Things that are None of my Business, a Non-Comprehensive List

1. What other people think of me.

2. Other people's opinions about my decisions.

3. Why other people make the choices they do.

4. Other people's medical status and their decisions about their care, unless it's a matter of Public Health.

5. How much other people weigh, and what they choose to eat.

6. Other people's belief system (or lack thereof).

7. Whether or not other people choose to have children or not, and why.

8. Why other people choose the relationships they do.

9. How much money other people make, and how they choose to spend it.

10. Who other people choose to have an intimate relationship with. 

ETA:

11. How people choose to dress.

12. How people choose to spend their time. 

The Weekly List - Life Lessons (The Short Version)

1. Never pass up an opportunity to admire a kid wearing his Ironman costume tucked into his cowboy boots.

2. If I take care of my body, it will (probably) take care of me.

3. Be kind to strangers, but more importantly, be kind to those I love and who love me.

4. I can spend my time however I see fit. And that rule applies to everyone else, too.

5. Some things are simply more important than others. Keeping those priorities straight in my mind will prevent my overdeveloped sense of responsibility from leading me into the weeds.

6. It's nice to be valued in my professional life, but it's wise to guard against the misconception that I'm irreplaceable.

7. Tip well, even if the service is bad.

8. Drama and crisis are not the same thing. Drama is what you get when you don't have a strategy to handle a crisis. 

9. Change is hard. It's harder when it's forced upon us, rather than a freely taken choice.

10. Suffering is not a contest.

Since I'm still struggling with grief, I'm finding myself trying to redefine who I am (and who I wish to be), and how my choices affect those around me. A work in progress, to be sure.

The Weekly List - Albums I could (and do) listen to for days

1. Dishwalla, Opaline

2. Scorpions, Love at First Sting

3. Florence + the Machine, Ceremonials

4. Fun., Some Nights

5. Ozzy Osbourne, Diary of a Madman

6. The Decemberists, The Crane Wife

7. Shakira, Laundry Service

8. Bond, Born

9. John Petrucci and Jordan Ruddess, An Evening with John Petrucci and Jordon Ruddess

10. Evanescence, Fallen

The Weekly List - What's on my Mind

1. Agency. I place a considerable amount of value on agency and self-determination. So you can imagine my cognitive dissonance on this topic in light of recent events. I'm not really ready to write about it this yet - but it's been on my mind. A lot.

2. Tattoos. Prior to my daughter's death, several of the women in our family were planning on getting tattoos depicting our family motto - Live without fear. Now that she's gone, I've decided to integrate her design into my own:

Her design - Circular Gallifreyan. Of course.

My design - a stylized Phoenix, drawn by my amazing Auntie Michel.

3. Change. My life is never going to be the same - it will always be divided between "before Moe's death" and "after Moe's death." There's nothing I can do about this, and there's no wishing it away. What I can do is make choices about my own life - and how I choose to live it - that honor her memory. While now is certainly not the time to be making any life-altering decisions, I'm thinking about it.

4. Peace. Peace of mind, peace in my life, emotional peace. This is more of a long-term goal for me at the moment. But I long for it.

5. Gratitude. People are really quite amazing. Or at least that's true of the people with whom I choose to share my life. Which I suppose is the point.

The Weekly List - Housecleaning my mind

1. When I choose an action, I choose the consequence of that action. And this rule applies to everyone else, too.

2. Even if I know someone to be a horrible human being, even if I know their shortcomings are demonstrable and beyond dispute, I still cannot expect others to share my opinion of them, especially if I have chosen not to share all the facts about how I have formed my opinion. People have the right to make up their own minds.

3. People aren't perfect. And love doesn't require them to be.

4. Again, I am not the only competent person in the room.

5. The reason I get so wrapped around the axle about my personal relationships is because my personal relationships are critically important to me. If I didn't care about the people I choose to share my life, they wouldn't have the power to hurt me so.

6. Expecting others to recognize my virtues is not admirable. It should be enough that I continue to work on being a better person for my own sake.

7. It's hard not to compare myself to others, but I need to concentrate on health and fitness, not weight.

8. While it's true that Information Technology is kind of a life-force sucking endeavor, it's the industry I've chosen, and pays the bills with room to spare. It behooves me to remember this truth. 

9. Relative to item 4, it's not my responsibility to solve other people's problems. People have agency, and are capable of managing their own business.

10. While being used fills me alternately with impotent rage and regret that I didn't see it coming, the responsibility for the bad behavior does not in fact lie with me, and I need to remember that.

The Weekly List - Why people fucking SUCK.

1. We occasionally have such a failure of compassion and a vilification of the other that we commit genocide.

2. There are segments of humanity who think rape is a perfectly acceptable behavior.

3. We victimize the weakest among us.

4. We use our religious beliefs as justification to deprive one another of our rights, our dignity, our lives. 

5. We manipulate the greatest scientific achievements of our species so that we may destroy each other more efficiently. 

6. We have an unbearable need to control one another's lives, even when their actions have no bearing on our own lives or the net good of the world.

7. We can easily ignore the suffering of others.

8. We routinely lie to ourselves about who we really are.

9. We have a tendency toward willful ignorance.

10. We're mean to animals. And to each other.

The Weekly List - Why people are fucking AWESOME.

1. We created vaccines, which have saved more lives than any other scientific discovery in the history of the world.

2. We cry for one another. Even strangers.

3. We spend a significant portion of lives either learning from or teaching each other. Usually both.

4. We recognize that we will be judged by how we treat the least among us and act accordingly.

5. We've sent people to the Moon. To the fucking moon. With 1960's era technology.

6. We create art, in all its forms and splendor.

7. We see that some people just need to be taken care of. So we do.

8. We seek out the divine, in whatever way makes sense to us, in order to connect with something larger than ourselves.

9. We're capable of devoting our lives to a single idea, whether that idea is figuring out the secrets of the early universe, a cure for cancer, or an analysis of our ethics.

10. We consistently run into danger in order to save one another.

The Weekly List - Books that took root in my mind and never let go

1. Damage, by Joespehine Hart

2. Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein

3. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

4. Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes

5. The Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard

6. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin

7. The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, by Barbara Strauch

8. The Prydain Chronicles, by Lloyd Alexander

9. The Neanderthal Parralax, by Robert Sawyer

10. Stiff, by Mary Roach

The Weekly List - Things I Don't Understand

1. The Infield Fly rule.

2. Why people who don't do what they say they're going to do don't feel bad about it.

3. Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).

4. How incredibly selfish people can feel good about themselves.

5. How I can be up for hours in the middle of the night with insomnia and still can't sleep later than 6:15 a.m.

6. Hoarding.

7. Why I feel guilty that my birth control pills - which I don't take for birth control - are still covered with no copay on a mandatory basis under the Affordable Care Act.

8. Road rage.

9. Mitochondrial myopathies. 

10.The evolutionary road that led to carnivorous kangaroos.

The Weekly List - Why I Dislike Conferences

1. I never seem to have enough time to exercise.

2. Attending the requisite "Cocktail Party" makes me want to start cutting myself.

3. Even though I'm well into my forties and always wear a wedding band, it's a safe bet I'm going to get hit on by at least one chowderhead who thinks professional conferences are the perfect place to pick up chicks. Bow-chicka-bow-wow.

4. The Good Ole Boy network is always out in full force. An example of an actual question asked of me during one of these events: "What the hell are you doing here?" Charming.

5. Maintaining the "always on" energy level makes me tired and cranky.

6. Sometimes there is distinct lack of...quality control...in terms of session content.

7. Deep fried everything. 

8. Giving out hundreds of business cards means I have to spend the next three months unsubscribing from marketing E:mail lists.


9. I miss my family and friends.

10. The level of intelligence gathering at these events borders on industrial espionage, although the level of competence more closely resembles Spy vs. Spy.

The Weekly List - Why my Life is Awesome

1. I'm not Theon Greyjoy.

2. I have friends that think my decision to "bedazzle" my MLB hat to designate ballparks where I've seen a game live does not make me white trash.

3. This week I was a good friend to someone I care about.

4. The Hot Chicks and Smart Men Dig Reading Summer Reading Program begins in just 7 days. 

5. I have friends and family that "get" me. And they still love me.

6. I live in a world that contains soft carnitas tacos. With avocados.

7. This week I got to perform ACTUAL ENGINEERING WORK. For MONEY.

8. I was reminded that each of us has the power to affect the lives of others, for good or for ill.

9. I'm finally caught up on my podcasts.

10. Starting tomorrow, I get to wear Fluevogs every day for four days in a row.