never mistake the ant for being blind to itself. it is only blind to any and all illusions cast upon it. PROTECT THE COLONY! BITE BITE BITE! BITE BITE BITE!
the flashlight of language illuminates nothing before the absolute shining WORD
and with your brain arms, hold up high with your left brain arm the truth that actions have consequences and with your right brain arm raise high the truth that all the rules are arbitrary and made up
heroism is a state of action guided by principle
today I had to pay TurboTax $0 to file my taxes and then on the checkout screen they got cute with me and were like
"um....for your billing address...for all this money we're billing you...don't you think it would be better if your zip code was 029847xcvcv09587294" and they put a bunch of extra numbers behind my regular zip code
...
...
...
sure, TurboTax. It's your none dollars. Do whatever you want with it, big dog.
I was using a leafblower at the bottom of an empty over-one-hundred-years old pool and I ended up with these big piles of leaves at the edges that I would then use a shovel to heave out of the pool and onto a tarp. And as I was getting to the end of one pile a little mouse appeared and started running from the pile. I felt bad for the mouse so I used the shovel to move it to another pile but I'd been working in the sun for a while and forgot that I would eventually need to heave that pile out of the pool as well. Some time passed and I started throwing that pile out of the pool and I never saw the mouse so I guess that was good. Then when I was all finished I went to my water bottle and a big of tortilla chips that I'd left at the end of the pool and a mouse had clearly chewed through the bag and took some chips.
There's no lesson here and nothing was learned.
I spent a lot of time on my trip last week thinking about how, for me anyway, the goal of a conversation or interaction is to say in a roundabout way "I care about you." Especially in cases where nothing really needs to be done or accomplished. The less practical the talk is, the more it is really about affirming, I want you to know I care about you.
Or you could phrase it a lot of different ways: I see you, I value you, I appreciate you, I enjoy being around you. It's all kind of swirling the same proverbial drain.
I don't definitely don't think it's true of all conversations at all times. I get the sense that some people try to get across, "I'm better than you" or "I'm smarter than you" and it tends to color their choice of topics and words. There's an infinite number of possibilities and a good amount of time we're probably saying things for ourselves more than the person we're talking too.
But maybe my favorite part of the trip was I felt like I was in that space a lot of the time. Where the reason I was talking was to try to get that across.
So that was cool.
