I was very excited to go to an internet friend's wedding in early April, but life/health intervened. Having a lot of FOMO, an emotion I'm not usually susceptible to, especially for big to-dos.

Best thing I saw this week (courtesy of Melissa Lyttle's great substack) is this riff on NPR's Tiny Desk concert, but at a hispanic grocery store in New Castle, Delaware.

I have for years been both a technical artist and a designer of tools for my discipline. On the software side my main methods of communication have been drawings and use cases. With the advent of coding agents, I’m now able to brainstorm and communicate intent with software itself - software that emerges almost as quickly as I can imagine it. The entire software industry has been organized around the fact that creating useful software takes time. A lot of that time is spent translating intent into code. I’m trying to imagine what software means in five years. To the user does it disappear entirely and simply become a response to intent? Do we have purpose built apps any more? Are they emergent? Curious how the designers and engineers who follow this blog are thinking about this.

My seven year old broke her collarbone last week going down a big spiral tube slide at a kids play center. Those places are misleadingly treacherous. It's heartbreaking to see her tiny arm in that tiny sling, but she's taking it like a champ.

In happier news, I'm working with an established film producer to adapt one of my writings into a motion picture (vagueness intended, I'm not permitted to share details yet). We're expecting to have the first draft of the screenplay done next week. Here's hoping it works out.

I write satire and humor on the side. Last year I set out to get at least one article professionally published, per month, and recently completed that goal. It's been a double-edged sword however, as much of it is satire critical of current events. Nevertheless, a kind of a mental health catharsis for me, in a way. I **think** it's helping.

Today, I'm officiating an impromptu wedding that's been planned in the last week. I've written the introduction, a small speech, the blessing, and something to close — but I am looking for a brief 1–3 paragraph piece of writing on love.

Do you have a favorite piece of writing on love? Maybe a poem or verse?

The service is this evening, so please make suggestions if you have a favorite. I'm very open!

Currently, I'm planning to read this small section from Ulysses where a woman is compared to the moon:

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

Thanks in advance for any help you might have!

This week I read The Great Gatsby for the first time in 30 years, officially to help get my kid through his quizzes but secretly to see what I thought about the theory that Jay Gatsby is bi-racial and passing as white. My head cracked open and I think it’s possible that all the main characters except Tom Buchanan may be passing to some degree. Wrote “a paper” on the topic (four pages, single spaced) just to see if I still remembered how. What a nice distracting rabbit hole to dive into.

I’m 10 months into fertility treatments and it has taken a toll on my mental and physical health (not to mention my bank account).

Still, the return of light and some warmer temperatures are making me feel more like myself. While nearly everything in the world and in my life feels so uncertain right now, I know that the days will keep getting longer and spring will eventually arrive.

I've reached the end of my viability (tiny violins) as a graphic/ux/handyman designer and am working now on opening a stationery store in our little town on the Hudson, north of NYC. It's an overwhelming change to manage sometimes, and it's been difficult to find a workable storefront, but it's also been nice to develop an outlet for making creative projects into saleable goods. The store is named, aptly I think, Busman's Holiday.
(ps thank you Jason for always evolving this site!)

A friend recently shared some of her Canadian pickle-flavored hummus with me and I really liked it (rare for me — not a hummus fan exactly). Inspired, I went to the store and got some lemon dill hummus (not as delicious as the pickle stuff but still good) and some caramelized onion hummus (also good) and now I'm a hummus guy?

I work in healthcare and don’t necessarily love how much it can train you to be a one trick pony when it comes to life outside of healthcare. This site is one of my refuges to broaden my horizons and expose myself to other worlds and ways of thinking.

I moved to Fairbanks, AK in September just in time to experience the 10th coldest winter on record. Thus far, I’ve really enjoyed it, but I’m definitely working hard to adapt my hobbies and lifestyle to a new environment. But, as an astronomy dork, the active solar weather cycle of late has been awesome.

Watching The Secret Agent. Wow, what an unsettling movie, both the content, but also how it's filmed. It's great so far, though.

Spring Break! Flying from New York, where we had a few days of false spring this week, to Los Angeles, where it is supposed to be unseasonably hot.

Trying to decide between Highest 2 Lowest (which isn't supposed to be great but I love High and Low), Whiplash (which I've never seen and one of my students said was their favorite movie), or Train Dreams.

Wondering whether, if only one person 👍🏻s a movie it shows up atop Top Rated Movies, or if lots of passengers 👍🏻'd Rocketman.

And joining the Kottke mile-high comment club…