Jesse Kelber

  • Triggered by a recent question from @KimberlyHirsh and the great responses she got, I thought I’d dig out my notebook covers for a group portrait.

    From bottom to top:

    Lochby Field Journal

    Rustico (defunct)

    Galen Leather Slim A5

    Little Mountain Bindery A5 tri-fold

    Traveller’s Notebook Regular

  • Freewill, Determinism, and Entropy...Oh My!

    Or: more rambling thoughts about careerism, changing tracks, and whether or not any of it is really our decision.

    Quick Ed. note: this one got away from me. I like the point I eventually get to, so I’m leaving it as is to give you an idea of how these things swirl around in my brain and eventually come out as written essays. Whether the words are in the right order or not I leave up to you.

    "The ability to differentiate between what we want and what we want to want." That is the definition of 'free will.'"

    Source unclear, quoted by Angela Duckworth on the No Stupid Questions podcast

    What I like about this quote is how simple it seems on the surface, but when you stay with it for a moment you see how incredibly complex the difference is. Self-image comes into play, as do cultural norms, family history, personal finance, and so many sub-specialties of psychology I lose track before I can even start a list.

    This is also something I've struggled with, well...forever. How many purchases can I trace to a thing I wanted to want? Something I believed "someone like me" should want. my first mountain bike, my touring kayak, my second Tacoma, etc...etc…etc.

    When I look at this through the lens of what I've learned about myself over the last, say, 5-7 years—that's when the insanity of it hits.

    "Someone like me" isn’t a thing.

    At least, not a thing I need to be spending my limited time and energy worrying about. I am me. I am the only someone like me that I need to care about or whose opinion matters to this discussion.

    What’s the difference? Why does it matter if I wanted, or just thought I wanted, or even thought I should want those things? Well, for starters, I never did camp in that Tacoma. It gets more salient when you expand the discussion to areas other than consumerism. Take that mythical thing, the "work-life balance," or careerism, for one example.

    I’m a writer. Currently freelance, but until late in '23 for a tech startup in the overlapping space where freight forwarding and technology meet. I used to be IT support. I entered adulthood with a degree in Anthropology, and several years ago earned a Graduate Certificate in Coaching. How did that particular chain of events come to pass? Honestly? I’m still working that out.

    When I graduated and started looking for work, you can imagine what I found in late 90s Seattle as a brand new graduate with a liberal arts degree and no ability to write code. Right. I took what I could get. I’m shortcutting a bit here since I didn’t land my first “real” job for several years, suffice it to say there was the requisite time spent as a barista, or ski instructor, you get the picture.

    As for that first “real” job, I interviewed to be a technical instructor for a large real estate company, figuring my experience as a ski instructor might serve me well. Nope, but they did hire me to answer the phones for their internal tech department. From there, my career fate was sealed. I was now IT Guy.

    Little did I know it at the time, but I was also embarking on more than a decade of career entropy.

    It was miserable.

    I was miserable.

    I truly have no idea how those who knew me at the time could stand to be in the same room as me.

    A brief aside to further explore the notion of free will: Neo-Freudians work from a belief that all humans are born with the ability and potential to govern themselves, but then we have it beat out of us by the guiding culture we’re surrounded by.

    That’s pretty much what I experienced. After several years in IT, the assumption became that I was what I was—IT Guy. So when I started looking to jump clear of that career train, I couldn’t get past the tracks. In the end, it took more than 15 years and several aborted attempts to make the pivot to writing.

    Which I finally did, at age 40.

    I've written about my mid-life pivot here and here, so I'll keep today about what happens when we become complacent to the cultural assumptions and standards we're surrounded by. I will offer a reading recommendation, however, Pivot by Jenny Blake. Even if you’re not looking to make a career shift, it’s a beautiful book full of broader work-life advice.

    My early attempts at extricating myself from the IT world ended with me tucking my tail between my legs and signing up with yet another IT contracting agency, hoping to be able to make rent that month. Why? Mostly because nobody I approached could see past the outward trappings of my experience. I was IT guy. Also because I was unable to sell what I was capable of, rather than simply pointing at what I had already done.

    This brings up interesting directions for the nature vs nurture debate, but I digress. Again.

    Society clings to the old pattern of “graduate, get a job, work ’til retirement, done.” But that model doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t since well before I graduated in the ‘90s—if anyone would pause long enough to think about it. Given the modern rise of gig work, the millennial generation’s focus on values and meaning, and my own generation’s slow-dawning realization that we’re pretty much screwed on the retirement front—what it means to have a career in 2021 bears strikingly little resemblance to what it meant even in 2011, let alone 2001, 1991, 1981, etc.

    So that’s a cultural construct that’s outlived its usefulness.

    Bringing this back around full circle to free will (or close enough to full circle, though I’m becoming less certain about the comparison to determinism the more I write), step back and look at some of the things you do in an average day. Why are you doing them?

    Because your boss said to?

    Because that’s how you’ve always done it?

    Or because you actively want to?

    I wrote the first draft of this piece from a patio next to a Canadian ski hill in early spring because that last job with the startup came with some incredible benefits I could never have imagined I would have when I started writing full-time. But I kept with it, making my pivot incrementally (fodder for many later pieces, I assure you), and found myself in a pretty awesome place when I emerged on the other side.

    What can you do today to express your free will? Be it in a creative, career, or relationship area of your life? I bet if you looked objectively, there are some things you’d like to change, too.

  • You Are Not Your Story

    Western culture has a bad habit. Well, several actually, but that’s the subject of another blog. Or a Masters level seminar. Anyway, the habit I want to talk about here is our felt need to have a backstory for...well, everything. This often extends to ourselves and how we view ourselves in the context of our daily lives. We listen to what others say about us, combine that with what we think we want our lives to look like, or what we think we stand for, and voila -

    we end up with a narrative, often with a side order of low self-esteem and unreasonable expectations for good measure.

    And that’s where I want to pick up the story (pun fully intended), after we’ve built this narrative around these externally derived concepts of ourselves. First, you need to understand that these stories often serve a valid purpose. They can give us the motivation we need to keep going when things get difficult. They can smooth over the bumps in life.

    However, they can also lead us astray - to a false sense of self that’s based on the story and not on who we truly are.

    The tricky part is recognizing when you start telling yourself such a story, then being able to separate your actual, present self from the version in the narrative. Start by realizing that you’re constructing the story around past events. Because that’s all you have to build them around, events you remember and can put yourself back into in order to sort out what’s happening now. You’re telling yourself, “something like this happened once, and here’s how I handled it.” This is often followed by a critical assessment of how you handled it and how your past self failed in some way.

    Here comes the self-doubt.

    Now step back from the story you’ve constructed and realize that this is not who you are. This is an event from your past. Your present self has learned from that past event and is attempting to translate what happened and make it relevant to the present.

    Let go of the story and allow yourself to live now.

    Shift From Dwelling On The Past To Planning For The Future

    “Nothing happens for a reason, but everything that happens has purpose."
    – Megan Hollingsworth

    Saying that an event happened for a reason shifts accountability (blame) to something that happened before that event - and since that precipitating event is in the past, there’s nothing that can be done. This conveniently shifts any impetus to take action off Present You, since all you can affect is now.

    However, saying that “everything that happens has purpose,” well now, that’s different. Now you’re saying that the event happened in order to affect something that hasn’t happened yet. Now the focus is on the future, something that your actions in the present can certainly impact. Suddenly, your future is firmly in your hands, and rests on what you do now, in the present - in reaction to the event in question.

    “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."
    – Epictetus

    This follows from the first quote, and Epictetus’ words ring true today - two thousand years after he said them. Granted, he was a Stoic philosopher who believed that all external events happen as a result of fate and should be accepted without fuss. I’m not advocating that extreme a view, I just want to take it far enough to adopt an outsider’s view of events in order to learn from them and carry that lesson forward.

    If you can make this perspective shift (yep, this turned into another piece about the power of shifting perspective), even if only when you remember this article, imagine the changes you can create. Instead of saying, “why did that happen to me?” What you’re saying is, “what can I do with this right now to positively impact my future?”

    I’m not saying this is easy. Or that I’m all that great at it myself. Frankly, I’m a ruminator, meaning that all too often I find myself chewing over some past perceived indiscretion, leading myself into a downward spiral where I’m so totally consumed by my past self that I can’t see my present, let alone my future. This is something I’ve been putting a lot of work into recently, and am happy to say that I’ve made some great progress.

    Now back to you.

    What I’m asking you to do is take the negative experience of dwelling on the past WHY and turned it into the positive experience of figuring out the future HOW. Realize that what you’re telling yourself is a story constructed in your head around some past event, a story that present you has the power to learn from. Then you can take that learning and use it to ensure that in the future, you don’t react to a similar situation in the same exact way. You’ve just effectively rewritten your future story, and I hope you like the new ending.

    Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.

  • I'm a writer.

    I just posted/sent an essay/newsletter (yeah, I’m not sure how to call what just yet) that starts with the line:

    I’m a writer.

    It took until I saw the email land in my inbox to realize something. That’s the first time I’ve written that line for public consumption. I’ve been saying it for a while, mostly in response to the question, “So, what do you do?” since it’s actually more straightforward than trying to explain content marketing or executive ghostwriting.

    Imposter syndrome?

    I’m sure that’s part of it. But I feel like a bigger part is that I’m still in shock and awe that I can say I write for a living (no, the irony of currently being “between jobs” is not lost). After making the career jump I talk about in that piece, I wrestled with what to call myself for, well, years before finally coming up with a pitch version. I’ve already forgotten what that pitch was. Now, I just say, “I’m a writer,” and let the questioner figure out their next question. And if they don’t, cool, at least they know what I know.

    I’m a writer.

    (I am, however, still working out what posts show up where, so apologies if you see dups. And finally, if you’d like to discuss brand marketing and/or executive ghostwriting, I am working with private clients and would love to chat!)

  • 5 Lessons I Learned Jumping Careers At 40

    Ed note: This essay started life back in 2019 when I was freelancing at the start of my new career as a writer. Starting in mid-2020, I became employed full-time as an in-house writer, first on a contract basis, then moving to FTE. While the specifics have changed, the underlying reality of my career jump remains the same—as I transition back to freelancing—and remains something I think others can benefit from hearing about. Thus, this will be but the first of a series of pieces here on I Like How You Think that cover changing careers in midlife.

    The punchline, should you want to skim the essay itself, is that if I can do it so can you.

    I’m a writer.

    I used to be an IT guy.

    After much hemming and hawing about what to write about on LinkedIn1, I’d like to start with some lessons I’ve learned since becoming a full-time creative. Truthfully, many of these lessons came to light when I was still in IT, it seems that a fair bit of what I was observing was NOT, in fact, specific to IT customers. Rather, it seems these idiosyncrasies are more generally human in nature.

    "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not, 'Eureka! I've found it,' but, 'That's funny!'"

    Isaac Asimov

    I find this quote more and more appropriate the more I freelance.

    I watch people. OK, that makes me sound creepy. What I mean is that I tend to notice things that others miss. Whether I’m sitting at a coffee shop, or at my desk in the front room of the IT hardware team workroom. I just didn’t give the foibles I was seeing much thought until the other day when one slapped me upside the head—I opened my inbox to find that a client I had only just started working with was putting a complete freeze on new content.

    I had only just completed a site audit and presented a rough draft of an editorial calendar for their blog, so this was more than a bit of a surprise. I immediately flashed back to one particular day at the healthcare consulting firm I worked for in DC. The short version for today is that a guy walked into my office and dumped the contents of his computer bag on my desk. Aside from the piece with a particular brand logo, there was nothing identifiably laptop-like about the pile of rubble I was looking at.

    The jolting non-sequitur of these two situations almost caused a spit-take (ed note: ever tried to clean tea out of a keyboard? It’s not pretty).

    You’re forgiven if it’s not as apparent, I mean a client canceling a work order and a customer with a destroyed laptop don’t sound related. At first glance. Here’s the thing—it wasn’t the details that were so striking.

    You Never Know What Each Day Will Bring

    Or each minute as the case may be.

    That dude walking into my office with a bag full ‘o’ bits was a wake-up call. We were just finishing our Monday morning rush of “oh my god, my laptop did a thing!” visitors and I was writing up tickets for the work orders we needed to call in.

    Then, all of a sudden, rubble.

    And with the client, the request to pause all work was just as abrupt and came just as far out of left field.

    Clients are people. Customers are people, too, it turns out. No matter if they’re end-users within a large company or the CEO of a 5-person startup who wants a homepage rewrite and a blog; people will be people. And that means you need to stay on your toes. And just like you didn’t see the cross-over initially and I didn’t see the pile of laptop detritus coming—they’re a never-ending source of surprise.

    Lesson Learned—laugh.

    Non-sequiturs are funny as hell. My favorite t-shirt ever isn’t objectively funny, yet I chortle every time I even think of it. Why? because it’s a non-sequitur.

    Haikus are easy

    But sometimes they don’t make sense

    Refrigerator

    See? Not objectively funny, but I can guarantee at least some of you laughed. We should hang out.

    It Never Seems To Be “Their” Fault

    That dude with the bag of detritus? Deadpan, he looks at me and says he has no idea how it happened. He swears he just went to check email on Sunday morning and BAM, there was a bag full of scrap where his laptop used to be.

    Amazing.

    At the moment I was impressed with his ability to keep a straight face. As for the client, well shockingly enough, they were freezing work because somehow—as if by magic—they found themselves without any cash.

    And despite the CEO also being the CFO nobody could seem to figure out how they came to find themselves in this situation.

    Lesson Learned—Know when “go along to get along” is the right move.

    With Zolthar The Destroyer Of Laptops, it wasn’t my place to call him on his lies. Company policy stated that we replace broken equipment and deal with getting it fixed—it was up to his direct manager to dole out discipline.

    As for the CEO, I may not want to work for someone who mishandles money like that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want his referrals.

    Mood Matters

    Humans are intuitive creatures. Even those who don’t know it. We have an ability to “read” a room, doing a sort of temperature check on the folks there and how they’re feeling. The trick is being able to pause and make use of that reading. Most of us can't. Or don’t. This isn’t intentional, or necessarily conscious, it’s usually simply because we’re too rushed to stop and take a deep breath as we enter the meeting room. Or the coffee shop.

    My desk at that healthcare place was in the front room, between the public and our workroom (where my team sat and did their thing), so everyone who walked in for help had to pass right by me. Not only did this impact how I felt at any given time, but it worked in reverse. If I was consciously aware of the mood I was projecting, I could tell when it calmed down an irate customer. And if I was stressed, I could tell that amped up some folks as soon as they walked in.

    Lesson Learned—Keep an even keel.

    Lead Quietly, Even When You’re the Only One in the Room

    This isn’t simply a volume request, it’s more of a leadership-style thing. The introverted among us (raises hand) have a unique leadership style that is often called quiet leadership (see the work of Susan Cain and Daniel Goleman among others). While we appear to be sitting quietly in the meeting, spacing out or otherwise not paying attention—we’re actually working out what we want to say in our heads before saying it out loud.

    This can lead to confusion, with bosses and coworkers often seeing us as not participating when in reality we’re formulating a response that will solve all the things in one blow.

    We just don’t talk through it out loud.

    This translates to a need for follow-up. Be the person who sends the email after a meeting, summarizing the salient points you took away and offering your thoughts on how to move forward.

    That client? I sent an email the day after our discussion with a summary of the work I had done, links to the product that was already paid for, and some ideas for how they could continue where I was leaving off. The CEO sent a lovely, apologetic message in response thanking me for being conscientious (his word). And I left the relationship secure in the knowledge that he’ll be recommending me to all his CEO buddies in the future.

    If I had just sent an invoice for work completed and left it at that, the client might still have remembered me but there would be nothing remarkable about the relationship. Over time I would fade into the background as just another vendor/partner he worked with once upon a time. By following up, I made sure I stick out in his mind. He’ll remember that I went that extra step (which took all of 3 minutes). I can’t stress this enough, follow-up can mean the difference between being the person who gets the referrals and the one who’s forgotten the instant the job’s done.

    Lesson Learned—Follow-up matters as much as showing up in the first place.

    If You Look For Problems, You’ll Likely Find Some

    Back to that meeting and the reading you get when you walk in. If you enter the room with a sense of, “OK, who’s going to piss me off first?” I guarantee you’ll be pissed off real quick. The thing is, whatever that person said that set you off, probably wasn’t so bad objectively. In fact, it may have been totally innocent and it was your attitude overlayed on top that actually caused the miscommunication.

    When this client signed on (I don’t use full contracts all the time, I know, I know) for this project, I admit, I had a bad feeling about it. And when that customer walked into my office, the first thing on my mind was the state of what was in the bag. Now, I’m not saying that the power of my thoughts caused the laptop to shatter (that would be kinda cool though). But my mindset did absolutely color our interaction.

    Lesson Learned—Trust your gut.

    Then be open to what happens. If I had followed my gut 100%, I never would have worked with this CEO. Since I moved past my initial misgivings however, I made some good money and ended up with a champion in my corner despite the seemingly negative outcome of our working relationship. I guess what I’m saying is that if you enter every working relationship skeptical of the possible outcomes you’ll just end up exhausted. So don’t ignore your gut, but work with what’s in front of you and see if you can turn the outcome positive in at least one way.

    I hope these lessons resonate with some of you. I’ll have more to say on many of these topics in the future, so I invite you to follow along if you like life lessons, stories, or a combination thereof.

    1. This piece’s original home.

  • Shift Your Perspective

    This is an amalgamation of what started out as 3 posts on a previous blog. I’ve edited it heavily and in the end decided to combine the whole thing into one longer piece, hoping that the resulting total is indeed more than the sum of its parts. Trust me, it’s going to make more sense and be easier to digest this way. Think of it like throwing the entire week's leftovers into one pot and turning it all into stew. It goes down easier than the individual bits would.

    Perspective is everything

    I stumbled on an interesting piece on Placemakers (ed: they appear to have removed their blog since I first wrote this) some time ago that had a great, brief history of the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) movement. The article’s goal was to pinpoint where the movement took a turn…for argument's sake let’s say for the worse, and it includes what I think is a fundamental life lesson about perspective:

    “The burden now falls on you to stop telling them what you don’t want. And start telling them what you do want.”

    In other words, if you go through life focused on the negative, you’ll likely miss all the positive that’s out there. This seems extra timely given the current state of the 24/7 news cycle. Don’t become so focused on a negative (let’s say news story) that you miss out on all the positive things that are also happening, often right under your nose.

    Take a step back and see negative situations/stories as a learning opportunity. Learn about the importance of shifting your perspective. Instead of "You can't do ABC," try "I wonder if XYZ would work?" By reframing the situation like this, you may be amazed that you can get results you’ll be proud of.

    Results that get you something you want, rather than just NOT getting something you don’t want.

    Back to the source quote and article for a second. NIMBYs focus all of their efforts and energies on blocking things they don't want; bridges, trails, airport runways (to use some examples from Seattle)—that they often miss what they already have—community. What if these groups of neighbors got together more often than just every time there was a hearing where they wanted to oppose something, and decided instead to build a community garden on a vacant lot? Or got together to help an elderly neighbor fix up their house so they could continue to live independently and remain a part of their community?

    “So maybe it’s time to flip our perspective upside down. Instead of talking about ‘lifestyle disease,’ maybe it’s time to start talking about ‘diseased lifestyles.’ This simple reversal will yield some new insights.”

    Frank Forencich

    It seems so simple on the surface. All you have to do is flip your view on something 180 degrees and you get a whole different perspective. You might find that you’re able to see it from someone else's point of view, making it easier to come to an agreement. So why is it so effing hard most of the time?

    Well, for starters there's this thing called the Backfire Effect. At its most basic level, this is a heuristic that says that no matter how much 'fact' you throw at someone, at best they will not alter their strongly held belief at all—and at worst your efforts will backfire and you'll actually strengthen that belief. In this light, the chances of you getting this person to 'see things your way' don't look so good.

    In terms of what Frank is talking about above, our Western medical system is the manifestation of a strongly entrenched belief that says 'treat the symptom.' It says nothing whatsoever about the cause. If you present with a stuffy nose, you're going to get a decongestant to dry out the mucus in your sinuses. If you have a fever, you'll get a pill to bring your temperature down. Never mind that mucus and fever are your body's natural defense, it's way of fighting off an intruder. By treating the symptom you never get to the point of finding out just what it is your body is trying to protect itself from, and you effectively cut off your own defenses before they have a chance to get started doing their job.

    And to effectively treat causes, you have to look at the root cause not just the immediate one. So if your symptom is that runny nose, the immediate cause might seem to be a seasonal allergy. If you look deeper however you may find that you're leaving yourself open to that seasonal allergy because your immune system is taxed past its limits because of the amount of sugar and refined wheat you eat (a little personal experience there). So we've gone from taking a decongestant for relief from the snot to examining a cultural assumption (wheat is part of a healthy diet) to find the root cause and eliminate it.

    All that from what feels like a simple shift of perspective.

    This 180 flip from symptom to cause can be useful in other situations as well. Take many of the culturally based assumptions we make about consumerism, the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. What if, instead of trying to out-spend the Joneses, we focused on out-experiencing them? Instead of buying a bigger TV, how about taking a trip with your family and making some new memories?

    Or instead of that new car you’ve been eyeing, how about selling the extra car and trying a cargo bike? The conversation on the way to school will shift from what video the kids want to watch to what bird made that noise, or how much fun it is to fly past all the cars stuck in traffic. All this from asking what the outcome could be if you did XYZ instead of ABC.

    Next time you have a decision to make around consumption, stop for a second and flip things over in your head. The results might surprise you.

    "If you change how you think about it, it’s impact on what you feel and do changes.”

    Walter Mischel

    This quote is a nice, tidy summary of the whole idea of shifting your perspective, and by extension, this essay. By definition, if you want to see something from the “other” side you want to change how that something is impacting your life. What Mischel is saying is that the simple act of looking at it differently can be all that’s needed to accomplish this.

    That takes us well beyond the realm of disease prevention and consumerism. In fact, it pretty well opens up any topic or situation for exploration.

    Having a discussion with your boss about when that big project needs to be ready for presentation? They say next week for the leadership meeting and you say 2 weeks later in time for the shareholder meeting? Instead of sticking to your guns, take a step back and look at it from their side of the table. You may find that having a dry run for the leadership group could be beneficial, plus you’d have 2 weeks to make changes and tweak your presentation before it goes public.

    In many ways, this is also connected to staying grounded in the present moment.

    When you get wrapped up in defending your perspective, you’re focusing on the future—and just one possible future at that. What you’re seeing is an extra 2 weeks of procrastinating, of being able to focus on other tasks that you view as more important than the project presentation. When you pause and take that step back, you return your grounding to the here and now. This is what allows you to shift perspectives over to that of your boss and see the future results of your actions now.

    In staying focused on your side of the discussion, you’re also staying focused on just one possible outcome. Being able to see an alternative can be extremely helpful in many areas of daily life. From work to your commute to asking how your partner’s day went (or knowing when to avoid asking).

    Even from crashing on the couch in front of reruns after dinner to playing a board game with the family, reading a book, or maybe taking a quiet walk around the neighborhood.

    All that from the seemingly simple act of taking a step back, staying present, and shifting your perspective.

    This piece took on a life of its own when I started editing. The idea was to show the wide variety of situations and topics where shifting your perspective can open up new vistas and possibilities. Perspective as a topic holds a special place in my heart since one of my traits is the innate ability to see things from multiple perspectives by default. I’ll address that trait and what it means to me in a future post, or possibly a series of posts.

  • 47th Rotation — Completed

    Update - 4/24/24: This was initially posted just after my birthday back in January. Since moving this blog from WordPress to Substack to Ghost (if you noticed anything off last week, please let me know!)—I'm updating and reposting pieces I find evergreen. So despite references to it being January, there are some points here I still want to make today. Look for additional scattered notes below.

    Welcome back to ILHYT!

    That was directed at me as much as you. I’ve been…derelict in my blogging recently, I know. All I can do is offer up a sincere apology and promise to be better going forward. I’d like to start with a quick rundown of 2024 thus far.

    (Ed. note: At least I've been less derelict since starting weekly posts last month!)

    Frankly, It’s more about the last week, seeing as how it was my birthday week and therefore I was culturally impelled to do some serious navel gazing and self-reassessing.

    Just kidding, you ought to know by now that I don’t generally fall into those sorts of culturally-defined habits. It’s taken me years to break them, but I’m happy to say that at 47 I can finally see most of them coming and swerve myself out of the way, without going off the road completely.

    OK, less aimless rambling, more blogging.

    I just turned 47.

    And, as I had made the reservation long before being laid off in October, I spent the week up at my happy place, Whistler, B.C. Just me and Rufus sharing a condo in Village North, a short walk from everything the village has to offer yet set back in the woods and quite peaceful as long as you ignore the noise from Hwy 99, the Sea to Sky Highway, that runs just on the other side of said woods.

    Rufus, aka Dingus, learns that snow will not, in fact, hurt him.

    My initial title for this piece was “In Search of Calm, I Found Dog Pee.” Since just off the edge of the patio there were 5 areas of yellow snow when we got there.

    Since the layoff, I’ve been struggling a bit. Not financially, mind you. Between the severance and state unemployment benefits, I’ll be OK for several more months. Rather it’s been a struggle to maintain all the great work I did with my therapist last year, before she retired a month before the layoff.

    (Ed. Note: Still struggling, just handling it more OK than I was in January.)

    I was hoping this trip would provide me with three things: a chance to reset up in the clean mountain air (Whistler regularly has an Air Quality Index score of 1), a chance to get some edits done on my novel, and a chance to get back on skis after 4 seasons off. And all that with my sister and brother-in-law staying two buildings away.

    Is it any wonder I love it up at Whistler?

    I finished a round of revisions on the novel and got two good days on the hill with my sister (including having her film me as I haven’t seen myself ski in…decades). As for the reset…sigh.

    I found it difficult to fully settle into being on vacation without constantly falling into an internal monologue about what I “should” be doing to find more freelance work, or how I “should” have tweaked my resume more for that last application I sent off, or…you get the picture.

    (Ed. Note: Yep, still having that difficulty back at home.)

    The week was absolutely a success despite this. If anything, it highlighted a few things I’ll be working on as January progresses and I find my 2024 feet. First, meditating has fallen to the side so I’m going to bring a regular daily practice back into the spotlight. (Ed. Note: Nope, that hasn't worked. Every week...ish, but not daily yet) Second, I’m going to be more present here at ILHYT. (Ed. Note: See above comment about weekly posts since last month, go me!) I’ve been stuck in a special version of Analysis Paralysis when it comes to writing here, one where I spend so much energy planning posts, doing research, and debating which title is more appropriate…that I never, you know, post anydamnthing. So the takeaway is:

    Less thinking about blogging.

    More blogging.

    Moving on to the weekend still in progress. I spent my actual birthday driving down from Whistler back to Seattle. With the recent weather happenings, the road was…messy. Snow, slush, ice, and what I now know is called Snirt (that icky mix of snow and dirt that litters…everything starting a day after a snowstorm rolls through) covered the road from Whistler all the way to the border. Then in Bellingham, southbound I-5 was closed. Not like ‘roadwork closed a lane’ closed, like ‘you’re getting off the freeway here, good luck’ closed.

    Needless to say by the time I reached home I was knackered. Happy birthday to me…

    Yesterday started with a Zoom meetup of folks from Micro.blog who are fans of analog tools. One need only look at my collection of currently inked fountain pens and multiple stacks of notebooks to understand why I was excited about this discussion. And the group did not disappoint.

    Aside from getting to meet and chat with the man I credit for getting me into all things analog, not to mention introducing me to Micro.blog in the first place, Patrick Rhone; I also got to hear about everyone’s current favorite analog writing tool. A personal highlight was the frank discussion with one person who wants to be into analog tools but asked for assistance as he continually finds himself back on the computer instead.

    (Ed. Note: That group is still going strong with monthly gatherings. Last week we had a member in the Basque Region of Spain and one in Scotland joining the rest of us on the West Coast.)

    Finally, today started with a quick dash through the farmer’s market to restock my eggs and meat supply, and now I’m comfortably settled in on the couch for a slow day of watching it rain and getting some reading done. As soon as I finish and post this, that is.

    (Ed. Note: Ironically, as I edit this I also spent this morning at the farmer's market. But this time it was followed by schlepping my sister and brother-in-law around since they have a flat tire and can't drive on the freeway until tomorrow.)

    The condo had a lovely couch...

    What’s next for I Like How You Think?

    A final word of the housekeeping nature. I know I’ve been absent more often than not, and for that, I apologize once again. The posts I’ve been overthinking are still in the works but will be spaced out between more posts like today’s—general updates and musings on all things…mundane.

    I find the mundane quite beautiful and would love to share more of those thoughts and ramblings here.

    Now I’m off for a tea refill then it’s into a good book with me. I hope you’re all having a wonderful January.

    (Ed. Note: Most of that is still true.)

    (Final Ed note: one more apology is needed, this time for the completely unintentional Alanis Morissette reference in the intro.)

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