Finished reading: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 📚
Quick and funny, this was a nice leisurely listen. I appreciated the British narrator, who perfectly punctuated the deadpan, sarcastic, and self-deprecating British humor.
I finally restored this old Sheaffer “School Pen” that I’ve had for a few years after buying it for a few bucks in a small baggie of pens (which included a Parker 61!). It had probably sat unused for multiple decades. The ink feed and original cartridge were all gunked up, but I was able to flush it out and put ink directly into the clear pen body. I love how the ink sloshes around as I turn over the pen in my hand!
Book Reflection: Tuesdays with Morrie
Finished reading: Tuesdays with Morrie : an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson by Mitch Albom 📚
I enjoyed Tuesdays with Morrie. It felt like a healthy dose of memento mori. I hope to be as graceful as the subject, Morrie, when I encounter challenging circumstances in my life.
I didn’t have a lot of notes, or even quotes, from this book, but one thing that stood out to me was how Morrie responded when asked by the author what he would do if he had one full, healthy day.
Watched: Materialists 🍿
Watched this for date night while the kids were asleep, and it was pretty good! It follows the usual romance trope of “emotion versus logic”, but did it in a way that felt fresh and interesting.
I’ve recently started a concerted effort to study philosophy. I want to ask good questions. Questions that grant me a long life, rather than a short, wasted one.
““It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” - Seneca” (Susan Rigetti, So You Want to Study Philosophy…)
It feels nostalgic to look at clouds. I remember laying in the grass as a boy and staring at them.
It doesn’t take long to look, so I wonder why I stopped?
The clouds were particularly beautiful yesterday, around sunset, just outside my bedroom window.
Its time to migrate to a new pocket journal again! I‘ve been using the one on the left since August 11. I love the process of looking through my old journal, reminiscing, and then manually transferring things over to the new journal.
Started reading: Tuesdays with Morrie : an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson by Mitch Albom 📚
I don’t know if it’s the changing of the leaves, but I’m craving a story that is wholesome and stirring. This is another book from my Goodreads shelf that I can’t remember when or why I added it, but the description sounded like just what I’m looking for.
Finished reading: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli 📚
I should not have read this as an audiobook! It was beautifully written and I was excited to listen each time, but the material was too dense to fully absorb audibly.
I’m planning to write up a “book review” on this soon, as inspired by:
- my college pastor Eric Asp (who recently read and wrote about Don Quixote)
- this article that I happened to come across today: Why I started writing about every book I read
This quote from the article captures my aspirations for my book review.
In my book review process, I take the juiciest off-the-cuff impressions and, through expansion, rewriting, and additional research, turn them into clear, informed opinions that will stick in my mind.
The thing that’s most surprising to me is how little I am able to plan the book review.
I have a few notes from my journal, a few half-baked ideas, a general idea of the direction I’ll take. But then, when I start writing, stuff I didn’t anticipate floods out.
This is proof, again, that I don’t know what I truly got from an experience until I write about it.
“The brilliant Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”” (James Clear, Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds)
I try to remind myself of this often. Software engineers are always squabbling over the “right” approach, and more often than not there is an emotional attachment. I also try to think of this in reverse, such that my view of reality is not perfect and it is okay to adapt it to new information.