Fun times in dogville

Thoughts on personal space and public spaces

Human beings are complicated creatures. They contain multitudes! They can be eminently reasonable, and they can be wildly, infernally unreasonable. It’s a conundrum for the ages.

Case in point: When you ask an off-leasher to please leash their dog, they often have a look of total surprise and confusion in their eyes, as if never once has this option occurred to them. They can be literally standing anywhere, from under a “No dogs” sign in a nature preserve to a hospital labor & delivery ward, and still have this reaction. Leashes? Never heard of ‘em! How preposterous! Don’t you know everyone on planet Earth unanimously and wholeheartedly loves my dOgGo?!

Yet when I’m telling even a small part of this story, people I’m talking to tend to respond with words of recognition and empathy, and often with their own dog attack story. I think there’s a silent majority (including many wonderful dog owners) whose daily lives have been impacted by the modern wave of crummy dog owners, and they’re rightfully scared to speak up due to the stigma around, well, questioning literally ANYTHING about dogs. And the stigma is real, y’all. Doesn’t matter if you’re asking someone to pick up after their dog or if you’re a dog attack victim yourself—there’s an immediate amygdala response from so many people when you dare to ask for basic common decency. If all you suffer is ostracism for expressing such a forbidden opinion, you’re one of the lucky ones. 

But this is exactly why it’s important to speak up. The relief that washes over the faces of people when they realize they can talk freely to me makes it all worth it. They feel seen, and they feel safe to speak to their own struggles and horrors.

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Gather ‘round kids, I’m going to take you on a journey. A journey about independence and autonomy, about personal space and public spaces. About what civic participation looks like in an era full of splashy pet projects but bereft of efficiency and accountability. About me engaging in the time-honored human tradition of fumbling around and learning some things, and then fumbling around some more. About entitlement and outrage, and about just trying to walk down the street.

Buckle in, it’s longread time.

Sabbatical Times, Part 3

This is part 3 of a series on sabbatical that I’m doing on the blog.

So it’s been almost full year since I last updated, and you can pretty much categorically attribute that absence to all the responsibilities I listed in my last post. To dive a little more into specifics, here we go:

Sabbatical Times, Part 2

This is part 2 of a series on sabbatical that I’m doing on the blog.

A neighbor’s prized purple hyacinth bean vine.

A sabbatical is supposed to be a period of deep rest—I typoed “rest” initially as “reset,” and yeah, that too—but it’s stayed pretty frenetic for me, especially at the beginning. This is due to the following factors, in equal-ish proportions:

Sabbatical Times, Part 1

A mind adapted over hundreds of thousands of years for the pursuit of singular goals, tackled one at a time, often with clear feedback about each activity’s success or failure, might struggle when faced instead with an in-box overflowing with messages connected to dozens of unrelated projects. We spent most of our history in the immediate-return economy of the hunter-gatherer. We shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves exhausted by the ambiguously rewarded hyper-parallelism that defines so much of contemporary knowledge work.

Cal Newport

prevnar, prevnar everywhere

Matt and I like to laugh about how it feels like they’re running out of available names for pharmaceuticals because they’ve just started sounding more and more awkward and ridiculous to pronounce.

Read more: prevnar, prevnar everywhere

We noticed at some point this year while watching the show Parenthood that we were pretty much only getting ads for drugs. It seems weird since we happen to be a household that rarely visits a pharmacy counter, so prescription drugs aren’t a slam-dunk thing to advertise to us…and here we thought the internet companies were doing a good job stalking us. But even a toddler could give us a once-over and see that they should be advertising gadgets, food, and pretty much anything Star Wars or vampires to us.

Then it occurred to me that this might be happening because I’m getting to be “of a certain age.” And maybe these are just the ads you get when you’re rounding this bend in the road of life. 🤷🏻‍♀️

We started keeping track of the drugs we were seeing ads for just for fun, and this is the list we came up with over the next few weeks. 27 pharmaceuticals total! Someone please tell me what I win for doing this.