-criticism is to understand it, have compassion for it, and replace it with a kinder response. A response that you would give to a dear friend going through the same thing. With self-compassion, we can provide the security and self-care that we need. We can recognize that imperfection is part of being human, that we are all as flawed and vulnerable as the next person. We can let go of the need to feel better than others and connect more deeply with our fellow humans.

Three Doors of Self-Compassion

Self-compassion has three parts that must be practiced to become truly self-compassionate:

Being gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than being harshly critical and judgmental with self-kindness.
Feeling connected with others in life rather than isolated and alienated by recognizing our common humanity.
Holding our experience in balanced awareness rather than ignoring or exaggerating our pain through mindfulness.

The beauty of using self-compassion as a tool for dealing with difficult emotions is that it has three distinct doorways in. Whenever you notice you are in pain, you have three potential courses of action. You can give yourself kindness and care. You can remind yourself that encountering pain is part of the shared human experience. You can hold your thoughts and emotions in mindful awareness.

Self-Kindness

Our first response to others who are suffering is to be kind and compassionate to their struggles. Our first response to our own suffering and failure is to “hit ourselves over the head with a club” rather than “put a supportive arm around or own shoulder.” There is an idea in our culture that we should be stoic and silent toward our own suffering. This turns into constant self-judgment and disparaging internal commentary. Self-kindness is stopping this internal monologue and understanding our shortcomings and failures instead of condemning them. It also means comforting ourselves and responding to our own needs how we would respond to a good friend who is in need.

It means we allow ourselves to be emotionally moved by our own pain, stopping to say, “This is really difficult right now. How can I care for and comfort myself in this moment?”

One of the most important ways we can be kind to ourselves is changing our critical self-talk. In Nonviolent Communication, Rosenberg stresses the importance of using sympathetic language rather than judgmental language when we talk to ourselves. He emphasizes that we should reframe our internal dialogue to express empathy for our human needs. We can either respond to our inevitable human imperfection with kindness and care or with judgment and criticism. What qualities of heart and mind do we want to encourage in ourselves?

When we develop the habit of self-kindness, suffering becomes an opportunity to experience love and tenderness from within.

Common Humanity

And what is “normal” anyway? … Being human is not about being any one particular way; it is about being as life creates you–with your own particular strengths and weaknesses, gifts and challenges, quirks and oddities.

Self-compassion is separate from mere self-acceptance or self-love by recognizing the interconnected nature of our lives. We remember that feelings of inadequacy and disappointment are shared by everyone. It is easy to fall into the trap of feeling isolated by our own feelings of insufficiency and insecurity. When we self-loath, we feel like the rest of humanity doesn’t exist. It is important to remind ourselves of our inherent interconnectedness so that moments of failure become moments of togetherness rather than of isolation.

Recognizing common humanity does not mean comparing ourselves with other humans. A consequence of social comparison is distance between ourselves and others whose success makes us feel bad about ourselves.

Common humanity means the shared experience that all humans go through. When we identify or relate to only subsets of people rather than the entire human race, we create divisions between us. This is the foundation of discrimination and racism. People see other groups as inferior as a way to provide themselves with a sense of pride and righteous superiority for identifying with their own group.

When our sense of self-worth and belonging is grounded in simply being human, we can’t be rejected or cast out by others. Our humanity can never be taken away from us, no matter how far we fall. The very fact that we are imperfect affirms that we are card-carrying members of the human race and are therefore always, automatically, connected to the whole.

Perfectionists inevitably become disappointed by their unrealistic expectations they set when trying to do things without error. It is good to set high standards for yourself and have determination to do your best but when your entire self-worth is based on being perfect and not making mistakes it becomes counterproductive. Failure is necessary for us to learn and grow as people. Imperfection is a great learning opportunity.

Yes, failure is frustrating. But it’s also temporary and eventually yields wisdom. We can think of failure as part of life’s apprenticeship.

It makes no sense to harshly blame ourselves any more than it does to blame a hurricane. A hurricane is a phenomenon that happens when the right set of conditions (air pressure, temperature, humidity, etc.) meet. Similarly, we are also phenomena that are here as a result of a set of interacting conditions (family, culture, social history, etc.). Without these conditions, we wouldn’t act or feel like we do. This is known as interbeing.

There is a difference between judgment and discriminating wisdom. Discriminating wisdom recognizes when things are harmful or unjust while also recognizing the conditions that lead to situations of harm or injustice in the first place. Judgment means putting people into boxes with simple labels like “good” or “bad”. Discriminating wisdom acknowledges the complexity of how life has unfolded in such a way to cause something to happen and allows for the possibility that with a new set of conditions, things may go differently.

Mindfulness

Being mindful means clearly seeing and nonjudgmentally accepting what is happening in the present moment. It is seeing things as they are, no more and no less, to be able to respond compassionately.

When we inevitably fall short of our ideals, we tend to focus on the failure itself rather than the pain caused by the failure. Our entire attention is on our perceived flaws and we don’t have the perspective to recognize the suffering caused by our feelings of imperfection. We immediately go into problem-solving mode to try and fix the problem. Instead, take a minute to breath, acknowledge that this is a moment of suffering, and recognize that our pain is deserving of a kind response.

We risk getting burned out, exhausted, and overwhelmed, because we’re spending all our energy trying to fix external problems without remembering to refresh ourselves internally.

We also tend to engage in a process called overidentification. This happens when our sense of self is so wrapped up in our emotional reactions that our entire reality is consumed by them. Instead of stepping back and objectively observing what is happening, we get lost in the emotional response. What we are thinking or feeling becomes our perception of reality. For example, you are giving a public speech and are worried people will judge you. Rather than noticing that you are nervous about the speech (actual reality), you instead believe that people will boo you off the stage or laugh at you (false reality).

The past doesn’t exist except in our memories, and the future doesn’t exist except in our imagination. Rather than being lost in our train of thought, therefore, we can take a step back and say–ahh, this is what I’m thinking, feeling, and experiencing right now.

Mindfulness can be a form of meta-awareness, an awareness of awareness. Instead of feeling anger, you become aware that you are feeling anger. You are thinking about what you are going to say in your speech and you are aware that you are thinking about what you are going to say. It allows us to take the role of an objective observer of our own awareness. It is also important to distinguish between awareness itself and the contents of awareness:

Imagine a red cardinal bird flying across a clear blue sky. The bird represents a particular thought or emotion we’re experiencing, and the sky represents mindfulness, which holds the thought or emotion. The bird might start doing crazy loops, take a nose dive, land on a tree branch, whatever, but the sky is still there, unperturbed. When we identify with the sky rather than with the bird, or in other words, when our attention rests in awareness itself, rather than the particular thought or emotion arising within that awareness, we can stay calm and centered. This is important, because when we are mindful, we find our resting place—our seat, as it’s sometimes called. Rather than having our sense of self caught up in and carried away by the contents of awareness, our sense of self remains centered in awareness itself. We can notice what is happening—an angry thought, a fear, a throbbing sensation in our temple—without falling into the trap of thinking that we are defined by this anger, fear, or pain. We can’t be defined by what we are thinking and feeling when our consciousness is aware that we are thinking and feeling: otherwise, who is it that is being aware of our thoughts and feelings?

Mindfulness allows us to respond rather than react. It provides a gap between a stimulus and an action.² We are able to recognize what we are feeling without letting those feelings immediately propel us into action. We can use that gap to question if we really want to take the action we are thinking about taking. We often react to our shortcomings with self-criticism but mindfulness allows us to take a step back and respond to our suffering with kindness.

Suffering is caused by comparing our reality to our ideals. When reality doesn’t match up to our desires (most of the time it doesn’t), we suffer. The key to happiness is understanding that suffering is caused by resisting pain.³ Our suffering is caused by wanting things to be different than they are. The more we resist what is happening right now, the more we suffer.

Counterintuitively, we can’t control which emotions and feelings come into our awareness. We can’t make negative thoughts and feelings go away but we can control how we relate and respond to them. We make things worse when we judge ourselves for having a particular negative thought. We tend to think to ourselves, “What a horrible person I am for having that thought” rather than a more mindful “These are the thoughts and emotions that are arising in my conscious awareness in the present moment.” We don’t need to criticize ourselves for these emotions because they are out of our control. All we need to do is let them go and dissipate on their own.

Emotional Resilience

The experience of depression and anxiety imply feelings of self-criticism and feelings of inadequacy. When we don’t feel equipped to handle the challenges life gives us, we tend to shut down emotionally and all we see is the bad. We also have a negativity bias where we take positives for granted and ruminate on the negatives. When we ruminate about the past, we experience depression and ruminating on the future causes anxiety. It is important to not judge yourself for ruminating on negative thoughts. While counterproductive, it just comes from your desire to feel safe.

One way to acknowledge and relate to our negative emotions is to become aware of their physical manifestations and harness the mind/body connection. It is much easier to stay present by focusing on what our body is doing rather than focusing on what is causing the negative thoughts. We can reduce our negativity bias and rumination by being kind to ourselves and remembering our inherent interconnectedness.

It is important to note that while self-compassion can help us lessen the hold of negative emotions, it does not push negative emotions away. Again, resisting the negative only makes it worse. We can’t actually suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions and trying to will only make them more intrusive.⁴ People with more self-compassion are less likely to suppress unwanted thoughts than those who are less self-compassionate. Instead of replacing negative feelings with positive ones, new positive emotions are generated by embracing the negative ones.

Self-compassion is a form of emotional intelligence and those that are more self-compassionate are better able to maintain emotional equanimity. They are better able to deal with the challenges life throws at them by being more willing to feel painful emotions and hold them with compassion.

People are often afraid of being compassionate towards themselves. They believe that if they don’t use self-criticism as a way of addressing personal shortcomings, they will become weak or rejected. They go through stages of self-compassion. First is “backdraft” where they become angry and negative when they first try to be more compassionate with themselves. Their identity is so wrapped up in self-criticism that they feel like their sense of self is being attacked. The second stage is “infatuation”. They become really enthusiastic about self-compassion practice as a way of blocking out their negative emotions. The last stage happens when the infatuation starts to fade and they realize that self-compassion isn’t a silver bullet that eradicates negative thoughts. Since self-compassion embraces negative emotions with kindness, the bad feelings often get worse before they get better.

Self-Esteem

In other words, high self-esteem isn’t associated with being a better person, just with thinking you are.

Self-esteem is an evaluation of our worthiness and a sort of judgment that we are good and valuable people. It is a product of perceived competence in domains of importance.⁵ We only care if we are good at things that we value. So, one way to raise our self-esteem is to value the things that we are good at and devalue the things we are bad at. For example, if I am bad at writing, I may tell myself that writing is for nerds and it’s a useless skill anyway. The trap here is that we may undercut the importance of learning valuable skills just because it makes us feel better about ourselves. The other approach is to increase our competence in areas that we deem important. The problem with this is we may prioritize things that aren’t actually important and striving to improve is counterproductive. I might decide that a relationship is important and do everything I can to improve it while the other person couldn’t care less. This just leads to feeling frustrated and dejected where downplaying the importance of that relationship may have been a better move.

Another source of self-esteem is from the “looking glass self”⁶, our perception of how we are perceived by others. If we believe that others judge us positively, we will feel good about ourselves and vice versa. We give a lot of weight to what others think of us, especially the nameless, faceless people in our second order relationships because we think they are more objective than our close friends.

Self-esteem isn’t bad in and of itself. However, there are healthy and unhealthy pathways to self-esteem. Getting self-esteem from a supportive family or from working hard to achieve highly valued goals is healthy. Putting others down to inflate your ego is not.

When our sense of self-esteem depends on success or failure, approval or disapproval, it becomes contingent self-worth. These areas of contingency can be personal attractiveness, peer approval, work success, competition with others, etc. The more your overall sense of self-worth is dependent on success in a particular life area, the more it hurts when you fail in those areas. Contingent self-esteem becomes addictive because we want to keep chasing the compliments or approval from others. It becomes a hedonic treadmill where we have to continually work harder just to stay in the same place.

Once we start basing our self-esteem purely on our performance, our greatest joys in life can start to seem like so much hard work, our pleasure morphing into pain.

We are prone to falling into the trap of confusing the map for the territory. Our thoughts and evaluations of ourselves can easily become confused with who we truly are. In reality, we are in a constant state of change. Sometimes we display good qualities and sometimes we choose bad behaviors. Our actions change all the time and one action doesn’t define us. We often forget this and try to capture self-esteem so that we can put ourselves in a box labeled as “good.” We try and flatten our complex experience into simplistic evaluations of self-worth.

Our successes and failures come and go–they neither define us nor do they determine our worthiness. They are merely part of the process of being alive.

In comparison, self-compassion doesn’t try and evaluate the worth and essence of who we are. Self-compassion embraces and honors the fact that we all have strengths and weaknesses. Instead of constantly wondering if we are “good” or “bad”, we become mindful of our experience and recognize that our experience is impermanent and always changing. The good feelings of self-compassion are not contingent on being better than others or meeting our ideal goals. Instead, they come from caring about ourselves, exactly as we are.

When our sense of self-worth stems from being a human being intrinsically worthy of respect–rather than being contingent on obtaining certain ideals–our sense of self-worth is much less easily shaken.

When we’re mainly filtering our experience through the ego, constantly trying to improve or maintain our high self-esteem, we’re denying ourselves the thing we actually want most. To be accepted as we are, an integral part of something much greater than our small selves.

Motivation and Personal Growth

People are afraid that if they give themselves more self-compassion, they will become lazy, unambitious, or overly self-indulgent. We think that beating ourselves up is an effective strategy for motivating ourselves to improve. But we all know that we need to feel calm, secure, and confident to do our best. When you try to motivate someone you love, you go out of your way to let them know that you believe in them and that you have their back. Why do we take the exact opposite approach with ourselves?

Our beliefs in our own abilities are directly related to our ability to achieve our dreams. Self-criticism undermines our self-efficacy beliefs and harms our ability to do our best. We begin to lose faith in our abilities when we constantly berate ourselves. We also begin to fear our own self-judgment and that anxiety that it causes also undermines performance.

Sometimes we undermine our own performance in ways that create a plausible excuse for failing. We become so afraid of failure that we self-sabotage. This is known as self-handicapping. One form of self-handicapping is just not trying very hard. Another is procrastinating. These create alternate excuses for failure other than our own shortcomings. We can say things like “Well, it’s actually not that bad considering I hardly studied” or “I just ran out of time” instead of “I’m incompetent.”

If Jim was more comfortable with the fact that he might fail even when he did his best, he wouldn’t have to self-sabotage in order to save his ego when he did fail.

Self-compassion is a more effective motivator than self-criticism because the driving force is love instead of fear. It makes us confident and secure when we trust ourselves to be understanding and compassionate when we fail. Self-criticism asks if you are good enough where self-compassion asks what is good for you. If you care about yourself, you will do what you need to do to learn and grow. Self-compassion involves valuing yourself enough that you make choices that lead to long term wellbeing.

As the Buddha said, “It is perceiving one’s hair being on fire.” The actions that are spurred when we see our hair go up in smoke, like grabbing a wet towel or jumping in the shower, stem from wanting to solve the problem, to escape from the danger of being burned. They don’t come from the desire to prove ourselves (see what an excellent fire-putter-out I am?). In the same way, the effort that comes from self-compassion is not the result of egoistic striving, but from the natural desire to ameliorate suffering.

Our ability to realize our potential depends partly on where our motivation comes from. Motivation can be intrinsic, stemming from our desire to learn or just because we want to. It can also be extrinsic, doing things to gain some external reward or avoid external punishment. Similarly, you can have learning goals and performance goals. Learning goals are intrinsically motivated by curiosity and because you want to develop new skills. Performance goals are extrinsically motivated to enhance self-esteem. They come from a desire to do well so that others approve. These are the “easy A” people who don’t really care how much they learn in the process.

When you can trust that failure will be greeted with understanding rather than judgment, it no longer becomes the boogeyman lurking in the closet. Instead, failure can be recognized as the master teacher it is.

Self-compassion does not lead to complacency or a lack of ambition. Self-compassion allows us to lose our fear of failure and we become free to challenge ourselves more than we would otherwise. We become more resilient and able to learn from those failures to achieve more. By softening the blow of self-criticism and recognizing our common humanity, we can see ourselves with greater honesty and clarity to see what is working for us and what is not.

So when you make mistakes or fall short of your expectations, you can throw away that rawhide whip and instead throw a cozy blanket of compassion around your shoulders. You will be more motivated to learn, grow, and make the much-needed changes in your life, while also having more clarity to see where you are now and where you’d like to go next.

Compassion for Others

People that are more self-compassionate are better able to create close, authentic, and supportive friendships by focusing on helping their friends and being compassionate towards their friends’ mistakes. They also admit their own shortcomings to their friends. Self-compassion allows us to feel others’ pain without becoming overwhelmed by it.⁷ This builds empathy and meaningful connection with others.

Self-compassion also helps us in forgiving those who have hurt us. By recognizing common humanity and our interconnectedness, we recognize the factors and infinite conditions that lead people to do what they do. It becomes impossible to blame any one individual for anything. Understanding this allows us to forgive ourselves and others. Forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning bad behavior and accepting being walked over. Discriminating wisdom sees when an action is harmful and when we need to protect ourselves. It also sees that people are imperfect and there are so many conditions that cause people to act the way they do.

And even in those cases where people are cognizant of the harm they are causing, the question still needs to be asked–what happened to make them lose touch with their hearts? What would occur to lead to such cold and callous behavior? What’s their story?

A Buddhist practice that cultivates goodwill towards ourselves and others is known as “loving-kindness meditation.” Phrases that invoke good feelings are repeated silently and aimed at different targets. Phrases are directed towards the self, another person, and to all beings. It can either start with the self and move out or start with all beings and move toward the self.

May I be safe
May I be peaceful
May I be healthy
May I live with ease
May you be safe
May you be peaceful
May you be healthy
May you live with ease

By cultivating the intention for ourselves and for others to experience wellbeing, corresponding feelings of love and compassion arise. When we are compassion towards others, we are giving a gift to ourselves.

With the equanimity of an open heart, the slings and arrows of our difficult and frustrating lives find less purchase, and suffering becomes a doorway into love.

Romantic Relationships

The reason it’s so blissful to fall in love is partly because it allows us to feel truly valued, accepted, and understood by another. Our partner loves us warts and all, which means that maybe our warts aren’t so bad.

According to John Gottman, there are four main problem behaviors in conflicts that predict a doomed relationship: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. On the other hand, couples that show some sort of positive emotion during a conflict are more likely to last. Conflicts usually stem from each partner wanting their own point of view and their own feelings to be validated at the same time. As such, each partner should validate and empathize with the emotions of the other partner before presenting his or her own view. Self-compassion can help you feel validated by allowing you to validate your own feelings. You don’t have to negotiate or talk louder and louder to feel heard.

Self-compassion gives incredible strength to romantic relationships. When we stop depending on our partners to meet all our emotional needs—giving ourselves the love and acceptance we want—we become less clingy, needy, and dependent. When we remember that we’re only human, we can admit our mistakes and talk things through with greater calm and clarity. And by being gentle and warm with ourselves, we’ll be in a better emotional space to be there for the person we love.

Openness

Openheartedness is a state of emotional receptivity in which even unpleasant or negative experiences are held with caring concern. When we feel compassion, we experience an inner warmth that lets us know our hearts are open. When we close our hearts, we shut down and cut ourselves off from others. We get scared of being overwhelmed by negative emotions and we shut them out. The price for this is feeling cold, empty, and alone.

When we hold our negative emotions with compassionate care, we create a new positive emotion alongside the negative. We not only feel inadequate, we feel connected in remembering that inadequacy is part of the human experience. We not only feel fear but also comfort from our own kindness and caring.

Self-compassion doesn’t just open our hearts but it also opens our minds. When we are overwhelmed in negative emotions, our minds focus on the problem and miss the beauty of the bigger picture. Negative emotions serve a purpose that helps us survive. Fear is accompanied by the urge to escape, shame urges us to hide, and anger urges us to attack. When we are stuck in negative emotions, it feels like we have only one option. Self-compassion allows us to take a step back and provide ourselves with a calm and productive mindset.

This mindset leads to an upward spiral of positive emotions in a theory called broaden-and-build.⁸ Where negative emotions narrow our attention and possible actions, positive emotions broaden it. When we feel positive emotions, we are better able to choose an appropriate response to a stimulus. We broaden our repertoires and build personal resources we can use to respond effectively to subsequent events. This leads to an upward spiral of positive emotion → psychological broadening → positive emotion → and so on.

Positive psychology focuses on understanding the factors that lead to mental health rather than the factors that led to mental illness. It emphasizes cultivating strengths rather than eliminating weaknesses. Self-compassion focuses on accepting our weakness and allows us to delight in what’s wonderful about our lives rather than dwelling on limitations.

Self-compassion provides us with the sense of safety and equanimity needed to remain open as we take leaps into the unknown. It allows us to take refuge in interest and discovery when we have no idea what’s going to unfold from one moment to the next.

Self Appreciation

It is difficult for us to appreciate the positive aspects of ourselves because it causes fear. One fear is setting up overly high expectations. If we underplay our strengths, we are pleasantly surprised rather than disappointed. We are scared of over-selling and under-delivering. Another fear is losing a piece of our sense of self. Our sense of self might be so infused with beating ourselves up that as soon as we start to appreciate ourselves, we lose that piece of our identity. We are also scared of seeming like we are better than those around us. We don’t want to ostracize ourselves by outshining others.

If I acknowledge my greatness, does that mean I’m better than you, and does that in turn mean you and I can no longer relate as equals?

We can celebrate our admirable qualities without falling into the trap of egotism by practicing self-appreciation. This is a subset of self-compassion. We recognize that all people have strengths and weaknesses and we allow ourselves to appreciate our good aspects without feeling arrogant or superior.

We can acknowledge our own beauty. Not because we’re better than others, but because we are human beings expressing the beautiful side of human nature.

Sympathetic joy (or, as Brené Brown calls it, freudenfreude) is the state that occurs when we are delighted by the good qualities and circumstances of others and is closely related to self-appreciation. It is typical to feel inadequate when considering others’ good qualities. I feel stupid because she is so intelligent. Sympathetic joy requires recognition of common humanity as well as mindfulness. We need to be mindful of others’ good qualities rather than let them fade into the background of the assumed and expected.

An essential ingredient of sympathetic joy is the recognition of our inherent connectedness. When we’re part of a larger whole, we can feel glad whenever one of “us” has something to celebrate.

Self-appreciation is not self-esteem. Where self-esteem focuses on separation and comparison, self-appreciation is based on connectedness. Rather than trying to feel better than others, we see our similarities and recognize that everyone has their strong points. Self-esteem is also a judgment of worthiness. We try and label ourselves as “good” or “bad” or “beautiful” or “ugly.” We confuse our self-concept with our actual self. Instead, self-appreciation is a way of relating to what is good in us. It is not a judgment or a label.

There are always wonderful things to appreciate about ourselves, even if they don’t make us unique. The fact that I can breathe, walk, eat, make love, hug a friend–these are all magnificent abilities that are definitely to be celebrated, despite the fact that just about everyone shares these abilities–despite the fact that they are beautifully average.

Two important factors for maximizing happiness are being grateful and savoring joy. Savoring is the conscious enjoyment of what gives us pleasure. These aren’t just sensual experiences. Savoring can also be applied to experiences by holding it in mindful awareness, paying attention to the pleasant thoughts and emotions that arise in the present moment.

We don’t need to be perfect to feel good about ourselves, and our lives don’t need to be any certain way for us to be content. Every one of us has the capacity for resilience, growth, and happiness, simply by relating to our ever-arising experience with both compassion and appreciation. And if you feel you can’t change, that it’s too hard, that the countervailing forces of our culture are too strong, then have compassion for that feeling and start from there.

Bill Swann, 1981 ↩
This is a part of being proactive in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. ↩
Shinzen Young ↩
This is known as the Pink Elephant Paradox. The more you try to suppress unwanted and intrusive thoughts, the more they will bother you. ↩
William James ↩
Charles Horton Cooley ↩
Brené Brown calls this cognitive empathy in Atlas of the Heart ↩
Barbara Frederickson ↩

The Earthquake

2023-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

For the past 27 (roughly) weeks, a group of volunteers and I sit down one night a week for a few hours to play Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a nice social break where I can be American and speak English for a little while. On this particular Friday night, September 8, 2023, I sat down like normal and jumped on the call. I was eating my breads and cakes that I always get for the occasion and was laughing with my friends.

Then I felt a rumbling in my chest, the kind that you feel when a train passes by. The windows across the room started to rattle and my computer screen shook back and forth. It took me a few seconds to realize that a magnitude 6.8 earthquake had hit. It felt strange to stand as my apartment floor shook. Outside, I heard the neighbors making their way outside in a panic. I put my shoes on and followed suit. By the time I got outside, people had conglomerated away from the buildings and away from anything that could fall. One of my neighbors approached me and asked if I was fine and if I’d ever felt an earthquake before. This was his first one, too.

Not soon after, the calls and messages started to come in from everywhere: Peace Corps staff, friends and family from home, and my Moroccan friends and family. My host family from training called to check-in. My LCF, Maryem, who taught me language during training called. My host family here who just experienced the same thing I did called as well.

We were waiting outside for a while, expecting aftershocks. All my neighbors were telling me “kay-3awd” (كيعاود) to mean that it is going to repeat and no one wanted to be inside when it did. I got tired of just sitting there so I went and took a lap around town. The closer I got to the center of my rural town, the more people were flooding the streets. Families were sitting outside on curbs while the children ran around without a care in the world. Some had started to bring rugs, pillows, and blankets outside to wait in mild comfort. There is a big new mosque currently under construction here and as I neared it, I got more and more afraid I would find it crumpled from the shaking. Thankfully, there was no apparent damage anywhere in the main part of town.

By the time I had gotten back home, my neighbors had pulled out their rugs and pillows and set up a nice little spot in an open area outside of our homes. They were all making light conversation and trying to get the kids to calm down and get ready for bed. It was decided; we were sleeping outside for the night. It was around two in the morning by then but I wasn’t particularly tired. I sat down on the curb and returned some more messages and phone calls. A little while later, my neighbor (I, admittedly, forgot his name and at this point it’s too late to ask) called my name and beckoned me over. He gave me a little area on their rug next to him and his family. There was a pillow and a blanket waiting there for me. I didn’t want to impose but he politely insisted that I was welcome. I laid down and tried to get some sleep as my neighbor tried to get his son to stop asking me questions and go to sleep.

I woke up a few hours later at around seven in the morning. It was foggy and my jeans and sweatshirt I had slept in felt damp and my glasses had a layer of condensation on them. I rolled over to find most of my neighbors gone and an older lady still sitting on her little stool exactly how she had been the night before. I also noticed an even heavier blanket had been laid over the top of me while I was asleep. I rubbed my eyes and got up, in a daze from the lack of sleep. I assumed people had went back inside so I folded up the blankets and made the short stroll home.

In the days that followed, there were all kinds of relief efforts to help those affected. A lot of the damage was up in the mountains where there were rock slides and people’s homes aren’t as structurally sound. Associations all over the country came together with community members to prepare care packages of food, blankets, and clothing to deliver them to the remote villages.

I often feel like Morocco is just one big family, of which I am eternally grateful to be a part of. Even (and especially) in the face of calamity, Moroccans band together to care for their brothers and sisters. While the fear and loss felt was devastating and debilitating, the heart of Morocco will recover. The communal spirit, the very culture of Morocco, keeps it strong and resilient.

Essaouira Travel Guide

2024-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Getting There
Lodging
Food
Drinks
Things to Do

One of my favorite places in Morocco, among many others, is Essaouira. It is a coastal town in the south of Morocco, a few hours west of Marrakech. It once functioned as a major trading port to connect Morocco with Europe. I have had a significant number of volunteers and someone from home ask me about what to do in Essaouira. I keep a list on my computer and just copy and paste it to whoever wants it. Then I thought, “What if I could just send them a link instead?”

Getting There

There are taxis pretty much all day that go straight from Marrakech to Essaouira. A seat in the taxi will cost you about 100 dirhams. There is also a CTM bus that leaves Marrakech every day at 08:30 for 90 dirhams.

If you are coming from Agadir to the south, you can take either a taxi or the CTM. The road is beautiful as it goes along the ocean but it has a lot of turns and the road sucks. The taxi is faster but if you are prone to motion sickness, go for the CTM. There are three a day and each take about three and a half hours and will cost 95 dirhams.

Lodging

There are lots of options here but I’ve only personally used a few of them.

Moga Hostel. I paid 100 MAD per night (about $10). I’m no expert on hostels but this one seemed fine. The rooms are a bit packed but clean. My room was backed right up to the bathroom so the light poured into the room all night and I could hear pretty much everything in the hostel. Each room fits eight people and the door has a combination lock on the outside. To get in the main door, you ring the buzzer and they unlock the door from the office. Breakfast is included and it was just a simple bread, boiled egg, yogurt, and tea Moroccan breakfast. Very nice staff.
Riad Inna. Very kind staff in a wonderful riad. It is right in the middle of the medina but, surprisingly, it isn’t too loud. A room is around 300 to 350 MAD ($30 to $35) and it is the same price regardless if it is one or two people. Breakfast is also included!
Airbnb. There are a lot of Airbnbs inside the medina and out. They sit around $30 per night per person in the medina.

Food

Ocean Vagabond. Wonderful restaurant at the end of the beach, super quiet. It was nice to walk down the whole beach, stop for food and drinks, then walk the beach back. Very friendly people. There is a proper pizza oven for some excellent pizza.
Fishburger. Exactly what it sounds like. It is a little hole in the wall in the medina with outside seating and decent prices. The fish burrito was excellent.
Asian Red Food. Thai food that is pretty cheap, only slightly more expensive than the taco places around town. It is in a small and quaint alcove in the middle of the medina. The people are super kind, the food is wonderful, and it’s a nice little relief from the busy streets. This is my go-to for a quick lunch if I don’t want to have a proper meal at Ocean Vagabond. Get the fried noodles.
Munchies. American food place down an alleyway away from the medina. One of the better burgers I’ve had in Morocco (mostly because of the basil mayo they use). They’ve also got wings and shakes and such.
Taverna Bolognese. Nice little Italian place tucked into an alley in the medina. Good cocktails and wine.
Salt and Pepper. This is the place to go for sushi. It has a nice cozy atmosphere and there are some round cats that lounge around inside. And, yes, it’s open. The door and spacious interior suggest otherwise but it is open.
Gelato in the medina. Right next to Asian Red Food, this place causes lots of street congestion at night because everyone wants gelato. They’ve got all kinds of flavors but it is kind of expensive for what it is. Nonetheless, it is fantastic.
Caffetteria Dolcefreddo. If you want some good gelato, leave the medina and head southeast, right next to the CTM station. I’m not sure if they have it all the time but I got gnocchi with tomato sauce and it was absolutely incredible. There are lots of little restaurants and cafés around here too.
The Hungry Nomad. I haven’t gone there yet but it looks like a cool rooftop restaurant/bar. Also a hostel down below.
Sisterhood Cafe. Quaint little coffee shop on the north end of the medina. This has wonderful “quiet cafe” vibes that make you want to crack open a book.

Drinks

Taros. Cool little rooftop bar with a central place for live music. There was a lot of gnawa music when I was there.
Dar Baba. If you want a fancy cocktail for a fancy price, this is the place to go. It’s got a quirky atmosphere inside, in a nice way. There is also a giant rug store right next to it that you’ll probably want to avoid after drinking so you don’t spend all your vacation money on a beautiful rug.
Megaloft. Another rooftop, the tallest one in town. At the very top there are rugs and pillows instead of proper tables. You can see basically all of Essaouira. Kind of expensive.
D’Jazy. Nice little spot to stop by for a beer. The sign said there is usually live music but not when I went.

Things to Do

Go to the ramparts. Walk along the outer wall (along the ocean) and you will eventually reach the ramparts. You can walk on top of the wall and look out to the ocean. They filmed some episodes of Game of Thrones here. If the tide is low, you can walk on the beach underneath the ramparts. Absolutely beautiful.
Chill at a cafe. Lots of options here but my favorite is the one by the beach, right outside of the southernmost gate, Bab Sbaa. It is called Cafe Terrasse. It’s usually not very busy and it is right on the beach so you can watch people swimming or playing soccer. There is also a big food/cafe area near Taros with lots of stuff going on. Great for peoplewatching.
Go to the beach. The beach is wonderful in the summer. Sometimes, it is a bit windy but it is usually manageable. The water is nice and cold and there are people playing soccer and just hanging out. Farther down the beach, on a windy day, you can see people kite surfing.
Go to the souq. Head out of the northernmost gate, Bab Doukkala, on a Sunday and there are people selling produce, knick knacks, and clothes for cheap.
Go to a music shop. I wasn’t able to find this one on a map but I know where it is when I see it. There is a kind older man that makes Gnawa instruments and will gladly play something for you if you ask.

Finances and Bookkeeping

2024-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Theory (Double Entry Accounting)
The Tools (Plain Text Accounting and Beancount)
Reporting
Expense Categories (COICOP)
Lending and Borrowing Money
Lending and Borrowing Goods and Services (Accrual Accounting)
References and Further Reading

I spent my free time this last month to learn some personal finance and, specifically, how to do personal bookkeeping. I did this so that I can have a more complete view of all of my accounts and how I am spending money.

I developed a good system that I think will work for me nicely now and is durable and robust enough to serve me for a long time.

Note that this finance system is basically just the bookkeeping aspect of it. It does not have any element of budgeting, though that may change in the future. Also note that I am not an accountant. I’m just a guy with a very simple financial life that learned some personal finance concepts on the internet.

The Theory (Double Entry Accounting)

Bookkeeping is the act of keeping track of transactions. All we are doing is recording when money moves from one “pocket” (called an account) to another. This sounds simple but can get messy pretty quickly, hence me developing and writing about my system.

Suppose that right now, you have $100 dollars and decide to go buy a new pair of socks that cost $15. You subtract $15 from $100, maybe tag the transaction with a category (“Clothing”), and you are left with $85. You repeat this with your normal transactions, just adding and subtracting money to get a new balance each time. This type of bookkeeping is called single entry accounting.

Another method is double entry accounting that requires every entry to an account to have an equal and opposite entry in another account. Every input to one account is an output from another. In our sock example, you still subtract $15 from your account. But where does that money go? In the double entry accounting method, it goes into an expense account called “Clothing.” So, at the end of the transaction your account has a balance of $85 and this new “Clothing” account has a balance of $15. Since every input is also an output, the transaction as a whole adds up to zero.

So, why use double entry rather than single entry? Single entry is inherently prone to errors. You only put in the transaction amount once and just keep a running tally. What if you, as a human that makes mistakes, puts in the wrong number? By essentially recording each transaction twice, double entry has checks built into it. For every transaction, it checks to make sure that it sums to zero. For the overall ledger, it makes sure that every bit of money has come from somewhere (Assets = Liabilities + Equity, if you want to get technical).

There are four main account types that we can have: Income, Expenses, Assets, and Liabilities. These are all pretty self-explanatory but I will define them here:

Assets. Things that you have like cash, investments, and checking accounts.
Liabilities. Things that you owe like mortgages and student loans.
Income. Things that you get in exchange for something else (usually you getting money in exchange for your time)
Expenses. Things that you give in exchange for something else (usually you giving money in exchange for goods and services)

Income and expense both refer to an exchange of goods and services. Assets and liabilities are set amounts. The difference here is that assets and liabilities are absolute while income and expenses are relative. What I mean by that is that you are usually interested in the balance of an asset or liability account at one moment in time while you are interested in the change between two points in time in expenses or income accounts. (How much money do I have in my checking account right now? vs. How much did I spend on toilet paper last month?)

The Tools (Plain Text Accounting and Beancount)

Now that we have the accounting theory behind the system, how do I actually implement it?

There are many apps out there these days that allow you to keep track of all of your transactions. These are fine and many of them come with cool features like allowing you to import transactions from other places like bank accounts. I don’t like them.

Let’s say you put your entire financial life on Quicken. All your investments, expenses, and income for years. Then one day, Quicken says that if you want to keep using their service, you have to give them $100 each month. Your data is locked up in one proprietary service and it is difficult, if not impossible, to get it out and into another system. Even worse, what if the business that runs your app is no longer a business? There goes all of that data and you have to start from scratch.

Funnily enough, a few weeks after I initially posted this, this exact thing happened. Mint, a popular bookkeeping and budgeting app by Intuit, announced that it will be shutting down at the turn of the year. Intuit decided that Mint wasn’t worth it to keep it running so users have no choice but to move to another tool. They, of course, pushed users to move to their other tool in Credit Karma but this new one doesn’t have the same budgeting tools that Mint did. You as a user get no say in this and are under a time limit before the service is inaccessible.

I am so legitimately upset about this. 12+ years of my financial history is about to be gone. My entire adult life.

u/NotEmmaStone

A different (and, for me, preferable) approach is to maintain it all in plain text. This is text that you can open on any computer and you can read. It is letters and numbers put together in a cohesive order that you can understand rather than ones and zeros that only a computer can understand. Plain text will never change its pricing structure and it will never go out of business. Even if all computers disappeared off the face of the Earth, I could still print out my ledger onto physical paper and still be able to see and understand all of my financial data.

My whole financial life, all of my transactions, my entire ledger is written down in one big plain text file. Every time I spend or earn money, I open my ledger in a text editor and type it out with my keyboard. The way that I write them down follows a specific syntax set by my financial tool of choice. The financial software parses all of that data, makes sure that each transaction sums to zero, and puts it together into useful reports. This is another benefit of having your data in plain text; it makes it scriptable. I can write code to process my ledger and spit out a report in any way, shape, or form that I ask.

There are currently three main choices for plain text accounting software: Ledger, hledger, and my choice beancount. These are all open source projects written by lots of smart people. They are also all great choices but have different philosophies and rules that govern what they look like. Again, all these do is parse your ledger file and do cool calculations and reporting with it. I went with beancount because the syntax made the most sense to me and I really liked the documentation. Also because Derek Sivers uses it.

I won’t go deep into the details of beancount because there is already excellent documentation out there. There are also lots of parts of beancount that add functionality that I just don’t use. My ledger looks something like this:

2023-09-20 * "Souq trip"
    Expenses:01-Food-and-Beverages:01-1-Food 36.00 MAD
    Expenses:03-Clothes:03-2-Footwear        30.00 MAD
    Assets:MA:Cash                          -66.00 MAD

2023-09-19 * "Cafe France" "Harira and msmen for dinner"
	Assets:MA:Cash                                -14.00 MAD
	Expenses:11-Dining-and-Staying:11-1-Eating-Out 14.00 MAD

2023-09-16 * "New York Times" "Games Subscription"
	Assets:My-Bank:Checking                     -2.00 USD
	Expenses:09-Recreation:09-4-Rec-Services     2.00 USD

2023-09-01 * "Peace Corps" "September Statement of Earnings"
	Income:Peace-Corps:Readjustment-Allowance   -400.00 USD
	Expenses:Taxes:TY2023:Medicare                 5.80 USD
	Expenses:Taxes:TY2023:Social-Security         24.80 USD
	Assets:Peace-Corps:Readjustment-Allowance    369.40 USD
	Income:Peace-Corps:Annual-Leave-Days          -2.00 PCDAYS
	Assets:Peace-Corps:Annual-Leave-Days           2.00 PCDAYS

Don’t mind the account hierarchy yet (see below). In this snippet, I have three types of money, called commodities: American dollars, Moroccan dirhams, and Peace Corps leave days. Did I mention that I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer and I live in Morocco?

Each transaction (i.e. every time money changes hands) is given a date, an optional payee, and some narration text. Each line below that tells beancount which account it is and how much money is being added or subtracted from it and what kind of money it is. Importantly, I can go through my whole ledger and read, line by line, and understand all of my transactions. You will also notice that, according to the double entry accounting method, all of the commodities each sum to zero.

Every week, as part of a more general weekly review session, I balance my ledger. I thought “balancing your checkbook” was just something old people did but I finally understand what they mean. I sit down and open up my ledger on my computer and input any pending transactions that I have from the week. Then, I generate a balance statement (more on in the reporting section) that shows me exactly how much money is currently in each account. I go on my various bank apps and verify that the number on my balance statement matches what the bank says I have to make sure I didn’t miss any transactions (and neither did they). I also hand-count all of my cash. There is usually a discrepancy here because I almost exclusively use cash in my day-to-day life and make small purchases often. Sometimes I forget to write down small transations or just plain lose coins. In this case, I make a balance assertion in my ledger (hey, ledger, I know that based on your calculations I should have this amount of money but I actually have this much) and put the difference into an Expenses:Uncategorized account.

Reporting

One important aspect of any bookkeeping system is the ability to query your ledger and get reports on your financial data. In the accounting world, there are two main ones. One is an income statement that lists all of your income accounts and their balances on the left and all of your expense accounts and their balances on the right, for the given reporting period. If you sum up all of your income and all of your expenses, you get your net profit or loss for that period.

The income statement is the most useful to me because I can see how much I spent on each category over, say, the previous month. With this, I can be more mindful of where my money is going and make lifestyle changes, if needed.

The other main report is the balance sheet. This one, you might have guessed, lists all of your asset accounts and their current balances on the left and all of your liability accounts and their current balances on the right. Remember that these types of accounts are absolute; we are only interested in the balance at a specific time rather than a time period. If you sum up all of your assets and all of your liabilities, you get your net worth.

Expense Categories (COICOP)

Now, as we saw above, every time you spend money on something, that money goes into an Expense account. You need to have some structure and granularity here so you can see exactly what you are spending your money on. There is a sweet spot between your expense categories being too granular (I spent X dollars on breakfast cereal, Y dollars on ground beef, and Z dollars on butter) and too broad (I spent X dollars on “Living Expenses”). Expense categories should be just detailed enough to provide insights into your financial life without being cumbersome.

The general consensus that I found online was to just track your expenses and figure it out as you go to develop meaningful expense categories. That didn’t feel right to me. It made more sense to have a set structure from the get-go and push transactions into those as I go. So, I did some cherry-picking and came across a whitepaper published by the United Nations Statistics Division. It is titled “Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) 2018.”

Basically, COICOP is an international standard to classify household expenditure. It is a framework that allows for all kinds of cool statistics to be calculated like CPI, living standards analysis, budget surveys, and stats related to food and tourism. It splits up household expenses into increasingly fine-grained categories starting from a division (01 Food and non-alcoholic beverage) to a group (01.1 Food) to classes (01.1.1 Cereals and cereal products) and further down to subclasses (01.1.1.3 Bread and bakery products). These are all organized by the purpose of the expense. The current 2018 revision has 15 divisions, 63 groups, 186 classes, and 338 subclass categories.

I decided to use COICOP for my personal finances for three reasons:

Unambiguous. There is a giant 265 page document that outlines exactly what categories a certain expense falls into.
Thought out. Lots of people much smarter than me spent way more time than I ever will thinking about this.
Standardized. I can see how my expenses compare with others using the same standard (lots of stats available online).

To avoid the problem of being too fine-grained, I opted for using the broad structure (chapter VIII in the whitepaper) which only goes down to groups meaning each expense category is defined by a three digit code DD.G where DD is the division number and G is the group number. I live a simple life and some expenses don’t make sense for me so I cut them out of my chart of accounts but I can always add them back later. Using the entire broad structure, there are 52 possible “buckets” all of my expenses can fall into. With the accounts I don’t need cut out, I actually have 20. My actual chart of accounts for my expenses looks like this:

`-- Expenses
    |-- 01-Food-and-Beverages
    |   |-- 01-1-Food
    |   `-- 01-2-Beverages
    |-- 02-Alcohol-and-Tobacco
    |   |-- 02-1-Alcohol
    |   `-- 02-3-Tobacco
    |-- 03-Clothes
    |   |-- 03-1-Clothing
    |   `-- 03-2-Footwear
    |-- 04-Living
    |   |-- 04-1-Rent
    |   |-- 04-4-Water
    |   `-- 04-5-Electricity-and-Fuel
    |-- 07-Transport
    |   `-- 07-3-Passenger
    |-- 08-Info-and-Comms
    |   |-- 08-1-Info-and-Comms-Equipment
    |   |-- 08-2-Software
    |   `-- 08-3-Info-and-Comms-Services
    |-- 09-Recreation
    |   |-- 09-4-Rec-Services
    |   `-- 09-7-Books-and-Stationery
    |-- 11-Dining-and-Staying
    |   |-- 11-1-Eating-Out
    |   `-- 11-2-Accommodations
    |-- 12-Ins-and-Financial
    |   `-- 12-2-Financial-Services
    |-- 13-Personal
        |-- 13-1-Personal-Care
        `-- 13-9-Other

Lending and Borrowing Money

What about money that we are owed? It is technically money that we have (i.e. an asset), it just isn’t liquid or usable right now. In this case, we want to keep it in a separate account to know who owes us how much as well as keep it separate in case we want to know how much liquid money we have. I use an Asset:Accounts-Receivable account to track who owes me money. Everything in this account is money that I “have” but just haven’t received yet. Notably, I don’t put someone paying me back in an Income account because it isn’t really income. I haven’t traded anything valuable for it. The transactions usually go something like this:

I pay cash for a taxi to take me from my town to some other big city to attend a Peace Corps training, a reimbursable expense. I paid cash but where did that money go? It does not go into an expense account because I’m not really spending money on the taxi, Peace Corps is. I am just loaning them the cash right now so it is just one type of asset being turned into a different kind. Instead of an expense account, I dump it into my accounts receivable and mark who owes me (i.e. the debtor).

2023-09-27 * "Travel to training"
  Assets:MA:Cash                        -100.00 MAD
  Assets:Accounts-Receivable             100.00 MAD
	  debtor: "Peace Corps"

Now, since my accounts receivable has a balance of 100 dirhams, I know that I am owed that. After the training, I fill out a reimbursement form and wait a few weeks. Once that hits my bank account, I record it in my ledger as that money moving from the accounts receivable to my bank account where it is liquid again.

2023-10-10 * "Reimbursement from travel to training"
  Assets:Accounts-Receivable             -100.00 MAD
	  debtor: "Peace Corps"
  Assets:MA:Checking                      100.00 MAD

On the other hand, I use a Liabilities:Accounts-Payable account to keep a record of who I owe money to and how much. This functions similarly to above except this time there is an actual expense. For example:

I go out to have dinner with a friend while I am in the city at this training but I forgot my wallet. I get 50 dirhams worth of food but where does that money come from? I am not yet exchanging an asset for the food. Instead, I am borrowing money from my friend so it goes into my accounts payable and I mark who I owe money to (i.e. the creditor).

2023-09-28 * "Dinner in training city"
  Expenses:11-Dining-and-Staying:11-1-Eating-Out 50.00 MAD
  Liabilities:Accounts-Payable                  -50.00 MAD
	  creditor: "My Friend"

To pay my friend back, I give them cash when I get back to my wallet.

2023-09-28 * "Paying back friend"
  Assets:MA:Cash                        -50.00 MAD
  Liabilities:Accounts-Payable           50.00 MAD
	  creditor: "My Friend"

Lending and Borrowing Goods and Services (Accrual Accounting)

You may have noticed in the last section that expenses happen when the good or service is exchanged not the actual money. When I went out for dinner, I accrued the expenses then and there, not when I paid back my friend later. This is the basis of accrual accounting.

But what happens when I pay for something in advance? I’ve given someone money but I haven’t received a good or service. The other party owes me but it’s not money. For example, I see my landlord a few days before rent is due and I pay him then or I buy plane tickets now for a trip a few months later.

In this situation, accounts payable and receivable don’t make very much sense. These accounts are for when actual money is payable or receivable. When goods or services are owed, I use different accounts: prepaid expenses (asset) and deferred revenue (liability).

In a travel example, it would look like this:

2024-08-20 * "Plane ticket to Toronto"
	Assets:Checking                          -691.00 USD
	Assets:Prepaid-Expense                    691.00 USD
		debtor: "Air Canada"

It still counts as an asset because I should still receive a service in the future, namely a ride on an airplane. Also notice how I haven’t incurred an expense yet. That comes later when I actually get on the plane and the actual service is provided. After this, the transaction is complete and that money is no longer an asset:

2024-11-29 * "Flying to Toronto"
	Assets:Prepaid-Expense                -691.00 USD
		debtor: "Air Canada"
	Expenses:07-Transport:07-3-Passenger   691.00 USD

Deferred revenue works the same way. If my neighbor pays me in advance to mow their lawn next weekend, that amount would end up in Liabilities:Deferred-Revenue. It is a liability because I am still liable to either mow their lawn or return their money.

References and Further Reading

Excellent write-up of double entry counting method, as part of the beancount documentation.
A set of scenarios for splitting a bill. The transactions look different depending on who pays and how it is split.
A collection of resources, examples, tools, and everything else by plaintextaccounting.org.
More on accrual counting and types of accruals by Harvard Business School.

The Moussem

2023-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Last week, there was a moussem (موسم) in my town. This is the Arabic word for “season” but in Morocco it basically means festival. People come from all over to sell their wares, see family, and watch the festivities.

I heard there was going to be one from one of the kids who works at a food place I frequent. He told me when the moussem was and roughly what to expect, most notably that it was going to be packed with people. Then one afternoon, sellers started to pour in, filling up over a half mile long stretch of road, from the outskirts to the center of town. Each one set up a makeshift sun cover out of sticks, rope, and whatever opaque material they could find. They set out all of their stuff for sale on tables and rugs on the ground; jewelry, trinkets, home products, dishes, food, etc.

It was right down the street from my house and I could hear one of the seller’s megaphones going all day, belting out prices for dates, nuts, and other foodstuffs. At night when people came out, it was a cacophony of people spitting out numbers, naming their prices with the Moroccan women challenging them in negotiation. The sellers clearly had done this before as they were perfectly comfortable dealing with four or five buyers at a time while also making change and answering questions from others.

Among the festivities that happened when it was cooler outside were ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, and bouncy houses. A nice man would stand at the base of the ferris wheel and get his shoulder workout in by manually spinning the wheel. The kids would go have the time of their lives while their mothers sat in plastic chairs out front, watching and gossiping amongst themselves.

The street full of sellers that drew out throngs of people wasn’t even the main event of the five day festival. People really come to see the tbourida (التبوريدة). Tbourida is a traditional cultural event of showmanship and the name comes from barud (بارود), the Arabic word for gunpowder.

Troupes of men on horses come in groups of anywhere from 15 to 25 members. Them and their horses are outfitted in traditional wear and each member carries a musket. They circle around the arena so the audience can get a good look at them before lining up at the start of the arena. Led by a special rider in the middle, the group then starts to gallop in unison for about 200 yards and fire one round from their muskets at the end. The difficulty of it is the whole troupe is trying to ride in perfect unison and fire their rifles at the same time such that only one booming shot is heard.¹

There is a big open area right in front of the youth center that I work at and the day before the tbourida started, there were water trucks going up and down the area, giving the dry, packed dirt some much needed hydration. Other trucks were bringing in hundreds of barriers to form the outer edge of the arena and yet another group was setting up tents so people could watch without sweltering in the heat of the sun.

I went to the first day of the event because I knew there were going to be less people and I could get a good view. From my window, I could hear the clip-clop of horse hooves on pavement and I followed the convoy to the arena. Both the riders and their horses were dressed in their best traditional garb, far different than the equestrian gear I have interacted with in my rural Central Oregonian hometown.² As the horses walked, I could hear the light tinging from the little bells that were hanging from their breast collars. The saddle pads were thick, constructed from a stack of squares of some kind of salvaged cushy material. Instead of a simple loop for stirrups, these looked like hollowed-out square lanterns with a big area for the booted feet of the riders to rest on. Where I would normally see a horn to dally off of after roping a steer, there was just a big hump for riders to maintain their balance with. The bridles were much more extravagant than the simple leather bands that I am accustomed to. They featured tassels and blinders to keep the horse’s focus attuned to the one direction they needed to go—forward.

There were now hordes of people sitting in plastic chairs with even more standing behind them under the tents that were empty just a day before. I found a decent enough spot to stand in the tent that faced the arena such that the troupes would be running right at us. The men in the tent seemed content sitting in claustrophobic positions in the center. Behind me and the rest of the men standing was a sizable gap that let people pass through. Also taking this route were people selling refreshments like coffee, tea, and bars of peanuts and almonds. As they passed through, they would yell out whatever they were offering like someone selling hot dogs at a baseball game.

The tents only held a percentage of the audience. There were even more people crowded along the street about 50 yards north of the arena. Groups of kids were climbing onto people’s roofs to get a good aerial view. Residents in the neighboring apartment complex invited another small mass of people to watch from their third story roof as well.

Troupes entered from the left, stopped and faced the crowd momentarily, then continued their gait all the way around the arena passing by the rest of the audience in the tents. At the same time, there were groups primed to make their run down the arena. The announcer informed us of the troupe and where they were from before saying “yallah, tfdl” to let them know they were clear to make their run.

The troupes would start at a trot to get a rhythm going. Once all their horses were in sync (or as close as possible), they would move to a canter or a full gallop. As they approached the crowd, I could start to hear the leader yelling over the trample of hooves, guiding the rest of the troupe to ensure that they all fired at the same time. Once they were about 20 yards out from the end of the arena, they would lift their muskets and deliver an ear-shattering blast. If they were sufficiently in sync, the crowd would erupt in cheer. The troupe would stop at the same place they stopped on their entry and soak in the applause that came from the crowd. The announcer would either thank the troupe with a shukran si Mohammed or bsha u raha (to your health and comfort) and their run was over. They would exit the arena from the same place they entered. I encourage you to go to YouTube to watch some videos that show the actual runs as well as delve into the history of tbourida much better than I can.

For five days, the cycle continued. I would wake up to the megaphone blaring out the same prices as the previous day, it would quiet down while everyone had lunch and took naps, everyone would come out to go shopping in the afternoon, and finally end the night by watching the tbourida. After the last night, all the sellers started packing up their wares and makeshift tents and the riders loaded up their horses and took off for the wherever their next event was. The arena got packed up and the ground underneath dried back out. The streets emptied and my town fell back into its normal quiet and lazy state to finish out the rest of summer.

This event has been inscribed into the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It describes the event and there are some gorgeous pictures there as well. ↩
Here is my crash course in horse gear anatomy for my urbanite friends. The breast collar is the piece that runs across the “chest” of the horse and connects to the saddle on the sides. Stirrups are the U-shaped things that hang to the sides of the horse for riders to put their feet in. The horn (present on a Western saddle) is the piece that sticks up between the legs of the rider. After roping something, the rider quickly wraps their rope around the horn to cinch it tight so that whatever is on the other end can be pulled. The bridle is the piece that goes over the head of the horse that allows the rider to control the horse. The bit is the metal piece that goes in the back of the horses mouth, over its gums. The reins connect to the sides of the bit and the bridle keeps the bit from coming out of the mouth. Blinders attach to the bridle and keep pieces of leather near the horse’s eyes to block their vision such that they don’t get distracted by things happening to the sides or behind them. ↩

Recursion

2023-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Side note: I am trying out a new rating system/framework to think about and write my notes for fiction books. It is called CAWPILE and you can find out more here.

Summary

Barry has had a difficult life. His daughter gets killed in a hit-and-run when she is still in high school and his life falls apart from there. His marriage fails and he is spending his days working as a detective for the New York City Police Department and spending his nights wallowing in sorrow in his empty apartment.

He gets a call one night about a women about to jump off the 41st floor to end the memories of a life she’s never lived. It looks like one of the False Memory Syndrome cases that have been popping up recently.

Helena is a workaholic who has dedicated her life and academic career to studying memories. She wants to have her mother experience all of her past memories before Alzheimer’s rips them away.

Helena doesn’t just create a device that allows people to experience their past memories; they can change them and the very fabric of time along with it. With Helena’s invention, Barry gets sent back to a memory of that dark night so many years ago when his daughter was killed. Except this time, he gets up from his chair and changes the trajectory of his life.

Helena knows the danger that this technology poses on the world. If memories can’t be trusted, what, then, is real?

Favorite Quotes

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

Spoilers Ahead

Characters - 4/10

The characters were a bit generic and not particularly interesting. There wasn’t much development and I feel like I don’t really know any of the characters, like they could be replaced by anyone and I wouldn’t notice. Even though Barry and Helena lived so many lives on a loop, they hardly changed as people. They are a bit more ragged and discouraged with the impending doom that comes at the end of each loop, but that’s about it.

The only character trait that I admired was Helena’s integrity. She didn’t sell out when she realized the potential use cases of her invention and recognized the danger it posed for the world. She understood the power that she held and did everything she could to destroy the knowledge of the technology that she created.

Atmosphere - 9/10

The setting felt modern and familiar. Crouch uses some amazing imagery throughout to describe the scenes. I could picture all the hectic moments, the hordes of people panicking. I could hear the sounds of bodies falling from rooftops onto cars and I could feel the pain in my lungs every time someone got into the deprivation tank. I physically recoiled after Barry and Helena survive nuclear fallout and are suffering from the radiation:

He steps to the door and takes hold of the three-spoked handle, groaning with agony as he strains to crank the wheel. Nothing’s moving but the layers of skin he’s stripping away, and a horrifying thought occurs to him—what if the heat of the blast fused the innards of the door? A vision of their last day together—cooking slowly from thermal radiation in the burned-out husk of their home, unable to reach the chair, knowing that they failed…Barry leaves part of his hand on the wheel as he pulls it away and follows Helena, corkscrewing down the stairs in the meager light of her phone’s sustained camera flash.

The tense moments in the city were balanced with nice idyllic settings when Helena and Barry were living their lives in loops. In one life, they lived deep in the Sonora desert. In another, they were in a remote tundra on Antarctica watching the aurora australis. They live the last moments of the current timeline in relative peace and quiet that is a nice change from the world blowing itself up.

Writing Style - 8/10

Crouch has an interesting writing style that I noticed in his other book, Dark Matter. He sometimes writes sentences that don’t use pronouns, as if to ask what she, he, and we really mean when timelines are getting crossed.

The dialogue is very natural and comfortable. Characters talk how people talk in real life. Crouch combines past, present, and future tenses into the same sentence to remind us how absurd and mind-bending this story is and how tangled everything gets after experiencing a few different timelines:

Barry pulls a black duffel bag out of the trunk, and Helena follows him onto the sidewalk and a little ways down to the entrance of a bar they’ve been in once before, four months from now, when they came to scope out the tunnel access to Slade’s building and discuss their plans for this exact moment.

Plot - 8/10

I liked the overall plot. It flowed nicely and didn’t have too many things going on. It is a unique story and as such was not predictable at all and made it an interesting read. The book resolved nicely although I do feel sad that Helena died thinking that she failed after so many long, hard tries.

Intrigue - 9/10

This was a page turner for me and I blew through it in just a few days. I got sucked in and had to stop a few times to ask what the fuck? I was thinking about the book when I wasn’t reading it and was constantly engaging with it, wondering what I would do if faced with these situations.

Logic - 8/10

As mind-boggling as this story is, everything made sense. Stories get complex as soon as you start to introduce time travel concepts and Crouch also adds on a memory component to further the complexity.

The logic did start to break down towards the end when Helena is looping through trying to find a way to stop everyone’s memories from coming back. Each time that the loop ended and everyone got their memories from their previous lives back, Helena was miles away from the chair that she uses to go back and try again. This caused her to always need to be dodging nuclear warheads or government agents right at the last moment. It fed into the intrigue but when you step back, it didn’t make sense.

For someone as smart and dedicated as Helena, why would she take the unnecessary risk of being away from the chair when she knew what would happen? I understand that she wants to spend at least a few moments with Barry when he has his full memory back. But why punctuate those moments with running for your life and fear of not being able to go back?

Enjoyment - 10/10

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will be recommending it to everyone who is a fan of science fiction. It was fun to read and to think through all of possible scenarios and consequences of going back in time to a memory.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

2023-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

Set in a sprawling, fantasized version of Venice, Locke is orphaned at a very young age and is welcomed into an underground thief empire. He is taught how to be a simple petty thief and survive against his peers who hold power over him. His marked thieving prowess gets him in trouble early on and he is sold to Father Chains, a con-artist who spends his days pretending to be a blind priest of Perelandro.

Father Chains takes Locke in, along with Calo, Galdo, and, later, Jean and Bug. The Gentlemen Bastards live underneath the Temple of Perelandro in secret luxury where Father Chains teaches them how to pull off long-con “games” to steal thousands of crowns from the rich of Camorr by breaking the Secret Peace, an agreement between the criminal underground and the Right People. They learn how to speak languages with perfect accents, how to dine properly, and how to apply makeup and wigs for disguises so that they can become anyone they need to become to wring money out of their victims.

One game goes too deep and gets the Gentlemen Bastards locked up in a fight for power and revenge between the powers-that-be of Camorr.

My Thoughts

This is a fun little story that’s big but not too heavy. The world this book is set in has a lot of lore and we are given just a few hints about how it came to be. There is just enough magic left over from the Eldren and from alchemists that give it some fantasy without being too far-fetched. Lynch does a good job of giving just enough information to have everything make sense and leaves out just enough to give it a sense of mystery and awe (and plots for future books in the series).

I really like how interludes are woven in to describe the expansive lore; character development, the factions, the gods, the geography. They aren’t too distracting and give the book a whole lot of body.

I admired the learning that Father Chains subjects them to. They live this life of constantly learning topics ranging from history to math to writing to linguistics. The Bastards each take turns going away for a few months to be an apprentice somewhere far away. Once they feel like they’ve learned enough, they come back to debrief and share with the others what they learned. It causes them to be well-rounded polymath type characters that have knowledge of seemingly everything.

Favorite Quotes

Suddenly unable to look Father Chains in the eyes, he tried to pretend that his feet were fascinating objects that he’d never seen before.

“Go fold yourself in half,” said Locke, “and lick your ass.”

Small blacksmiths seemed to be pounding on anvils inconveniently located just above his eyes; Locke wondered how they’d gotten in there.

Spoilers Ahead

Jean and Locke’s Friendship

Jean and Locke have a really special relationship. When Jean first showed up, he was timid, afraid, and much bigger than the other boys. Locke was jealous and despised Jean because he was better at math and could beat up Locke with almost no effort.

Eventually, they warm up to each other and complement one another well. Locke is the brains of the group, designing the games that the Bastards pull off while Jean is the brawn. Due to Jean’s size and demeanor, Chains has Jean go to the best teacher in Camorr to learn how to fight with various weapons. Jean excelled with the matching hatchets with a ball-peen on the side opposite to the blade (that he endearingly calls the Wicked Sisters). Jean is the protector for the group and is always there to save Locke through brute force when needed.

“I don’t have to beat you, motherfucker. I just have to keep you here…until Jean shows up.”

They’ve been to hell and back together. They watched their fellow Bastards die at the hands of The Falconer, watched their haven burn to the ground, and had their massive fortune stolen out from underneath them. Together, they get revenge and get justice for their brothers’ deaths and, together, they set off for a new life.

Deception

I thought deception was going to be a major theme and driver of the plot. Locke is depicted as this mastermind thief that devises these grand plans to steal money from the rich of Camorr. Usually how these stories go is the thieves do one last really big job, there are a bunch of unforeseen hurdles, they lose a bunch but make it out in the end by out-tricking everyone else.

Locke’s big deception game is kind of an aside in this book. His final game goes off almost too well and they start raking in more money than they’ve ever gotten before without a hitch. The main conflict in the book doesn’t come from this, however. The real conflict comes from Raza’s desire to overthrow Barsavi for revenge. And in the end, Locke gets fully found out and is sent packing with only a few coppers to his name.

I can’t decide if I liked it or not. It is interesting, however, that Locke is too good at his job that it creates almost no conflict and the conflict instead comes from a bigger scheme that he merely gets wrapped up in.

Revenge

The books main antagonist, Capa Raza aka The Grey King aka Luciano Anatolius, is teeming with revenge. He spent 22 years making this scheme to kill Capa Barsavi and all the high class Right People of Camorr because Barsavi killed his father. He goes to great lengths and sacrifices all to get his revenge and move on.

Locke’s desire for revenge becomes so great after his brothers’ deaths that he nearly runs himself into the ground trying to get back at Raza and The Falconer. Even though Raza’s swordsmanship is much more superior to his, Locke’s blind revenge-filled fury keeps him going long enough to kill Raza.

Defeating The Falconer

Come on. Lynch spent the whole book making The Falconer seem like this formidable foe, this unbeatable Bondsmage from Karthain, a top-ranking sorcerer that can get anything he wants by bending people to his will. All it took to defeat him was a bonk with a hatchet and he was dispatched.

One whack of the hammer and his genetically modified bird is killed and he is tied up getting his fingers cut off and his tongue removed, after spilling the beans on Raza. It was very anticlimactic and a bit disappointing.

Atlas of the Heart

2023-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

A Model for Cultivating Meaningful Connection
Near Enemies
When Things Are Uncertain Or Too Much
- Stress
- Overwhelm
- Anxiety
- Worry
- Avoidance
- Excitement
- Dread
- Fear
- Vulnerability
When We Compare
When Things Don’t Go As Planned
When It’s Beyond Us
- Wonder
- Awe
- Confusion
- Interest
- Curiosity
- Surprise
When Things Aren’t What They Seem
When We’re Hurting
- Anguish
- Hopelessness
- Despair
- Sadness
- Grief
When We Go With Others
When We Fall Short
When We Search for Connection
When The Heart Is Open
- Love
- Lovelessness
- Heartbreak
- Trust
- Self-Trust
- Betrayal
- Defensiveness
- Flooding
- Hurt
When Life Is Good
- Joy
- Happiness
- Calm
- Contentment
- Gratitude
- Foreboding Joy
- Relief
- Tranquility
When We Feel Wronged
- Anger
- Contempt
- Disgust
- Dehumanization
- Hate
- Self-Righteousness
When We Self-Assess
- Pride
- Hubris
- Humility
My Thoughts

Brené Brown and her team started this project by gathering comments from an online class Brown was teaching where she asked two questions: What are the emotions and experiences that emerge the most often, and which emotions and experiences do people struggle to name or label?

From this list of about 150 emotions and experiences, they invited therapists from various backgrounds to rate these with one statement in mind: In my experience working with clients, the ability to name this emotion or experience is essential to being able to process it in a productive and healing manner.

There was some more processing and they ended up on the following 87 emotions and experiences. They are neatly organized by how they relate to each other, thoroughly researched, and clearly explained to give us a guide to the emotions and experiences that we all have as humans, all in an effort to cultivate more meaningful connections with others.

Language and emotional granularity matter. Without accurate language, we are limited in our ability to make sense of what is happening in our lives and share it with others. We don’t get the help that we need. We don’t regulate our emotions in a productive way. Our self-awareness is diminished.¹

A Model for Cultivating Meaningful Connection

“Cultivating meaningful connection is a daring and vulnerable practice that requires grounded confidence, the courage to walk alongside others, and story stewardship.”

Grounded confidence is centered around curiosity, learning, and improving. Its near enemy is knowing and proving and its far enemy is protecting fragile self-worth. The specific skill sets are practicing courage, rumbling with vulnerability, staying curious, practicing humility, committing to mastery and practice, and feeling embodied and connect to self.

Practicing the courage to walk alongside others is about being “other-focused, using language in the service of connecting, practicing compassion, empathy, and nonjudgment.” The near enemy is controlling the path and its far enemy is walking away. The specific skill sets are committing to be other-focused, practicing compassion, practicing empathy, practicing nonjudgment, sharing “power with” and “power to”, being relational, and setting and respecting boundaries.

Controlling the path is a very dangerous near enemy that we often do without thinking. Help can quickly turn into controlling the path. Remember that walking alongside is other-focused and control is self-focused.

Just Associates define three different variations of power within the social justice and activism fields. “Power with is based on mutual support, solidarity, collaboration and recognition and respect for differences. Power to is based on the belief that each individual has the power to make a difference. Power within is defined by an ability to recognize differences and respect others, grounded in a strong foundation of self-worth and self-knowledge.”

“Story stewardship means honoring the sacred nature of story—the ones we share and the ones we hear—and knowing that we’ve been entrusted with something valuable or that we have something valuable that we should treat with respect and care.” Its near enemy is performing connection while driving disconnection. The specific skills are rumbling with story (listening, discovering, and staying curious) and building narrative trust (believing, acknowledging, and affirming).

It is very difficult to know exactly what someone is feeling. So many emotions present the same way so that it is impossible to know if someone is crying because of anger, despair, grief, or any other range of feelings. Even physical expression can be difficult to read. Instead, we need to ask questions and listen to their story empathically.²

Performative connection is “acting interested or invested.” What drives the disconnection is that we want to be the knower, give advice, and solve the problem when others are suffering. The best way to practice story stewardship in these moments is to say something like “I’m grateful that you’re sharing this with me. What does support look like? I can listen and be with you, I can help problem-solve, or whatever else you need. You tell me.”

The two near enemies to building narrative trust are narrative takeover and narrative tap-out. Narrative tap-out looks like disinterest or complete shutdown, either because the story makes us uncomfortable or we don’t care about the other person enough to care about their story. We can also tap-out of our own stories when we lack grounded confidence that our stories matter.

Narrative takeover happens when we hijack the story and make ourselves the center of it. This can look like “shifting the focus to us, questioning or not believing what someone is sharing because it’s different than our lived experience, or diminishing the importance of an experience because it makes us feel uncomfortable or, worse, complicit.”³

For each of these three parts of the model, a key property is knowing and applying the language of human experience and emotion. The near enemy of this is shaping emotion and experience to fit what we know. This means feeling our complex emotions and experiences and shoving them into a word that we have like “sad”, “glad”, “mad”, or “fine.”

Near Enemies

Chris Germer defines, “Near enemies are states that appear similar to the desired quality but actually undermine it. Far enemies are the opposite of what we are trying to achieve.” Jack Kornfield explains that “near enemies may seem like the qualities that we believe are important, and may even be mistaken for them, but they are different and often undermine our practices.”

Brown tells us that “on the surface, the near enemies of emotions or experiences might look and even feel like connection, but ultimately they drive us to be disconnected from ourselves and from each other. Without awareness, near enemies become the practices that fuel separation, rather than practices that reinforce the inextricable connection of all people.”

“The near enemy of love is attachment.” Attachment says that you’ll only love someone because you need something from them or you’ll love them only if they will be the way you want. They can look very similar but at the root of it, “true love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aims to possess.”

“The near enemy of equanimity is indifference or callousness.” Again, these can look really similar but “indifference is based on fear” and has a sense of withdrawal tied to it. True equanimity is stable and stems from an engagement with life as a whole rather than a withdrawal. They can look similar but the near enemy actually drives us away from equanimity.

We should “pressure-check” our responses often to make sure that a near enemy isn’t lurking. For example, are we showing compassion or are is it really coming across as pity? Near enemies destroy connection and they are often very difficult to spot.

When Things Are Uncertain Or Too Much

Stress

“We feel stressed when we evaluate environmental demand as beyond our ability to cope successfully. This includes elements of unpredictability, uncontrollability, and feeling overloaded.”

Stress is different from pressure which arises when we feel like an important outcome depends on us. Stress comes from too many demands and not enough resources in our environment.

Overwhelm

“Overwhelmed means an extreme level of stress, an emotional and/or cognitive intensity to the point of feeling unable to function.”

When experiencing overwhelm, we have intense emotions, our focus on them is moderate, and our clarity about exactly what we are feeling is low enough that we get confused when trying to identify or describe the emotions. (Carol Gohm)

Anxiety

“The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as ‘an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure.’“

Anxiety can be both a state and a trait.

Brown offers a helpful analogy to describe anxiety: the Willy Wonka shit tunnel. This comes from the scene in Willy Wonka when they ride the boat on the chocolate river through the tunnel of “escalating loss of control, worst-case-scenario thinking and imagery, and total uncertainty.”

Worry

“Worry is described as a chain of negative thoughts about bad things that might happen in the future.”

Worry is one of two coping mechanisms for anxiety, the other being avoidance. Worry, unlike anxiety, is not an emotion. It is completely cognitive.

Avoidance

“Avoidance, the second coping strategy for anxiety, is not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing that already feels like it’s consuming us.”

Excitement

“Excitement is described as an energized state of enthusiasm leading up to or during an enjoyable activity”

Excitement isn’t always a good feeling. We get a similar feeling as when we are feeling anxiety. We usually use “anxiety” to describe a negatively perceived sensation and “excitement” for positively perceived ones.

Dread

“Dread occurs frequently in response to high-probability negative events; its magnitude increases as the dreaded event draws nearer.

Fear

“Fear is a negative, short-lasting, high-alert emotion in response to a perceived threat, and, like anxiety, it can be measured as a state or trait.”

“For anxiety and dread, the threat is in the future. For fear, the threat is now—in the present.”

Fear and anxiety are necessary emotions that are helpful in our quest for connection.

Vulnerability

“Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.”

Being vulnerable does not mean oversharing and spilling out our hearts to everyone we meet. It is “sharing with people who have earned the right to hear our stories and our experiences.” We are vulnerable with those that we trust with our stories.

When We Compare

Comparison

“Comparison is the crush of conformity from one side and competition from the other—it’s trying to simultaneously fit in and stand out.”

frequent social comparisons are not associated with life satisfaction or the positive emotions of love and joy but are associated with the negative emotions of fear, anger, shame, and sadness.

Admiration

“We feel admiration when someone’s abilities, accomplishments, or character inspires us, or when we see something else that inspires us, like art or nature.”

Usually when we experience admiration, we want to improve ourselves. I am currently in admiration of Brené Brown after reading her thoughts in this book and it makes me want to absorb all of it so that I can be similarly well-equipped for meaningful connection.

Reverence

“Reverence, which is sometimes called adoration, worship, or veneration, is a deeper form of admiration or respect and is often combined with a sense of meaningful connection with something greater than ourselves.”

While experiencing admiration drives us to improve ourselves, reverence gives us a desire to be closer to the thing or person that we revere.

Envy

“Envy occurs when we want something that another person has.”

Most envy experiences stem from one of three categories:

Attraction. We want to look like someone else, be as popular as someone else, want the romantic partner that person has, etc.
Competence. We want to be as smart or as skilled as someone else.
Wealth. We want to be rich and able to afford all the cool stuff that person has.

Jealousy

“Jealousy is when we fear losing a relationship or a valued part of a relationship that we already have.”

Jealousy is a cognitive function. We think jealousy and that can lead us to feel anger, sadness, or fear.

Resentment

“Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, ‘better than,’ and/or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. It’s an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.”

“Resentment can be recognized by a thought pattern: What mean and critical thing am I rehearsing saying to this person?”

Schadenfreude (shaa·duhn·froy·duh)

“In the case of “schadenfreude,” it simply means pleasure or joy derived from someone else’s suffering or misfortune.”

We don’t have a specific word for this experience in English but luckily German does. Schadenfreude doesn’t necessarily stem from a lack of empathy. Often, we are “grateful for the healing that accountability brings to those who have been affected by wrongdoing” rather than celebrating someone’s suffering.

Freudenfreude (froy·duhn·froy·duh)

“Freudenfreude, which is the opposite of schadenfreude—it’s the enjoyment of another’s success. It’s also a subset of empathy.”

There are two behaviors to increase freudenfreude:

Shoy. Intentionally sharing the joy of someone relating a success story by showing interest and asking follow-up questions.
Bragitude. Intentionally tying words of gratitude toward the listener following discussion of personal successes.

When Things Don’t Go As Planned

Boredom

“Boredom is the uncomfortable state of wanting to engage in satisfying activity, but being unable to do it.”

Doses of boredom or mundane tasks can be good. It allows our minds to wander, imagine, and create. Barbara Oakley, in her popular MOOC Learning How To Learn, calls this diffuse thinking. It allows our brains to relax and create new links between seemingly unrelated topics in our minds.

Disappointment

“Disappointment is unmet expectations. The more significant the expectations, the more significant the disappointment.”

“It didn’t work out how I wanted, and I believe the outcome was outside of my control.”

Expectations

“When we develop expectations, we paint a picture in our head of how things are going to be and how they’re going to look.”

When the picture in our hand doesn’t match up to reality, it leads to disappointment.

Expectations can be unexamined and unexpressed and can be a slippery slope towards disappointment. It is best to think through and vocalize your expectations of a situation so that you can prepare accordingly. Ask yourself, “What expectations do you have going into this? What do you want to happen? Why? What will that mean to you? Do you have a movie in your head? Are you setting goals and expectations that are completely outside of your control?”

Lowering our expectations is one way to minimize disappointment but that can lead to living a cynical life full of foreboding joy and never really engaging. Instead, examine and express your expectations. Express what you need and the why behind the expectation.

Regret

“Both disappointment and regret arise when an outcome was not what we wanted, counted on, or thought would happen. With disappointment, we often believe the outcome was out of our control (but we’re learning more about how this is not always the case). With regret, we believe the outcome was caused by our decisions or actions”.

“It didn’t work out how I wanted, and the outcome was caused by my decisions, actions, or failure to act.”

The idea of living life with “No Ragrats” seems romantic, spontaneous, and outgoing. But when you live without regrets, really you are just living without reflection. You don’t learn anything or improve yourself if you don’t reflect on past experiences and ask yourself, How could I have done that better?

Discouragement

“I’m losing my confidence and enthusiasm about any future effort—I’m losing the motivation and confidence to persist.”

Resignation

“I’ve lost my confidence and enthusiasm about any future effort—I’ve lost the motivation and confidence to persist.”

Frustration

“Something that feels out of my control is preventing me from achieving my desired outcome”

Frustration often overlaps with anger. The difference is that, with frustration, we don’t think we can do anything to fix the situation. We think there is something we can do when we are angry.

When It’s Beyond Us

Wonder

“Wonder fuels our passion for exploration and learning, for curiosity and adventure.”

Awe

“‘Wonder inspires the wish to understand; awe inspires the wish to let shine, to acknowledge and to unite.’ When feeling awe, we tend to simply stand back and observe, ‘to provide a stage for the phenomenon to shine.’“

Confusion

“Confusion is critical for learning.” Learning needs to effortful and work our brains like we work our muscles at the gym. There is a zone of optimal confusion where learning is at it’s peak. Too little confusion and we don’t get deep learning and we’re not problem-solving. Too much confusion and we get frustrated, resign, or become bored.

Interest

“Interest is a cognitive openness to engaging with a topic or experience.”

Curiosity

“Curiosity is recognizing a gap in our knowledge about something that interests us, and becoming emotionally and cognitively invested in closing that gap through exploration and learning. Curiosity often starts with interest and can range from mild curiosity to passionate investigation.”

A notable difference between interest and curiosity is the heart and head investments. When we are interested, we are cognitively open to seeing what’s there. When we are curious, we are emotionally invested to closing the gap in our knowledge.

This also means that we have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can become curious. We aren’t curious about things we don’t know about or are unaware of. Some research shows that the more we know, the more we want to know.

Surprise

“Surprise is ‘an interruption caused by information that doesn’t fit with our current understanding or expectations. It causes us to reevaluate.’“

Surprise is an emotional amplifier. It intensifies the emotion that we feel once our brains work out the unexpected thing that is happening.

When Things Aren’t What They Seem

Amusement

“The definition of amusement that aligns with our research is ‘pleasurable, relaxed excitation.’“

Amusement can be identified from other positive emotions by two themes: an awareness of incongruity (something unexpected) and feeling playful with others around us.

Bittersweetness

“Bittersweet is a mixed feeling of happiness and sadness.”

The sadness comes from having to let go of something and the happiness comes from what has been experienced or what is coming next. Bittersweetness is not being unsure whether we are happy or sad (ambivalence), it is feeling both at the same time.

Nostalgia

“We define nostalgia as a yearning for the way things used to be in our often idealized and self-protective version of the past.”

Nostalgia is usually positive and context-specific. It is similar to bittersweetness in that it combines “happiness and sadness along with a sense yearning and loss.” It can also be used as a tool for disconnection when we yearn for “the good old days” and resist important change and growth in the world due to our discomfort.

Nostalgia can also lead to rumination where we involuntarily “focus on negative and pessimistic thoughts” which can lead to depression. Rumination is different from worry in that we are focused on the past rather than the future. Rumination is also different from reflection which is a healthy and productive coping strategy.

Cognitive Dissonance

“Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other.”

When we feel cognitive dissonance, we immediately want to make the discomfort of it go away by resolving the dissonance by rejecting or avoiding one of the cognitions. We will go to great lengths to lie to ourselves or avoid just to reduce the dissonance. Instead, we should sit with new information and rethink and unlearn and “stay curious and resist choosing comfort over courage” to reduce the dissonance.

Paradox

“A paradox is the appearance of contradiction between two related components.”

Where cognitive dissonance drives us to resolve the tension between two conflicting cognitions, paradox invites us to understand the tension and recognize that both cognitions can be two. Like cognitive dissonance, paradox is not an emotion in and of itself. It starts with cognition and then emotion comes later when we feel the pull of two different ideas.

Irony and Sarcasm

“Irony and sarcasm are forms of communication in which the literal meaning of the words is different, often opposite, from the intended message. In both irony and sarcasm, there may be an element of criticism and humor. However, sarcasm is a particular type of irony in which the underlying message is normally meant to ridicule, tease, or criticize.”.

Using irony and sarcasm is a slippery slope. For irony to land as intended, the recipient has to “infer other people’s mental states, thoughts, and feelings.” They hear the actual words and tone and have to make a guess at the intended meeting. This can easily and quickly become misunderstood. We also often use sarcasm to soften the blow of criticism.

Because of this, we should use irony and sarcasm thoughtfully and with the right people. Ask yourself, are you dressing something up in humor that actually requires clarity and honesty?

When We’re Hurting

Anguish

“Anguish is an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief, and powerlessness.”

There is another alternative to not addressing the trauma of anguish—we can convince ourselves that we’re okay and keep ourselves upright by hanging our crumpling anguish on rigidity and perfectionism and silence, like a wet towel hanging on a rod. We can become closed off, never open to vulnerability and its gifts, and barely existing because anything at any moment could threaten that fragile, rigid scaffolding that’s holding up our crumpling selves and keeping us standing.

Hopelessness

“Hopelessness arises out of a combination of negative life events and negative thought patterns, particularly self-blame and the perceived inability to change our circumstances.”

Hope is a cognitive process, not the warm, fuzzy emotion we see in movie and book plots. Specifically, we experience hope when:

We have the ability to set realistic goals
We are able to figure out the pathways to achieve those goals
We have agency and believe in ourselves

Setting good (SMART) goals is a skill and is necessary to have hope. When we don’t have proper goal-setting skills, small disappointments quickly grow into hopelessness and despair.

Despair

“Despair is a sense of hopelessness about a person’s entire life and future. When extreme hopelessness seeps into all the corners of our lives and combines with extreme sadness, we feel despair.”

Like hopelessness, becoming resilient to despair requires us to build our capacity to set realistic goals, think through the pathways to achieve those goals, and develop a strong belief in ourselves. This is called a hope practice; it’s intentional and requires patience and effort.

Along with a hope practice of goals, pathways, and agency, we can look to Martin Seligman’s three Ps of resilience:

Personalization. We believe that we are the problem and forget to think about larger issues and context. Remember to think of all the outside factors that are playing a role in your struggles.
Permanence. We believe that our struggle will never end. Remember the temporary nature of most struggles by asking yourself Will this be a big deal in five minutes? Five hours? Five days? Five months? Five years?
Pervasiveness. We believe that our struggle has leaked into every single part of our lives leaving them all stained or changed until nothing good is left. Will this struggle at work ruin your relationship with your loved ones, for example?

Sadness

Sadness is not depression. Depression is a whole host of other emotions and experiences that persist over a long time. Similarly, sadness is not grief. Grief is also a group of emotions and experiences.

Sadness is often thought of as this evil emotion that we should never feel. Instead, it is an important and necessary emotion with some positive aspects. Most importantly, sadness is critical in developing empathy and compassion. When we are sad, we often look to connect with others. That is why we like sad movies and books. Sadness leads to feeling moved and connected to what it means to be human.

Grief

“Three foundational elements of grief emerged from the data: loss, longing, and feeling lost.”

Loss. This can obviously include death or separation but could also be the loss of normality or the loss of what we thought we understood about something or someone.
Longing. This is an involuntary yearning for wholeness, meaning, or the opportunity to regain what we’ve lost.
Feeling lost. When experiencing grief, we need to reorient every part of our physical, emotional, and social worlds.

Like a lot of these experiences that hurt, grief is a process with many different emotions involved. Grief does not follow a linear “stages of grief” process like many of us were taught. Robert Neimeyer writes, “A central process in grieving is the attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss.”

When experiencing grief, we need connection to heal. Our grief needs to be witnessed and talked about without our grief being lessened or reframed. We need others to be completely present to help us make meaning of our loss.

When We Go With Others

Compassion and cognitive empathy are the most effective ways to be in connection with and in service to someone who is struggling, without taking on their issues as our own.

Compassion

“Compassion is the daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering.”

Compassion is fueled by understanding and accepting that we are all humans. We all go through pain and suffering. It’s not about being “better than” others or being able to “fix” them. Compassion is a “practice based in the beauty and pain of shared humanity.” It is “not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals” as American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes.

“Compassion is the tender readiness of the heart to respond to one’s own or another’s pain without despair, resentment, or aversion. It is the wish to dissipate suffering. Compassion embraces those experiencing sorrow, and eliminates cruelty from the mind.”

Pity

“Pity involves four elements:

a belief that the suffering person is inferior;
a passive, self-focused reaction that does not include providing help;
a desire to maintain emotional distance; and
avoidance of sharing in the other person’s suffering.”

Pity is the near enemy of compassion; the difference is the separation. When we pity someone, we feel different from them whereas when we are compassionate we recognize the suffering as a reflection of our own pain. Pity is “Oh, that poor person. I feel sorry for people like that.” versus “I understand this; I suffer in the same way.”

Empathy

“Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill set that allows us to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding.”

Cognitive empathy specifically is “the ability to recognize and understand another person’s emotions.” This does not mean feeling the same emotion they are feeling for them. It means reaching back into our own experience with an emotion so that we can understand and connect with that person. It isn’t relating to an experience, it’s connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience.

Empathy is also not walking in someone else’s shoes. Instead, empathy is listening “to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.” As soon as you try to put yourself in someone else’s place instead of trying to understand from their perspective, it is no longer an empathetic connection. You either take on their emotions too much or you doubt what they are telling you because their experiences don’t match yours.

You don’t need to be the expert or experience what they’ve experienced. You need to connect to your own experiences in a “thinking” way that creates emotional resonance: Oh, yeah. I know that feeling. I’m not going to fall into it right now, but I know it and I can communicate with you in a way that makes you know you’re not alone.

Theresa Wiseman developed four attributes of empathy and Brown’s team added a fifth from Kristen Neff:

Perspective taking. What does that concept mean for you? What is that experience like for you?
Staying out of judgement. Just listen, don’t put value on it.
Recognizing emotion. How can I touch within myself something that helps me identify and connect with what the other person might be feeling? Check in and clarify what you are hearing. Ask questions.
Communicating our understanding about the emotion. Sometimes this is elaborate and detailed, and sometimes this is simply, “Shit. That’s hard. I get that.”
Practicing mindfulness. This is not pushing away emotion because it’s uncomfortable, but feeling it and moving through it.

Empathy Misses

Sympathy Versus Empathy - I feel sorry for you. The person who responds with sympathy (“I feel so sorry for you”) rather than empathy (“I get it, I feel with you, and I’ve been there”). The subtext of this response is distance: These things don’t happen to me or people like me.
Judgement - You “should” feel shame! The person who hears the story and actually feels shame for you. The friend gasps and confirms how horrified you should be.
Disappointment - You’ve let me down. The person who needs you to be the pillar of worthiness and authenticity. This person can’t help you because they are too disappointed in your imperfections. You’ve let this person down.
Discharging Discomfort with Blame - This feels terrible. Who can we blame? You? This person immediately needs to discharge the discomfort and vulnerability of the situation by blaming and scolding. They may blame/scold you: “What were you thinking?” Or they may look for someone else to take the fall: “Who was that guy? We’ll kick his butt.”
Minimize/Avoid - Let’s make this go away. We minimize and avoid when we want hard feelings to go away. Out of their own discomfort, this person refuses to acknowledge that you’re in pain and/or that you’re hurting: “You’re exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad. You rock. You’re perfect. Everyone loves you.”
Comparing/Competing - If you think that’s bad! This person confuses connecting with you over shared experiences with the opportunity to one-up you. “That’s nothing. Listen to what happened to me one time!”
Speaking Truth to Power - Don’t upset people or make them uncomfortable. You hold someone accountable for language, comments, or behavior that marginalizes or dehumanizes others, and it causes discomfort or conflict. When this person observes this or hears your story of what happened, they respond with, “I can’t believe you said that to your boss!” or “I can’t believe you went there!” or “You can’t talk about that stuff with people” versus an empathetic response of “That must have been hard—you were really brave” or “It’s hard to stand up for what you believe in—thank you.”
Advice Giving/Problem Solving - I can fix this and I can fix you. Sometimes when we see pain our first instinct is to fix it. This is especially true for those of us whom people seek out to help with problem-solving. In these instances, rather than listen and be with people in their emotion, we start fixing.

Sympathy

“Sympathy is the near enemy of empathy.” It is also very similar to pity in that it creates a disconnection via a separation between you and them. When you show sympathy towards someone, you are saying that you two are different and that thing you’re dealing with doesn’t happen to me or to people like me.

Boundaries

“Boundaries are a prerequisite for compassion and empathy. We can’t connect with someone unless we’re clear about where we end and they begin. If there’s no autonomy between people, then there’s no compassion or empathy, just enmeshment.”

“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” One good way to set boundaries is to say what is okay and what is not okay. This way you can set boundaries without denying others their right to thinking or feeling. It is simply the expression of the thinking or feeling that is the problem. For example:

It’s okay to be pissed. It’s not okay to raise your voice and pound on the table.
It’s okay to change your mind. It’s not okay to assume that I’m okay with the changes without talking to me.
It’s okay to disagree with me, but it’s not okay to ridicule my ideas and beliefs.

Comparative Suffering

“Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world.”

“Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.”

When We Fall Short

Shame

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”

Brown’s shame 1-2-3s: We all experience shame. We are all afraid to talk about it. The less we talk about it, the more control it has over us.

When we feel shame, the focus is on our being, not on our behavior. We fear that something we’ve done or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection, like no one could love us and like we don’t belong. Most importantly, shame thrives on secrecy, silence, and judgement.

Empathy is the cure for shame. When we share our experience with shame with someone who responds with empathy, the shame starts to go away. Similarly, we can’t show empathy when we are feeling shame because the “inward focus overrides our ability to think about another person’s experience.”

There are four elements that came up when researching shame resilience. These aren’t necessarily steps but they all need to happen to build resilience to shame.

Recognizing shame and understanding its triggers. Mindfulness is critical here to recognize when we are feeling shame and what triggered it.
Practicing critical awareness. Reality check the triggers and expectations that are causing you to feel shameful.
Reaching out. Own and share your story by connecting empathically to others.
Speaking shame. Talk about how you feel and ask others for what you need. Staying silence makes shame worse.

Self-Compassion

“According to [Kristin] Neff, self-compassion has three elements: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.”

Self-kindness vs. self-judgment. “Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism. Self-compassionate people recognize that being imperfect, failing, and experiencing life difficulties is inevitable, so they tend to be gentle with themselves when confronted with painful experiences rather than getting angry when life falls short of set ideals.”
Common humanity vs. isolation. “Self-compassion involves recognizing that suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience—something that we all go through rather than being something that happens to ‘me’ alone.”
Mindfulness vs. over-identification. “Mindfulness is a non-judgmental, receptive mind state in which one observes thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to suppress or deny them. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time. At the same time, mindfulness requires that we not be ‘over-identified’ with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negative reactivity.”

Perfectionism

“Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, work perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”

Perfectionism is one of the biggest barriers to working toward mastery.⁴ Curiosity is a prerequisite to learning and achieving mastery. Perfectionism kills our curiosity by telling us that we have to know everything or risk looking less than.

Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven (How can I improve?). Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think?

Perfectionism is self-destructive. There is no such thing as perfect and perfection is an unattainable goal. Perfectionism is about trying to earn approval and be perceived as perfect. We cannot control other people’s perceptions.

Perfectionism is addictive. When we inevitably fall short (because, again, there is no such thing as perfection), we believe it was because we weren’t perfect enough so we strive to be more perfect. Perfectionism increases the odds that we experience shame.

Perfectionism causes “life paralysis”, all of the opportunities we don’t take because we are too afraid that what we do or put into the world could be imperfect. Life paralysis is also all of the dreams we don’t follow because we are scared of failing or making mistakes.

Guilt

“Like shame, guilt is an emotion that we experience when we fall short of our own expectations or standards. However, with guilt, our focus is on having done something wrong and on doing something to set things right, like apologizing or changing a behavior.”

We feel guilty when we compare something we’ve done against our values and they don’t match up, when we live without integrity. The focus is on our behaviors, not our self like it is with shame. With reflection, guilt can be a driver of positive personal change.

Humiliation

“We can define humiliation as the intensely painful feeling that we’ve been unjustly degraded, ridiculed, or put down and that our identity has been demeaned or devalued.”

Humiliation causes us to feel unworthy of connection, like shame, but we don’t believe that we deserve that feeling of unworthiness. With shame, we do believe that we deserve our feeling of unworthiness.

Embarrassment

“Embarrassment is a fleeting feeling of self-conscious discomfort in response to a minor incident that was witnessed by others.”

Embarrassment is fleeting and is often seen as funny or something that could have happened to anyone. Embarrassment can be triggered from three types of events: committing a faux pas or social mistake, being the center of attention, and being in a sticky social situation.

When We Search for Connection

Belonging and Fitting In

“Belonging is a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are.”

When we have a deeper sense of belonging and connection to a larger humanity actually gives us more freedom to express our individuality without fear of jeopardizing belonging. Belonging means sharing our authentic selves with the world. “True belonging doesn’t require us to change who are; it requires us to be who we are.”

Fitting in is the near enemy of belonging. Because we have an instinctual desire to be a part of a group, we will go to great lengths to fit in. We try and make some fake figure of ourselves just to fit in and as soon as we do or say something that is true to our authentic selves, we risk our (false) comfort of belonging. There can’t be true belonging if people don’t really know who we are. “Authenticity is a requirement for belonging, and fitting in is a threat.”

Connection

“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”

As described by Judith Jordan, “The need for connection in which growth is a priority is the core motivation in people’s lives. In growth-fostering relationships, people are able to bring themselves most fully and authentically into connection.”

Disconnection

“Disconnection is often equated with social rejection, social exclusion, and/or social isolation, and these feelings of disconnection actually share the same neural pathways with feelings of physical pain.”

There are two big things to look out for when it comes to disconnection. The first is that sometimes we would rather hide and pretend that we don’t need connection rather than make a bid for connection and risk that bid being ignored or rejected. The second is about perfectionism. There is research that shows that people with perfectionist traits tend to do things that cause perceived or actual rejection from others. “Authenticity is a requirement for connection, and perfectionism is a threat.”

Insecurity

Insecurity is more than just self-doubt or lack of confidence. There are three types of insecurity:

“Domain-specific insecurity occurs when we are insecure about a specific domain or resource in life, for example, food insecurity, financial insecurity, or a lack of physical safety. Combating domain-specific insecurity is about access and resources.”

“Relationship or interpersonal insecurity occurs when we don’t feel we have a supportive and trusting relationship. It can happen either in a specific relationship or as an overarching feeling about all of our relationships. It makes us feel uncertain about being loved, trusted, protected, and valued. This kind of insecurity varies based on the relationship partner.”

“General or personal insecurity occurs when we are overly critical of our weaknesses. This may include being overly critical of our body image or our performance at work.”

Self security is “the open and nonjudgemental acceptance of one’s own weaknesses”, according to Alice Huang and Howard Berenbaum. The more self-secure we are, the more successful we are at cultivating meaningful connection with others and developing healthy relationships. Like how perfectionism is a threat to connection, our insecurities can cause us to become disconnected.

Invisibility

“I define invisibility as a function of disconnection and dehumanization, where an individual or group’s humanity and relevance are unacknowledged, ignored, and/or diminished in value or importance.”

Invisibility causes people and groups to be looked over and ignored. This can look like not getting proper credit, having limited cultural representation in the group you belong to, or being viewed as a symbol of your overall group without being recognized as an individual.

Loneliness

“At the heart of loneliness is the absence of meaningful social interaction—an intimate relationship, friendships, family gatherings, or even community or work group connections.”

Loneliness and being alone are not the same; being alone can be rejuvenating for introverts. Instead, loneliness comes from a lack of social connection. Just like we feel hungry when we need food or we feel thirsty when we need water, we feel loneliness when we need social connection.

So, to combat loneliness we first need to identify and have the courage to acknowledge that we are feeling lonely and are deprived of social connection. To alleviate it, we should look to find quality social connection. Quality is much more important here than quantity.

When The Heart Is Open

Love

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can be cultivated between two people only when it exists within each one of them—we can love others only as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can survive these injuries only if they’re acknowledged, healed, and rare.”

Lovelessness

We all need love and we need it to truthfully guide decisions and behaviors.

Heartbreak

“I learned that heartbreak is more than just a painful type of disappointment or failure. It hurts in a different way because heartbreak is always connected to love and belonging.”

There are many ways that heartbreak can happen but the common thread is a loss (perceived or real) of love. Whether from rejection, death, or unrequited love, heartbreak only can be broken by something that you gave your heart to.

Every time that we offer love, we risk heartbreak. It takes bravery and courage to risk that but the reward for loving someone or something often far outweighs the risk. As Joe Reynolds describes, “heartbreak is unavoidable unless we choose not to love at all.”

Trust

“Charles Feltman defines trust as ‘choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.’“

Brown’s team identified seven elements of trust, condensed to the acronym BRAVING:

Boundaries. You respect my boundaries, and when you’re not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. You’re willing to say no.
Reliability. You do what you say you’ll do. This means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise.
Accountability. You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends.
Vault. You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. I need to know that my confidences are kept, and that you’re not sharing with my any information about other people that should be confidential.
Integrity. You choose courage over comfort. You choose what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy. And you choose to practice you values rather than simply professing them.
Nonjudgment. I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. We can ask each other for help without judgement.
Generosity. You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others. You assume that people are doing their best with all of their abilities, resources, and knowledge they have now.

Self-Trust

“Self-trust is normally the first casualty of failure or mistakes. We stop trusting ourselves when we hurt others, get hurt, feel shame, or question our worth.”

We can also use the BRAVING framework here:

Boundaries. Did I respect my own boundaries? Was I clear about what’s okay and what’s not okay?
Reliability. Was I reliable? Did I do what I said I was going to do?
Accountability. Did I hold myself accountable?
Vault. Did I respect the vault and share appropriately
Integrity. Did I act from my integrity?
Nonjudgment. Did I ask for what I needed? Was I nonjudgmental about needing help?
Generous. Was I generous toward myself?

Betrayal

“Betrayal is so painful because, at its core, it is a violation of trust. It happens in relationships in which trust is expected and assumed, so when it’s violated, we’re often shocked, and we can struggle to believe what’s happening.” We can also betray ourselves.

Betrayal is difficult to heal because it “requires significant courage and vulnerability to hear the pain we’ve cause without becoming defensive.” To come back from betrayal, we first have to acknowledge the pain that was caused without minimizing it or making excuses. Then, we have to be accountable, make amends, and take action.

Defensiveness

“At its core, defensiveness is a way to protect our ego and a fragile self-esteem.”

When we are exposed to information that differs from how we view ourselves, we get defensive. We make excuses, minimize, blame, discredit, or refute it to avoid it. We get tunnel vision and start thinking of our response rather than actually listening. Becoming defensive keeps us from understanding feedback we get from others and keeps us from reflecting on our attitudes and behaviors based on that feedback.

Flooding

“According to the Gottman Institute, flooding is ‘a sensation of feeling psychologically and physically overwhelmed during conflict, making it virtually impossible to have a productive, problem-solving discussion.’“

We can only take so much negativity before it is too much and flooding begins. It is critical to take breaks during times of flooding instead of making the conflict worse. The more often we experience flooding, the more we dread communicating.

Hurt

A team of researchers led by Anita Vangelisti write, “Individuals who are hurt experience a combination of sadness at having been emotionally wounded and fear of being vulnerable to harm. When people feel hurt, they have appraised something that someone said or did as causing them emotional pain.”

It is vulnerable to admit and express that our feelings are hurt. We lash out, cry, get angry, or internalize the pain instead of saying “my feelings are hurt.”

People usually don’t mean to hurt our feelings. It is usually caused by thoughtless, careless, or insensitive actions.

Hurt can be a mix of different emotions but they all culminate to a unique emotional experience. Because of the variety of emotions involved, hurt can look like many different things.

When Life Is Good

Joy

“Based on our research, I define joy as an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation.”

Joy is different from happiness. Joy is more sudden, unexpected, and higher intensity than happiness. There is some connection with others, nature, or the universe. Experiences of joy are difficult to articulate. The “very nature of joy pushes the boundaries of our ability to communicate about live experience via spoken language” as hypothesized by Matthew Kuan Johnson.

“While experiencing joy, we become more truly ourselves. Colors seem brighter, physical movements feel freer and easier, and smiling happens involuntarily. Some researchers even describe spontaneous weeping as part of the overwhelming experience of joy.”

Happiness

“I would define the state of happiness as feeling pleasure often related to the immediate environment or current circumstances.”

Happiness is often talked about as a trait (something you are) rather than a state (something we experience). As a trait, happiness is relatively stable and usually the result of effort and practice.

As a state, it is important to have happiness in our lives. However, what makes us happy in the immediate environment may hinder us from experiencing deeper feelings like joy and gratitude.

Calm

“I define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity.”

Calm is contagious, just like anxiety is. There are three behaviors/questions for cultivating and maintaining calm:

Do we want to infect people with more anxiety, or heal ourselves and the people around us with calm?
Do we match the pace of anxiety, or do we slow things down with breath and tone?
Do we have all the information we need to make a decision or form a response?

Contentment

“I define contentment as the feeling of completeness, appreciation, and ‘enoughness’ that we experience when our needs are satisfied.”

In one piece of research, 71% of the variance of life satisfaction is measured by one question: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”

If we are not satisfied, do we need to buy or do more stuff to make us satisfied? Or do we need to stop taking things for granted so that we can be satisfied?

Gratitude

“Gratitude is an emotion that reflects our deep appreciation for what we value, what brings meaning to our lives, and what makes us feel connected to ourselves and others.”

Gratitude prevents us from “adapting to goodness.” We get used to the new car, the new spouse, the new job until they are no longer exciting or bring us happiness. When we are grateful, we appreciate the value something brings us and we extract more benefits from it. Gratitude allows us to move into contentment.

Like most things, gratitude is a practice. It is a way of thinking and doing that allows us to participate more in life, to magnify the pleasure we get from life.

Foreboding Joy

“If you’re afraid to lean into good news, wonderful moments, and joy—if you find yourself waiting for the other shoe to drop—you are not alone. It’s called ‘foreboding joy,’ and most of us experience it.”

Joy is the most vulnerable human emotion. When we experience joy, there is a fear that we are inviting disaster into our lives. When we feel that glimpse of vulnerability, instead of using it as a warning sign that something bad my happen use it as a reminder to practice gratitude.

Relief

“Ira Roseman and Andreas Evdokas describe relief as ‘feelings of tension leaving the body and being able to breathe more easily, thoughts of the worst being over and being safe for the moment, resting, and wanting to get on to something else.’“

Tranquility

“‘Tranquility is associated with the absence of demand’ and ‘no pressure to do anything.’“

Tranquility allows us to restore ourselves from the drain of mental fatigue and attention depletion. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan identified four elements of a restorative environment:

a sense of getting away
a feeling of immersion
holding attention without effort
compatibility with one’s preferences

Contentment and tranquility are similar but hold an important distinction. We often have a sense of having completed something when we are content and we relish the feeling of doing nothing when we are tranquil.

When We Feel Wronged

Anger

“If you look across the research, you learn that anger is an emotion that we feel when something gets in the way of a desired outcome or when we believe there’s a violation of the way things should be. When we feel anger, we believe that someone or something else is to blame for an unfair or unjust situation, and that something can be done to resolve the problem.”

Anger is an indicator emotion that masks our other feelings that are harder to talk about than anger. Many emotions and experiences present as anger. “It’s much easier to say ‘I’m so pissed off’ than ‘I feel so betrayed and hurt.’ It’s even easier to say ‘I’m angry with myself’ than ‘I’m disappointed with how I showed up.’” When feeling anger, dig in and ask yourself what is behind the anger. Is it shame? Is it disappointment? Is it loneliness?

Anger can be a catalyst for change. It is often a compassionate response to be angry when witnessing social injustice. It is important to remember that the anger is a catalyst for change, not the change itself.

Contempt

“Contempt, simply put, says, ‘I’m better than you. And you are lesser than me.’”

John and Julie Gottman identified four damaging negative communication patterns that predict divorce, dubbed The Four Horsemen:

Criticism. Verbally attacking or blaming your partner’s character.
Defensiveness. Victimizing yourself to ward off a perceived attack or to reverse the blame.
Contempt. Attacking your partner’s sense of self with insulting or abusive language that communicates superiority. “What separates contempt from criticism is the intention to insult and psychologically abuse your partner.”
Stonewalling. Withdrawing from interaction to avoid conflict and convey disapproval, distance, and separation.

Contempt results in distancing in a way that signifies that they are not considered worthy of your time or energy. We look down on the other person and want to exclude or ignore them as a sign of superiority.

Disgust

“According to emotions research pioneer Paul Ekman, disgust ‘arises as a feeling of aversion towards something offensive.’“

“With contempt, we look down on the other person and we want to exclude or ignore them. With disgust, inferiority is not the issue, the feeling is more physical—we want to avoid being ‘poisoned’ (either literally or figuratively).” Like how regular disgust prevents us from ingesting contaminants, interpersonal disgust “protects” us from contamination of the soul.

Disgust causes dehumanization and distinguishes it from contempt. When we are disgusted by someone, it “implies that human dignity is perceived as alienable.” By performing a bad action that we view as disgusting, “one has responsibly degraded oneself to sub-human.” Another dangerous side of disgust is that it seems to be permanent. An apology or reparation doesn’t make the judgement of disgust go away.

Dehumanization

Michelle Maiese defines dehumanization as “the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment.”

David Livingstone Smith explains that “dehumanization is a response to conflicting motives. We want to harm a group of people, but it goes against our wiring as members of a social species to actually harm, kill, torture, or degrade other humans. Smith explains that very deep and natural inhibitions prevent us from treating other people like animals, game, or dangerous predators. He writes, ‘Dehumanization is a way of subverting those inhibitions.’”

We use language to reduce people to things that we find physically disgusting to dehumanize them. It is crucial to be aware of this so that we can call out dehumanizing language when we recognize it.

Hate

“According to researcher Robert Sternberg, hate is a combination of various negative emotions including repulsion, disgust, anger, fear, and contempt.”

Hate is fueled by our need of connection, a concept known as common enemy intimacy. “I may not know anything about you, but we hate the same people and that creates a counterfeit bond and a sense of belonging.” This belonging hinges on the agreement that neither party will challenge those ideas of hate.

The “goal of hate is not merely to hurt, but to ultimately eliminate or destroy the target, either mentally (humiliating, treasuring feelings of revenge), socially (excluding, ignoring), or physically (killing, torturing), which may be accompanied by the goal to let the wrongdoer suffer.”

This is why dehumanization is always involved in hate. We dehumanize entire groups so that we can then terrorize individuals based on their affiliation to that group or identity.

Sternberg writes, “It is not clear that there is any magic bullet for curing hate. But any mechanism that helps one understand things from others’ points of view—love, critical thinking, wisdom, engagement with members of target groups—at least makes hate less likely, because it is harder to hate people if you understand that in many respects they are not all so different from you.”⁵

Self-Righteousness

“Self-righteousness is the conviction that one’s beliefs and behaviors are the most correct.”

When we are self-righteous, we see things as black and white and we don’t consider other opinions. We feel morally superior and try to convince others (or ourselves) that that is true.

When We Self-Assess

Pride

“Pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to our accomplishments or efforts.”

We refer to pride here as authentic pride which is a healthy feeling of accomplishment. We also use pride in ways like “too proud to accept help”, or “pride got in the way.” Usually there is a deeper driver of these feelings like shame, hubris, or defensiveness.

Hubris

“Hubris is an inflated sense of one’s own innate abilities that is tied more to the need for dominance than to actual accomplishments.”

Hubris differs from authentic pride in that hubris is centered around dominance and authentic pride is centered toward attaining prestige. People experiencing hubris feel good about themselves and don’t care about respect or social acceptance.

Hubris is positively correlated with narcissism, the shame-based fear of being ordinary. Jessica Tracy explains that “for the narcissist, positive views of the self are too essential to leave to the whim of actual accomplishments, for they are what prevent the individual from succumbing to shame and low self-esteem.” They assert themselves into the world without any actual accomplishments so that they can feel good about themselves and ignore the shame they feel of not having those accomplishments.

Humility

“Humility is openness to new learning combined with a balanced and accurate assessment of our contributions, including our strengths, imperfections, and opportunities for growth.”

Humility is not “downplaying yourself or your accomplishments” (this is called modesty) and it is not “low self-esteem or meekness or letting people walk all over you.” Instead, it “involves understanding our contributions in context, in relation to both the contributions of others and our own place in the universe.”

Intellectual humility is a “willingness to consider information that doesn’t fit with our current thinking.” When we have humility, we admit when we are wrong and recognize that “getting it right is more important than needing to ‘prove’ that we are right.”

My Thoughts

This is a life changer that I would recommend to just about everyone. Atlas of the Heart gives me the tools to understand and handle the sorrow, anguish, joy, awe, or any other emotion that I will inevitably experience in this life. I can be there for myself and for others, empathically and wholly. “Even when we have no idea where we are or where we’re going, with the right map, we can find our way back to our heart and to our truest self.”

I struggled making notes for this because I wanted to just highlight the whole damn book. It seemed like every sentence spoke to me. I want to absorb the whole thing.

I liked the overall theme throughout of meaningful connection. Why learn a bunch of emotional vocabulary? It’s for truly understanding and recognizing these experiences so that we can connect with ourselves and with others.

It’s important to remember that this is all a practice. We aren’t going to know it all or have the best answers or be compassionate all the time. We have to actively choose to use and develop these skills every single day to get better with them.

This is a key concept in Permission to Feel. Brackett emphasize throughout the book that we need accurate and specific language to be able to Label, Express, and Recognize our emotions. ↩
This is the Understand portion of the RULER model in Permission to Feel. ↩
Brown uses the BLM movement as an example of narrative takeover that was really enlightening. Instead of listening and believing the stories of racism and injustice, people started crying “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” when there was no narrative of white lives or police lives not mattering. They hijacked the story and made themselves the center. ↩
This goes along with developing a craftsman mindset from So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Becoming a master at something involves deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means trying, failing, learning, and repeating so if you are afraid of failure, deliberate practice will be extra painful and keep you from reaching mastery. ↩
Maybe it is cheesy or a lofty goal but I think this is why Peace Corps is so important. Volunteers are on the ground actively trying to increase understanding between two very large groups all in an effort to reduce hate. ↩

The Weddings

2023-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

This is a very special two-part post! I went to my first Moroccan wedding and a few weeks later another volunteer in a different region, Ally, went to one. She was telling me about it and I mentioned that I was preparing this piece for my blog and asked if she wanted to write something. Fortunately for us, she said yes!

Westley

I got invited to my first real Moroccan wedding. The bride is the neighbor of my host family here in my final site. At Moroccan weddings, everyone gets invited, neighbors and their weird American son included.

Also of note, Moroccan weddings aren’t just one evening like American ones. They last all weekend.

The first function I was invited to was lunch the day before the wedding proper. I put on my red and gold fuqaya¹ and went to my host family’s home. As I turned the corner, there were about twenty cars parked all over and a giant tent (khozana) put up smack dab in the middle of the street.

My host sisters and some of their friends were doing henna on their hands and feet. My host dad, Shafei, had me follow him to the tent where lunch was going to be served. At the entrance was a jovial man on either side, prompting me to wash my hands. They poured water from a kettle and a perforated container underneath caught the water as it ran down my hands. The lunch was men only and every table in the tent was full. We squeezed in with some friends of Shafei’s.

Inside the tent was beautiful. Dark red rugs lined the floor and the walls were covered with pleated white and gold fabric. Everyone talked quietly amongst themselves as the hosts passed around cups of tea and plates of nuts, dates, and sweets. In one corner were two or three tables of older men reciting verses from the Quran, as is usual for these kinds of gatherings.

Back in training, I went to a funeral gathering with a similar setting. It was a big tent full of men with a few tables of older men reciting the Quran. I asked my host brother why it sounded like singing rather than a monotone recitation that I would have expected. He explained to me and my fellow trainee, Christy, that it is recited how the prophet Muhammed heard it from the angel Gabriel. When I heard the small group of men reciting in unison, I felt a sense of awe, the same that I felt now sitting in this tent.

After the recitation and appetizer, the hosts passed out sheets of plastic to protect the white tablecloths from the impending feast. On top of the plastic, each table got a big bowl of bread that everyone got out and pulled into rough quarters in preparation.

The hosts started coming in and out with the first course. They plopped a plate of three roasted chickens, olives, and preserved lemons down in the middle of the table. Everyone dug in, first pulling off a small piece of bread then a small piece of chicken and soaking up some of the sauce that collected on the plate.

As much as I wanted to, I didn’t fill up my stomach completely. At big Moroccan gatherings, there are usually two or three dishes brought out and if you fill up on the first, you can’t enjoy the others. This time, the hosts swept away the plate with nothing but bones left on it. In its place, they put down a plate of roasted lamb and plums. This is one of my favorite Moroccan dishes. The lamb and sauce is so rich and fatty while the plums are sweet and sticky.

The last and final part of the meal was a big platter of fruit that replaced the last course on our table. It was a pile of watermelon and cantaloupe wedges, as that is what is currently in season. Conversations wrapped up at the table as everyone had a few slices and got up to leave. The same men who washed our hands when we came in were doing the same as we made our exit.

Just after lunch and just before everyone went home to take naps, I was invited to another function that same night. My host family told me there was going to be a “show” in the same tent that we had lunch in and I was told to meet them at ten that night.

After a nap and some errands in town, I made my way to my host family’s a little before ten. Nothing was going on and most everyone was dispersed throughout the house asleep, aside from Shafei. We sat and watched the news on TV with my host dad translating some things every so often from the Arabic they spoke to the regional Arabic that I am learning. This lasted for a while and I was starting to think the “show” got cancelled and no one told me. Just as I was about to go home and go to bed, at one in the morning, my host mother and two of my host sisters got ready and we went to the tent.

Inside was the same setting that I found at lunch earlier that day with the tables removed and a group of men wearing white jellabas¹ and holding various sized drums. We split off with the men sitting in the front few rows and the women filling the back.

After testing all of their equipment and getting ready, they started beating their drums and dancing. The oldest man in the group was sitting in the center with two steel rods drumming on an old brake cylinder with one side propped up on a flip-flop. It rung out with quick successive ting-ting’s that created the central rhythm.

The singer belted into the microphone some lyrics that I didn’t understand and the rest of the group repeated exactly what he sang. Every once in a while, there would be times with no drumming and just a booming voice. Then, one by one, the drummers would come in to create the same familiar rhythm.

During some of these pauses, a man would come to the front and start stomping his feet and jumping up and down enthusiastically. Next to him, another member would watch intently and hit his drum at the same time that the first man’s feet would make contact with the ground.

There was also a big green cylinder like a short and wide oil drum flipped over so that someone could stand on top of it. The same jumping man wore special shoes with a harder bottom on them got on top of the make-shift drum and stomped his feet making a deep sound I could feel in my chest. At one point, an audience member got on the foot drum and did the same foot stomping while also twisting his body and raising his arms, making a show of it. Everyone cheered him on and he had a big smile on his face going back to his chair.

People came up every so often to stick money in each of the dancer’s hats or shirts to show appreciation and to pay them. One stuck a 50 dirham note to the bald singer’s sweat glistened head.

I watched and clapped along until I couldn’t stay awake anymore at around 3:30 in the morning. The next day my host sister, Hajar, told me they stayed out until almost six in the morning, dancing, singing, and celebrating.

I slept in late the next day. I had barely had breakfast before Hajar called me and told me to come over again.

Soon after I got to the wedding tent, people started filing out into the street clapping and singing. Down the road was a convoy of horse-drawn trailers, cars honking, the band from the previous night (with the brake cylinder guy drumming away, sitting contently on one of the trailers), and a whole group of people clapping excitedly. The two crowds merged into one and a member of the welcoming party was spritzing a scented liquid on everyone, customary protocol for these sorts of things. The trailers and cars brought various gifts for the bride like clothes, milk, incense, and sugar.

Everyone crowded around and sang with the drummers doing their thing. People took turns getting on one of the trailers to dance, elevated in the middle of the crowd.

Eventually, the crowds dispersed and Hajar told me to follow them into the tent. Like the previous day when the tent was full of men, this time it was all women. Besides the men handing out dates and water, there were exactly two other men in there; me and the DJ, Hakim. They got me a chair and I nestled in behind his booth, barely out of his way.

The bride and groom came in and took pictures in front of the gifts that were brought earlier. Everyone had their phone out, eager to take a picture of them. After a while of this, the bride and groom exited while Hakim played music and people talked at their tables and some younger women danced in the front. Hakim was explaining stuff to me and giving me a whole page of new Arabic words.

The bride came back in a little while later after doing an outfit change. She was wearing white and gold with a tiara on her head. She came in and sat on a silver pedestal (called an amariya) as everyone took pictures again. Four men wearing gold and white with beige hats came and hoisted her and the pedestal up onto their shoulders. They held hands and moved their feet in unison, ebbing back and forth as the bride smiled and waved at the guests below. Everyone took pictures as they moved about.

Eventually, they put the bride down and she left for, presumably, another outfit change as they disassembled the amariya. The music continued, only stopping for the afternoon call to prayers.

They started to bring in bread for each table, signaling that it was meal time. I was feeling particularly out of place in a tent full of Moroccan women and I was pretty burnt out so I called it a day there. I said thank you to Hakim, waved to Hajar, and shook hands with anyone that I passed on the way out.

This October, my host brother Youssef will be getting married inshallah and I am so excited to go to another wedding and be more involved this time. It is such an honor to see and be a part of these life celebrations with my new friends halfway across the world.

Ally

Something that I think might be a universal truth for Peace Corps Morocco volunteers is that you never know what is going on. No matter how hard you try, no matter how long you spend in-country, you’re just not going to know what’s happening. You’ll never show up at the right time, you don’t know what to wear or what to say. All you can do is try your best. I find this is especially true for weddings.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a wedding by a couple of friends, Khadija and Chaymae. The wedding was an Amazigh wedding (also called l3rs lShluw7). Just to give you a little background, Amazigh peoples are the ethnic groups indigenous to North Africa who predate the arrival of Arabs to the region. I am located in the Middle Atlas region of Morocco where the Amazigh culture and language, called Tamazight, thrive.

So back to the invitation — a couple of weeks ago, my friends invited me to a family wedding that would take place in a nearby town. I excitedly accepted their invitation with a small stipulation. The Peace Corps has a rule that volunteers are not allowed to travel between cities after dark. I told them that I would absolutely love to attend, but I would have to spend the night with them at the host’s house to be in compliance with the rule. They happily agreed to my stipulation and actually preferred that I was sleeping over. It’s not uncommon for invites to dinner or bigger invites like weddings to turn into a last-minute slumber party.

The day of the wedding, Khadija and I made plans to meet and head to the host’s house sometime that afternoon. No time is given. We just say afternoon, so I am on standby that morning until I receive Khadija’s text that we will leave at 3pm. Okay great! I gather up my stuff and start making my way to the taxi stand at 2:50. I imagine they’ll be late, but I’d prefer to wait on them than have them wait on me. I sit for a few minutes then get a call from Khadija asking where I am. I tell her and she says she’s on her way to come get me. Okaaaay? She arrives and says, “We have to head to the salon, I haven’t gotten my hair done yet.” Deep breath, internal sigh, okay. We get to the salon and her little sister and cousin are there, also having their hair done. Several hair-dos and a set of nails later, we head out… to go rent Khadija’s outfit for the evening. This is just an example of how you never really know what’s going on. But you’ve just got to embrace it and go with the flow. Not to mention, a lot of the time, the unexpected changes to plan end up being a lot of fun!

We go upstairs to this cool shop that is obviously entirely dedicated to weddings. They have traditional Moroccan dresses, accessories, and jewelry to rent. There is a small salon to make-up the bride. On the other side is a small kitchen to prepare tea for the big wedding parties that get ready here. There are several women in the shop, chatting and working. There is a word for this in Darija that I love. It’s كايجمعو (kayjm3u), and it literally means “they are gathering”. It’s a word for sitting and spending time together. Talking, laughing, drinking tea. The energy of the shop is lovely, and they are kind to me. So of course I get totally carried away and end up renting some pretty glitzy, somewhat gaudy jewelry. (A black-beaded choker with a large diamond in the center and the dangly earrings to match, thank you very much. Moroccan traditional clothes meet goth vampires.) Who cares? It was a lot of fun and even more fun to dress up with them in my formal kaftan at the actual wedding. After we pay for the rentals, we head over to the taxi stand to go to the host’s house for the night!

In Morocco, there are two ways to greet people when you arrive at an event, and it depends on the size of the group. For a large event, with several rooms full of people, all you have to do is wave your right hand over the room to your heart and say Salamu 3laykum to each room. If it is a smaller gathering, and you want to be liked, you go up to each person and give them a kiss on each cheek (in this region, it usually goes one kiss on the left, two on the right) and have a script ready. “Salamu 3laykum, labas, tahenna, bkheir”…. Basically means “Hi, how are you?”. It’s somewhat of an art to me because it’s really hard to kiss people and talk at the same time.

We get there early in the evening since it’s a family event for my friends. Which means that social obligation calls for an individual greet of everyone already there. I am a little weary of this since I tend to get pretty sick after these events where I kiss a lot of people. But again, I tell myself, “who cares?” — when in Rome, do as the Romans do. And maybe build a Roman immune system while you’re at it.

The house is stifling hot inside since it’s the last day of July. Even as the evening progressed, the house never cooled off. We sat outside in the street. The older women sitting on blankets and the younger women on bricks leaned against the houses. Eventually the women just decide to bring all of the furniture outside. This was great as other guests started arriving around 10pm or so.

One of the best things about Morocco is that you spend so much time at these events, that it’s not uncommon for people to just lay down and nap during the down time. I am one of those people. I used to be shy about it, but I got over that when I realized how quickly my social battery would drain otherwise. You want to lay down? Those ladies will bring you out a pillow, no questions asked. Embrace the Moroccan disco nap.

Around 8:30, Khadija tells me it’s time for an outfit change. We are going to wash our faces, change, and put on a little make-up. There is one spigot of running water, but there is an unspoken rule that the spigot is not for guest use. It’s reserved to the women cooking the food in the front room of the host’s house. So we use kettles of water. Khadija pours water into my hands so I can wash my face, then I do the same for her. On our way out, I am stopped by a woman who starts speaking to me in Tamazight. I know a few words and phrases, but it’s almost like a party trick. I am not able to communicate; however, I understand she’s asking me something about speaking Tamazight. I do know how to say “I don’t know” in Tamazight, so I say that to her. She smiles and laughs a bit, so do the women around us who overheard the interaction. 10 months ago, this type of interaction would have me red with embarrassment. I know better now. These kind women were welcoming me and sharing their culture with me.

Everyone starts changing, and keeps telling me to do the same. But I’m already wearing my first outfit. When I asked her what to pack, Khadija told me I could wear my one dress to start the evening, so that’s all I packed. Everyone keeps looking at me and asking, “why aren’t you changing?” I just respond with “Ma3ndish” and a point to the woman’s outfit next to me. This literally means “I don’t have”. Khadija pulls out a royal blue velvet kaftan that she plans to wear to the next night’s festivities, but offers it to me since I won’t be attending part two of the wedding. I take one look at it and blanch. It is a very heavy, thick velvet blue kaftan.

We’re in a back room where we deposited our bags earlier, and I kid you not, it feels like a freaking sauna. After about 60 seconds of standing still back there, I became completely drenched in sweat. Like the very obvious, “ArE yoU oKAy??” kind of sweat. I tell her that while her kaftan is very beautiful, I am just too hot to wear it. But she insists I just put it on then take it off after a bit. I am so overwhelmed by her generosity, and by the compulsion to fit in, that I put it on.

At this point, I’m feeling pretty sick from the heat. While I feel death approaching, the other women start applying their makeup. I dread the thought. It’s just too hot, but I can’t go the rest of the evening without any makeup on. In Morocco, it’s almost rude to show up at these events without makeup on. I learned that the hard way when I came to a wedding in my everyday, natural makeup.

I look Khadija dead in the eye and say in the best Darija I can manage, “I cannot put on makeup here.” It’s not just because I feel ill, but my face is literally too wet to apply any makeup. So we head up to the roof with a shard of mirror and a phone flashlight. We spend about 30 minutes doing each other’s makeup while in a Moroccan squat because you can’t sit down and dirty up your new outfit. We finish up and head back downstairs, and I catch a glimpse of all the other women in their new outfits doing the final touches on their makeup too. I absolutely love witnessing moments like this. It reminds me how special and fun womanhood can be.²

I need to mention that the dress code for weddings in Morocco does not change like it does for weddings in the U.S.. Moroccan women know exactly what they’re supposed to wear and when because it’s the same for every wedding. I bought a deep red, beaded kaftan pretty early on in my service knowing I could wear it to any and every wedding I might be invited to.

After the rooftop makeup, we head outside. People have started pouring in, and the wedding has officially begun. We start to hear a car repeatedly honking from a few blocks away to signal the arrival of the bride. Everyone stands up and pushes forward to greet the car delivering the bride, and the male family members break out the drums. LET THE DANCING BEGIN! Specifically, we start doing Ahidus (pronounced Ah - hee - duce). It’s a style of dancing in which the participants stand shoulder-to-shoulder, bouncing their shoulders and arms up and down, while shifting weight from foot-to-foot. It makes a bouncing, swaying line of people. Very fun to do and very cool to watch.

While people are dancing and singing, the bride stays in the car. Her face is covered by a stunning, glittery, semi-sheer veil called a LaBrindig. (Maybe called laBrindis, I did not fully hear my friend’s answer). Customarily, the bride does not participate in any of the singing or dancing. For most of the evening, the guests hardly see the bride. They take her into the house where people take turns going in to sit with her and take pictures with her while the rest of us stay outside to continue the celebrations.

I went inside with my friends to take pictures with the bride, and it struck me how young she was. In the region where I live, it is still common for women to get married pretty young. This bride is sixteen-years-old. I’ll save my opinions on that because I have many friends in my site that got married that young or intend to get married young. I will tell you that seeing her didn’t exactly make me feel like celebrating.

I can also tell you that this is the part of the evening where I started to get crabby. I’m looking back through my notes, and it’s apparent that I was annoyed. (Side note: I was just hangry and immediately felt better after dinner.)

The real dancing began around 1am after we finished up dinner. The Nai player showed up and showed out. A nai is a reed flute and a traditional instrument played at Moroccan weddings. And it is the coolest thing ever. This man absolutely lit up the party along with the drummers. Everyone went wild! The young women wrapped their mzuns around their waists and got after it. (Pronounced moo-zoon; it’s a long rope with small silver disks on it that make noise when you shake). The women without mzuns made an ahidus line around the ones who did. We danced like this until about 3:30am.³ All of the neighborhood women were in attendance. All of the men stood off to the side in the dark watching the festivities. Neighbors and young kids watched from the roof. On one roof in particular, a young girl was dancing with her mzun by herself, having the time of her life. We all were. I danced so hard with Khadija’s mom that when the song ended we collapsed into each other’s arms laughing.

Even though I was cranky and hot at points, it’s nights like these that remind me of home and how I could never truly explain an experience like this to my family. An all-night Amazigh wedding in the mountains of Morocco is an experience my family will likely never have, and that’s the reason I joined the Peace Corps. To meet people and be exposed to things I never could have otherwise, to grow and learn and be changed forever.

Traditional Moroccan clothing, like a jellaba but without a hood. ↩ ↩²
There were two more outfit changes after dinner. (Dinner was served at 12:30am) ↩
Party ended around 4am. I slept on the roof along with 15 other guests. We had to sleep on the roof because of the Peace Corps’ policy about traveling after dark. Khadija and her family are so kind and accommodating to me about the rules I have to follow. I am beyond grateful for her understanding. ↩

A Thousand Splendid Suns

2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

Mariam is born as an illegitimate child between her mother and Jalil, a rich businessman who lives in the city. Her and her mother are cast out to live in the outskirts of town so Jalil can save face and not have a public display of his mistakes. After her mother succumbs to her mental trauma, Jalil forces Mariam to marry a shoemaker in Kabul, sending her away yet again.

Rasheed, the shoemaker, is a despicable man. He forces Mariam to do all the housework, not leave the house without him, and to wear a burqa when she does go outside. Rasheed’s physical and emotional torment never relents.

Laila lives right down the street from Mariam in Kabul. She is a bright young girl with a decent life. Her biggest concern in life is not getting caught kissing her romantic interest, Tariq. Until mortars come down from the sky, that is, destroying everything she loves in life. In the midst of tragedy, she is also forced to marry Rasheed and live alongside Mariam.

Although Mariam despises Laila at the start, a deep and sincere bond forms, forged by the shared pain inflicted upon them by Rasheed’s fists, belt, and threats.

Spoilers Ahead

Mariam

Mariam is isolated for her entire life. She grows up in a little hut in the outskirts of Harat with just her mother who doesn’t let anyone else near. Her father never really takes her in. When she moves to Kabul, Rasheed makes sure that she is kept busy cleaning up after him and his friends. Rasheed also makes her wear a burqa when she is outside, physically separating her from everyone outside of her home. She is also unable to have children and so the only human connection she has in Kabul is her abusive husband.

When Laila marries Rasheed and moves in, everything changes. After some initial resentment, Mariam and Laila form a deep connection. After Laila has children, Mariam finally feels like she is part of a real family and gladly takes on a motherly role to Laila and her children, protecting them from Rasheed when she can.

She recognized that she was stuck with no way out and she never wanted that life for anyone else. She had so many opportunities to make Laila suffer like she herself did but she protected Laila and wanted a new life for them, going so far as to kill Rasheed and take the fall for it so they can escape.

Mariam is also at other people’s service for the whole story, and never really gets to pursue her own wants or dreams. She bends to the will of Rasheed and serves him out of fear of repercussions. As part of her motherly role, she is at the service of Laila and her children except it is purely out of love and affection. She does what she must all the way up to the end of her life when she is about to be killed:

“Kneel here, hamshira. And look down.”
One last time, Mariam did as she was told.

I was rooting for Mariam the entire time but she just kept getting beat down and repressed. She was not in control of her own life and I so badly wanted her to be happy after all of the nightmares she was put through. Even so, the joy and love she feels with Laila and the children outweigh all the pain she has experienced:

Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.

My Thoughts

There are similar themes between this book and The Great Alone. Both involve an abusive husband/father that oppresses and abuses the women in his life. The violence and time span of A Thousand Splendid Suns was just so much more gut-wrenching and unrelenting. The female characters in The Great Alone were much different. They were strong, independent, and triumphed over challenges. While the women in A Thousand Splendid Suns were strong and persevered in their own way, they were so utterly oppressed that they couldn’t ever come out on top.

What a wonderfully painful book. A Thousand Splendid Suns is chock-full of loss, grief, pain, and sadness but I found myself wanting to read more. I kept turning the page in hope for some good fortune for Laila and Mariam. If you are looking for an emotionally challenging book, I highly recommend it.

How I Use Obsidian as a Peace Corps Volunteer

2023-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

Overview
Quick and Dirty Markdown
Basic Functions
Advanced Concepts
- Frontmatter
- Tags
- Templates
- Exporting
- Linking
Further Reading and Resources

Overview

My most used tool that I use on my computer is called Obsidian. It is a free note-taking app that can be as simple or as powerful as you like. It makes writing notes for just about anything super easy and friction-less. I use it to organize my thinking for almost everything in my life.

I can go down so many rabbit holes into the inner workings of Obsidian and personal knowledge management in general but I will save that for another day. I can also talk about file organization for hours but, again, that is a can of worms for another day. This guide is specifically how I use Obsidian on a daily basis in Morocco as a PCV.

This is also just a teaser to hopefully pique interest, inspire, and show the possibilities, not an in-depth guide. You’ll have to do your own research to really understand and use this tool to its potential. Alternatively, contact me and we can talk about it anytime for as long as you like!

Quick and Dirty Markdown

Every note that you write in Obsidian gets typed in and formatted according to a language called Markdown. Basically, instead of clicking buttons to format the page you type symbols to denote formatting.

For example, to make a big heading add an octothorpe/hashtag (#) before the heading words. If you want a smaller header, use two. To bold words, wrap them in two asterisks (*) on either side. For italicizing words, wrap them in one asterisk. Lists are made with either dashes for bullet lists or numbers for ordered lists.

Those are the basics to get started but I wrote a longer piece on this a while ago if you are interested and there is a good cheat sheet available.

Basic Functions

This is a list of the use cases in my work as a PCV, roughly in order of usefulness. Again, this is just to exhibit the possibilities and uses of Obsidian, not a full how-to guide.

Lesson Plans

As every PCV knows, 4MAT is your friend. I write all of my lesson plans in Obsidian, usually according to 4MAT. My lesson plans look like this:

# Lesson Name

**Duration:** 60 min

**Session Objectives:**
1. By the end of the session...

## Motivation

## Information

## Practice

## Application

Under each heading are either paragraphs or bullet points detailing all of the steps and information that we need for the lesson.

Of course, some activities don’t follow this form and for those I just write down what makes sense. For example, I have a conversation circle activity and that note is just a long list of bullet points of questions.

Journaling

It has probably been highly recommended to you to start or maintain a journaling practice during your service as a form of mindfulness or documentation.

Built into Obsidian is an option for Daily Notes. You click the icon and it opens up a new unique note for that day. It is incredible for journaling as it really reduces the friction between thinking about it and actually writing.

You could also use your daily note for task management, habit tracking, or whatever else you want to make a note of each day. My journal entries have the location I am writing from and just paragraphs of what happened that day and how I am feeling.

Presentations

Making simple presentations in Obsidian is easy and it is wonderful having your presentations and lesson plans all in the same place.

All you do is write the slides in Markdown like normal and when you want to create a new slide, add three dashes (—). All Markdown rules apply like italicizing and bolding. For example, here are some translated slides for a Python workshop I did. This is exactly what I typed in the note:

### Programming

- Computers follow instructions
- When we write code, we are just writing these instructions

---

### Python

- Easy programming language
- We can do a lot of different things with it
- Easy to learn, easy to understand

---

...

Then I just right click Start Presentation and the slides open up directly in Obsidian. You can navigate between slides with your mouse or arrow keys like normal. This example rendered as a simple black and white presentation with three slides and big headers and bulleted lists underneath. It may not look the prettiest but it is incredibly easy and gets the job done.

Travel

I keep notes on each major city that I visit. This is nice for when other people ask me for my travel recommendations or I need to remind myself when I am going back. A standard travel note looks like this:

# City Name

**Relevant journal posts:**

## Getting There

## Lodging

## Food and Drinks

## Things to Do

Under Getting There, I keep track of my modes of transportation and how much it costed. This is really only for me since it’s usually travel from my site to the destination.

I also write down the places I’ve stayed and how much those costed under Lodging. I will include a link to the Airbnb if I would stay there again or recommend others stay there.

Lastly, I keep track of places to go for food and drinks as well as other things to do. This is just a simple bulleted list with a little blurb about where it is, what I liked about it, and other notes.

Session Notes

Training is often described as a fire hose of information and it is almost impossible for it all to stick into your brain immediately. You will likely want to take notes so you don’t lose all of the information.

I use pen and paper during sessions and rarely have the gumption to digitize them. However, I do take notes on the virtual sessions in Obsidian. These are usually bulleted lists that I will clean up after the session and send out in the group chat for others to use.

I do digitize notes post session if I am thinking about them again and want to remember the information or find myself flipping back to those notes often enough.

Committee Work

I am the self-appointed scribe in my committee because I have a good note taking system. Yet again, these are usually rough bullet points that I clean up after the fact to share with the rest of the committee members.

Depending on the content of the meeting, there will be a clear outline that I will add before the meeting but sometimes it just goes wherever it goes and bullet points work just fine. There are also times when we send out emails to the cohort or staff members and I will write them in Obsidian as a means to draft them and archive them at the same time.

Dungeons and Dragons

I think the majority of my cohort is in at least one DnD group. You and your party will be grateful to have someone taking good notes. I’ve got a whole elaborate system for tracking items and characters but it’s a bit much. The majority of use comes from the session notes.

Each session, I create a new note title Session X where X is whichever session we are on that day that looks like this:

## Session Summary

## Recap

## Log

## Loose Ends

Under Session Summary is where I put a 5-7 sentence summary of the major plot points for the session. I like to do this the day after the session while it is still fresh in my brain. My philosophy with the summaries is that someone should be able to read all of the summaries thus far and get a rough idea of the story.

The summary of the previous session is under the Recap heading. It’s easy to get it to automatically fill rather than copy and pasting but that is a bit too technical for this.

Log is where the magic happens. I take pretty rough notes during the action because I am trying to focus on what is happening in the game. These are just bullet points that summarize what happened on each players turn or what the party is doing in general. I also do a quick comma separated list when the DM is describing places or things. Important details get bolded and stuff outside of the game gets put in parentheses.

Lastly, Loose Ends is a bulleted list of important stuff the party might want to return to, interesting items that we picked up, or ideas for stuff to try at a later session.

Advanced Concepts

These are more general concepts that you can use to upgrade, automate, and organize the above use cases.

Frontmatter

In Markdown, frontmatter is a way to add more information and metadata to notes without that information being seen. Many of my notes have the date in the frontmatter since I want to keep track of that but I don’t necessarily need it to be seen in the note.

To add frontmatter, add three dashes, a new line, and another three dashes. Whatever is between those sets of dashes is your frontmatter. It is typed in using key: value format. For example:

---
date: 2023-07-05
tags: english/adults, english/youth
---

# Comparative Adjectives

## Motivation
...

This English lesson now has the date and some tags added to the metadata. The most relevant thing is the tags which I will talk about next.

Templates

You might have noticed that a lot of my notes are repetitive; lots of lesson plans that look the same, lots of journal entries that look the same, etc. No, I’m not copy and pasting every single one. Instead, I create the notes based off of a predefined template.

For example, if you have specific journaling prompts that you like to do everyday or want to do daily habit tracking, you can have your daily note be created based on a template. I stole the idea of adding the location to my journaling so I wanted each note to have “Location:” at the top. Instead of typing that out each time, I just put it into a template note and it automatically gets pulled in when I make that day’s note.

To use templates, I made a separate templates folder to dump all of them into. Each individual note in this folder is a template. Write out exactly what you want the note to look like from the start, whatever all notes of this kind are going to have in common (usually headings).

Then to pull in a template, create a new note, open the command palette with Ctrl + P and type Insert Template and select which one you want. This will populate the new note with whatever was in your template note. You do not necessarily need to create a new note to use a template. You can embed smaller templates into already existing notes.

Exporting

Most people aren’t using Obsidian but sometimes you need to share your work. Obsidian makes it very easy to export to PDF. Your fellow volunteers will think you are a “king among men” when you drop your session notes as a PDF in the group chat. It is also nice for things like committee meeting notes or if you want to share your travel notes.

All you need to do is open the command palette from the note you want to export with Ctrl + P and type Export to PDF, select options, and export.

Linking

A major selling point for Obsidian is the ability to link to notes from other notes. There is a big philosophy of “linking your thinking” in the personal knowledge management circles. With enough links, your Obsidian notes will start to turn into your own personal Wikipedia.

A thorough example of how I use linking is with my DnD notes. Throughout the session, I will link to existing characters or locations that we have encountered so I can quickly click through to those other notes and remind myself of important features. This is done by using the [[]&ZeroWidthSpace;] syntax. Whatever note name is inside the brackets will be linked to.

Linking can be extended to embedding. Under the Recap heading, I embed the last session’s summary so it automatically populates and I don’t have to copy and paste and try and keep them in sync. Embedding is done with the ![[]&ZeroWidthSpace;] syntax.

Permission to Feel

2023-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

We all experience emotions every moment of every day. Our emotional state is one of the most important parts of our lives. It is incredibly important to be able to identify, express, and harness our feelings to lead effective and satisfying lives. Some think emotional intelligence or emotion skills are something fuzzy or too squishy for them.¹ But emotion skills, like other mental skills, allow us to think better and enrich our own lives and the lives of those around us. “There’s nothing squishy about that.”

Brackett encourages us to become emotion scientists rather than emotion judges. Instead of judging emotions as good or bad, decrease judgement and allow yourself to listen and learn with curiosity. Emotion scientists are able to pause, identify, and understand their feelings so that they can respond effectively.

An emotion comes from an interpretation of what is happening in the world through the lens of your present concerns. A feeling is an internal response to an emotion. A mood is more long term and more diffuse than an emotion or a feeling.

Emotion skills, like any other skill, can be learned. We can all learn to identify, understand, and express our emotions. Emotion skills are not things like resilience, grit, or emotional stability. Brackett has identified five key skills that form the basis of the rest of the book and his RULER model: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating.

R: Recognizing Emotion

James Russell came up with “the circumplex model of emotion” that is the foundation for the main tool in the RULER approach, the Mood Meter. Russell found out that human emotions have two main dimensions that you can use to identify them: pleasantness and energy. The Mood Meter is split into four quadrants based on these dimensions. High energy and low pleasantness are emotions like anger, fear, and anxiety. Low energy and low pleasantness are emotions like sadness, boredom, and loneliness. Low energy and high pleasantness are emotions like calmness and serenity. High energy and high pleasantness are emotions like joy and happiness.

The goal of Recognizing is to simply read nonverbal cues and figure out the general area of where the emotion exists. Don’t overthink it. Pause and check in with your mind and your body and ask yourself: Am I feeling pleasant or unpleasant? Energized or depleted? Also check for physical cues. Is my jaw tight or is there a knot in my stomach? Am I raising my voice?

U: Understanding Emotion

Understanding emotions (either your own or someone else’s) boils down to asking why. Why do I feel this way? What is the underlying reason for this feeling? What is causing it? The primary skill of Understanding is figuring out the underlying theme or potential cause that is fueling the emotion.

Appraisal theory tells us that emotions are caused from our perception (appraisal) of a situation. Emotions have underlying themes but their individual causes vary from person to person as the perception of an event varies from person to person.

When evaluating emotions, we tend to focus on behavior rather than the root cause. Behavior can be a clue to Understanding but it doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, someone raising their voice and pointing their finger at someone can be feeling jealousy, anger, or disgust. We need more context to understand the underlying cause of the emotion.

L: Labeling Emotion

Labeling is the pivot point of the RULER process. This is where we take the information from Recognizing and Understanding and start to put words and actions to it. Labeling is the act of putting a specific word to a feeling.

We tend to put our feelings into a few general categories like “fine”, “happy”, “busy”, “stressed”. There are thousands of words out there to describe our feelings and the more granular we get, the more likely we are to get the empathy we need and the more ownership we have over our emotional lives. In addition, the more granular we are, the less likely we are to mislabel. For example, saying we are stressed about your interview when you are actually feeling pressured. Yes, there is a difference.

The Mood Meter can also be used here to identify labels. After you Recognize what quadrant you are in and Understand why, the Mood Meter provides comprehensive vocabulary for each category.

Labeling is also an effective emotion regulation strategy. Simply putting a word on a negative emotion can decrease its intensity.

E: Expressing Emotion

Expressing is where we start to put action to our feelings and start to involve others. When we express our emotions, we are telling others: here is what I feel and why, here is what I want to happen next, here is what I need from you right now.

Expressing our emotions does not mean letting it all out and acting on every emotional impulse that comes across our minds. It is important to be honest about our emotions but we also need to account for what we might provoke from those we are expressing our emotions to.

As we develop our language and understanding of our emotions, our emotional needs become more complex and so does how we express those. At the same time, we also develop the ability to hide our emotional needs. We hide behind “fine” rather than Expressing with honesty.

There are all kinds of factors that increase or decrease emotional labor or our ability to express our emotions: gender, race, culture, class, etc.² Some people have a big gap between what they feel and what is safe to express. We can help by truly listening without judging their feelings and letting them know that we are sympathetic and there for them.³

R: Regulating Emotion

The skill of Regulating is first to manage our own emotional responses and later the skill develops into co-regulation of emotions with others.⁴ Regulation is not about being stoic, exerting control over what we feel, or banishing negative emotions. Instead, Regulation is owning our feelings and managing them in an appropriate and effective way.

There are endless tools and strategies for regulating emotions. Strategies that work for you might not work for others and strategies that work today might not work tomorrow. Be flexible and try new things when your current Regulation tools don’t work.

There are five broad categories that emotional regulation strategies fall into:

Mindfulness. Breathing and calming your mind and body to be present and less reactive.
Forward-looking strategies. Anticipating some unwanted emotion and avoiding or altering the situation or environment.
Attention-shifting strategies. Moving your attention away from the source of the emotion to something else.
Cognitive-reframing. Analyzing the source of the emotion and finding some new way of seeing it.
Best-self thinking⁵. Being proactive by visualizing what your ideal self would do instead of reacting directly to emotional stimuli.

To summarize, the five skills in Brackett’s emotional intelligence model are: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating. These are skills that can be built through consistent, daily practice to improve our emotional health and increase empathy between one another. We can also develop these skills by becoming curious and kind emotion scientists rather emotion judges for ourselves and others.

My Thoughts

This was less practical and concrete than I would like. I was expecting more of a handbook of how to use the RULER model. Instead, there were a lot of stories, out-of-pocket examples, personal woes, and business struggles to slog through. Some of the stories and dialogue made me think, “Did that really happen?”

Still, I have been using this model in my life and feel like I unlocked something useful. Did I automatically become more emotionally intelligent? Definitely not. But, as Brackett describes, this is a skill that can be built up.

One way I have been building this skill is with an app called How We Feel developed with Brackett using the same RULER principles. It provides a way to track your emotions using the Mood Meter. You get periodic notifications throughout the day to Recognize, Understand, and Label how you are feeling. Those few reminders help me to stop and honestly think about my feelings using the RULER model as a lens.

There are similar ideas between this book and Nonviolent Communication. The four components of NVC are observations, feelings, needs, and requests. That sounds a lot like Recognizing, Labeling, Understanding, and Expressing. NVC focuses more on empathy and communication between people while RULER has a bit more general emotional intelligence skills.

Me included until a few months ago. Peace Corps really encourages you to think about and talk about your feelings and this is something I had never really done before becoming a volunteer. I thought our resiliency training and reflection times were going to be sitting in a kumbaya circle that I dreaded. It turns out that talking about your feelings in a safe environment feels great and that’s why I have been studying emotional intelligence since. ↩
I still struggle reading how Moroccans express their emotions. I’ve had times where people have seemed, from my American perspective, absolutely livid but then shake hands and have a standard goodbye and all is perfectly fine. ↩
It already came up in the footnotes of my summary of Nonviolent Communication but this reminds me of a John Green quote: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” ↩
This reminded me of the maturity continuum model from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Throughout our lives, me tend to move from being Dependent as children, move to being Independent, and ultimately become Interdependent with those around us. ↩
Brackett actually calls this the Meta-Moment but that seemed a little cheesy for me so I am going with a more on-the-nose name. ↩

So Good They Can't Ignore You

2023-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

The common advice for finding a compelling career that you actually want to work in can be explained as the Passion Hypothesis: Being happy with your job requires you to know what you are passionate about and then find a job that matches that passion. Newport argues the exact opposite and that working right trumps finding the right work. Job satisfaction is highly complex but matching your job to your passion is not one of the reasons people are happy in their careers.

Amy Wrzesniewski makes a distinction between a job, a career, and a calling. A job is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward better work, and a calling is work that is part of your life and identity.

Self Determination Theory tells us that there are three components to feeling motivated, in work or otherwise. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness. To feel intrinsically motivated about work, we need to feel that we have control over our day, our actions are important, feel that we are good at what we do, and feel connected to others.

Building a career that you will love requires that you adapt the craftsman mindset. Focus on what value you are producing in your work and what value you can offer the world. This is in contrast to the passion mindset where you focus on what value your job offers you and what the world can offer you.¹

Newport then offers three traits that define great work: creativity, impact, and control. To build a meaningful career, you should pursue one that has these three traits. In order to attain these three valuable traits in your job, you need something of equal value to trade in in return. We trade in rare and valuable skills (our career capital) to buy desirable career traits. Adopting the craftsman mindset is a great strategy for getting more career capital.

To become a good craftsman, deliberate practice is necessary. Deliberate practice is an “activity designed for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” This deliberate practice is how people break past the performance plateau and are able to provide way more value than their peers. That is, they gain acquire way more career capital for later trading.

Deliberate practice can be applied to any kind of work through five steps: 1) Decide what capital market you are in, 2) Identify your capital type, 3) Define “Good”, 4) Stretch and destroy, and 5) Be patient.

\1) Your capital market can be either winner-takes-all or auction. With winner-takes-all, all that matters is your performance. There is one type of career capital and many people fighting for it. In an auction market, there are many different kinds of career capital and skills that will land you the job. 2) Then, look for gates that are open for you to build career capital. This is much more efficient than starting to build career capital from scratch. 3) Set clear goals for where to apply deliberate practice. Define what “good” looks like in your field. 4) Use deliberate practice to stretch your skills past what is comfortable and past the performance plateau. This is not easy and will be difficult and uncomfortable. 5) Building career capital takes time and consistent effort. It is a marathon, not a sprint.

One of the best things you can invest your career capital in is control. Control over what you do increases engagement and sense of fulfillment in your career. However, there are two traps that you can fall into in your pursuit for control.

The first is trying to acquire control too early and without career capital. You first have to have rare and valuable skills to trade in for control, otherwise it isn’t sustainable. Think of those travel bloggers that try and have a life of control where they blog and run their website from wherever they are in the world. They often don’t add much value (i.e. don’t have career capital) and therefore don’t make any money and their dream falls apart.

The second trap is acquiring enough career capital such that you become so valuable to your employer that they try to prevent you from acquiring more control. You put in all of this effort and add so much value to your current job that they offer you more money to prevent you from switching to a job with more control.

One tool for avoiding these traps is to use the law of financial viability: Ask yourself if people will pay for a potential pursuit for more control in your working life. This is helpful in determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with the pursuit.

Having a strong mission (not a calling or passion) is another crucial element in finding meaningful work. Against common thought, missions are difficult to find. Yet again, career capital is necessary to find a meaningful mission. Big ideas are almost exclusively found in the “adjacent possible²”, the foggy area just beyond the cutting edge. Therefore, you need the career capital to get to the cutting edge to find a strong mission in the adjacent possible.

Finding a mission also isn’t a big plan that you follow the path to and find sitting there. You have to search for it by making “little bets.” Do small experiments (less than a month or two) that offer concrete feedback to learn critical information about your direction. This way, you don’t waste time and effort going down a fruitless path and you have a higher likelihood of finding a successful mission.

Lastly, your mission needs to be remarkable. Your project must compel people to want to remark about it and should be deployed in an area that supports this remarking. Seth Godin refers to these as purple cows. Your projects should stand out and compel people to market it for you by chattering about it.

In conclusion, forget about trying to discover your passion and hope that you can get a job that matches said passion. Become a craftsman with rare and valuable skills that you later invest into your career. This investment will buy you control and a meaningful mission which will lead to a fruitful career.

My Thoughts

The first part of this book really went against everything I have ever been taught about finding meaningful work. I have always been told to just follow my passion and the money and satisfaction will follow.

I really like now having something to call the aspects of the craftsman mindset. I try my hardest to add value wherever I can in my life. Now I have a good metaphor and specific label for thinking about how I approach doing that.

Same thing for career capital. I like to think about skills, frameworks, and tools that I have in my brain as a toolbox that I pick and choose from as I go through life to see if one of them helps my current problem. I have never really applied the same thinking to a career until now.

I am currently a Peace Corps Volunteer so I was reminded of JFK’s Inaugural Address when I read this: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” ↩
Term coined by Stuart Kauffman. ↩

Nonviolent Communication

2023-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

Nonviolent communication (NVC) is a way of communicating that manifests compassion and “leads us to give from the heart”. The four components of NVC are: observations, feelings, needs, and requests. This is a process where each one feeds into the next.

There are other ways of communicating that block compassion that Rosenburg refers to as “life-alienating” communication. One kind is using moral judgments that imply others are wrong or bad when they don’t act in harmony with our values.

[!definition] Values are the principles that you work toward that make up the core of your identity. Morals are what you believe to be right or wrong, especially when it comes to others.

Another form of communication that blocks compassion is the use of comparisons. Comparing robs others and, especially, yourself of joy.¹ Another form is denial of responsibility. This usually comes in the form of “You make me feel …”, as if we are not responsible for our thoughts and feelings. We deny responsibility when we attribute the causes of our actions to factors outside of ourselves. Yet another form is communicating our desires as demands. A demand implies that there is some kind of negative consequence of the listener does not comply.

It is important to separate observations and interpretations.² This is the first component of the NVC process. Observations are specific things that you see or hear without judgement/interpretation added on top. When we first focus on specific observations rather than adding our interpretation, we avoid the listener hearing criticism and resisting compassion.

After making specific observations, it is important to properly identify and express feelings. “I feel” should be used cautiously and avoid using it to mean “I think”. That is, don’t follow “I feel” with “that”, “like”, “as if”, or a noun or pronoun. Feelings are not thoughts, what we think we are, or how we think others behave toward us. They are specific emotions.³

What others say and do may be the stimulus but they are never the cause of our feelings. We are responsible for our own feelings and we can express that by saying “I feel … because I …” The better we are at expressing our needs rather than spitting judgements, the easier it is for others to respond to us compassionately. There are three stages that we go through to get from believing we are responsible for others’ feelings to accepting full responsibility for our own but not for others’.

The last step in the NVC process is requesting action based off of the observations, feelings, and needs that were discovered earlier in the communication. It is important to use positive action language that includes what we want the listener to do rather than we we don’t want them to do. Requests also need to be complemented with feelings and needs to avoid the request becoming a demand. Requests should only be completed willingly and not through fear of consequences if they don’t comply. Otherwise, it is a demand. Demands usually contain words like “should”, “supposed to”, or “deserve”.

NVC is heavy on compassion and empathy.⁴ Listening completely and connecting with others empathically is crucial for this method. Listening empathically means fully focusing on another person and giving them the space they need to express themselves fully. Sometimes people need an ear rather than a hand so check before advising, consoling, story-telling, interrogating, explaining, etc.

Empathy applies to yourself also. It is easy to get into a mode of self-hatred when things don’t go right rather than learning from our mistakes. “Should” is a destructive word that causes us to resist learning. Instead, use NVC to analyze what needs of yours you were trying to meet when you made a mistake. When we switch our mindset and choose to pursue our needs and values, we become much happier in life.

This is not an anger management book but Rosenburg looks at expressing anger through an NVC lens. Going back to the concept of emotional liberation from others, the first step in expressing anger is divorcing the other person from any responsibility for our anger. Then, go back and ask what needs of yours are not being met and make strong requests.

Lastly, NVC can be used to express appreciation for others. A good expression of appreciation contains the actions that contributed to our well-being, the needs of ours that have been met, and the good feelings that we feel from those needs being met. When you truly appreciate those around you, let them know.

My Thoughts

While I am skeptical of these big best-selling books, especially when there is some product or workshop to pay for at the end of it, there are some good tools and nuggets throughout this book. I don’t foresee myself following this method to the T as I picture my shy self in one of the many example dialogues. The method emphasizes that it takes a lot of time and exploration which means extended amounts of time in awkward conversations. This would be fine for my deep relationships but for everyday interactions, I am going to cherry pick tools from the book to use.

I was reminded of this by Peace Corps Morocco Country Director Susan Dwyer when she drew a connection between Charlie Brown getting a rock for Halloween and the Volunteers getting their permanent sites. ↩
Rosenburg actually calls it the separation of observation and evaluation. However, this concept is very similar to the DIVE model of cross-cultural competence that I have significant experience with. I believe we tend to interpret rather than properly evaluate so I switched it here. ↩
Rosenburg offers lists of feelings to make it easier to find the language that describes your feelings. I prefer using the Feelings Wheel. I know it’s kind of cheesy but it is an excellent tool for finding the language you need. ↩
I stumbled on one of my favorite quotes of all time here: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” I first heard this from John Green in his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed. It is easy to immediately try to solve others’ problems or turn the spotlight to yourself to avoid awkwardness but most of the time, people just need an ear to listen to rather than a hand. ↩

Task Management and Notebook Workflow

2023-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Overview
Concepts
Quick Capture
Everything Has a place
- Spreads
- Adding a Task
Flow: Migrating Tasks
- Updating a Spread
- Symbols
Physical Layout
- Example
Adapting the System

How I setup and use a physical notebook for task management and to make sure nothing gets forgotten

Overview

This is my personal workflow that I use for my task and date management. It is super boring (in a good way!). It means that it is no-nonsense, simple, sustainable, and reliable method for tracking things that you need to do. It works great for me but please adapt it to your own needs to create your own perfect system.

I combined two different frameworks to land on my system. I started with the Bullet Journal method. It’s dynamic, robust, and easy to get started with. While the method itself is flexible, it is physically rigid. The problem I had was wasted paper and wasted time. The BuJo method asks you to create a new page for each month and reserve a bunch of blank pages for your future spread. There was either way too much space on the pages which led to wasted paper or not nearly enough which led to frustration.

It was also so much work to keep updated. I constantly had to redraw these spreads, counting dots to get the perfect divisions and lines all over the place. This created too much friction for me and I never got into a habit of using my notebook. It also became a bit of an internet fad to have these elaborate drawings and a perfectly executed page for every so called “collection” in your life. It invited me to bloat my notebook with shiny new stuff I didn’t need or use rather than stick to the essentials. I did, however, keep most of the symbols from the original BuJo system.

As for the second framework, I took a page out of the GTD (Getting Things Done) book; contexts.

[!info]
Contexts identify tools, places, or people that you require to complete a given task. In other words, contexts allow you to focus on what you can actually get completed given your current circumstances.
- Todoist

The GTD method encourages you to tag different tasks based on context so that when you are in that context, you know exactly what you can be doing. You don’t want to be filtering through home tasks when you are at work or filtering through computer tasks when you are offline. For me personally, time is way more important than physical contexts. I put dates on all my tasks and do them based on that rather than waiting to be in a specific context. Adding proper contexts to tasks adds too much work than value I get out of it.

In my system, my context categories are months, weeks, and days of the week. If you wanted to, you could also add more traditional contexts like computer, cafe, dar chabab, etc. but, again, that is more work for me that isn’t particularly useful.

I put these two frameworks together and now I consistently use my notebook and can quickly get a glance at all of the tasks that I have and in what order I should do them in. More importantly, I never forget things that go in the notebook. It is a system that I trust and I can rest easy knowing everything I need to remember is all in the book.

Concepts

Quick capture
Everything has a place
Flow
Minimize wasted paper

Quick Capture

Another bit that I got from GTD is quick capture; always have a way to capture thoughts, ideas, and things you want to remember in the moment. I always have a pen and a little notebook in my pocket to write things down in. The important thing is regularly getting it out of the quick capture notebook and into my actual notebook or another system for long-term storage.

The majority of my quick capture notebook is Darija words but it can also contain people’s birthdays as I hear about them, lesson plan ideas, events in the future, kind notes from others, etc. I also use Google Keep to write little notes if using my notebook isn’t convenient at the time for whatever reason.

You can also carry around a notebook that is both your main one and your quick capture one if that is convenient for you. I don’t like lugging around my big notebook so I opt for a small pocket one and I transfer stuff at the end of each day.

Everything Has a place

Basically, there is a line in my notebook for every single important task or date in my life. When I hear about a new task or date, I don’t have to spend mental energy figuring out where to put it in my notebook and I trust my system to not let it slip through the cracks.

They are broken into progressively more refined time blocks (called spreads), starting at the high annual level and working down to the weekly level.

Spreads

Future

The future spread looks six months into the future max. For the rare times I am planning out farther than that, I just write those on the margins of the future spread (utilizing that wasted paper space). The six months is customizable, I kind of chose it arbitrarily. It’s a good mix of being far enough in the future and not wasting paper. Each month is a context category.

Monthly

Each month is split up into weeks. Weeks of the year, not weeks of the month. For example, it is March 31, 2023 right now and it is week 13 of the year. Each week is a context category. I also keep a key on the same line as the month so I can quickly know what week a particular date falls into without consulting a calendar every time.

Weekly

This is where the magic happens and the majority of tasks end their lifecycle. The week is titled the same as it is in the monthly, based on weeks of the year. Each day of the week (and its corresponding number date) is a context category.

Daily (Optional)

This will depend on your setup. I used to make little notes in here and maybe journal once in a while but I found way better tools to do both (quick capture notebook and other software) and don’t really use the daily note anymore. The only thing I think I use it for is for a particular drawing that I want to capture.

Adding a Task

At most, you have to ask yourself two questions to know where a task or date goes:

flowchart LR
%%classDef default fill:#8388A0%%
A-- YES --->C>Put it in the weekly spread]
A(Can it be completed this week?)-- NO --->B(Can it be completed this month?)
B-- YES --->D>Put it in the monthly spread]
B-- NO --->E>Put it in the future spread]

Flow: Migrating Tasks

flowchart LR
	subgraph Spreads
		%%style Spreads fill:#8388A0%%
		A[Future] --> B[Monthly]
		B --> C[Weekly]
		C --> D[Completed]
	end
	
	subgraph Tasks
		%%style Tasks fill:#8388A0%%
		direction LR
		T1(Task) -.-> A
		T2(Task) -.-> B
		T3(Task) -.-> C
	end

This is the heart of the system and what allows new tasks to move through their lifecycle. Tasks generally flow forward from Future to Monthly to Weekly to Completed. They don’t necessarily always start in the Future spread either (I don’t plan my life that far out). Tasks usually get created in the Monthly or Weekly spreads and flow forward accordingly. They almost always end their lifecycle in the Weekly spread unless I am really on top of it and complete a task weeks in advance (rarely).

Sometimes, tasks flow backwards. For example, it’s the end of the week and I realize a task isn’t a particular priority anymore. I may move it to the monthly spread to tackle in a later week this month.

Updating a Spread

When you need to update a spread when the month or week changes, it is easy. You don’t need to create a new page unless the current one is full. Simply skip a line on the current spread, write the new context categories, migrate tasks, and you are done.

When I create a new weekly spread, I look at the monthly spread for tasks that fall into this week. I transfer them from the monthly to the weekly where they will (hopefully) finish their lifecycle this week.
When I create a new monthly spread, I look at the future spread for tasks that fall into this month. I put them in their correct week number context categories.
When I create a new future spread, I look in the margins of the previous future spread. I either move it to its correct month or if I really planned something, put it in the margin of the new future spread.

Symbols

I use various markers to indicate task status. These markers are directly copied from the original Bullet Journal method.

A dot means that the task is still alive in that location. If you see a dot in a monthly spread, that means it could have been moved from the future spread but has not been migrated to a weekly spread.
An X means that the task is done.
A strikethrough means the task is cancelled.
An arrow pointed to the right (>) means that the task has been migrated forward (from future to monthly or from monthly to weekly).
An arrow pointed to the left (<) means that the task has been migrated back (from weekly to monthly or monthly to future).
An exclamation point is reserved for really important tasks.

Physical Layout

I personally like Moleskine with a dotted layout but anything works. The vertical component of the dotted or a grid layout is very helpful compared to standard lined paper.

Each page (future, monthly, or weekly) has a vertical line running down the entire page on the left side. The columns to the left of this line are for marking context categories while the tasks themselves go to the right of this line.

Example

For demonstration, privacy, and simplicity reasons, I made a toned down version in a normal old notebook.

Future

My future spreads usually contain birthdays and holidays because I don’t plan actual tasks that far out. In this spread, you can see that I have migrated tasks from March and April to monthly spreads. I can now forget that they exist in my future spread.

I can get a quick glance of what is coming up in future months by looking for dots in that context category. For example, I know that I have a wedding to go to on June 3rd and I have to pay rent on June 4th. Similarly, I have a training from July 10th to July 12th.

You can also see that it is easy to add recurring tasks, like paying rent on the 4th every month by just adding dots in each context category.

Monthly

In this monthly spread, you can see the tasks that were in the future spread like $\pi$ day and paying rent.

You can also see the key for converting from a calendar date to its corresponding week number. Week 9 contains March 1st through March 5th, week 10 contains March 6th through March 12th, etc. This way, I don’t have to look at a calendar when someone tells me that Easter is on April 9th. I look at the key, see that the 9th falls into week 14 and I add it accordingly.

Weekly

Like I said, this is where the magic happens. You’ll notice tasks from the monthly and future spreads alongside new tasks. If a task comes into my periphery and it can be done in the current week, I add it directly to the weekly spread (see the above flowchart).

It’s also easy to scan and see tasks that I have yet to do. For example, I scan the context columns for dots and I see that I didn’t do laundry that I wanted to do on Monday the 27th.

It’s also incredibly easy to switch days when dates change. Just cross out the dot and move it to the right. For example, I was supposed to see the gendarme on Wednesday the 15th but he kept cancelling on me for three days straight until I finally visited him.

As for the last VRG task, I realized that I don’t have the energy for it this week and I still have time so it’s not a priority anymore. I simply put a left arrow on it to indicate that I migrated it back to a previous spread and that’s it.

Adapting the System

This is a very simple and boring system that can easily be built on. What’s important is having a system that is reliable that you will use consistently. Use these ideas how you like to make a system that works for you.

I have hinted at a few ideas already that may work for you. First, you could add a daily spread to add notes, journal, sketch, or whatever your heart desires. When I did this, I would simply use a line to write the date and add notes below that line using as much space as I needed for my thoughts. The next day, I would skip a line, write the new date, and add more notes.

Second, you could add more contexts. This would keep the date contexts front and center while adding more information. Draw another line on the right side of the page with whatever context categories you need. For example, your context categories could be dar chabab and home or internet for tasks that you might need to do while you have cafe internet.

Doodle, put stickers, highlight stuff, make it pretty. As I said, build the system that works best for you.

So long and thanks for all the fish,

Westley Winks

Khalti in the Taxi

2023-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

I had just said goodbye to my first host family, to the Peace Corps staff, and to the volunteers that I wouldn’t see for the next three months. I was now on my way to my final site to live there for the next two years.

I had all of my belongings; those that I brought from home and the couple of things I had acquired here. I was to take a total of three taxis that day, the first of which was shared with some other volunteers and “our” luggage (In reality, it was one volunteer’s luggage that took up most of the space. You know who you are!). After we reached Marrakech, the most touristic city in Morocco, I was on my own.

We made it to Marrakech in one piece with only one stop for some roadside coffee. The taxi station was a bustle. It was packed with travelers, tourists, and people trying to sell things to said tourists. Add on the second-hand stress of making sure the previously mentioned volunteer had all of their bags, I was ready to get out of there.

I found my second taxi that was headed in the right direction and loaded up all my stuff. The grand taxis that go between major cities in Morocco don’t leave until all of their six seats are ~~filled~~ paid for and I was the second one there. I was waiting for what seemed like a really long time, declining people wanting to sell me overpriced bottles of water, when a middle-aged Moroccan woman put her stuff in the seat next to me and went behind the taxi for a smoke.

In Morocco, it’s common to call women older than you khalti (literally “my maternal aunt”) as a respectful term if you don’t know their name. Another meaning of a khalti is a very kind and warm woman that would drop everything to help you. I said a hello and how are you to khalti that was sat next to me and we were off.

I spent most of the ride looking out the window at all the new views I hadn’t yet seen and occasionally tried to focus on my language flashcards so that I would sound like I had learned something when I met my host family. As we were approaching the city that contained my last taxi and the home stretch, khalti leaned forward to the driver to ask a question. I recognized a few of the words: where, taxi, the name of my town. They exchanged some words and, in my three-month-old Arabic, I explained to her as best I could that I was going to the same place she was and I didn’t know where the taxi stand was either. She said some more words that I didn’t understand, smiled warmly, and nodded.

We get to where we are going and everyone dismounts from the taxi. I take the longest because I have a total of four bags to grab. I turn out of the trunk of the taxi with all my stuff to find khalti waiting for me, telling me mashi mushkil (no problem) and kindly gesturing to follow her. Without exchanging any words, we walk around the building and across the street to the taxi stand.

She leads me to the correct place and helps me load my stuff into the last taxi and tells me 3shra while showing me a 10 dirham coin. I give her the money and she pays and deals with the taxi driver for us while I grab my seat. All I can give in return is shukran (thank you). As we depart, she turns around in the shotgun seat and quizzically gives me a thumbs up to make sure I am good and comfortable.

We are very close to my town at this point. I can see the youth center and a few buildings on the outskirts of town. khalti leans over to the driver once more to say something. He stops right there instead of going all the way to the taxi stand and khalti gets out. She pokes her head back in to exchange more words with the driver, pointing at me as she is doing so. She looks back to give me another one of those warm smiles and quizzical thumbs up but this time it was punctuated with a wave goodbye. I could barely get out one last meager shukran before the door closed and she disappeared into the rear view mirror.

I didn’t have the language or experience at that time to fully express my gratitude to that woman. For the kindness and comfort she extended to me, a poor foreigner far from the beaten path. I keep waiting for the day when I recognize her in my little site to properly thank her but I know that she did it purely because she wanted to and she’ll tell me that I don’t need to thank her, that she was just doing what she was supposed to do.

Being kind doesn’t have to be some big, drawn out spectacle. Sometimes all it takes is someone to comfort you and look out for you with a warm smile and a quizzical thumbs up.

Hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise,

Westley Winks

Settling In and Housekeeping

2023-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Housekeeping

Finally. Four months in and things have calmed down enough where I have time to write about this wonderful culture and experience that I find myself in.

In this initial post, I will talk more specifically about my role here, what my life has looked liked during training, where I am now, and how I got here. After that, this blog/newsletter will be used mainly to share stories that highlight aspects of Moroccan culture as I experience it. There are a lot of blogs and videos about being a Peace Corps Volunteer; day in the life, packing lists, policies, travel, training, Chacos or Tevas, etc. that are generally universal. I won’t be writing about my day-to-day or my personal woes and undertakings. I am simply a medium for people having a better understanding of Morocco. The Third Goal of Peace Corps is to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans and that is the main focus of this space.

However, there are also some truly remarkable Americans that I have met along the way and it would be remiss of me to not occasionally share their stories.

I would also like to post weekly but we’ll see how that goes. If you would like to follow along, add your email here to get these posts in your inbox! Otherwise, check back here periodically. Please reach out if you have any questions or want to talk about anything.

The Journey Thus Far (In Brief)

There I am, sweating bullets in the middle seat of a Boeing Dreamliner as we leave the tarmac of the Reagan International Airport runway just as my bedtime is approaching. Eight hours of flying later (maybe one of which was spent sleeping) we landed in Casablanca, Morocco. In a sleep-deprived daze, I got off the plane and put my feet on the ground of a different continent an entire ocean away from home. I couldn’t believe it. I actually made it. It was (and in some ways still is) an absolutely surreal experience.

We were shipped in buses to Meknes where we spent the better part of two weeks under a tent learning about our new roles and new lives. We were also split into training groups of four or five people and one LCF (Language and Culture Facilitator) who would be teaching us the local language and helping us navigate in Moroccan culture in towns across the region for nearly three months.

In our training sites, we went to our LCF’s house every morning at 8:00 AM sharp. For four hours, Maryem (my LCF) would go through her language lesson plan with us until noon when we would go back and eat lunch with our host families and take a nap if you were lucky. We would return to Maryem’s house and either learn more language or do a culture lesson for a few hours. Finally, we ended the day with an activity in the youth center and went home. This was the schedule six days per week with the occasional training day in a nearby city thrown in.

Then, equipped with what I thought was a decent understanding of the language, I was sent alone to my final site where I will be living and serving in for two years. I couldn’t understand a thing people were saying but thankfully my second host family was kind and accommodating. With a lot of help, I found a small apartment to live in and the bare necessities to make it livable. And now, here I am writing this on a thrifted rug on the floor of my front room. Slowly but surely, I am getting a grip of the language and becoming more accustomed to life here. Thanks to all of the kind people here, I feel more and more at home everyday.

My Role

My “main” mission here is to do youth development. That can look like many things and I am still figuring out what my role is exactly. It depends on the needs and resources of the community but the immediate want in the community is to learn English. So to start, I will be working in the youth center teaching communicative English to the youth of the town that want to learn. As time goes on and I get a better understanding of the community, I will add more classes and activities for youth to learn life skills and community engagement. I am here to serve this community and will do, to the best of my ability, what is needed from me.

The other, less visible, part of my job is sharing culture. I am here to share American values and traditions while at the same time learning Moroccan values and traditions to share with my American friends back home. This means that I am working nearly 24/7 where every interaction presents an opportunity to advance this goal. It can be as complex as teaching youth about Thanksgiving or as simple as describing how much calmer people drive in America.

That leads to a major part of my day: language learning. I think I underestimated how important learning the local language would be. How can I fully express myself and my culture without a good command of the language? How can I understand this culture without understanding the little nuances of the language? Language learning is going to be a major part of every single day here.

Looking ahead

I have packed so much information into my brain over the past four months and there is still so much more to go. Now that I am living on my own, there isn’t a host family to make me delicious and healthy food; I have to make my own food again. So on top of learning the language, I will be re-learning how to cook and how to maintain a house (it’s been a while). Add onto that learning how to be a good teacher and that will be my life for the next few months!

It’s an absolute honor to be in Morocco and an even bigger honor to share a small sliver of it with anyone who reads.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley Winks

The Assignment

2022-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

On December 24, 2020, I applied for the Peace Corps. I was entering my last terms of college and knew that I wanted to join the Peace Corps when I graduated.

A year and a half and one pandemic later, I received an official invite: Youth Development Specialist in Morocco set to depart September 2022. After reading the invite and job description, I did a fist pump, had a small joyful cry on the porch, and accepted the position. It couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.

Here I am with three weeks left before I depart. I am nervous and beyond excited. I am going to be an educator in a beautiful country with so much to learn.

My day-to-day job will be working with youth to teach them important skills and promote engagement in the community. Dependent on the needs of the community, topics could include employability, health education, information technology, English, sports, or environmental education.

The more difficult, nuanced, and arguably more important job that I have 24/7 while I am there is to be an interface between the people of Morocco and the people of the United States. I have the opportunity to learn a culture completely different from my own and share that with friends, family, and strangers at home. Along with that, I am there to represent American culture, sharing that with new friends and colleagues I meet in Morocco.

This website is primarily where I will be completing the former; writing articles and sharing photos of what I learn about Morocco so that whoever reads can better understand Moroccan culture. The latter will be completed in every interaction I have in Morocco. I will do the best I can to represent the people and culture of the U.S. with honesty and honor.

Keep an eye on this website (https://wwinks.com/peace-corps) for new articles and experiences from Morocco for the next two years. Please feel free to send me an email with any questions or just to connect! Email and other contact methods are in the footer.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley Winks

Brainstorming

2022-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

Back in my college days, I had the good fortune of taking a course from the newly developed Humanitarian Engineering department called “Innovation for Social Impact.” It was co-created with a Mechanical Engineering professor and an Anthropology professor. The course was about designing solutions to support low-income or other vulnerable populations using a mix of tools from engineering, entrepreneurship, and social sciences. It was great being in a multi-disciplinary environment and considering things other than just the technical engineering stuff.

I learned a little about a lot of things but one of my favorites that I use pretty often in my life is the seven rules of brainstorming. Developed by Ideo, these simple concepts have really helped me come up with better and better ideas through brainstorming.

Brainstorming is a great way to get out of a creative rut or to come up with a plan. You allow creativity to flow and let ideas bounce around in your head. It opens doors that you previously couldn’t see. One thing that I am very guilty of is thinking of or hearing an idea and saying “Yeah but that won’t work because of this, this, and this.” While that may be true, it immediately stops the flow of ideas rather than propelling it into novel territory. Using these seven guidelines helps maximize the potential that brainstorming has for developing ideas for just about anything:

1. Defer Judgement

Brainstorming is all about letting ideas flow. Let your brains ride the wave, occasionally stopping to explore. One of the fastest ways to cork the flow is to judge other people and their ideas. You focus on judging instead of the creative flow. It makes the recipient reluctant to share their flow. Judging people or their ideas generally isn’t a nice thing to do and should be avoided all the time, especially when brainstorming.

2. Encourage Wild Ideas

Brainstorming is all about thinking outside the box. When you come up with and encourage ideas that are way out there you keep that flow of creative energy going. Even if they are way out of left field, at the very least, they are likely to spark another idea. They also might seem like crazy ideas now but might be actually reasonable in the future. Keep asking “What if?” to get to these more lofty ideas.

Side note: Jacob is the king of wild ideas.

3. Build on the Ideas of Others

Building on other people’s ideas means saying “Yes and…” rather than “But…”. This is probably the most important rule for me that I am still learning. “But” makes everyone think of all the limitations, both perceived and real, to their ideas and encourages in-the-box thinking. “And” keeps the flow going by continuing on down the path rather than blockading it.

Here is a Family Guy clip of this in action. Not quite to this comedic extreme but you can see how “and” keeps the story going.

4. Stay Focused on the Topic

It is so incredibly easy to get distracted. It’s easy to have an idea and then your brain goes “Hey, what if we applied that same idea to a completely different topic!?” That is exactly my definition of creativity but it is still important to stay focused on the goal of the brainstorming session.

5. One Conversation at a Time

Similar to the previous rule, allowing one conversation at a time lets you fully flesh out ideas. It allows you to fully explore an idea and see where it leads. You are navigating a maze of ideas and you don’t know which route leads to the million dollar idea. Exploring each route one at a time increases efficiency and prevents backtracking.

6. Be Visual

Break out the whiteboard to activate different parts of your brain. Use different colors and sticky notes to help form new ideas. This also helps map out where ideas come from, how ideas are connected, and how you got to each idea.

7. Go for Quantity

Most of your brainstorming ideas are going to be bad. The bigger pool of ideas you have to select from, the more likely it is to pull a winner.

Go forth and brainstorm some great ideas.

So long and thanks for all the fish,

Westley

Styling

2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

I’ve been dabbling with web development for a while now and was looking for the best tools for the job. For basic websites, you need two things: HTML and CSS.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) describes the content of the website and looks like this:

<h1>This is a heading!</h1>

<p>This is some content!</p>

<a href="somewebsite.com">This is a link!</a>

<a href="specialwebsite.com" class="specialLink">This is a special link</a>

<img src="someimage.jpg">

Every piece of content, whatever it is, is wrapped in tags and might have some attributes and values (href is an attribute with a value of somewebsite.com, class is an attribute with a value of specialLink, and so on) that combine into a single element. Now, if you wrote exactly that HTML file and deployed it, it would look awfully boring. It would be a white screen with a black font that says “This is a heading”, “This is some content”, a blue link to “somewebsite.com”, another link, and an image.

We need some way to style our content and CSS does exactly that. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is code written to specifically style HTML by changing colors, fonts, animations, and placement on the page. The page you are reading right now (if you are reading this on the website) has CSS for a unique font and large margins on the left and right of the text. The traditional way to do styling is make a separate CSS file, target individual elements, and write specific style rules for those elements. In our example, let’s say you wanted to center the h1 element and make the font size bigger. You also want the links to be red instead of blue. This would be done like this:

h1 {
	text-align: center;
	font-size: 24px;
}

a {
	color: red;
}

Easy! You target the h1 element and write some style rules. Then you target the a elements and apply different rules. As you add more content and rules, you can start to make really complex and beautiful websites. What if we wanted the special link to look different? We can use the class attribute to target that link specifically. It would look like this:

a {
	color: red;
}

a.specialLink {
	color: magenta;
	font-size: 36px;
}

We can target specific elements by adding a class to that element and updating our CSS accordingly. The first rule targets all a tags (aka links) and colors them red. The second rule targets all a tags that have a class of specialLink and colors them magenta and makes the font size 36 pixels.

Imagine you had a website with thousands of these elements and you need to individually target many of them. You would have to think of a clever class name for each of them and write at least three extra lines of CSS for each element. That quickly gets arduous, takes way too long, and is difficult to maintain.

Rather than use the class attribute as a marker to refer to later in your CSS, what if there was a way to use the class attribute functionally? In comes utility classes and Tailwind.

Tailwind is a tool that allows you to write your CSS inside of your HTML. To do the exact same thing as the previous example, your HTML would look like this:

<h1 class="center font-xl">This is a heading!</h1>

<p>This is some content!</p>

<a class="text-red" href="somewebsite.com">This is a link!</a>

<a class="text-magenta font-4xl" href="specialwebsite.com">This is a special link</a>

<img src="someimage.jpg">

To do the same thing, I didn’t have to write any CSS and both my content and styling are done in the same file. You can see that I used Tailwind’s pre-defined classes in my HTML and Tailwind converts that to CSS. It specifically scans the HTML, sees that the h1 tag has a class of center and font-xl. Tailwind knows to map the class attribute center to text-align: center; and does that for every element.

Rather than trying to find and target individual elements and worry about overriding previously written rules, you can write the specific styling for each element from within the element itself. It has really removed a lot of headaches for me and speeds up development. As an initial first test, I completely redid the CSS on my personal website. I converted all the old CSS to Tailwind. It is now so much easier to make small changes to colors, sizing, and placement of anything within my website. For new projects, it makes getting started that much easier as well.

Tailwind is an excellent concept and tool that I will absolutely be using for all of my web development projects in the future.

Good luck in the future,

Westley

Have a Website

2022-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

After much prep, I finally decided to actually start freelancing this week. I noticed in my hometown that the majority of small businesses there don’t have any online presence. They do advertising in the local newspaper, word of mouth, and some use only Facebook. In 2022, there is a whole population of people that these small businesses are missing by not being online. Before I leave for a while (different post, different day), I would like to give back to my community by offering to build them basic websites that function as online business cards.

Why is having a website that important for your business?

I think the biggest reason is actually the change in how people shop these days. What most people do when they want to buy something is go online and buy from some big online store so that it gets shipped to their door in two days. That’s a huge chunk of customers lost that is out of your control. As for the rest of the pool of potential customers, they want to buy something from an actual store. But how do they know what store to go to? If someone wanted to buy a new pair of shoes, they would probably go and google “shoe store near me”. They scroll through the results, looking at each store’s website until they find one or two that they actually want to spend the energy on visiting. Maybe they go and look at your hours to make sure your store is open. They might also look for a phone number to call and see if you have the specific style of shoes they want.

The problem is that they don’t even know your business exists if you don’t have a website. The odds of a young person reading the local newspaper is low. The probability of their friends (also young people) telling them about a cool store they went to is also low. People are deleting their Facebook accounts like crazy (again, mostly young people). People new to the area don’t even have many friends to hear from. That is a lot of customers that are being cut out from being a potential customer for your business.

The second-hand effect of having a good looking website is credibility. Either consciously or subconsciously, people tend to have less trust in a business without a nice website. Dealing with businesses without a professional looking website is reminiscent of doing business with that friend of a friend that ripped you off that one time. It tells customers that your business isn’t established or doesn’t care enough to reinvest in the business. There is so much less credibility and professionalism than the exact same business that has even a simple website.

There are fantastic tools out there nowadays to both build and host your website. Platforms now exist to make it so incredibly easy and cheap that you are experiencing the negative effects of not having a website almost for no reason at all. You can use a website builder but you pay a premium each month. You can hire a web developer for not that much money and they can have it running for $0 per month after the initial cost of building the actual website. The tools that exist for developers have really focused on getting a working website up very rapidly and tweaking it from there, reducing cost and time spent significantly.

Most businesses really don’t need some complex website with online ordering or some log in process. The most value for a small business’s money is a simple website that tells people what products or services you provide, how to contact you, what your hours are, where you are located, and an “About Us” page. The value that that simple website provides will pay for itself in almost no time. If you want more, you can use social media in tandem with your website. Use your website as a main information source and your social media to interact with your customers, post pictures of your products in use, and quick updates.

This is exactly the niche that I would like to operate in for the next couple of months. I want to help empower all of the local businesses in my area to take the step into this new age of shopping for products and services. Especially in the current economic climate, small businesses need a lot of help to compete with the likes of Amazon and online stores and I have the tools and skills to offer that.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

Sorting Algorithms

2022-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

This Tuesday, Jacob and I found ourselves with a pile of hundreds of football and baseball cards searching each one on an app to get a rough estimate of their value. We started off by just searching the name of each player one by one but that quickly grew boring and would have taken us months.

Our next workflow was to sort all of them into their individual teams (33 for the NFL and 30 for the MLB) and then look at the most popular in the app and see if we had that player. There we were, trying to give order to a randomized pile of cards.

Let’s talk about sorting algorithms.

First of all, why is sorting important? Think about all the times in a day, both in real life and on your computer, information or items need to be sorted. Emails are sorted by date, Google results sorted by relevance, books sorted by the author’s last name, baseball cards sorted into teams. A great reason to spend time upfront sorting things is to make it easier to search through later. This is what Google does with their search engine and exactly our goal for the baseball cards. Google grabs all of the websites on the internet (that it is allowed to) and is constantly sorting them so that it can be searched in milliseconds for end users.

This is one of the fundamental trade-offs in computer science. Is it even worth it to spend time sorting things? If my books on my shelf aren’t sorted and are in a random order, it might take me on average 15 seconds to scan through and find the book I am looking for. On the other hand, it might take me an hour to sort my bookshelf but then will take me only 5 seconds to find the book I am looking for. In this case, leaving my shelf unsorted is the best choice because it would take me 360 searches for it to start saving me time. However, if I ran the NYC library it would take me hours to search through thousands of books to find the one I am looking for. At that scale, it makes sense to spend time sorting all of them to save so much time searching later.

When we talk about sorting, size matters. The more there is to sort in one go, the longer it takes. Sorting 100 baseball cards by last name alphabetical order will take longer than sorting 50 twice. For computers, they often need to sort millions of items at once. How you sort (aka your sorting algorithm) also matters immensely. Some methods, as we will see, will take hundreds of times longer than more efficient algorithms. Therefore, it is important to pick efficient algorithms to minimize the time and resources spent on sorting.

Let’s start with one of the most simple algorithms: Bubble Sort. This sorting algorithm is kind of the punching bag of computer science because it is so simple and inefficient. To sort a bookshelf by alphabetical order, I would compare the first and second book. If those two are in alphabetical order, move on to comparing book two and book three. If they aren’t in alphabetical order, switch them and compare book two and book three. Repeat this process until there are no more switches and your books are sorted.

This will work every time but quickly becomes arduous with a lot of books. Bubble sort is what is known as a quadratic time algorithm. This means that if the amount of books you need to sort doubles, the amount of time it will take you (on average) will quadruple. If the amount of books triples, the amount of time spent sorting is multiplied by 9.

Let’s say it takes me one hour to sort 100 books using this algorithm. If I go to the bookstore and get another 100 books, it would take me 4 hours to sort all of them. Then if I ended up with 1,000 books, it would take me 100 hours to sort them all. You can see how this wouldn’t work very well when the scale gets large.

How else can we sort our books? Let’s try taking all of our books of the shelf. Grab one at random and place it on the shelf. Then grab another book and insert it in order on the shelf. Repeat this, inserting books in order one by one. This is what is known as Insertion Sort. While it is slightly faster than Bubble sort, it is still in quadratic time so this also quickly becomes too inefficient at large scale.

So quadratic time is bad, is there a sorting algorithm that is faster and doesn’t get out of hand as quickly at a large scale? Absolutely! This problem in computer science history is what is called the Quadratic Barrier and wasn’t properly solved in a computer until 1945 with the sorting algorithm known as Mergesort. The idea is that it is fast to combine two sorted stacks into one larger sorted stack. So the goal is to start by creating sorted stacks of two. Combine those to create sorted stacks of four and repeat until you have one stack completely sorted.

Take the books back of the shelf and create sorted stacks of two books each. Now take two of those stacks and now you only have to compare the top book of each stack! Take the book that starts earliest in the alphabet and start a new stack. Then, again, compare the top book of each stack and add it to the new stack. Repeat this until all of your stacks of two are stacks of four. Repeat this process, combining stacks into larger ones until you have one sorted stack.

Mergesort is one of the best and most practical sorting algorithms. You might have noticed that while you are merging two stacks, the rest are just sitting there. What if you invited a friend over? You both could be merging stacks and half the time it would take just you. Unlike Bubble and Insertion sorting, Mergesort allows for multiple people to be sorting at the same time, reducing the overall time spent sorting. At the large Google scale, this means you can have tens of computers working in tandem to sort all of that information.

Mergesort changed sorting in the computer science world forever. It is fast and scales well. But can we sort even faster?

Yes, with an algorithm called Bucket Sort. This algorithm first groups things into less granular buckets until each bucket has a manageable number of items. Remember when I said that sorting 50 books twice is faster than sorting 100 once? That is the fundamental idea with Bucket sort. It reduces the size of the shelf you are sorting into many smaller shelves (size matters).

For my bookshelf, one way to do a bucket sort is choosing buckets A-F, G-M, N-S, and T-Z. Then I would go through my random pile of books and drop each one into its corresponding bucket. By doing this, I have reduced my one big bookshelf into four smaller ones. Within these bucket, I could do something like an Insertion sort to get a perfect sort. Then I would put each sorted bucket next to one another on the shelf.

The trick is choosing buckets. If you end up with 99% of your items in one bucket, you haven’t really done much. To smartly choose buckets, you need to know the distribution of the items you are sorting. Let’s say most of my books are written by Malcolm Gladwell, John Green, and Tom Griffiths. Using the even A-F/G-M/N-S/T-Z split doesn’t make sense because most of my books will be in bucket two. A better split would be A-F/G/H-Z or even A-F/Gl/Gr/H-Z to make all of the buckets have the same number of items in each.

If you choose buckets correctly and the number of buckets is small compared to the number of items, Bucket sort ends up being in linear time! When the number of books doubles, the time it takes for me to sort them doubles. When it triples, the time it takes triples. This ends up scaling extremely well.

So, how should we have sorted all those baseball cards? If the goal was to have a stack of cards sorted by team name and then player’s last name to make searching as easy as possible, we would have two sorting operations. Assuming that we have an even distribution of teams (the same amount of player cards in each team), one way is to put the cards into buckets A-M and N-Z based on team name then take each of these buckets and do a mergesort on them still based on team name. Then, do a Bubble sort by player last name within each team name (Bubble sort works best in this case because of physical limitations; all the information is on the face of the cards such that we would have to lay them all out on the floor to do an Insertion sort. If we had books with the information on the spine, an Insertion sort would be best).

References: Most of this information came from the great book Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. In it, they write about the application of computer science in everyday life. They talk about so many other incredibly interesting topics like optimal stopping, scheduling, randomness, caching. All of these are computer science problems with solutions that can be applied to everyday life (like sorting baseball cards!).

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

Tech Stocks

2022-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

Right now is one of the most interesting times in my life in many ways. One of those is that I can finally understand macroeconomic trends and see them play out right in front of me. My economics teacher from high school told me that the Federal Reserve raises interest rates (among other things) which has a cascading effect to reduce the money supply in the United States all in an effort to reduce inflation to a manageable rate. That made sense and all but I am now watching Jerome Powell walk the fine line between curbing inflation and keeping the economy out of a recession all in real time.

During this time, I have also noticed stocks in the tech market dropping rapidly. I wanted to know specifically the role of tech stocks in these economic conditions and this is my best attempt at understanding it (for now). It unfortunately won’t be in simple plain English and that is a limitation of my understanding:

Let’s set this up starting from the pandemic and the stimmies. The pandemic hits and the world stops. People stop spending money and instead save it in case they lose their jobs or have to pay when the supply chain of goods dries up, expecting the worst to happen. People holding onto money (demand decrease, in economic terms) is exactly when a recession happens. So how do you get people to spend money when all the uncertainty and instability in the world tells them to save it? Give out free money! When the stimulus packages were being dumped into the hands of American citizens, it caused people to go out and spend, avoiding a recession.

That money doesn’t just go away when the pandemic is over. It is still in the money supply. The pandemic starts to break and all that repressed demand start to break the dam holding it and everyone starts spending again. With more dollars in the system, they have less “rarity” so finding a dollar now is much easier than it was pre-pandemic. Your dollars don’t hold as much value as they once did. Sound familiar? That’s inflation.

Now we are avoiding an over-correction. Recession was looming and now inflation is booming. How does the Fed fix that? They raise interest rates. This has the exact opposite effect of the stimmies. Interest rates make it more expensive to borrow money and spend that borrowed money. People start holding onto their money, tipping the scales away from inflation. But it’s not enough. The Fed needs to raise interest rates a few times to find that perfect balance between stopping inflation and economic growth.

Another way the Fed can cool inflation is buying bonds. This is essentially the Fed trading paper money for IOU’s. Money moves out of the money supply and causes money to be more rare, increasing the value of a dollar.

So there is the long-winded set up. Interest rates are increasing and the Fed is buying bonds. Let’s move to what that means for tech companies.

Higher interest rates are bad for tech companies. When borrowing money becomes more expensive, they aren’t going to go get more money they need to keep growing. Investors don’t want to invest in companies that aren’t constantly growing and not exceeding earnings each quarter and investors start selling their shares which drives the price of that stock down.

If investors don’t want to put their money in tech companies that aren’t expected to grow in the short run, where should they put it? They know that bonds are about to be in high demand when the Fed starts buying them up. When the demand for a stock goes up, it drives the price up. Investors start selling their tech shares and start buying safer bonds.

Lastly, tech companies are inherently risky investments. I’m not talking about the Apple’s and the Meta’s of the market. I am talking about Bitcoin and companies utilizing new technologies like AI or renewable energy. Just like when the pandemic hit and filled the room with uncertainty, people don’t want to put their money in risky investments. They will start selling their risky tech stocks in favor of more stable and safe investments like bonds or savings accounts.

But wait a minute. You might be thinking, “Didn’t tech stocks absolutely blow up during the pandemic?” They did!

There is an economic term called ceteri paribus meaning “all other things being equal”. Throughout all these claims, I have assumed that they hold true with everything else being equal. True, with everything else being equal people don’t want to spend their money when the economic climate is sinking. But the pandemic was a case where everything else wasn’t equal. It pushed everyone indoors and everyone needed technology to survive. They need Zoom, Peloton, and Apple even more than before the pandemic. Since these companies are expecting to have record profits, investors jump on the boat, increasing the demand for tech stocks and increasing the price.

As usual, this as an intense simplification of some economic theory and I am no expert. I am hoping that some of the wise readers of this newsletter can correct me and teach me something so I can understand these trends better (@PC and @MM). Call me!

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

APIs

2022-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

Last week, I talked about how the internet works. Clients make requests to servers and servers respond to those requests. Today, let’s go deeper into how programs and computers can talk to each other: APIs.

Back when computers were just starting out, the companies producing them built everything for that computer (the hardware, the chips, the software) and that one company put all of these together to make it work. Since computers became ultra popular, it opened up the market such that entire companies could be formed around building each of these components: Intel makes chips, Apple provides low-level software and hardware, and there are thousands of companies that build applications (Facebook, Chrome, Discord, etc.). We now have so many different applications and they all need to connect so that they can be useful to us.

This is where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) come in. APIs act as an interface between different applications and allow them to get information from and communicate with one another. Let’s start with an analogy.

If you wanted to start a company that builds houses, you wouldn’t build everything from scratch. You would have to go chop trees, make them into boards, forge nails, build all the cabinets, deal with the circuitry that goes into an oven. But there are specialized companies out there that can do all of those individual tasks so much better than you. These individual companies have a competitive advantage over your company in each of those tasks. Yes, your company can build a full house from scratch but your cabinets won’t be better than Cabinets ‘R Us LLC and your couches won’t beat Great Seating Inc. You would be building shitty houses that nobody would buy and you would be bankrupt in no time.

A better business model would be to pay those other companies that are good at those individual tasks to do them for you at a lower cost. You pay Cabinets ‘R Us and Great Seating to build the components for a house. Your job then becomes stitching all these pieces together into a functional dwelling.

This is exactly what APIs allow for in the virtual realm. APIs create specialization and competitive advantage. Companies can really perfect a specific service and offer it as an API for other applications to use. Stripe has an API for payment processing. FedEx has an API for logistics and shipping. NOAA has an API for weather information. When a developer is making an application, their job isn’t to build everything from scratch. A developer’s job is to stitch APIs together into a functional application.

Let’s say I start an online business and I want to have some way to collect payments online. I could spend weeks or months trying to code a payment system from scratch. It probably wouldn’t look good and would have bugs and I would need to constantly maintain it along with my other business functions. I could also hire a very expensive and specific developer to take care of that for me.

But there are companies out there that are really good at processing payments. Why not just pay a specialized company to do it for me at a lower cost? Stripe has a full suite of payment infrastructure with a fully featured API that I can tie into my application so the two can talk to one another. With this, when someone makes a purchase, I just point that information to the Stripe API and it is taken care of. I don’t have to write hundreds of lines of code, it’s reliable, and there is no maintenance on my end. All I have to do is stitch my application and the Stripe API together.

Later on, I might want to include shipping time estimates so customers know roughly when their shipment will arrive. Again, I could spend months making some kind of shipping model to estimate a shipping time. But why not just bolt on the FedEx API that already has that information? My application would ask the FedEx API for a shipping estimate and I could provide that information to the customer.

These are just a few examples of all of the possibilities that APIs have opened up. Developers can now spend less time reinventing the wheel and more time innovating. APIs have allowed really unique applications to be built with speed and quality never before seen while opening the door for companies to specialize. All of the software startups in Silicon Valley have APIs to thank for that.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

What Is The Internet

2022-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

The internet. We all know it. We all love it.

But what actually is it?

At the most basic physical level, the internet is a bunch of wires connecting all of the computers around the world. That’s it! The “World Wide Web” is literally a web of wires that connect our devices together and allow them to talk to one another.

There are two kinds of computers on the internet: clients and servers. We are all familiar with clients. Client devices are the phones, iPads, laptops, and gaming consoles that we interact with on a daily basis. Servers are different kinds of computers that do just that; serve things like files and images to clients.

Clients make requests for files, images, and websites to servers. Servers listen for requests and return responses to those requests (usually the response is good and you get what you requested but sometimes other things happen and you can end up with a 404 Not Found response). That’s it. That’s the whole internet. Computers making requests and different computers sending responses to those requests across miles of wires.

TL;DR: The internet is just computers making requests for files and different computers sending responses to those requests across miles and miles of wires.

But let’s go deeper. Our website, untilitsnotfun.com, is literally just a collection of text files and images (which can be seen here!) that your browser understands. But for you (or to use our newly learned jargon, your client) to see those files rendered, they need to be on a server so that when your client requests the page, the server can respond and deliver it to you.

How does your client know what server the website is on and where to send the request? There are thousands and thousands of servers across the world and untilitsnotfun.com lives on one of them. This is where a special kind of server comes in called a Domain Name Server or DNS.

The DNS provides a map between a domain name (untilitsnotfun.com) to a more accurate server location called an IP address. It’s like you typing in “Cafe Yumm” into Google Maps and it returning the very precise latitude and longitude coordinates. You make a request to the DNS that you want to see untilitsnotfun.com and it points that request to the actual server where the untilitsnotfun.com files are. The server then hears the request and responds.

Let’s anthropomorphize all these elements to see how a conversation would go between all these elements:

Client: Hey DNS, I would like to see untilitsnotfun.com. Can you help me get that?
DNS: I am so glad you asked. Let me find who has those files and I will send your request to them. They should respond shortly!
DNS: Hey Server, I have a client that wants to see some files you have of untilitsnotfun.com. Can you find them and send them to her?
Server: Sure thing! I will get started on that right now.
Server: Hey Client! Good news, I found untilitsnotfun.com and am sending you all the files right now. Let me know if you need anything else!
Client: Thanks Server! Looks great. Thanks for your help!

I am going to make a quick side note here and comment on the speed of all this happening. Your request needs to go from your computer, through the air waves to your router, to a DNS somewhere in the world, to a server somewhere in the world. The server searches for all those files you are requesting and sends them all back to your computer. This is also a very simplified model of the internet and there is a lot more that happens during this process. The time between pressing enter and seeing a website happens in seconds. That is amazing. Think about all of the infrastructure and smart people it took and takes to keep the internet running next time you are waiting for something to load or buffer.

Now to sum this up so you can explain it at your next dinner party. The internet is a web of wires that connect all of the computers in the world together and allow them to communicate with each other. The two kinds of computers in the world are clients and servers. Clients are things like phones, laptops, and gaming consoles. Servers listen for requests from clients and serve them when requested. When you try to go to a website, that request goes to a Domain Name Server that maps the website’s domain name to a specific server location. The DNS routes that request to the server that has actual website files on it. The server responds by sending all of the website files to your client. Your browser understands how these files fit together and renders a beautiful website that you can use.

Keep in mind, this is a heavily simplified model of the internet so that I can understand it and put it into plain English for you to have a high level understanding of what goes on behind the scenes when you use your devices.

Come back next week for part two where we dive into a huge building block of the internet: APIs.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

Proton

2022-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

I have been using Proton Mail for a few months now instead of using GMail. Proton offers secure, encrypted email that gets locked up in a such a way that only you and the recipient see the message.

What does this mean? When you send an email from your GMail account, it gets stored on Google’s servers as plain text. This means that anyone that can access the servers can see all of your emails; when they were sent, who they were sent to, and the actual message content. Authorities can also request the records from Google and give Google a gag order to prevent anyone from knowing they accessed them.

Encrypted email offers a “solution”. Before being sent, your email gets encrypted, jumbled into an unreadable mess. Even if Proton wanted to see your message (or anyone else for that matter), they physically can’t. They are stored with zero-access encryption on Proton’s servers. I put “solution” in quotes because this is a classic case of the Network Effect. The more people that use Proton, the better it is for everyone.

Let’s say I sent a message from my Proton Mail to a GMail user. That message still makes its way to Google servers where they have the keys to access the message (you can, however, use password protection to have a weaker form of encryption). The real magic happens when I send an email to another Proton user. Since both the recipient and the sender put the message on Proton servers where there is zero-access encryption, that email is end-to-end encrypted: only the sender and recipient can see the message.

How does this encryption happen physically? Proton uses public key encryption. Each person generates two keys; a public key and a private key. Keys are long (usually 2048 bits) strings of characters and an encryption algorithm uses these to quickly lock or unlock the message. The basic concept is that anything locked with a public key can only be unlocked with the matching private key.

If I wanted to send you an end-to-end encrypted email, I would write my email and look up your public key. I would then lock my message with it. The only way for anyone to de-scramble that message is with your private key which only you have. To reply, you would encrypt your message with my public key that can only be unlocked with my private key. Proton does this all automatically and it is exactly like using any other email service but with excellent protection in the background.

Encryption and cryptography is a massive field and this is just the most basic idea.

Proton also offers a fantastic VPN service. With a VPN, all of your internet traffic gets routed to a different server so it looks like your traffic is coming from somewhere else. The most relevant benefit for this is that it hides your internet activity from your internet service provider (Starlink, Bend Broadband, etc.) to prevent them from selling your internet history data.

The trick is that you have to trust your VPN service to not do the exact same thing. Proton VPN has been audited by a third party and can prove that they don’t keep logs of your internet traffic. Your internet activity gets routed through Proton servers and then they burn that data (virtually, of course).

I barely scratched the surface of why Proton offers a fantastic service and I didn’t even get into their mission and why people should pay for this service to support Proton’s mission. Proton just got a huge update with a re-branding and a simplified pricing structure. Privacy focused companies usually stall out after a certain amount of growth simply because people generally don’t care about their online privacy. This is a huge step in the internet privacy space and it is exciting to see a solid company with a strong mission grow into an actual competitor to the more mainstream companies.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

RSS

2022-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

Much like my discovery of IRC, I recently found a technology called RSS … and have since been wondering why nobody is talking about it and why I even had to discover it in the first place.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a way for anyone that makes content on the internet to broadcast out “Hey I just made a new post and here it is!” Have you ever seen that little orange symbol that looks like a rotated Wi-Fi symbol? That is a link to a website’s RSS feed!

Let’s say I really love Until It’s Not Fun and I love what they are doing and want to know every time they post. I also really like the r/mycology subreddit and want to follow that. I also want to keep up with @themarymclane on Twitter. How would I follow these things while avoiding all of Reddit’s ads and NSFW subs and also avoid The Twitter Algorithm?

RSS feeds, baby. RSS feeds.

RSS feeds are files that describe the content (date, author, description, etc.) and point to where it is located on the website. This feed updates any time the website is updated. While some sites don’t advertise it, most sites that have content that changes have an RSS feed. You can find them by searching the page (or the page source) for “RSS”.

We need something to listen for those changes on all of the feeds we are following so we don’t have to manually refresh each of these pages. This is what is known as an aggregator that listens to these feeds and (you guessed it) aggregates them. All of the content in the feeds you subscribe to get combined and delivered to one place for you to dig through. To reiterate, RSS delivers only the content you subscribe to and it’s all in the same place!

The aggregator is like a really good intern; they sit there all day and refresh the pages you want then delivers the updates to your desk whenever you ask.

This is such a life hack. Once you know about RSS feeds, you can start looking for content you actually enjoy rather than be pushed around by the algorithms. You don’t have to scroll past all your old high school acquaintances baby/partying posts and ads to find the stuff you actually like.

When I look at my feed throughout the day, I see the important things that bring value to my life. Events happening in Bend, some news sites I frequent, tech blogs and news, a few actually valuable subreddits. We have here the ability here to take back some control of our digital lives.

Want to follow the latest NASA mission? They have specific RSS feeds for each mission directly from NASA’s website.
Like xkcd comics? They’ve got an RSS feed delivering comics right to my browser.
Book reviews? New York Times has an RSS feed for their book review column.

Get the content that brings value to your life and ignore all the other shit.

If you want to get started, I recommend Feedbin as an aggregator and You Need Feeds for some starter feeds to follow and more information! Then start finding the content you like and add them to Feedbin.

A handclasp over the miles,

Westley

Markdown

2022-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

Humans write a lot and most of it is done on computers these days. If someone asked you to write them a letter, where would you start? Most would open up Word or Google Docs. We all know the headaches that these word processors can cause: formatting not doing what you want it to, files getting lost, the person you are sending files to doesn’t use the same processor, et cetera.

What if there was an easier way to write basic documents to avoid all of that? Something that can be opened and read on any computer and easily shared? Something with simple and predictable formatting?

Meet Markdown.

Developed in 2004 by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz, Markdown allows you to write in plain text and doesn’t require a special program to read the content. Word documents (.doc or .docx) are binary files; ones and zeroes that machines can read very well but humans can’t read at all. Thus, we need the Word program to translate those ones and zeroes to plain text so that we can actually use them. “Languages” like Markdown and HTML allow us to work directly with plain text so that we don’t need a specific translator.

I put languages in quotes for a reason. Markdown is what is generally known as a lightweight markup language. Another markup language is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) which is what webpages are written in (including what you are reading right now!). At a general level, markup languages simply describe the content in a digital document. Lightweight markup languages (like Markdown) are designed to be simple, easy to use, and human-readable.

All of the posts of this newsletter are written with Markdown. You can see the raw Markdown of this exact post on our GitHub repo, and anyone with internet can read it. What you are reading now is the conversion of that Markdown into rendered content. In the raw Markdown, you can see that the section headings are defined by octothorpes (or hashtags for the youngsters) like this:

## Popcorn and A Coke
### *Where Jacob talks movies*

## The Tech Shelf
### *Where Westley talks about Markdown*

When the conversion between Markdown and what you are seeing now happens, the program knows when it sees an octothorpe to make the text that follows larger and grey.

Similar rules apply for links, bold font, italic font, and others:

[our GitHub repo.](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Westley-Winks/until-its-not-fun-newsletter/main/content/posts/2022-05-13/index.md)

**Bold**

*italic*

~~Strike through~~

- Bulleted
- List

1. Numbered
2. List

This all makes writing on the internet incredibly easy. No need to mess with styling or formatting, you can just simply write. So why isn’t everyone using Markdown? For the everyday lay-person it just isn’t as easy and for most tasks a Word document works great. There is no widely available and popular Markdown editor made specifically for the task. However, if you do a lot of communication on the internet, I would suggest learning Markdown and finding a good system that works for you. Personally, I use VSCode and that works great for the workflow of the newsletter.

There have been some (controversial) standardization efforts that attempt to unify the syntax and all the different implementations of Markdown. As a result, Markdown support is coming to more and more platforms like Discord, GitHub, Slack. I think Markdown’s simplicity and optimization for writing will make it increasingly relevant in the future.

I leave you this week with a joke and a Markdown example for you to try. Paste this into Discord and see the Markdown magic:

*I asked my friend "Do you know any other word for a big rock?"

He said "Boulder?"*

I said **"Do you know any other word for a big rock?"**

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

Gaming With Patrick

2022-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

My friends Patrick and Sasha are coming over this weekend! I met them when I was going to college at Oregon State and they lived right above me on the second floor. The day Patrick and I first saw each other, we were both wearing shirts that had cactuses on them. Patrick and Sasha invited me over for food and beers and we played games and really got to know one another. I learned that Patrick and I both enjoy gaming. We both had Playstations and we played a few games together while we were both in Corvallis.

They had to move on with their lives to a different state while I stayed in Oregon to finish my degree.

I think it’s easy to discount gaming as not really hanging out but that’s not really true. Patrick and I not only stayed connected but deepened our friendship through mining, killing Oni, escaping the Arctic, and surviving in a jungle together. When we meet in the virtual realm, it gives us a chance to catch each other up on our lives and work on a common goal together. We learn how to work together and how to interact with each other to foster friendship.

The way people socialize is changing so fast. Young people have so many tools to make friends both virtually and in real life to maintain a healthy social life. As VR and the gaming industry (and the metaverse) continue to evolve, so will people’s capacity to connect with one another, unbound by physical location. And that is a beautiful thing.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

Complibot

2022-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

In January 2022, I built my first Discord bot. It was very crudely put together and completely unreliable. Jacob wanted a bot in the server that would randomly insult our friends during the day. Put simply, he wanted a bot that was mildly an asshole. On that weekday in Powell Butte, Complibot was born.

I threw together Complibot v0 in a few hours using Python and a couple tutorials. Simplicity and fun was the goal at that point. Since I am very comfortable with Python, I opted to use a third party package, discord.py, that wraps Discord’s API’s which are normally used with Javascript. The goal was to have Complibot send a random insult or compliment (I didn’t want her to be too mean) to someone twice a day, at random times.

She was completely unpredictable. I couldn’t get the randomness and time (we didn’t want her pinging us in the middle of the night) to work with the asynchronous nature of the Python functions. I converted it to use commands like /insult and /compliment to trigger it or whenever she was mentioned. This worked fine except for the weighting between her picking an insult or a compliment. On average, she should have sent one compliment for every insult; all of her responses were insults. To this day, I have no idea why the weighting wasn’t 50/50.

Not only that, the channel members were static; I handwrote everyone’s member ID into a .txt file and she picked from that randomly. Every time someone joined the server, I would have to edit that .txt file to put the new member in the pool to be selected. The code was embarrassingly bad but, hey, it worked and made my friends laugh.

The deployment was even worse. I deployed Complibot on Heroku where she listened and was running 24/7. Because I was too cheap to get out of Heroku’s free tier, Heroku limited the time to about three weeks per month. Complibot didn’t even work for the last week of the month.

Why am I talking about a failed bot I built months ago? Two reasons:

I released a newly developed and much, much better version, Complibot v1
I recently applied for a job at Discord so I have been thinking about bots lately

For Complibot v1, I completely rebuilt it from the ground up. In most of Discord’s guides and resources, they use Javascript. Any time is a good time to learn a new programming language! In one weekend, I had a bot that works every time, is deployed much more reliably, and is open source. I came out with Javascript knowledge and continuous deployment knowledge.

Discord’s getting started guide helped immensely. I took most of Complibot’s parts and pieces from their demo project. Complibot now has full support for slash commands. When you start typing a Complibot command, Discord shows the description of what the command does and also prompts the user what to put in after the command.

I am most excited about the deployment. Complibot now lives on Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a serverless platform that runs apps. Because it is serverless, Complibot isn’t constantly running and increasing my bill. It goes to sleep after 300 seconds of inactivity and wakes back up whenever someone sends her a command. She only takes about three seconds to wake up and send a response. Cloud Run also connects nicely with Cloud Build. Cloud Build is configured to trigger a build whenever there is a push to the main codebase on Complibot’s GitHub repo. This makes my life so much easier and I am able to make changes on the fly. When I push changes to share my code on GitHub, those changes are automatically reflected in the Discord channel within minutes thanks to GCP.

Using this same process, I ~~am working on~~ built a bot that sends a message to Discord whenever this newsletter gets sent out each week. You might be thinking, “Why? Isn’t that exactly what an email does? Subscribers will get a message in their emails whenever this newsletter gets sent out.”

That is exactly right. But learning is fun, so why not?

Keep learning.

I leave you with some Complibot samples:

/compliment: You’re great at figuring stuff out.

/insult: If I typed ‘stupid’ in google, your name would pop up.

Ouch.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

Jammy Jellyfish

2022-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

nano content/posts/2022-04-22/index.md

As I am writing this, I am patiently awaiting the release of Jammy Jellyfish – Ubuntu’s 22.04 LTS release. The Ubuntu subreddit and IRC channels are ablaze with newcomers and veterans to Linux alike. Why is everyone so excited?

Well first, what is Ubuntu? Ubuntu is a fork (aka a distribution or distro if you really want to sound cool) of the Linux operating system. Linux is open source and widely used in servers and by tech people. There are many other distros out there: Mint, Arch, Manjaro, and many, many more. These come out when people don’t particularly like the features of another distro. That is the beauty of open source. People can download the source code for the entire operating system, make changes, and publish it as a new distro. For example, Sabily (now discontinued) was built as a fork off of Ubuntu. Someone wanted more support and tools for the Muslim tradition and added Arabic language support, a Quran study tool, and a prayer time tool to the base Ubuntu. Ubuntu stands out for being one of the most user-friendly Linux distros and stands as the closest competitor to closed-source Windows and MacOS.

Every two years in April, Ubuntu drops a Long Term Support (LTS) release. LTS releases are supported for ten years, during which Canonical (the “owner” of this particular Linux distribution) supports, patches, and maintains the software. What this means for users is the LTS release has quick security patches and less bugs for the lifespan of the release.

In between LTS releases, Canonical has developer releases that drop every six months but are only supported for nine months. This is where they test new features, minor bug fixes, and reliability changes that eventually make it into the LTS releases. These are for the tinkerers and developers that want to be on the cutting edge with the shiniest Ubuntu version. Users who download the developer releases need to update their operating system twice a year to stay up to date. This is why only individuals download these and not businesses and enterprises; it is a chore to switch a whole operating system over to a new version and no guarantee that everything will work as it once did. Why risk it when there is LTS support for 10 years?

Ubuntu is great for beginner hobbyists and anyone looking to get a feel for Linux without experiencing too much of a headache. All for free, you can experience open source first hand and really use your machine to its full potential. You join a community of tinkerers, DIY-ers, and problem-solvers. It is a fun playground to break things in and learn from them.

If you want to install Ubuntu for yourself, avoid doing it on the only computer you have. It is absolutely terrifying when it inevitably doesn’t boot on the first try if it is your first time doing this sort of thing. I was profusely sweating for at least six hours when I did this. Don’t get me wrong, I love using Ubuntu and I learned a lot but installing it on your only job-searching/coding/working machine is not for the faint of heart.

Have a great week.

I have the honor to be Your Obedient Servant,

Westley

^O ^X

IRC

2022-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

/join #untilitsnotfun

/nick dadofapollo

(12:04:08) Westley is now known as dadofapollo

(12:05:16 PM) dadofapollo: IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a beautiful relic of the internet that helped set the stage for how we communicate on the internet today. IRC was one of the first internet based chat systems. Users can enter different chat rooms called channels and can start communicating with anyone else that is in the same channel. People can connect from anywhere in the world with internet access so you have no idea who you are talking to or where they are from. You only know their username (known as a “nick”) and whatever they share in the channel. There is a certain element of anonymity where people can truly be themselves without fear of being judged for what they look like, what they do, or anything else. It leads to truly organic and wholesome conversation between complete strangers.

(12:13:52 PM) dadofapollo: Back when IRC was first created (in the 1980’s), it required programming knowledge to get connected and was used at universities because they were the only places that had computers and internet before they were mainstream consumer products. As more and more households got connected to the internet, IRC was what people used to communicate with one another. Then as the internet evolved and platforms like Facebook and Discord came online, people stopped wanting to connect with strangers on the internet and used these social platforms to connect only with people they knew in real life. IRC usage has been declining from millions of users in the early 2000’s to only tens of thousands today.

(12:35:56 PM) dadofapollo: The interface looks familiar and old in a good way. It is a line-based interface so each message exists on one line. Here is what a typical exchange looks like (with nicks blurred out):

(12:36:28 PM) dadofapollo: There are no fancy profile pictures, gifs, pictures, or emojis - it is simply a space for conversation.

(1:01:44 PM) dadofapollo: I have truly enjoyed dabbling in IRC channels recently. I was introduced to this internet antique by Gretchen McCulloch in her book Because Internet. I like having IRC open when I am doing light work on my computer or relaxing at night before bed. It’s like having your dorm room door open for anyone to come in and talk but without any of the awkwardness or wondering if they will ever leave or worrying about them inviting you to a party when all you want to do is sit at home and do lame stuff like read a book. As McCulloch puts it, IRC channels are a fantastic “third place”: the hallway at a conference, an informal club meet-up, a car show, where people come together under similar interests and have organic conversation more powerful than their more polished counterparts like speeches or work meetings.

(1:19:42 PM) dadofapollo: My absolute favorite channel I have found is ##books on the Libera server. On a normal day, there are only about 50 people in the channel, making it feel more cozy and personal. People talk about what they are reading, their opinions about those books and authors, and anything else book related. In my real life social circle, I don’t really have anyone to talk about books with because I have a small circle and it takes time to get through a book. In ##books, there is a constant stream of 50 people talking about books I probably wouldn’t have even heard of otherwise.

(1:28:18 PM) dadofapollo: I am going to continue talking in these IRC spaces until it completely dies off. I hope to develop new relationships with these people completely through this simple text-based exchange network. I want to recognize their nicks and associate them with good conversation. Most importantly, I hope people in the future will say about me “Oh there’s dadofapollo! I have no idea where he is or what he looks like but I do know that he has a good heart and that he is my friend.”

/quit see you next week

(1:30:22 PM) dadofapollo has left the room (quit: see you next week)

Ergodox

2022-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter.

It has been a couple of weeks now with my Ergodox EZ keyboard. Not only is the split design strange, I also moved every single key from the QWERTY layout. Since QWERTY was designed in the 1800’s to keep typewriter components from hitting each other (also to help telegraph operators translating Morse code and also because Remington and Sons bought the rights to a popular typewriter design) and I don’t use a typewriter, why not change it to something more ergonomic?

I went with the Engram layout. Optimized to reduce lateral finger movement and increase efficiency for common letter pairs, it seems like a strong candidate for replacing QWERTY someday. The only reason QWERTY still exists is because it is so ubiquitous. People can use any other computer and type just as efficiently as they normally do. As soon as someone tries to use my keyboard, myself included still, typing speed takes a huge plummet.

As for the keyboard itself, I absolutely love it. The design is clean and feels well made. More importantly, I like the repairability factor and its open source nature. Unlike most other tech products, companies prefer if you didn’t open up their products to fix them; they would rather you buy a new one. For the Ergodox, they encourage you to fix it yourself or write your own firmware. If mine breaks, I can replace any part myself (with Google’s help). The icing on the cake is it uses open source software to run. As a proponent for open source (our website is open source!), this is exciting. *tin foil hats on* Who knows what kinds of keyloggers are on Microsoft and Apple products? With open source software, anyone can go look at the source code. The Ergodox also allows you to add “layers” to the keyboard - holding a certain key changes other keys on the board. One of my layers allows me to hold a key with my left thumb and have a number pad in my right hand all without my fingers leaving the home row. I have similar layers for other common things like symbols and media.

The ergonomic design is the most important part. Because the board is in two pieces, it allows you to place each half shoulder width apart. This prevents you from having to bend your wrists at unnatural angles when typing. (Hack: This is also the perfect spacing to prop up your phone on the legs of the tilt kit.) My wrists would hurt after a long day of coding but now I can comfortably be on my keyboard all day without pain or discomfort.

Overall, I would recommend anyone who spends more than a couple of hours typing each day to get this keyboard. The efficiency gain is incredible, the ability to repair it is a must, and your hand and wrists will thank you.

Westley