Information and Inspiration

• New York Times: What If Instead of Trying to Manage Your Time, You Set It Free?
• Vice: I Asked ChatGPT To Control My Life, and It Immediately Fell Apart
• Charity's Place: The Christian Kink of Redeeming Love
• LGBTQ Nation: Let’s stop treating Trump’s indictment as if he were a normal ex-president
• Politico: The old guard: Joe Biden seems like a spring chicken compared to some of these guys
  
• GreenBiz: Can Gen Z save the planet?

A video came up in my TicTok feed recently that pinged some things for me.  The message isn't hate-filled or even entirely incorrect, but it felt like it was missing some critical pieces.  And without those considerations, its message is deeply problematic.  It's basically 8 minutes of one person's philosophical musings on why it doesn't matter what pronouns other people use to talk about them.  What they didn't articulate, but which is a critical distinction: it doesn't matter to them because they are sufficiently disconnected from the consequences of those labels.

The video first points out that gendering of pronouns occurs only with third-person pronouns.  The first person pronouns of I and me are universal and genderless, just like the second person pronoun of you.  They ask why they should care what pronoun someone uses when talking about them to another (third) person whey they are not around.  It's like they have never noticed when anyone has referred to them in the third person while they were also present.  Or they have never noticed they sometimes have to read something written about them in the third person.

The video creator is un-bothered because their True Self has no identity; we're just making all this identity stuff up.  Yes.  Exactly.  Identities are a societal construct.  But when you are handed an identity by society or the people around you, you then also live-out the consequences of being assigned that identity.  It doesn't matter if you reject that label or all labels.  The outcome is the same: your experience in society is directly impacted by the labels you are assigned.  If that label sucks, then you have to push against it somehow.  One way to do that is by shedding that crappy identity and fill the space with something else that doesn't make you want to die inside.  In modern society most of us seldom get the chance to just exist.

All measurements of objects exist only relative to other objects.  People are not objects, but the video's reference to Einstein's theory of relativity kind of works in a similar way.  As I exist in the world, I simply am.  I am just me.  But I don't live in a formless, solitary vacuum, so I eventually interact with the physical space and with other people.  Interaction with physical spaces is how I learn things like I am too short to reach certain products on certain shelves in the grocery store.  Interaction with other people is how I learn things like I am shorter than some people and taller than others.  Over time, I learn what any of that means for me relative to anyone else.

So even though, as the video creator says, when a person attacks you they are not attacking the real you, they are only attacking who they think you are, and therefore "only if you identify with what they are attacking will you suffer," that doesn't solve the problem of being attacked.  This would be a fine resolution if we were all on equal footing in society.  If no one had any kind of power over me to affect my day to day living experience in any way, then it wouldn't matter what anyone else thought about or called me.  But because the made-up labels come with real consequences, that makes the labels matter.  The video creator's answer to this is if rejecting labels means you don't fit into society, then fuck society.

Wouldn't that be nice if we could all just extract ourselves from society?  It's fine to detach yourself from the world if you have the skills and resources to do that.  But that is not actually a solution to the problems that come from interacting with society or other people.  All that does is insulate you from the problem.  A lot of people don't have that option.  And a lot of the people most affected by the ills of society are the least-resourced people, which makes them the least likely to be able to just escape.  Which means the people who have the ability to just leave are the ones who should be investing their time, energy, and resources in making a better society that nobody has to insulate themself from.

It feels important to say clearly that I don't think this person's understanding or explanation needs to be perfect.  It doesn't even need to perfectly consider all the things I think it should include.  They are in-process just like the rest of us, and as they say at the end of their video, "this is their process."  So that's great.  Carry on with your process.  And also, it's important to me to point out the places where the application of this viewpoint is problematic.  Philosophy is interesting and theorizing is important, but I am ultimately interested in outcomes, not just ideas.

It reminds me of the times I've been bowling at a place with electronic screens and automatic scoring.  You throw your ball down the lane and knock over however many pins you knock over.  If you're highly skilled at bowling, you knock them all down and it's someone else's turn.  If you're like me, you hit some number of pins (or none) and a variety of pins remain standing.  That's when the computer flashes a tip up on the screen.  It shows a diagram of the remaining pins with an arrow for where you need to send your next ball in order to knock all the remaining pins down.  I always imagine the screen is saying "just do this!"  As if it were just ​that simple.

And it is.  All that is needed is a ball thrown at that one simple angle.  But if I had the skills necessary to take the screen's advice, I probably wouldn't need the screen to tell me what to do.  Which means it's not actually that simple.  It's complicated, just like dealing with other humans and existing in the world that isn't built for every body.  You can't say something is not a problem just because you have never experienced that particular problem.  And you can't just leave and call that a solution.  But you can help change the system so when you or anyone else struggles within it, the means exist to fix the issue.

Information and Inspiration

• TikTok: yam - what are my pronouns? 
• Science News Explores: Einstein taught us: It’s all ‘relative’
• Cyborgology: The Privilege of Disconnection
• The Oracle: Take responsibility for your privilege
• The New York Times: Some Alleys can Now Do Everything but Bowl
• Insider: The screens at bowling alleys are absolutely wild — and they've become the meme you never knew you needed

When a butterfly begins life, it is a hungry little caterpillar.  It eats and grows and eats and grows and eats and grows until it's time to become something different.  And then some freaky nature magic happens.  The caterpillar builds itself a cocoon and then melts into a soup of pure potential.  It grows its new self from that soup, and when it emerges from that chrysalis it is a completely different creature.  Somehow the butterfly even manages to maintain memories from its time as a caterpillar.  Totally incredible.

​I've been going through my own chrysalis period the last few weeks.  I didn't hang upside down from a tree branch, but I cocooned myself in work during a very intense tax season.  Overall, it went really well: I put together a good team, we had good systems, and we did good work.  I'm proud of everything we accomplished (and even more impressed with just how much we got done by the deadline), but the pace and volume of work was grueling.  Long months of long weeks of very long days with little time outside the office and no time for rest or recovery.

The way I have survived similar periods of concentrated overwork in the past was by being a tough guy and just pushing through.  I flipped on survival mode, put my head down and did what I needed to do to get shit done by the deadline.  I rode the wave of momentum to keep up the ceaseless level of effort, and then collapsed the moment I crossed the finish line.  So that's basically what I did this year, but with some unexpected consequences.

The pace and manner of my tax season participation awakened some of the deep dark personal demons I thought I already worked-through and resolved.  And of course I have worked through them, but the old neural pathways are still there no matter how dusty or cob-webbed they may be.  Once I got over my initial disappointment at having to deal with these same inner demons again, I realized their arrival actually makes perfect sense.  Those demons were the ones who built survival mode in the first place.

That protocol was constructed during the part of my life when I took-on or was handed responsibility for too many things.  I thought it was my role in the world to take up as little space as possible and give as much of myself as I could give (and then a little more) to work, volunteer work, home, and family while having no needs or feelings of my own.  And if I did need or feel something, I was supposed to take care of all that myself.  How exhausting.

Obviously that's not sustainable, so I had to do something to stay alive.  One by one the demons showed up, and together they crafted a way I could get through it.  Eventually, I decided I wanted more out of life and extracted myself from the relationships reinforcing those toxic narratives.  Then I began the long and painful process of removing the metaphorical string and bubble gum that was keeping me together and mending the cracks in my soul left by all that abuse.

Part of that healing included deconstructing the wall I put up to prevent anyone from noticing I was having feelings.  Over the last few years I have dismantled a good portion of that wall, stone by stone.  I haven't had a clear vision of what should replace it, I was just focused on taking it down to make space for something else.  So when I engaged the outdated survival mode protocol and accidentally summoned all the old demons, all the old feelings came too.  But this time there was no containment mechanism, so feelings just flooded out and got all over the place.

The old methods don't fit my current circumstances, and even if I could just lock it all away behind a wall I don't want to.  I don't want to be more coping strategies than person.  I want a different relationship with these once-protector parts of myself.  One that isn't so devastating when they arise.  So I am sifting through what is merely surviving while allowing the status quo to persist and what helps me live through tumult while also building something more sustainable for the future.  A process that feels very much like I am breaking down most of my self parts into formless, primordial goo.

I'm not sure what form I will take when I fully emerge, but I am aiming to treat myself with more curiosity and less control and containment.  The wall I have mostly torn down was built for control and containment.  You know what else was built for and persists on control and containment?  The Patriarchy.  I'd like to tear that down too.  But I won't be able to if I lean-in to perfectionism and try to erase the parts of me that don't fit into the societally assigned acceptable box.

All I will be doing in that case is working against myself.  Just like the two marginalized groups that feature prominently in the latest Black Panther movie "Wakanda Forever."  It was an action-packed and entertaining super hero film, but it was also a commentary about recognizing your actual enemy.  A lesson about seeing not just the foe right in front of you, but the greater threat lurking in the shadows waiting for you to squabble yourself to pieces before they swoop in for the final blow.

The story follows the only two nations to have discovered and mastered the highly powerful (and highly valuable) substance of vibranium.  Wakanda is the land-dwelling, highly advanced society we already knew, and we discover Talocan have been similarly thriving deep under the ocean.  For most of the movie they are at odds.  Talocan demanding Wakanda ally itself with them under threat of annihilation and Wakanda resisting being bullied into championing another nation's fight.

To me as the viewer, it was clear they should just join forces and protect each other.  But humans are complicated and we can't always see the path that will bring us greatest access to health, peace, and well-being.  So Wakanda and Talocan fought it out and damaged each other before they realized what the audience already knew.  It was good story-telling in part because it was so relatable.

So why do we have to fight amongst ourselves?  Probably the same reason we sometimes fight against ourselves.  Because we're all traumatized and it's nearly impossible not to lash out from our trauma at those around us.  I think it's also sometimes necessary to go through the whole process.  Even if I've traveled this dark, windy, thorny road before, I might have to experience the entire journey to gain the embodied understanding of where I end up.

This is why we need to champion each other's causes.  If I can stand for my fellow humans, it gives those folks space to fall apart and heal.  Then they are more whole and more able to be rested and ready when I need someone to stand up for me.  The only way out of this mess of inequity and inequality is slogging through the sticky quagmire of humans relating to other humans.  If we can give each other a hand, then we all get to be free.

Information and Inspiration

• Scientific American: How Does a Caterpillar Turn into a Butterfly?
• IMDb: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• YouTube: The Rise of the "Trauma Essay" in College Applications | Tina Yong | TED
• TikTok: watchfulcoyote - How does our gender inform what we can see?
• The Reader MIT Press: The Extraordinary Ways Rhythm Shapes Our Lives
• YouTube: How "Second Chance" Laws Could Transform the US Justice System | Sheena Meade | TED

I want to be internally whole and harmonious.  It feels good.  And it makes coping with everything life throws at me a little less arduous.  So I spend time shining a light into the dark and shadowed corners of my internal world.  I dredge up shameful secrets.  I open locked doors and sift through the traumas and the treasurers.  Over the years I have reconciled many sides of my Self and I have made tremendous progress toward wholeness.  Recently I have felt a bit stalled in this effort.

I realized this feeling like I'm treading water is because I am afraid.  Afraid that if I am to congruous it might make me too powerful.  A truly whole and complete me might be more powerful than I can control and contain myself (as I have spent most of my life doing in various ways).  And that might mean I end up on the radar of somebody much more powerful who is interested in controlling and containing me.  I definitely don't want that.

I want freedom and autonomy.  Unfortunately, I got in the habit of denying myself greater liberation in a misguided attempt to avoid unwanted scrutiny.  I adopted one of the great (and cruelly ironic) false narratives handed to everyone by the structure of our society: if you want freedom, keep yourself in-check.  But that's not actually freedom...  That's coping.  And I'm tired of continuously coping with the way things are.

A lot of people (with and without various kinds of power) are threatened by my very existence.  I don't fit cleanly into many of the societally-defined boxes.  But I do pass real well.  At first glance, I seem relatively normative.  I don't look like anybody's worst nightmare of a queer, polyamorous, anti-capitalist with ADHD and anarchist leanings.  So sneaky.

​Even though keeping parts of myself undercover began as a survival strategy, now it means I get insider access to spaces other people like me are not welcome in.  And that gives me opportunity to disrupt problematic attitudes and assumptions.  It gives me a chance to humanize more kinds of people in the eyes of more kinds of people.

So while the prospect of drawing the attention and ire of bigots and authorities is frightening, I'm in a  protected-enough position that I can be living out-loud a little bit more.  The more I admit and embrace all the aspects of myself, the more permission I give other people around me to do the same.  And the more I show people who have less access to resources or community support that they are not alone.  That feels worth the risk.​

Information and Inspiration

• Harvard Business Review: The Dark Side of Self-Control
• FiveThirtyEight: Recess Is Good For Kids. Why Don’t More States Require It?
• Inspired Success: Why Perfectionism is a Form of Oppression - Stay With Me Here
• BBC: Is it impossible to end burnout?
• Inc: Yale Research Confirms What You've Always Suspected: Nobody Is Normal
• LGBTQ Nation: After facing discrimination, Dr. Jon became the gay doctor every queer person needs

Fred Rogers derived a great deal of meaning from the number 143.  This week being the 143rd OnHumaning essay, it felt like an appropriate moment to celebrate one of the most devoted life-long humanizers of the modern age.  To Mr Rogers, the numerical phrase 1-4-3 was a stand in for the phrase "I love you" (I = 1 letter, love = 4 letters, you = 3 letters).  Love was at the core of everything Mr Rogers created and shared with the world.  It was the generous spirit he brought to his work.

When the documentary “Won't You Be My Neighbor?” came out in 2018, I saw it 5 times in the theater.  And I cried every time.  It is a very sweet telling of the life and works of a very sweet human being.  The more I learn about Fred Rogers, the more I admire about.  What stands out the most to me was his utter authenticity.  He was the genuine article, as the saying goes.  He always did things the way he thought things should be done.  I try to emulate his example, being the change I want to see in the world.

I grew up on a steady diet of Mr Rogers and his neighborhood and I learned a lot of important lessons, often without even realizing it.  One thing I learned was how important it is to recognize and appreciate each person's unique contribution to the world.  No one individual has the exact same thoughts, feelings, or perspective as another person, and our coming together with those differences from a place of genuine curiosity is how we find common ground.  And that's what makes the magic happen.

Another thing I appreciate about Mr Rogers is his subtlety.  Until I saw the 2018 documentary, I had no idea he was a religious minister.  It took me by complete surprise because most examples of religious leaders I see in the media are loud and obnoxious, dripping with volatile judgement for anyone who thinks or acts differently than whatever the one way they proclaim is righteous.  Mr Rogers didn't preach like those people.  He simply existed.  And in so doing invited others to try on an existence of love and caring for on another as well.

I hope to be just a sneaky.  I'd like to be an example in the way I move through the world that inspires other people to actively demonstrate care for everyone around them, especially people they don't know and may never meet.  The things Fred Rogers had to say were similarly out of line with the prevailing societal winds of narcissism and personal safety by controlling others.  I think one reason nobody shut him down was because he didn't seem threatening.  He didn't arrive with an argument.  Therefore there was nothing to argue against.

But his message was insidious.  It seeped in through the cracks left in all our souls by the detrimental aspects of society.  And it helped some of us fill those cracks with healing and knit ourselves back together.  I didn't realize the breadth and extent of the balm I received for my soul from Mr Rogers and his neighborhood until after he died.  Fortunately, it left its mark on me forever.  Just like all the crappy parts of existing in modern society, I soaked up all the beautiful and healing love from all my exposure to Mr Rogers.

We should all be so lucky.  I don't know that there are fewer examples of people like Fred Rogers today, but there are a very high number of people actively working to dehumanize other people.  Maybe it's just because those jerks are so loud and there are so many of them in positions of power that they seem so many.  But that's also the point: there aren't enough examples of the Fred Rogers way of being in positions of power in the world right now.

This week Uganda's parliament passed a bill making it illegal to identify as gay.  It hasn't been officially signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni yet, but that seems quite likely given his vocal support thus far.  Interviews with gay and trans Ugandans have been a feature in the news since the bill passed and the future these ordinary people see for themselves is truly horrifying.  The blackmail and extortion has already begun and the ink hasn't even dried.

This morning three Ugandan women who identify as lesbians used false names to speak on the BBC program "Outside Source."  One of them paraphrased the law in a perfect way: "I have a right to take away your right and you have no right to have a right."  That is exactly what laws like this one in Uganda and the many similar anti-trans and anti-LGBTQIA+ bills in the US are saying.  It makes absolutely no sense to legislate who anyone is allowed to be.  But a lot of jurisdictions are doing it anyway.

A lot of people are also fighting back against these horrific and dehumanizing laws, but not enough of the people with the power to stop this madness are actually doing anything meaningful about it.  Talking points are not enough.  We need our governmental representatives to take action.  Bold action.  Immediate action.  Real action.  And we need them to keep doing it until the problem is all the way fixed.  They need to keep chipping away at hatred, injustice, and bigotry until everyone is safe and taken care of.

To get there from where we are right now, we all need to take greater responsibility for each other.  Not because we'll get something out of it (although we absolutely will), but because no one can thrive while their fellow human beings suffer from abuse and neglect right beside them.  This is why wealthy and healthy people work so hard to distance themselves from the existence and effects of poverty.  If they had to live among the suffering brought about by their lifestyle, they could not stand for it and remain whole.  So they put up walls around their neighborhoods, eat in exclusive restaurants, and travel in private planes.

It doesn't have to be this way.  Each of us wouldn't have to work so hard to meet our own needs if we could rely instead on our community to support us.  If we pooled our collective efforts to ensure our collective survival.  Just like adults are doing with children in Japan.  There they see children as everyone's collective responsibility, so it's perfectly ordinary for very young children to do things like ride public transit or run errands by themselves.  And if a child needs help while they are out and about, they can turn to any adult for assistance.

That's what we should be doing more of: taking care of each other.  And the good thing about that is we don't have to wait for laws to be passed or the hearts and minds of bigots to change.  We can just do it.  Like Fred Rogers, we can live-out an example.  May all our neighborhoods be like that of Mr Rogers.  May we see each other as fellow passengers on the roller coaster of life.  May we embody compassion for people whose life experience or struggle we cannot personally relate to, even if - and especially if - we don't quite understand it.

Information and Inspiration

• IMDb: Won't You Be My Neighbor?
• BBC: Uganda Anti-Homosexuality bill: Life in prison for saying you're gay
• TikTok: flower.got.power: trans women are women
• It Could Happen Here: The Trans Genocide Part 1: Eradication
• It Could Happen Here: The Trans Genocide Part 2: Hit Them Where It Hurts
• amNY: Hats off…umm, on!…to Japan’s attitude on kids​

According to the internet, well-known psychologist Carl Rogers made that pronouncement.  I had never heard of that person until I Googled their quote, but I didn't need to know who they were to agree with that slice of wisdom pie.  I feel quite strongly that no matter what we're doing or how we're doing it, we're always practicing something.  I spent many years putting other people's needs before my own in relationships, so I became a person whose needs were not prioritized.  That dynamic only changed when I began to practice a different way of relating to loved ones.

That gem of an insight also reminds me of something my Taiji/Qigong teacher has been saying for years which I now say to my students all the time: it's always your turn.  Even when you're not the partner "doing the action" in a training drill, you still have an important role and you are still working on something.  Even if all your doing is standing still while your partner identifies all the open targets in your posture, you are working on confront by watching strikes come in and keeping your awareness and your wits about you.

Beyond its application to martial arts, this concept feels especially poignant this week.  According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have all the tools and ability to avert the worst outcomes from global climate change but we're not employing them effectively.  To avoid impending doom, nations and industry must take drastic action and they have to do it soon.  Like yesterday.  But year after year world leaders negotiate incremental adjustments they fail to accomplish.  As a global community, we're not doing what we need to do about climate change because we're still practicing what we've been doing the same way we've always been doing it.

Meanwhile, people of parenting age in China aren't getting married and making babies in sufficient numbers to keep the population up.  This week a city in China launched its own state sponsored match-making app and included all the local residents without consulting them first.  This move is such a glaring example of the simultaneous missteps of missing-the-point and making-things-worse.

Marriage rates are down in China for a myriad of reasons, including economics.  Many folks say they can't afford to get married, but instead of addressing the root-causes, the government does what it's most practiced at doing: forcing people to behave how the government wants them to behave.  And best of luck to anyone who wants to avoid a stalker or an abuser, or who isn't getting married because they happen to be gay.

The whole situation is a horrifying example of dehumanizing one of the most human things in the world: romantic love.  Sure, the State has lots of data about all the people and it can certainly group two of them together.  But this "service" is not likely to use metrics chosen by those people.  The state sponsored match-maker is undoubtedly making matches according to its own criteria, pairing couples based on what is most likely to further the government's interest.  Add this to the stack of things created “for people” that doesn’t actually take people into account.

Another highlight from this week is the 20 years that have elapsed since the US invaded Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein and discover all the weapons of mass destruction he was supposedly hiding.  I heard an interview on the BBC news with Richard Armitage, who was the Deputy Secretary of State during George W Bush's administration when the Iraq invasion began.  Armitage spoke rather candidly about what made the US operation such a catastrophe.

The most striking observation to me was how Armitage described the ignorance of the US national security team.  Apparently the folks in charge thought it would be easy to just show up, install democracy, and then leave.  They had no understanding of the tribal nature of Iraqi politics, governance, or societal structure.  So we didn't know what we were doing.  But we ran in there, guns blazing, and did it anyway.  Because we thought it, that made it a good idea... because that's what the US always does.  And then everyone has to deal with the consequences of our national practice of arrogance and ill-informed assuredness.

Another quote from Carl Rogers fits nicely in with this consideration:  "Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas and none of my own ideas are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me."  Thinking about your values and imagining your principles is one thing, but it pales in comparison to the embodied experience of living-out those values in the way you move through the world.

It's always my turn.  Even if it seems like my individual actions have no effect in shaping the grand universal design, I am still a participant.  I can choose to participate passively, going with whatever flow happens to present itself to me, which lumps my effort in with that of the prevailing wind.  Or I can participate deliberately, choosing how to engage with the people, places, ideas, and world around me, which adds my efforts to the stack aimed at the outcome I desire.

As Paul Rulkens says in his TedxTalk, "If you do what everyone else is doing, you get results that everyone else is getting, and those are normal results.  And the thing is, what we are after today, are extraordinary results."  The time is long gone when mere minor shifts could save us and rescue our one and only planet.  Today we are facing the accumulation of several generations of fossil fuel use.  That means we have to take a several-generation-scale step in a completely different direction if we hope to end up in a different place.

Information and Inspiration

• Very Well Mind: Carl Rogers Psychologist Biography
• The Nature Conservancy: The Latest IPCC Report: What is it and why does it matter?
• BBV: UN climate report: Scientists release 'survival guide' to avert climate disaster
• The Guardian: State-sponsored matchmaking app launched in China 
• Reuters: U.S. grapples with forces unleashed by Iraq invasion 20 years later
• YouTube: Why the majority is always wrong | Paul Rulkens | TEDxMaastricht

So essential.  So precious.  So elusive.

Sleep is sweet.  And it comes in many iterations.  Sometimes it is pure oblivion; dreamless non-waking.  Sometimes it is a transported existence; a visit to otherwise unknowable times or places.  Sometimes it is utterly mundane; a purely practical experience.

Sleep can also generate a surprising amount of creativity.  More than once in my life I have been stuck on some conundrum.  Frustrated, I took a nap and magically woke with some resolution.  With my conscious mind on break, my unconscious mind had full freedom to explore solutions without the constraints of the waking world.  According to scientists, the two cycles of sleep work together to support the brain's creativity.  There's "a stage for abstraction and a stage for linking things together."

It is unfortunate that most of society isn't set up to enable sufficient sleep.  Young students must attend school all day, participate in extracurricular activities, and somehow also complete all their homework.  Add work into the mix for older students and students with fewer resources and the time in each day available for rest shrinks.  Then we graduate into the working world and must devote most of our waking hours to our career while somehow managing to have a family.  It's exhausting just thinking about it.

I have spent most of my life as an overachiever.  Partly out of need and partly because that's what I was used to.  One of the unfortunate consequences of trying to do a lot with insufficient resources (like time) was I often had to choose between finishing something and going to bed on time.  Whether it was work, study, house chores, volunteer duties, or preparation for the next day, those tasks always seemed to take precedence over going to bed.

I didn't want to leave anything for my future self that I didn't absolutely have to.  Future Me had enough on their plate.  So I stayed up too late most nights, then got up early to get to work or the dojo.  Once I started my own business, I could begin my workday later in the morning, but the habit of trying to pack in as much as possible before turning-in for the night persisted.  As did my tendency to volunteer for too much.

I burned out a couple times in various ways, but it wasn't until the pandemic that my relationship to sleep really shifted.  All of a sudden a lot of the working world became untethered from the 9-5 workday.  A lot of us adopted what I started referring to as vampire hours, working late into the night and sleeping through much of the daylight.  Sometimes I only stopped working and went to bed when I saw the sun begin to rise.

Although completely different than the hours I kept pre-pandemic, my switch to vampire hours was less irregular.  I missed the mornings, but I was actually getting full nights of sleep consistently for the first time in my adult life.  And that was revolutionary.  After a few months I slowly shifted my bedtime back toward midnight and away from the wee hours, but I kept the consistent number of sleeping hours.  And now I can't give it up.

I don't remember fighting naps or avoiding bedtime as a kid, but I assume I did because most children do.  It's amusing every time I see a toddler resist an offering of care-free rest so vehemently.  Restful sleep is such a valuable phenomenon at this point in my non-toddler life.  I guess I've been enough places and done enough things in my nearly four decades on the planet to feel assured it will all still be here when I wake up.  My FOMO has been recalibrated with sleep higher up on the priority list.

I've been thinking a lot about sleep lately because I'm in a particularly busy work season.  I've been working extremely long hours and missing many social activities.  I long for more time with friends and family, but there are two things I haven't skipped out on: body movement and sleep.  I'm insufficiently rested for the volume of office hours I'm putting in, but this temporary work overload is more tolerable since I'm not also under-slept.

Working out and my external martial arts practice allow me to shed the stagnation building-up in my body from so much sitting (or standing) and staring at the computer.  My Taiji and Qigong practices allow me to process the mental and emotional stagnation so I can maintain the quality of my sleep.  Despite the overwhelming nature of my current work, I feel like I'm going to make it to the end of the season.  I hope you can also find the time and space for rest in whatever shape your life is currently taking.  We can all use more of it.

Information and Inspiration

• CDC: 1 in 3 adults don't get enough sleep
• The Atlantic: A New Theory Linking Sleep and Creativity
• Sleeping Should Be Easy: 4 Reasons Kids Need Downtime
• Nature: Increased sleep duration and delayed sleep timing during the COVID-19 pandemic
• YouTube: Go The Fuck To Sleep ::: Samuel L. Jackson ::: Adam Mansbach
• CNN: The rise of sleep tourism

On International Women's Day I attended a conference organized by, for, and about women in the anti-fraud industry.  Earlier this week I almost decided to skip it because it's a busy time for me at work and the event itself was on East Coast time (which means it started in the middle of the night according to my usual sleeping and waking rhythm).  I'm glad I got up before dawn to attend virtually from my home office in my pj's, robe, and slippers because it was terrific.  Just the wind I needed in my professional sails.

I don't totally identify as a woman, but it is a title I claim because it was assigned to me by society, which means I was also assigned all the baggage that comes with it.  I don't need to feel like a woman all the time to have a lifetime of experiences and traumas and frustrations shared with most women in modern society.  It was relieving to hear other highly competent humans describe their experience being discounted due to their gender.  It's nice to confirm I am not alone.

It was also refreshing to listen to the amazing, accomplished presenters talk about the impact gender has on their investigative work.  It's nice to say the quiet parts out loud sometimes.  One of the reasons women tend to be such effective investigators is the collection of micro skills we develop in order to survive the patriarchal world.  Women are frequently dismissed as non-threatening, and because of our position in society we are well practiced at not asserting that we are "in charge" even when we are the authority.  Consequently, an interview subject will tell us just about anything if we play into their bias and act like we just don't understand long enough for them to explain themselves into a guilty corner.

There was a lot of solidarity at that conference.  So much that I could feel it coming through the magical internet lines of the virtual stream.  The in-person attendees were not on camera so I don't know how they were interacting with each other, but the group chat on the livestream was bursting with shared experience and empathy.  Presenters and attendees were more willing to call out injustice in its various forms than I ever see at a co-ed conference.  And there was not one single instance of mansplaining.  Just a whole day of outstanding professionals sharing their craft and their experience.  The way all continuing education should be.

Keynote speaker Kelly Donovan shared her struggle as a whistleblower in the Waterloo Regional Police Service in Ontario, Canada.  After calling out corruption and trying to effect change from the inside, she was forced to resign and work on fixing the system as a disgraced outsider.  Kelly's story is harrowing and unfortunately typical of most whistleblowers.  It is also touched by the impact of her gender.  The times she has appeared before a judge who is also a woman have been the most successful for her case.  Once the corruption is resolved she will be a hero, but in the meantime she will be dismissed and attacked.

One thing Kelly said about ethics landed with me in a particularly powerful way.  She opened her talk describing the current state of corruption and lack of accountability having moved the collective understanding of where the line in the sand is.  We've been living with things the way they are for long enough, we have all forgotten it doesn't have to be this way.  Kelly closed her talk by saying: if you have to change who you are to fit in to your environment then it's time for an ethical self-check-in.  Otherwise you lose sight of where the line in the sand is supposed to be.

If you can't see the line, or if you allow the influence of others to move it when it should stay fixed, then it's pretty hard to recognize when you or anyone else crosses it.  This not only applies to corruption in policing and the justice system, it also applies to politics, private sector workplaces, and many other parts of life.  The republican party is a prime example of gradually normalizing completely unacceptable behavior to the point of absurdity where politicians just make up their entire resume and face no consequences.

The way we regulate (or don't regulate) speech on the internet is also a chilling example.  In 1995 the Communications Decency Act became law and included Section 230 which basically prevented internet platforms from being held liable for the content users post on their site.  It also gave the internet platforms the prerogative to regulate speech as they saw fit.  Fast forward almost three decades and you get the internet in its present iteration.

Section 230 has been in the spotlight as politicians call for changes and two prominent cases challenging the law were recently presented before the Supreme Court.  It makes perfect sense not to blame the YouTubes or Twitters for the many utterances of every human on the internet.  But it does not make sense to grant them complete control over what content should be removed to protect and ensure the safety of people using the platform.

In the US we have a right to free speech.  It's enshrined in our constitution and it's fundamental to the continued existence of our democracy.  But it isn't absolute.  We have collectively agreed that one person's right to say whatever they want stops at the point that speech harms someone else.  Maybe cops should stop wasting their time hassling people who don't have a place to live and redirect that energy toward removing hate speech from internet forums.  It would be the responsible thing to do.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem a likely reapplication of that particular public resource.  Especially with examples abound like Portland City Councilor Rene Gonzalez ordering the Street Response team to stop giving out tents to people who need shelter.  Gonzalez said he gave the order because of recent tent fires.  So instead of doing the work to identify and address the cause of the fires, he made the lives of a bunch of people who are already suffering just that much more miserable.

The same sentiment infuses Britain's brand new approach to immigrants crossing the English Channel in small boats.  The current Prime Minister wants to deprive the trafficking gangs of an income stream.  So his plan is to deport the people who are desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the Channel in the hopes of asylum.  Apparently Britain will take everything from other countries except people in need.  The Empire had no qualms colonizing food, fashion, art, ideas, and valuable resources, but it won't absorb the people from those places who need help.

It seems to me that we're all taking responsibility for the wrong things and not taking responsibility for the wrong things.  We're failing to take responsibility for each other in the ways that matter and interfering with other people's lives where we have no business meddling.  Women are socially conditioned to take responsibility for emotional labor.  Men are socially conditioned to take responsibility for denying all their own emotions.  Anyone who doesn't fit one of those categories must take responsibility for everyone else's discomfort at their existence.

And it isn't working.  We've made tremendous strides in some areas, like technology, but we're squandering our advancements.  Capitalism was supposed to give us all 15 hour work weeks and freedom from the constant labor of survival.  But all we've done with our outstanding economic progress is allow a small few to hoard the majority of wealth when it could be used instead to feed, house, and heal everyone.  We've amassed an incredible amount of collective knowledge, but we haven't made sure everyone can access it.

We have so many healing modalities, and we can address all kinds of suffering, but we continue to traumatize each other again and again in the same ways.  I saw a tweet this week that said "how u gonna be on the wrong side of history while it's repeating itself, like bro ur failing an open note test."  Thousands of years on the planet together but we’re just still failing to take care of each other.  We need to figure that out.  It's the responsible thing.  And it's also the only way we're gonna make it.

Information and Inspiration

• Goodreads: Police Line: Do Not Cross: Silencing a Canadian Police Whistleblower
• NPR: What's at stake in Atlanta's 'Cop City' protests
• Vox: Section 230, the internet law that’s under threat, explained
• OPB: New Commissioner Rene Gonzalez bans Portland Street Response from distributing tents
• BBC: Plan for lifetime ban for Channel migrants is unworkable, say charities​
• BBC: The long haul of long Covid

Last week President Biden visited Warsaw, Poland and gave a speech about the war in Ukraine, which has now officially waged-on for an entire blood-soaked year.  Many verbal highlights made headlines, but one part that didn’t get as much coverage struck me particularly.  Biden explained that Putin could end the war quite easily.  If Russia stops invading Ukraine, then the war will end.  Simple as that.  On the other hand, if Ukraine stops fighting against the invading Russian troops, then Ukraine will end.

That moment stood out to me in a very personal way.  It’s the exact same dynamic playing out all over US politics in various forms.  If conservatives in the US stop fighting against reproductive rights, that war would be over.  If I stop fighting for reproductive rights, then my rights would be over.  If conservatives stop fighting against trans rights, that war would be over.  If I stop fighting to protect trans rights, then my trans family and friends lose their rights.  The aggressors in these scenarios are refusing to acknowledge their position as aggressors and are instead hiding behind a veil of victimhood.

Putin blames the West for his invasion of Ukraine, even though he clearly started this fight.  We were all there, Mr. Putin, we all saw what happened.  US conservatives insist they are standing up for the unborn, even though they refuse to stand up for those same people once they exit the womb.  And they claim to champion liberty and the freedom of personal choice, even though they vehemently oppose some people consulting with their own doctors to make individual medical decisions for their own body and mind.

In all these cases the real cause for the crusading is simply a desire to control other people.  There is no reason to invade another country with very clearly defined and internationally recognized borders other than to control that territory and the people in it.  There is no reason to stand in the way of medical professionals caring for their patients other than to try and control those medical professionals and those patients.  The misplaced sense of entitlement behind that drive to control is astounding.

By trying so hard to get their way, these people are not making things better for anyone.  In fact, they are making things much, much worse.  Abortions are still occurring all over the country, but they are less safe and more costly in states where laws restrict access.  Trans people continue to exist, no matter how much legislation claims they aren't real.  Those laws just make it more difficult for them to access medical care and support.  Without that care, some of those folks will decide it's better to end their life than to live a life of suffering and persecution.

In Iran, girls schools have been attacked with poison gas this week.  The authorities are investigating, and it turns out "some people" want all girls schools to close.  Apparently those people feel entitled to control these girls, so now dozens of students have been hospitalized.  The family of those students must now endure the terror and uncertainty of their children being poisoned, as well as bear the cost of treatment and manage the process of recovery.

The only result of these kind of actions is a net increase in suffering.  In the end, whoever is trying to control whether girls go to school still doesn't actually control those girls.  They never did and they never will because human beings are not things, no matter how much one person objectifies another.  People have thoughts and feelings and opinions and dreams and experiences all their own.  And no one can stop anyone else from being who they are.  All anyone can do with restrictions is delay expressions of self for a while.  But we are human beings and those of us who survive oppression make it out alive because we find a way to be ourselves no matter what anybody else tries to say about it.

These examples are real and they are serious.  And we need to talk about them.  We also need to talk about the examples that are more ludicrous and less life-or-death because they point to just how deeply this problematic sentiment has rooted itself within society.  This week a person who participated in a dognapping scheme sued the victim for failing to pay the reward originally offered for the safe return of the dogs.  The audacity of this person to demand a pile of money from the dog owner after their conviction for participating in the dognapping blows my mind.

I dated a person for a while who wanted a life-building relationship with me.  I didn’t want that kind of relationship with them, so I declined their offer to add those life-entwining aspects to our differently committed connection.  That kind of misalignment in relationship intention is not sustainable for the long-term, but not every relationship has to last forever.  Unfortunately, because they wanted more from me, they felt entitled to more from me.  So when I said no and we broke up, they got mad and accused me of withholding what I should have been giving.  They are still mad about it to this day.

My former lover and the litigious dognapper are clearly not connecting all the dots.  And I think it's because they are following the well-publicized example of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and countless other conservative and bigoted individuals.  Any reasonable person can see what's happening, but the aforementioned folks simply refuse to acknowledge reality.  They feel entitled to control other people and they refuse to take responsibility for their wake of suffering and chaos following behind them as they move through the world.

You and I probably can't personally do anything about the way Mr. Putin conducts himself, but we can at least refuse to emulate that toxic and destructive example.  ​This is one reason I spend so much time and effort engaging in self-reflection.  It’s critical to consider my thoughts, feelings, and actions in a process of sincere inquiry.  It’s important to listen to others who are kind enough to give me feedback.  And it’s vital to check-in and ask for feedback when it’s not already arriving.

Please do not avoid looking at yourself.  Please do not avoid registering your impact on the world in all the small ways because that adds up to big blank spots in your vision.  Refusing to acknowledge the existence of some of the dots makes it much harder to connect them.  And just like we learned in school: if you don't connect all the dots, you don’t get to see the whole picture.  We must look honestly at the totality of our present circumstance before we can do anything to improve it.

Information and Inspiration

• BBC: Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, Biden tells crowds
• NPR: Why overturning Roe isn't the final goal of the anti-abortion movement
• CNN: Abortion restrictions don’t lower rates, report says
• TikTok: enlighten.mentality: Fun Montage at 2:10
• The Guardian: Dozens of schoolgirls in Iran taken to hospital after poisoning
• The Washington Post: Woman convicted in dognapping case sues Lady Gaga over $500,000 reward

I had a conversation this week with a friend currently on the hunt for a new job.  We were talking about the interview process and musing about how much of your real self you're supposed to bring into those engagements.  I want it to be true that if you intend to be your genuine self at work then you should bring that genuine self to the interview.  My friend's conclusion of the process thus far is: some amount of code switching is still required.  You have to know the right moment to be your true self and the right moment for that self to be the Man Behind the Curtain, pulling levers and throwing switches, while your interview appropriate Oz takes center stage.

That conversation got me thinking about immersion and assimilation.  When I took German language classes in college, they were taught immersion-style.  There was no English in the classroom, all the instruction was delivered in German and all the interactions among students were also in German.  Beginning that course was definitely jumping in to the deep end, but it was incredibly effective and a lot of fun.  Instead of learning German through English, I formed a direct connection to the language I still feel to this day.

Before college, I took French in middle and high school to fulfill my state-mandated second language requirement.  I picked it because my mom studied French and I thought it would be cool for us to speak French together.  I started in sixth or seventh grade and continued through my sophomore year.  None of those courses were taught in an immersion-like manner.  I got high marks in all my French classes, but of that 5 years of continuous study I remember almost none of it now.

German, on the other hand, I took for only two years and still feel comfortable holding a simple conversation.  My vocabulary is not as vast these days since I don't practice regularly enough to maintain it, but the grammar and structure of the language feels like a permanent part of my personal communications array.  Even if I forget the German word for something, I can at least talk my way around it well enough to get my meaning across.

My friend's experience with the job interview process seems similar to my experience learning French.  I learned what I needed to know to participate in what was happening at the time.  I studied diligently and performed well in class and on tests.  But as soon as I stopped taking those classes, I stopped needing to maintain that information and my French essentially evaporated.  Once the interview process is over, that secret code is no longer necessary and you're faced with a different immersive experience of fitting-in to a new workplace instead.

And that is so strange to me.  Why are job interviews so notoriously not job-related?  The hoops candidates must jump through these days leave some well qualified people out of the pool and give a distinct advantage to humans who can speak the language of Interviewing more fluently.  Just as standardized tests allow children who have developed the skill of taking a test to shine while discounting and demoralizing students whose aptitudes and expertise shine through other applications.

One reason for the disconnect is probably that we're not being completely honest with ourselves as a society.  It's quite clear to me the public school system is designed to mold children into young adults who can be productive in our capitalist economic system.  At some point, it became common for employers to require college degrees for entry-level positions, so many college programs continued the molding beyond primary and secondary education.  The standardized method of schooling children into adulthood is basically just one big immersion program.  By the time those folks graduate into the working world, the language of being a productive cog in the economic machine is essentially second nature.

I have found value in totally immersing myself in some places or activities.  I just spent a whole weekend at a Contra Dance camp and it was magical.  Spending concentrated time sharing a fun activity with lots of other people who also delight in that same activity is incredibly fulfilling.  Part of what made my dance immersion such an enjoyable experience is that I chose to be there.  I put regular life on pause for a couple days to jump into the deep end of moving my body joyfully with friends.

Voluntary immersion can be nice.  But having to assimilate is not so nice.  Visiting an environment with particular protocols without receiving a briefing ahead of time is disorienting and challenging.  Things like standardized tests, job interviews, and navigating health care in the US are all examples of systems set-up for only one kind of correct interaction.  Unfortunately they are also systems that many more than one kind of human must interact with.

That means it's up to the individual person to be sufficiently resourced and informed on the often un-spoken rituals required to pass the gauntlet of education, hiring, or healthcare.  That's. Absurd.  This entire world is made up of people.  It only makes sense for the systems, institutions, and infrastructure to function for all those people.  Those pillars of society should consider and value every iteration of person.  And they should be designed as understandable and accessible to all those kinds of people.  Otherwise, what are we even doing here?

Information and Inspiration

• YouTube: Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
• Lead with Languages: Why Learn Languages
• The Workplace Group: Do You Consider Interviews to be Tests?
• The Atlantic: How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System
• Hack Education: The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education'
• Scientific American: Universal Health Care Could Have Saved More Than 330,000 U.S. Lives during COVID