I’ve had amazing pups but Meta is the Queen of them all.
Category: self-portrait
Show up. Do your best.
This is the best advice I’ve ever received. It’s so good and I am so grateful, it is the only advice I ever offer. Not surprisingly, it’s transmitted directly and indirectly by some of the greatest characters in fiction. I offer it to my 5-year-old each day when I drop him at school. He answers…
In the not-too-distant future
I will describe keyboards to my son one day in a not-too-distant future when he asks about them. That is when he and I will ask the computer to show us some examples. We will spend a rainy afternoon making make-believe keyboards (QWERTY and Dvorak) out of cardboard and crayons and pretend to type in…
The Top-Ten List of Things That Do Not Get Easier With Practice – Part 7 – Saying Goodbye
I deleted Mom and Dad’s contact information from my phone. They are gone. Looking at their mobile numbers, their email and physical addresses was, how can I put it into words? It was interfering with my memory of them, almost as if, since they have transcended the need for those things, these mortal-only assets were…
Living With Dementia
Mom passed away. Here’s everything I learned from the experience about Vascular Dementia.
Blending: Building A New World Family
This is the first time I’ve ever done this and, since I’ve spent seemingly countless middle-of-the-night hours reading everyone else’s opinion about it on the Internet, I will offer my own out of respect for others – now knowing just what it feels like, having only imagined it up until now. If you are like…
Perspective
The first time I saw this was sometime in May of 2011 while flying across the US inside a Boeing 737. I was commuting back and forth between the Midwest and West Coast on a weekly basis. I was uncertain about a lot of things. Specifically, in addition to my dad’s health failing and wanting…
Parallel Parenting: A Strategy for Acceptance
Divorces are snow-flakey, meaning each one is different. Some people are able to be grown-ups about it and be respectful, friendly enough to co-parent but, honestly, this is the exception rather than the rule. Everyone has to move on, eventually. Acceptance is not always easy, though. Not everyone is good at accepting new paradigms, especially…
How to Interview People
Inspired by a mentor who taught me by example.
R2 me, too
I was 5 years old when my parents took me to my first movie. It wasn’t just a movie. It was a drive-in movie. It wasn’t just a drive-in movie. It was Star Wars. Needless to say, it flipped me right out. Unlike most of my pals at the time, though, who called out “I’m…
Does empathy bridge art + engineering?
It takes a special something, a combination of unique experience and compatible disposition, to effectively temper hard sciences with soft ones in practice. Everything may very well come back to user experience, not only in the product (the outcome) but also in the process (the story). Empathy is arguably a key component of both hard…
On overcoming adversity
Having gone through a particularly trying time over the past couple of years or so, involving pretty much every type of major life-changing event (moving, career changes, divorce, child-custody battle, loss of parents, etc), I made some time to write down my thoughts about it, to write the whole story from my perspective, what it…
Gratitude is Noticing
It is not easy to notice progress. As a carpenter might build a house, it is not always easy to see construction moving forward. It is only after some time has passed, days and weeks of seemingly endless labor, and only then climbing to the top of a hill in the distance to reach a…
Memorial
Right before you got very ill, Mom, you had already made up your mind. You wanted no funeral. No wake. No trace left behind but the memories you built yourself with each of us. You wrote letters to us to be read after you were gone. You made every consideration to make sure we knew…
Understated Upsides to Donating Our Bodies to Science
When Mom decided to donate her body to science, her choice taught me a lot about myself and others.
The Top Ten List of Things That Do Not Get Easier With Practice Part IV: Saying Goodbye to Uncle Mike
On an incredibly cold and windy day in December of 1995, I was standing atop some forty-plus feet of scaffolding, perched vicariously near the edge of a river, another 20 feet below where the scaffolding’s feet stood in the wind, shaking slightly from my tinkering about at the top. Just outside the small town of…
Race, Socio-Economics, and being cool with each other
What do I know about diversity? I thought I knew something about race, gender, socio-economics, and my own identity in relationship to something larger than myself. Turns out I knew very little. I learned more from this past year than I ever imagined I did not know and am keeping my eyes and ears open…
Success, Failure, and the Power of the Rebound
I was married to my first wife for 10 years. We were together for 3 before we married. It was a fabulous adventure, a tale to tell, full of ups, downs, and everything in between. We lived all over the place, followed our hearts, made sacrifices to spend time with friends in far-flung parts of…
The Top Ten List of Things That Do Not Get Any Easier With Practice: Saying Goodbye PART III – One Year
So, it happened. One year ago today, Mom passed away. It was beautiful and could not have gone down any better. The story is something to recall. It started the evening of April 23rd. I was in Chicago, on a conference call with some people. We were collaborating on a volunteer project for an inner…
On being a fan
It is an understatement to say YouTube has changed things. It has replaced Encyclopedia Britannica (merely an artifact from another age of learning) as the de-facto go-to resource for everything everyone may want to know, including how to fix an engine, cook dinner using a recipe, even how to tie our shoes. It is a…
Perfect cubes, balance, and the number 27
It’s the 27th day of the month today. Turns out, the number 27 is singular. The Internet can tell us why, mathematically, the number 27 is so unique. For example, 27 is a perfect cube (3 cubed), a completely balanced equation. In math, that is truly saying something. The number 27 pops up a lot,…
The Top Ten List of Things That Do Not Get Any Easier With Practice Number Two: Moving
I recently moved again. It was actually fun this time. Everything about it was invigorating and welcome. I moved from one urban neighborhood in Chicago to another: from the shopping-oriented Andersonville neighborhood, to Bucktown, primarily residential, with a mix of older single family homes, new builds with edgy architecture, and converted industrial loft spaces. Andersonville,…