December 3. I still haven’t gotten over the friendships that broke apart three years ago with the start of covid. I feel like I’ve disqualified myself beyond remedy. We knew who the bad people were, and then it turns out I’m one of them. I try to declare that I’m not, but I am. This verdict sticks. I brought it upon myself.

December 2. I had not realized that the ten-year anniversary of this blog is already today, not tomorrow. I only found out by looking for the oldest entry in my Google Drive. 3,648 entries as of today, the only days I missed were those when I was unconscious in the hospital.

It had taken me twenty-five years of writing, and twenty-five years of technological development happening in the world at the same time, until I realized that this was the most logical, the most appropriate way I could ever be a writer. I need to write things down as they happen. I need to be in a sense of wonder about them as I write.

I thought I’d lose all of my friends, contacts, followers out there by doing such a stupid thing. I also realized that this project was not in the realm of negotiable things. So I went ahead with it. To my great surprise, people started reading it, and have kept reading it over the last ten years.

I will keep this blog running as long as I live. I will have to remind myself constantly to stick to its agenda: Don’t write what about what you already know. Write forward, not backward. Write about what you’re scared of. Be even more scared of publishing it. And then do just that.

I need other projects besides this. It took me seven years after the start of this blog to realize that my long-form writing should follow basically the same mechanism. It took me another three years, until this very week, to realize that the only way I can do that is to give it a fixed amount of time every single day. Which I will from now on.

December 1. We had planned to drive to Philly for the weekend and go to PAXUnplugged. Somehow the universe seemed to say no at every turn. J has misplaced the entry badges that had been sent to her by mail, and the AirBnB host did not respond to her messages. We were unbelievably tired and also, just not at the right level of enthusiasm. So we skipped it.

On call for important customer from 6am until 7pm, the major promotion sale event we’ve been covering every year for at least the past four years.

Trying to learn chord structures and can’t quite figure out how to do it. I need to get to the point where I play highly complex voicings just from seeing symbols on a sheet. Like typing words on a keyboard. But it’s mysterious to me how to get there. Maybe any kind of engagement with these chords, no matter which particular form it takes, will eventually get me there?

Remembering how I learned touch typing at age 19 or 20. I realized I’d be doing this for the rest of my life, so I decided I’d type blind from one day to the next, and with all fingers. Took only a few weeks (or was it days?) until I had it down.

November 30. Let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel. – We’ve both known this song for a long time, still laughed at its poetic perfection the whole evening, and that wasn’t even the best part.

November 29. Pale moon in the afternoon sky, like a faint cloud, but round like the things in space.

It hasn’t snowed in Central Park for 653 days and counting. My son, who today sent his first sleigh videos from Sweden, draws the correct conclusion: So since we last played in the snow in New York it hasn’t snowed there?

I’m pretty good at setting myself a schedule, and keeping it. Writing this blog daily for the last ten years wasn’t hard. It’s how I function. It would be harder for me to give it up than to continue. I just need additional schedules. Half an hour a day of piano, for the last three years. Also easy. I’m having a hard time with any schedule that’s not daily though. Exercise multiple times a week – that’s tough to keep track of, and not let it slip. Long-form writing, which I’d hoped I could do on a monthly schedule – did not work. I’ll have to stick to half an hour a day for those projects. Every. single. day.

November 28. For someone who is twenty today, the year 1994 is such an unbelievably distant past as the year 2000 was an unbelievably distant future for me.

November 27. I sleep in waves. A good night is followed by a bad one inevitably. And all over again. Longer waves are modulated onto this daily rhythm, seasons of sleep. It’s noticeably better now than it was two years ago. Or maybe it’s just a different software version on the smartwatch.

November 26. Any technology feels like cheating at first.

November 25. Always keep moving so much that you don’t have time to mourn how little of a distance you cover relative to the size of the world.

November 24. J is the smartest person I’ve ever met, a smartness that is primarily energy. Almost every time I turn on my Kindle, there are five new books that she’s bought on the homescreen.