“Everything, as they say, is connected to everything else, and not neatly. There is no clearly determinable boundary between the sea and land, between sociology and anthropology, between an automobile’s exhaust and your nose. There are only boundaries of word, thought, perception, and social agreement — artificial, mental model boundaries.” -Donella H. Meadows, in Thinking…
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The stories we tell
I have one picture from my childhood. It’s summer and I am maybe eight. My brother and I are in swimsuits under the fig tree in our backyard, hugging and beaming at the camera. We look happy. I was supposed to give the picture back to my mother, but that was 15 years, ten homes…
Sabbatical
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and stumbled on this one the other day, which I found fitting for this time of year. In it, podcast host Tim Ferriss and Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot.io) spend a good amount of time talking about a two-month sabbatical Jerry takes every year, and more broadly about…
Quarantine games
Around the house we go, creating games to pass the time. Hide and seek, capture the flag, obstacle course… Any excuse to run wildly. Pull some weeds, rake the earth, cover our fingers in dirt, plant some seeds we found in the cupboard somewhere. Picture a meadow of flowers. Listen to the rhythm of the…
Here, we wait.
“Where do you want to go today?” I ask my oldest. She has a thing for the Northern Lights, so we spend a little while trawling YouTube for videos before doing another few laps around the house. She put together a rainbow obstacle course for part of the lap, just to mix things up, and…
The pandemic continues
We’re in our fourth Saturday in a row of covid testing and quarantine. I’m a bit over it. Daycare / school bugs caught us the last three weeks and now, it seems we may have crossed paths with someone with the omicron variant. And so we wait, again — this time, with the knowledge that…
When objectivity is not an option
In physics, I was trained to design and conduct experiments that were repeatable — that anyone could, with careful scrutiny of my papers, the right equipment, and some hard work, reproduce at another facility somewhere. The observers, by this logic, were important only in the sense that they were needed to do the work. If…
Trajectories
If you had told me back in late 2019 that all the places I loved would burn that year while a pandemic raged, I would have thought you were mad. And yet, here we are. Two years later and we’ve gone through months of smoke, catastrophic hail, two lockdowns, and now, the slow march towards…
And so it begins
I never know where to begin these things–partly because I’m writing this to see how this site will look once a post is live, and partly because my intentions for this site are terrifying to me in the same way that any truly worthwhile journey might be. I’m thinking now of a trip J and…