A fitting end to Microblogvember prompt: bewildered, is an excuse for me to share my love for another human.

When I get annoyed at the small, bewildering patterns of things that my life partner leaves around our house, I try to remember how sad I would be not to see those things. It doesn’t always work, but it’s important to try because those things, and she, truly enrich my life.

For today’s Microblogvember prompt: verse:

I’ve five minutes to write me some verse,
So forgive me for remaining terse.
Shakespeare it is not,
Not even a bot,
I don’t think could have written worse.

For today’s Microblogvember prompt: wrist, a story and a quote.

I started experiencing wrist pain a few years ago and read somewhere that changing your keyboard layout could help. So I learned to type in the Dvorak keyboard layout. I think I was just bored, but it turned out that it did help, or at least I’m no longer experiencing wrist pain from long work sessions at the computer. It’s possible that I learned to touch-type in poor form with QWERTY, and my motivation to do this weird thing made me more conscious of better typing form. Learning Dvorak without popping your keys off the keyboard and rearranging them (or getting a dedicated Dvorak keyboard) makes it easy to force yourself to learn how to touch type because the keys no longer mean what they say they mean.

There’s all kinds of skepticism of the speed and efficiency benefits of Dvorak, but the real reason you should consider switching is to watch people’s faces when they type on your keyboard. In case you need more reasons, there’s also this profound quote, from August Dvorak himself,

I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race. They simply don’t want to change!

from https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-curse-of-qwerty

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, panoramic, a vertical panorama of the Statue of Liberty.

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, horrible, where to start? Stream of consciousness, I guess.

It feels like we are living through a horrible time. It is very easy to find negative things to think about, read about, and fear, without actually being directly affected by those things. People in the U.S. are dying (so-called “deaths of despair”) and life expectancy is decreasing. Changing climate presents a potentially scary future. Many don’t want to see it, but I think we need to think about how the world is going to change and how we can support each other. I think about privilege a lot, and about what I am owed. I used to think that working hard meant that I would have a house and build equity and retire easily. Most people where I grew up had a detached house — there were not a lot of apartment buildings. That felt normal to me for a long time. But now, living in New Jersey with a good salary, that feels like a fantasy (student loans don’t help). That used to make me angry, like how could I have a good job and not be able to afford a house with a yard here? I’m resigned to it now, and mostly ok with it. But the embodied emotion of it, the feeling that I’m owed something, is still sometimes present. It is an ugly feeling, toxic, because, taken to its extreme, it does not allow for potential future realities.

Anyway, I think about what it must have felt like to live in times before modern medicine and when regular people were (arguably) more tribal and (maybe) more corrupt, and that I live a full life and have the privilege to teach and learn from young people in my job. Related, I also think about this scene from Deadwood a lot:

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, integration, to me the most surprising dictionary definition of the word:

Psychoanalysis; the process by which a well-balanced psyche becomes whole as the developing ego organizes the id, and the state which results or which treatment seeks to create by countering the fragmenting effect of defence mechanisms.

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, mix, I reflect on the chemical rollercoaster I’ve been on for the past few weeks. I had a cold that lasted a few weeks, which I normally take Advil Cold & Sinus for, then very uncomfortable acid reflux likely triggered by the Advil, followed by stomach pain from the Pantoprazole I started taking for that. On top of all that, switching another medication from one with unusual side effects to another with more predictable side effects that include nausea. And cutting coffee all of a sudden so that stomach can recover. Not a happy stomach, bleh mood, hopefully all temporary. The plus side: blogged through all of it and happy to be almost a month into daily blogging.

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, secure, I’m thinking about being secure in who I am as a teacher and found this tweet from 10 years ago interesting to reflect on.

Security guy came into my class this AM and gave the students a talk. I'm helpless with discipline. Wishing I was born with a louder voice!

— Joshua Fishburn (@jafish) March 30, 2009

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, company, I kept thinking back to my visit to the Morven Museum in Princeton last year. There, in the permanent exhibition, I found this pictured credo from Johnson & Johnson. Apparently it is still their credo, but I’m skeptical that any non-B-Corp can actually run that way today. J&J itself has been implicated in the opioid crisis, found to have used false and misleading claims in marketing their drugs.

But maybe things are changing.

Either way, having grown up on the 80s, the idea that a company could be about anything other than maximizing profits was alien to me. I cannot imagine an U.S. corporation today staking out such a position. It reads like a bonkers utopia.

Another quote from the exhibit:

Out of the suffering of the past few years has been born a public knowledge and conviction that industry only has the right to succeed where it performs a real economic service and is a true social asset.

— Robert Wood Johnson

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, second, a Tom Waits quote:

We live in an age when you say casually to somebody ‘What’s the story on that?’ and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That’s fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.

-—Tom Waits

www.swiss-miss.com/2018/09/d…

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, abate, asbestos comes to mind because it’s the only time I’ve consistently heard “abatement” used. It made me think of this terrific and sad episode of the podcast The Stakes, which chronicles the history of lead paint advertising to today’s simmering lead crisis.

Today’s Microblogvember prompt, selective, reminds me that I used to have an essentialist attitude about music; only certain music was pure enough to fit certain genres or even qualify as music. As I’ve gotten older, this attitude has softened a bit and I allow more music in, being also interested in the story of that music. All of this is to say that when I heard Iggy Pop introduce Sweet Leaf of the North by Mik Artistik’s Ego Trip on Morning Edition this week, I was completely charmed. Maybe you will be too.

I struggled more with today’s Microblogvember prompt, neck, than any of the others, so I started making a list:

• Necking (ht @macgenie)
• Sticking your neck out

…and arrived at Wu-Tang Clan’s Protect Ya Neck.

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, able, I searched my Twitter archive, which was more fascinating than I expected because I used to post more frequently. I found this gem of a tweet from my pre-iPhone days.

Not necessarily saying that the G1 is better, but it’s damn funny to see people all excited about being able to copy and paste on the iPhone

— Joshua Fishburn (@jafish) March 17, 2009

A lovely quote on solitude for today’s Microblogvember prompt, stay:

An artist should stay for long periods of time at waterfalls
An artist should stay for long periods of time at exploding volcanoes
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at fast-running rivers
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the horizon where the ocean and sky meet
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the stars in the night sky

— Marina Abramović, from An Artist’s Life Manifesto, discovered on BrainPickings

For today’s Microblogvember prompt, touch, I made a flowchart that’s an approximation of my brain when deciding about hugs.

Full size PDF available here.

In some way, just by being a human being, each one of us is very very fancy.

— Fred Rogers, from the tail end of the recorded version of It’s You I Like

Starting Microblogvember a little late, so I’m picking “fancy” out of the first five prompts, in honor of Fred Rogers, who has been with me in spirit over the past couple of weeks. I dressed up as Fred and sang a couple songs, got to see Max King speak about his Fred Rogers Biography and I weighed in at 143 pounds, so I’ve been feeling extra fancy.