B E Hoch

When Everyone Is an Impostor, No One Is

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Everyone Is Super an Impostor, No One Is

My first instinct is to talk about how it’s been a long time and I’m turning over a new leaf and I’ll be writing more. But you’re a human (presumably), you can read and see the difference in date. And you can probably deduce from that length of time that I’m unlikely to keep up blogging again, like I didn’t last time. So what’s changed? Why will this time be different?

It may not be, but I’ve changed. I’ve grown and thought a lot in the past two years. I’ve written most of a new novel in that time and I think about a number of things a bit differently than I did. The end result is that I actually feel like I have a lot of things to say, at the moment.

I’m also sick and tired of letting the intrusive voice of “impostor syndrome” win the day and shut me up before I even say anything. I’ve spoken with a lot of people and realized that either just about everyone I know also suffers from “impostor syndrome,” or just about everyone I know is lying to me. As I’m not the person to come up with the term “impostor syndrome” for the feeling of inadequacy in the field of my expertise, I choose to believe that many, maybe even a majority of people suffer from it. So why should I let it hold me back. Sure, my writing and thoughts may not be the best or clearest, but I won’t learn without practice, and if I wait until I don’t feel like an impostor then I might as well just give up.

So, I’m going to push ahead despite. Because if everyone is an impostor, then maybe I’m not.

Challenges

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Periodically, I like to do a challenge for myself. It started out as a modification to the 75 Hard challenge. I know, according to the rules of that challenge, you aren’t supposed to make any modifications to the challenge. However, I also believe in living in the real world, and as a person dealing with chronic illness, a full-time job and a husband and father of six, I don’t see how it is feasible to have two 45-minute workouts (one of which must be outside) every single day to succeed.

So instead, I take inspiration from the 75 Hard challenge. I run my personal challenges for 75 days as well, because I feel that 75 Days feels like a nice, achievable number compared to 90 days. It is also long enough that it lets me really start to reshape my life around the patterns of the challenge.

I take the aspirational approach to the challenge. It is a chance to take a look at my life without guilt and ask myself “if I could snap my fingers, and it would be done, what are the things I would most like to see in my life? What does the life of the person I want to become look like?” From there I can work backwards.

I would like to be more well-read, so I should read every day. I would like to be a writer, so I should write something every day. I would like to be closer to Jesus, so I should dwell on His words every day. I want to be more thoughtful, so I should journal every day.

As a rule, I always keep the base of weighing myself, taking a progress picture, drinking 3+ liters of water every day and doing some sort of exercise as well.

Now I have a good base to start from, so the next question is, what is manageable? Is writing 1,500 words a day manageable for 75 straight days? Maybe, but probably not right away. What about 1,000, 750, 500? How much of a time commitment am I willing to give each part of this challenge? As I mentioned before, I have other considerations in my life that I have to take into account. I want to do the challenge, but I mustn’t prioritize the challenge above my family or my health. Many of the goals have a minimum, but I’m not giving myself a maximum. If the muse strikes, I would rather not ignore her.

I find that using SMART criteria helps here. I would like to take these aspirational goals and turn them into Specific, Measurable, Acheivable, Relevant, and Time-boxed tasks. The goals I’ve laid out for myself are generally not something I can see progress toward at the end of each day. But, if I set up my daily tasks right, I will have something that I can look to at the end of the day and say, “yes, I made progress today,” as I check it off.

Once I’ve organized these goals into achievable daily tasks, I track them each day. In various challenges I’ve used spreadsheets, notebooks, journals, and an app called Streaks. All are good, and I honestly will probably bounce between them this challenge. Streaks is definitely well suited to this, but having a pocket notebook, well, there’s something magical about a pocket notebook.

Today is the first day of my newest challenge, and I’m excited about it. I haven’t completed every challenge I’ve started. I’ve completed several, but not all. I want to keep updates going on this one, and I hope that will help me to complete it, as I’ll be doing it in public.

Here’s what I’m doing:

Recording my weight every day
Taking a progress picture to track the changes to my body
Reading the Sermon on the Mount every day and attempting to memorize all three chapters (Matthew 5-7)
Reading 10 pages of a book (or listening to 10 minutes of an audiobook)
Drinking 3L of water
Journaling for 5 minutes
50 sit-ups*
50 push-ups*
Eat mindfully, don’t just snack because I’m bored or there’s food there
Write 500 words
Make the bed
Take a picture with my wife
Take a picture of each of my children.

* There are days when I do physical activity above and beyond the norm. On these days, I sometimes allow myself to substitute this for the push-ups and sit-ups.

Wish me luck!

And Thus, Like a Self-Conscious Phoenix …

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Image by raquelraclette https://unsplash.com/photos/red-flame-MYjFOiVWWT8

I poke my head up from the ashes and look around to make sure I won’t look like a complete fool as I try to rise again.

Seriously, though, it has been a while since I’ve posted anything, and I feel embarrassed about it. It’s been a really rough few years, and we went, more-or-less, into survival mode.

Perhaps I’ll write more about those things some day. There’s a lot of pain associated with much of it. But there’s good too. We adopted our youngest son, I changed jobs, and we recently moved across the country.

As we adjust to a new city, a new house, and (in many ways) a new life, I want to take stock of what all I am doing and why. What habits do I have which serve no purpose? Then I will look at whom I wish to be. What rituals and routines can I establish to begin the fake-it-till-you-make-it path to personal change? One of those changes is that I desire to write more and publish more. Perhaps even publish my book on foster care.

The first step towards this is to just it publish.

Death with Dignity

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In just over a year, my mother-in-law has lost both of her parents. They were wonderful people and we all miss them. My wife’s grandfather died first, last year, not long after the lockdown started. It was sudden, but not a surprise either. He’d been declining steadily over the past few years. He fell at home and just never recovered.

After he passed, my wife’s grandma moved up and lived about 20 feet away from my in-laws. She seemed to be doing very well for a little while, apart from the deep sadness of losing her husband of over 50 years.

Over the winter, though, we noticed a change in her breathing. A labor and raspiness that wasn’t there before. Early in the spring, she had a scan and her cancer was back. The doctor gave her a couple of months, even with treatment.

She chose not to pursue treatment. People choose not to receive treatment for all sorts of reasons. Some people want to pursue naturopathic methods until it’s too late1. Others don’t seek treatment out of denial. Some want death on their own terms2. But Marlene Vittitow’s reason was different. When I think about it, I can’t help feeling fortunate to have known her in this life.

She took a few days before making her decision. She preferred not to go through treatment again. She’d done that years before, and she knew just how awful it was. And it wouldn’t do anything more than delay the inevitable. So, she met with her pastor to discuss it. Her main concern wasn’t about pain avoidance or even for more time with family. She was most concerned about if she should pursue treatment, so she might have time for even one more opportunity to share the gospel.

Hers was a life so well spent that she felt no need to fight to extend it. And so, it ended peacefully at 8:03 on 16 July 2021. My wife was able to be there, gathered around with her family, as she passed on to be with her Savior.

In “The Death of Ivan Ilych” Leo Tolstoy describes the horror with which Ivan Ilych faces the realization of his impending death. He is tormented by the question of if his life was a good life.

’Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?’

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Grandma Vittitow’s life was, in many ways, “proper,” but not in the successful, esteemed-among-humanity sort of way. Instead, she lived a life of quiet faithfulness.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

She was always the first to point attention, and thanks, back to God, where it belonged, in any and every situation. But especially so when she was the recipient of praise. Hers was a “faithful, hidden life.” But her tomb will not go unvisited.

Permission to Breathe

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A little while back, I posted about my commitment to posting on this blog. But it’s been a couple of weeks and I haven’t posted. I haven’t abandoned my blog, though. I have been working through a lot that’s been going on over the past few weeks, and I needed to scale back on what I was doing. There simply wasn’t enough time in the day to take care of everything.

Normally, I would have felt guilty about stepping back from some tasks and commitments, but this time I chose to reframe how I thought about it.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

— Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (ESV)

I still stand by my commitment, but I’m beginning to learn what the Preacher in Ecclesiastes might have meant. Sometimes it is a time to refrain. When it’s time to refrain, it’s actually worse to try to push on. For my own mental and physical health, I took a little while to refrain. But I’m coming back.

I’ll write more again soon.

Keeping Quotes

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When I was a young man, I started writing down quotes that I found interesting, inspiring, or funny. I think I was probably inspired by a book my grandpa published when I was twelve, 1001 Great Stories and Quotes. It’s a habit I’ve kept up over the years, though with waxing and waning consistency. When I hear or read something that sparks my interest, I try to record it for future reference.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

— Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard’s Almanack”

After a year or so, I started keeping the quotes in a notebook dedicated to the purpose. I found it was much easier to reference them there than to sort through my regular journals or loose-leaf notes to find the quote I wanted. I didn’t order or arrange them in any way, other than the order in which I discovered them. This has had its benefits and its detriments.

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

— Marlene Dietrich

One of the fun little bits is to go through them and see them in the order I wrote them down. Since I remember roughly when I wrote some of them, I can estimate about what time in my life that particular quote seemed important. As I now begin the process of transferring them to a new, more durable notebook, I am careful to keep them in the same order and to not remove any of them; even if I find them silly or unimportant now. When I look back later, it is almost a sort of diary or journal to see the things that struck me as important or deep as a teenager. It’s enjoyable to get an indirect peek back into my mind at those stages.

Contrariwise, the most annoying thing is probably that, with no organizing structure, it is difficult to find a specific quote. If I know the exact quote I am looking for, I have no real way to find it quickly unless I can remember when I first encountered it. It also has the downside of not being able to find related quotes easily. If quotes were grouped by topic, I would be able to look up one quote about, let’s say, quotations and there would be other quotes about quotations nearby. Instead, with them lacking any arrangement other than by date of discovery, it can certainly be annoying when I know exactly what I’m looking for. In order to navigate right to what I want, I would need to know roughly when I wrote it down and roughly the order of all the other quotes.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

But this is also its greatest strength, in my opinion. Since I am forced to skim through everything to find what I want, I am constantly experiencing the joy of rediscovery as I find quotes I had copied down and forgotten about. The joy of serendipity more than outweighs the inconveniences in finding what I wanted.

It seems to me that we often make things too easy on ourselves. For a while, I used an app on my phone to collect and organize my quotes. It was really nice and I loved it. When the app died, I was upset at first, but I’m really grateful now. It had made finding the exact quote I wanted so easy that I had completely lost the serendipitous discovery. As a result, I ended up returning to the same handful of quotes because those were the ones that came to memory. Since switching back to a physical notebook, I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been looking for a quote and stopped because I ran into a quote I had completely forgotten about; which spoke to me more in the moment than the quote for which I started searching.

This experience is worth too much to me. I want to go back to a system where I can find my saved quotes more readily, but I worry that it will cost too much.

This leads me to my current decision. As a mentioned above, I found that the notebook in which I kept my collection of quotes was beginning to fall apart, so I’ve started transferring all the quotes in their exact original order into a new notebook. But, as I build out my PKM (Personal Knowledge Management. More on this in the future…) in Obsidian, I really want to put my quotes in there as well. I can cross-link them and index and tag them to tease out how the ideas and concepts interrelate. But I’m hesitant to do that because I feel it would be better not to lose that serendipitous re-discovery.

But, I suppose the beauty of a digital system is that if I find that I am not using the notebook to rediscover what I had loved and forgotten, I can always delete the digital notes and force myself back.

Doctor StrangeVirus or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the COVID-19 Pandemic

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

COVID-19

On Halloween 2020 my wife was getting ready to visit her sister in Idaho who was going through an awful divorce and I began to feel a tickle in my throat. I knew it wasn’t COVID because I had been so careful; I never went anywhere without my mask, I hadn’t been around anyone who had it, and I washed my hands religiously whenever I returned home.

Since my wife was flying, though, I went to get tested first thing the next day just to be safe.

SARS 2 CORONAVIRUS NCOV-19: POSITIVE

I woke up to the above message on my phone the next morning. Delightful.

COVID was awful. The body aches were no joke and the brain fog was debilitating. But the strangest part of it was waking up a few days in and having no sense of taste.

I had lost my sense of smell as a teenager. I suspect it is psychosomatic, since the last thing I can remember smelling before losing it was the overpowering smell of death as I climbed under a neighbor’s porch to retrieve a cat that had died a few weeks before in the midwestern summer heat. The stench was all-consuming as my face was inches from the rotting corpse. I think at that point my brain decided that smells were, perhaps, just not worth the trouble. I retained a few smells that I could detect, smoke, fouled diapers, and bacon. Beyond that, it was as if my brain said, “I’ll let you know if it’s important, otherwise let’s not worry about that anymore.”

So, I didn’t even notice the loss of smell. But the loss of taste was immediately apparent and quite shocking. The day after I lost it, I was sitting at my desk in my study working. Next to me, I had my morning coffee, a glass of room temperature water and a glass of cold orange juice. The only way to tell them apart was the temperature and consistency. If it was cold and pulpy it could only be the orange juice, if it was hot, it must be the coffee. But there was absolutely no difference in taste. There was no taste at all. Before I lost it, I expected that everything would just taste like water. But it turns out that water does have a taste, and even that taste had gone. It’s hard to describe how disorienting that actually was.

As with so many others, I did get pretty sick. I had body aches and extreme fatigue to the point that climbing the stairs required near herculean effort. My wife also was very ill at the same time, and how we managed to keep our children alive was a wonder. Some days all we managed was to throw a frozen pizza in the oven and go back to lay on the couch.

I am fortunate enough, being a programmer, that I could actually work almost all the way through fighting COVID-19. I did have to take one sick day through the whole ordeal. That day I found myself gasping for breath at my desk. The mere act of sitting in my chair left me winded, feeling as if I had run a marathon.

However, the worst part of the disease, for me, was the brain fog. I think that fog was probably the best word to describe it that I could think of. It was such a strange phenomenon; it wasn’t just my thoughts that seemed foggy, but even physical sensations felt indistinct and confusing. I even caught myself staring at the blinking cursor on my screen

console.log('

unsure of what I was doing and why I would want to log output to the console there. Was I debugging? What was I debugging? What did I hope to learn from that output?

Part of me wonders if that might be what an amnesiac feels as he tries to regain himself. Slowly, it started to fade. It faded, but it didn’t go away. I found myself relying on my notes more and more, but I also found that when I would try to take notes, I would touch the pen to paper but not know how to summarize the salient points. This continued on for months.

As the brain fog continued over those months, my mental health deteriorated. I tried to get out and walk every day on my lunch hour to stimulate my mind and body, but it didn’t make a difference. I was getting more and more depressed. My ability to evaluate the events in my life was completely skewed, but the irony was that even with the brain fog, I felt like I had never thought more clearly. I couldn’t remember anything and struggled to reason through my work sometimes, but when it came to understanding the trajectory of my life; I felt like I was crystal clear.

Finally, in March my wife convinced me to speak with my doctor who was quite concerned for me. We spoke for a long time about my health concerns, and she told me just how concerned she was for my mental health. The doctor wanted me to exercise more and to eat healthier, and we spoke about some herbal supplements I could take. She had me schedule a follow-up call after a month to see if I had improved and if I hadn’t, she was going to prescribe something more.

This is why I am thankful for what I experienced through COVID-19 and the pandemic. I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s pain by saying that. I understand how terrible it has been for everyone, and I appreciate the deep pain of those who lost loved ones to this awful disease. But, I say I’m grateful for the things I learned from my experience because it forced me to make needed changes.

For years, I had made excuses to not exercise, or justified eating too much junk, not eating the salad and staying up too late. My weight had crept up, my mood had slowly trended downward, and my stamina had decreased. But since the declines were gradual over a long time, I hardly noticed. When I had some minor lingering effects after COVID (and I know that others had it much worse) it brought all of those other issues out in the open. To get back to myself after COVID I would need to address the other health issues I had been ignoring.

I bought a bike

My wife, also, was working on making some changes to her fitness and overall health. She bought a hybrid bicycle, so I bought one too. I thought it would be fun to bike with her; maybe that would be enough to get me to exercise.

At first, going five miles (around eight km) was a stretch. It was difficult and I came back sore. Then I found I was getting less sore. Then I could go seven miles (roughly 11 km); then ten. I left one Saturday morning and got on the trail, intending to go around 8 miles (almost 13 km) total, but instead I went 8 miles before turning around. It felt good. I wasn’t better yet, but my depression was lessening, and my general mood was rising. Even my insomnia was starting to go away.

I found that I loved cycling. I loved everything about it. I love the beauty of riding nature trails and seeing the deer and birds and turtles and toads. I love exploring new trails and routes and visiting places I’ve only ever driven by; sometimes stopping to look closer just because I can. I love the speed and that feeling of effortless tension when the gearing is just right.

And I love the feeling of being healthy again. I’m healthier now than I ever have been, and I know I wouldn’t be now if I hadn’t been sick. I would have continued on in a slow, hardly noticeable decline. Each year a little more irritable than the one before, needing to buy new clothes every few years as my waistline gradually increased.

But now I need to replace much of my wardrobe because after dropping around 35 pounds (ca. 16 kg) this year. And I am happier and more present than I have been in years. I feel recharged spending time with my kids and want to spend more time with them instead of seeking alone time. My productivity has gone up at work too. I still have to work through problems that seem difficult, but I don’t feel like I’m forgetting the basics anymore. I feel like I’m back. And, obviously to you, I’m writing again. I’m writing out of an intrinsic desire to write rather than a feeling of duty. So many things had become a task to be completed just so I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about not doing them, but I’m actually finding enjoyment in them again, and I’m really thankful for that. God is good.

Professor Florian Graves

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For a few years now I’ve had the idea for some detective stories floating around in my mind. I’ve always wanted to try to write murder mysteries. I finally began working on some and I plan to publish them here as I finish them. I know they are not great yet, but I want to share them all the same. I’ve created a page to house all of the stories on the website here Professor Graves Mysteries. The first story “Silence in the Library” is up now. I hope you enjoy and please provide feedback if you feel inclined. It will help me in my quest to improve as a writer.

– Brian

Silence in the Library

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash

The body lay in the middle of the floor, sprawled in exactly that sort of pose one comes to associate with the chalk outlines on prime-time police procedural dramas. Detective Fleming noticed his position right away and thought it odd. The campus security had escorted Fleming and his partner, Detective Maria Sandoval, to the body. “It’s funny, in a way, you don’t always see a body that’s positioned like it belongs on TV.” She looked at him and offered a non-committal “hmph.” They spiraled in as they approached, taking in the body and its immediate surroundings from as many angles as they could, looking for anything that stuck out or seemed out of place.

The early arrivers had already started to gather. A few students who had come to study early were peering over the police tape. One, an older gentleman, probably a professor, had even sat at one of the tables with his hands resting one over the other atop his walking stick. His chin perched between the first and second fingers of his right hand; his head tilted slightly, and his lips pursed in a mournful expression.

Detective Fleming stopped and addressed the group of seven or so onlookers, “Hello everyone, my name is Detective Erik Fleming with the Chicago Police Department…”

“Like the James Bond guy?” A lanky young man interrupted.

Fleming sighed, “No, that’s Ian Fleming, no relation. If you could please all be so kind as to stay back while we investigate the scene. If you have information you feel may be pertinent we invite you to share it with us once the coroner arrives. Until then, you will all need to stay here.”

“You don’t think he was murdered, do you?” A girl with a messy ponytail and overalls, who stood chewing her thumbnail, asked.

“We’re not committing to anything yet,” Dt. Sandoval answered.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no.” The young woman murmured to herself, and went back to chewing her thumbnail and glancing around the room. Sandoval followed her eyes to a ceiling mounted security camera.

She made a mental note and returned to the body as Fleming knelt beside her, and she began listing her initial impressions. “Young Caucasian male. Late teens or very early twenties. Brown hair and medium build, slightly overweight. There are numerous scratches on his neck, see that?” She used her pen to move his collar aside, so Fleming could have a better look.

“Yeah, those look pretty fresh,” Fleming noted, “probably perimortem.”

The professor looked up at the vaulted ceiling of Harper Memorial Library and closed his eyes. He remained that way for some moments before he opened his eyes and shifted, returning his silent gaze and attention to the two detectives.

He sighed and began speaking softly to himself, “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them…”

The room had quieted enough that the detectives were able to hear him from where they kneeled by the body and Fleming’s ears perked up at the word “kill.”

“Whoa, what was that?” He started back over to where the professor was sitting. “What were you saying about killing?”

“Oh dear, I’m sorry.” The older man looked up, shaken from his musings. “I was quoting Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms.’ ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.’ It came to mind as I was thinking about the tragedy of such a young man dying.”

“Hmmm,” Fleming grunted and squinted his eyes at the professor as he turned and walked back to the body.

Detective Sandoval was still examining the body “Blue hue to his lips, probably cyanosis due to lack of oxygen. Do you think, maybe, strangulation?”

“Possibly, we should have the coroner check his hyoid, but it would be consistent with the scratches on his neck if… Check his fingernails.”

“Yeah, it looks like skin and blood there. We’ll get the DNA matched, but those scratches were probably self-inflicted.” Maria Sandoval held her own hands to her neck, curling her fingers in and drawing her hands down; miming how the wounds might have been inflicted. “If he was strangled, that’s just how he’d try to get whatever object it was off of him.”

From one of the tables on the opposite side of the room a uniformed officer walked over with a student ID card in her gloved hand. “His name is Andy Stevens. He’s a freshman here.” She gestured with the card.

“Yes, I could have told you that from the start. He’s one of my students,” came a reply. All three officers turned to see the professor rising to his feet. “It breaks my heart to see. I, I can’t bear to think of what it will be for his parents.” He paused a moment to look at each of them in turn, “I am Professor Florian Graves. I teach English here. I don’t suppose you’d let me tag along; I promise I’ll stay out of the way and just observe. I’ve always loved a mystery; I fancy myself a bit of a hobbyist detective, you know.”

Fleming let out a brief and quiet groan. The uniformed officer muttered, “There’s always one,” Under her breath.

The Professor looked at her name badge, “Yes, I’m terribly sorry. I understand your reluctance. I don’t mean to insert myself into your process at all. I just had hoped to be able to observe.”

Sandoval turned her back to the Professor and spoke sotto voce to Fleming, “We’ll need to ask him some questions anyway. Those scratches look like foul play, and he knew the victim. As long as he stays out of the way I don’t see the harm.”

Fleming closed his eyes and shook his head side to side as if saying “no,” but instead he whispered back, “Ugh, fine.”

“You,” he said, pointing to the Professor, “we’ve got some questions to ask you. You can follow along, but you’d better stay out of our way, or I will arrest you.”

The Professor briefly smiled a tight, sad smile as he stepped forward.

“When was the last time you saw the victim and what are you doing in the library this morning?” Detective Sandoval asked.

The Professor thought for a moment, “It must have been at class on Thursday, I don’t take roll, but I do believe I saw him there. As to my being in the library, I am an English professor and this is a library. I mean no disrespect. I come here most days to peruse or just be available to students who might have questions.”

“Students like Mr. Stevens.” Sandoval offered.

“Yes, if he’d been alive and had questions he, like all of my students, knew that he could stop me as I walked by to discuss.”

“Did Mr. Stevens ever stop you to ask questions?”

“No, I don’t remember him ever doing so.”

“Did Mr. Stevens have any enemies or anyone he didn’t get along with?”

“I can’t say that he did, but I didn’t know him well enough to comment with much certainty on his social life.”

“Thank you. If we have other questions, I’ll let you know.” Fleming said.

“Yes, well, I’ll be around.” The Professor replied and stepped back a couple of feet until he was satisfied that he would be in no one’s way while remaining in the thick of the action.

“Well, since we’re talking to people already,” Sandoval muttered to herself.

“Miss,” she gestured to the thumbnail biter, “do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“What? Why? Uh, sure, I guess, why?” She answered.

“I’m Detective Sandoval. What’s your name?”

“Al- Alma, Alma Gutiérrez. Why do you want to talk to me? What’s going on?”

“Well, Alma, I noticed you looking around earlier. You seemed interested in the security cameras earlier. Why was that?”

“Oh, that?” Alma almost chuckled. “Well, I was just thinking that it was really bad timing that this happened last night, since the security cameras were down.”

Sandoval swore under her breath. “How do you know they were down?”

“Because she was the one who brought them down in the first place.” An older man with a crisp goatee and deep chocolate eyes stepped closer to Alma as he said this. “She’s upgrading all the security cameras and software currently. I’m advising her on this project for my class.”

“And you are?” Dt. Sandoval asked.

“Marcus DuBois, I teach software design and development here. Miss. Gutiérrez has designed a new CCTV system in my class and has been installing the equipment and servers.”

“So, you knew the security cameras would be down last night?” Detective Sandoval asked, turning again to Alma.

Alma glanced quickly at Sandoval then to Professor Graves and then to DuBois before she replied, “Well, yeah. But it’s not like I thought anything was going to happen. I mean why would it? And I was in the server room and security closet for the entire night.”

“Can you corroborate that, Professor DuBois?”

“No, unfortunately I cannot. I was at home last night with my family.”

“I see,” continued Sandoval, “is there anyone who can confirm your whereabouts?”

Alma glanced at her professor nervously. “What? Nu-no. No one. Nope.”

Before she could ask any follow-up questions, Detective Fleming called over. “Hey Maria, come take a look at this.”

“Stay right here. I’ll be back with more questions.”

Professor Graves stood a moment longer watching Alma before he turned to follow Dt. Sandoval as she walked over to where Fleming was standing. As she approached where the young man had left his backpack beside a stack of books and his laptop, Fleming pointed to the papers and contents of the backpack spread around the table and onto the floor. “Looks like afterwards the killer was looking for something.”

“You’re thinking there was a killer, then?” She asked.

“Yeah, and it looks like there was a struggle.” He nodded toward a bookshelf next to the table. Several feet of books had been pulled off the bottom shelf and flung around the aisle.

“Alright,” she replied, “let’s see if this makes any sense. He’s studying at the table. He realizes he needs another book, so he gets up to get it and walks over to the book case…”

“Or maybe he was lured over.” Detective Sandoval offered.

“Yeah, maybe he demanded the victim give him whatever it was he wanted…”

“Or she.” Sandoval interrupted, “I was just talking to that I.T. girl, Alma Gutiérrez, and she had disabled the security cameras for an upgrade. She says she was in the security closet and server room all night but when I asked if anyone can confirm that she said no. She seemed pretty nervous when I asked about her being alone.”

“Hmmm. Ok. Interesting.” Fleming mused aloud as he looked over Sandoval’s shoulder at Alma. “Well, he or she, either way, didn’t like being told ‘no.’ Our victim comes over to the bookshelves and is attacked. He’s kicking and flailing to get free and that’s how the books get knocked loose.” Fleming looked up from the books on the floor to the body and raised his eyes from the body to the opposite wall and the “Exit” sign. “He manages to get free and makes straight for the exit, probably yelling for help.”

“Alright. But the attacker was faster and caught up to him and threw something around his neck and strangled him with it. No bruising to indicate what it was. We’ll see if they can lift any fibers to determine what it was.” Sandoval continued the rundown.

“Good,” said Fleming. Then he continued the narrative, “then our guy came back to the backpack and searched through it.” Inspecting the backpack with gloved hands as he spoke, he added, “He certainly was thorough, every zipper on this thing is open.”

“What about the wallet? Was there anything left in there?”

Fleming reached over and grabbed the evidence bag, extracting the wallet and opening it. “Nope. No cash, but the bank card is still in here. Makes sense. The killer can explain away cash, if they’re stopped, but it’s hard to explain why you have a dead guy’s ATM card.”

“Yes.” Professor Graves stepped forward as he spoke again. Both detectives turned to look at him in annoyance. He had promised to stay out of the way but was already interjecting himself. “That’s very true. But, I think the main problem I have with it is that I’m almost positive that’s not how it happened. I don’t believe there was a killer. Well, not a human killer at any rate.”

“We were just talking about this. There are clear signs of a struggle. There are perimortem injuries to his neck and the bookcase was disturbed, plus his backpack was ransacked.” Detective Fleming didn’t try to hide the annoyance in his voice.

“Plus,” Detective Sandoval added, “there’s clearly something fishy going on with the Gutiérrez girl. She knows more than she’s willing to tell.”

“Yes, I suspect I know what’s going on there as well. If you don’t mind, I think I can ask her a question that will clear that up. If I’m right about that, I’ll explain what I think happened.”

“If you’re wrong you will go back and stay out of the way.” Fleming growled back.

Graves nodded his head as he answered. Then, as Dt Sandoval turned to call Alma over he added, “And, Detective Sandoval, would you please have Miss Gutiérrez come apart from Professor DuBois? I think we’ll get a clearer picture from her without him.”

Fleming and Graves watched as Detective Sandoval walked over to the small crowd and spoke quietly to Miss Gutiérrez and then returned with her. Alma looked uneasy and stared at the body as she walked past him, even though he was covered now.

“Hello Miss Gutiérrez,” Professor Graves began, “I know you’re scared and nervous and that’s very natural. But I did have one question I wanted to ask you now that Professor DuBois is not here to hear you. When you were working last night, were you actually alone? Did you perhaps have a visitor and weren’t supposed to?”

Alma looked frightened and looked back and forth between the detectives before she looked back over her shoulder toward DuBois. Relieved that he was well out of earshot, she finally took a deep breath and answered.

“Yes. I know we’re not supposed to have anyone over when we’re working on the project. We’re graded on it being our own work. But I was so hungry, so my boyfriend brought me some food, and we may have made out for a bit, and it probably wouldn’t be a big deal normally, right? But he’s also in DuBois class, and then it looks like cheating, for both of us. And this project is 20% of my grade, I can’t afford to fail it and neither can he. I know I shouldn’t have said I was alone, and you’re probably going to think he did it, but he didn’t. He never even came in the building. I went out to meet him. You can probably look on the security feeds from the building next door, I wasn’t working on them. They’ll show that he never went in, and I was with him outside the whole time he was there.” She spoke so fast, the confession came so freely that she nearly seemed to need to catch her breath when she stopped speaking.

Professor Graves smiled another tight, sad smile as he turned to the detectives. “Yes, I supposed it was something like that. Thank you, my dear. That’s all we needed from you. You may go back for now.”

She left, walking quickly and stiffly past the body, this time keeping her eyes straight ahead until she was past it.

“And now,” Prof. Graves moved over to the bookshelf and supported himself on his cane as he lowered himself to his hands and knees. “And now, I believe I shall reveal the real killer.”

He pushed his cane under the bookshelf and made a large sweeping motion. A small grey object slid out from under the bookcase, stopping as it collided with Detective Fleming’s foot. Both detectives looked at it.

“Asthma.” It was an inhaler. The professor continued speaking as he rose to his feet. “Mr. Stevens ransacked his own backpack looking for his inhaler when he began having trouble breathing. In his frenzy to find it, he accidentally dropped it, and it slid under the bookshelf. Mr. Stevens then tore the books from the bookshelf, trying desperately to find a space that he could reach down underneath to the inhaler. He probably then ran for help or for something to try to fish it out like I just did, but it was too late. The more he panicked and the faster he moved, the faster he ran out of the little air he could still breathe. You rightly deduced that he inflicted those scratches himself as he clawed for oxygen. But it wasn’t an assailant, it was his own lungs he was fighting. The poor boy.

“I believe that fits all the facts quite well.”

Erik Fleming looked at the professor, now standing quietly before them. “Asthma.” He repeated. “How did you figure on asthma?”

“Oh, I wasn’t sure it was asthma until I saw the inhaler at your feet. It might have been severe allergies.” But the fact that only the bottom row was disturbed puzzled me. If it was disturbed in a fight I would have expected the rows at shoulder height to have displayed as much or more of the disturbance. If there was no fight, then it was simply a question of why. Why would someone tear apart the bottom shelf? Perhaps to get at something underneath? If there was no fight he might’ve been alone and in that case, it seemed to me that it might have been the medicine he was after. Then it was just a matter of looking for anything that wouldn’t fit that story. Nothing did.

“As for the girl, I’ve been a teacher for long enough that I can spot when a student is worried about her grade. Miss Gutiérrez was clearly nervous around Marcus and seemed very concerned that he should believe she was alone. Since she was working on a solo project, that made sense if she’d bent the rules a bit.”

As Professor Graves walked away the two detectives heard him muttering to himself, “It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.”

A Change of Scenery

Fri, 28 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Teanna Morgan on Unsplash

Last weekend I was quite productive. I was more productive than I have been in a long time. Over the course of a five-day weekend I wrote and published a blog post, read a book I bought over a year ago, edited half of my own book, as well as rode around 50k on my brother-in-law’s borrowed bike.

And I did all of this while feeling like I was taking time off and relaxing. I don’t say this to brag about how capable I am. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I want to figure out what it was that made the weekend so productive so that I can repeat it. Why could I do so much more on this vacation than I normally do on vacations, and why was I able to do more while “relaxing” than I do on weekends when I don’t take any time off? And what lessons can I learn from that?

Just the Facts, Ma’am

The weekend was a surprise vacation that my wife planned for me with my brothers and parents. My parents were driving their camper across the country, and they picked me up on the last leg of their journey, from Chicago to Denver. After spending a few days with my family, I flew home.

In doing some thinking after I got back, I think I’ve found three things that made the trip such fertile ground for productivity; planning, distance and novelty.

Planning

Serendipitously, the week after I returned The Art of Manliness published an article on how Ernest Hemingway would plan his leisure time (A Lesson From Ernest Hemingway in Why You Should Plan Your Weekends). He wanted to make sure that he got the most out of life, including his “free time” and so he had some structure to it. It occurred to me as I was reading this that that is precisely what I had done on my trip. I hadn’t sat down with a planner and planned out what I would be doing at specific times, but leading up to the vacation I had figured out what I would like to do while on the trip.

I knew I would have some time when my sister’s family would be busy or my brothers would be at work and I would be left to my own devices. So, I thought that I could work on some of the projects I had been making slow progress on during those times, so I gathered what I would need to work on them. Sure enough, several hours each day I found myself unoccupied and could grab one of the projects and start working on it. I was prepared for it because I had planned. And because I had planned to have several things to work on I was able to bounce between them if I got stuck or bored doing the same thing for too long.

Distance

Because I was so far from home, I had fewer interruptions too. Certainly, I had interruptions. I was visiting family I hadn’t seen in over a year, but many of the can-you-open-this-pickle-jar-for-me or why-does-my-phone-say-it’s-not-on-the-wifi type interrupt just weren’t there because I was absent from my family. (That’s not to complain about my family. I love them, and I’m happy to help them with whatever they need, but those types of interruptions are focus assassins). The added friction of my physical distance kept me from those mundane interruptions and so the times I was able to work were more focussed than normal.

Novelty

And because I was in an unfamiliar place I was forced to think about things in a new way. That seems dramatic, but I’ve noticed that as I go through my day I tend to think as well as act on a routine. When I drive to work in the mornings, I usually think about the same things along the way. Familiar landmarks remind me of what I was thinking about the last time I passed them, and then I begin thinking about the same things all over again. But when I’m out of my element I have to think about even such boring tasks as getting a cup of coffee, I have no muscle memory for where the mugs are. I am unburdened by the subconscious associations of my environment, so I feel like thinking new and novel thoughts is that much easier.

Takeaways

To try to capitalize on these observations I am going to try, before taking a vacation or even a weekend to ask:

Plan: “What do I want to walk away with from this time?”

Distance: “Am I able to silence my phone or go on DND? Can I set expectations with people to avoid interruptions?”

Novelty: “Are there parks or cafés (now that things are starting to reopen) that I can go to? Is there music or sound machines I can use to drown out familiar background noise?”

A New Commitment

Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

As I begin the process of restarting my blog I think it is useful for me to establish my purpose and goals in blogging. What is it that I hope to get out of blogging? I want to be a better writer. I want to grow and learn in the craft. To that end I think that posting on this blog will help me by keeping me accountable as I am forced to post on a schedule. Ideally, I will be able to get feedback from any readers I might be fortunate enough to acquire along the way as well.

I also get a lot of catharsis and enjoyment out of writing. That coupled with the introspection from learning what makes my writing better and more enjoyable (both to read and to write), and the experimentation that goes along with that make me almost giddy in anticipation.

So, where does that leave me? To what am I willing to commit myself? I want to be careful to not overcommit and quit from being overwhelmed. I will start, I think, with the goal of posting fortnightly and the goal of gradually increasing frequency to a roughly weekly cadence. I intend to write about my journey as I try to become a writer. I like to think of these posts as “meta-writing”. I will also post some of the short stories I work on and some samples from longer projects I am working through. I hope you enjoy and are willing to embark on this adventure with me. Bon voyage!

— Brian

Fear and Loathing in a Text Editor

Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently come to learn two things about myself. The first is that I enjoy writing. I really enjoy writing. When I get in the flow and the words just seem to come pouring out of my fingers. It is an incredibly rewarding feeling. Last year I wrote the first draft of a book in three months because I enjoyed doing it and didn’t want to stop writing each day.

Since then, I haven’t done much with it because the second thing I’ve learned is that I do not enjoy reading what I’ve written; I hate it.

As I’ve been slowly doing a first rough pass through the book to polish up the roughest parts of it I have more than once almost thrown in the towel and thrown the whole thing away. I read it, and it’s not anything like what I want to have written. My vocabulary feels too limited, my sentence structures are childish, and my brilliant insights are incredibly shallow. I feel like I need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

It’s scary to put things out there into the world. When I write I often feel as if I’m having a conversation with my imagined readers, I can almost picture them. It’s calming and makes the whole experience feel wonderfully relational. But as I prepare to actually publish something that same imaginary scenario becomes frightening, even paralyzing. When I’m writing I can adjust my words, restructure my sentences and control what I’m saying. And I control my imaginary readers in the same way, they’re all happy with it because I’m enjoying the writing process. But once I push the text out to the world it is fixed. I cannot change it anymore and the people who read it will be actual humans with their own opinions, not figments of my imagination who are receptive to my ideas and blind to my oversights.

I put care into what I’m writing and vulnerability is hard. It’s scary to let other people read and judge my work, knowing that they may not like it. Often I’ll get partway through typing something and that fear sets in and kills the creativity. The words languish in the text editor.

Am I a fraud; am I putting my naïveté on full display? When I fire up my text editor to continue working on a draft I look back on the words I’ve written, and they feel so juvenile, so poorly constructed and fragmented.

In Episode 27 of Baronfig’s Eureka Podcast Joey Cofone talks about feelings of anxiety surrounding creativity as he has been writing a book.

There’s a ton of fear, which I write about in the book. Creativity has a ton of fear involved, and you never get rid of it. But you just acknowledge it and still work anyway.

Joey Cofone

That really struck me because I really look up to what Joey has been able to do, all he’s been able to build and create at Baronfig. To hear that he knows that fear as well gave me so much encouragement.

Perhaps these feelings are part of the process.

Perhaps this anxiety is an aspect of creating that I need to learn to accept and even embrace.

Perhaps I simply need to take a deep breath and click “Publish.”

Changes

Sat, 18 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/@mikbutcher

The past 9 months have been full of changes. I received a promotion, adopted a daughter, remodeled a bathroom and a kitchen and accepted a new position at another company. And there are more changes coming in the next couple of months, selling the house and moving across the country.

Back around Thanksgiving I was promoted at work from a Configuration Engineer to a Developer III. My friend and coworker John was also promoted from UNIX Administrator to Developer III to work on the tools. The promotions were to enable us to focus all of our efforts on the disaster recovery tool suite we had built. I felt very honored to receive that promotion. Being a full time developer has been a dream of mine for a long time.

In January, after a year and a half in foster care, we finally were able to adopt Penny. It was an amazing and emotional experience to have this little girl who we have loved and taken care of every day since she came home from the hospital become our actual daughter. I might write a separate post on that later. It was just incredible.

We also decided to sell our house and so we began some much needed remodeling of the bathroom and kitchen.

And finally, I accepted a developer position in the Chicago suburbs. This means I had to leave my job, which I’ve loved. It also means we will have to move across the country once we sell the house.

My last day at Expeditors was yesterday (17 May 2019). It was a hard day emotionally. I’ve never left a job that I loved that much and I had no complaints, no reason I wanted to leave other than I’d accepted this new job.

That said, I am really excited to start my new job remotely on Monday! I’m excited to be working with the people I’ll be working with at my new company. It’s going to be awesome.

And I’m excited to see what this new chapter of our lives holds as we move back to the midwest. I can’t wait until we sell the house and move. We will do a cross country road trip as a family and it will be so fun to show my kids that much of America.

That’s all for now. I’ll update you all soon.

Ideation

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As I tried to come up with an idea for this month’s blog post I started thinking about ideas themselves. Where do they come from and how? In short, how does ideation happen? I want to think grand and lofty thoughts, so how do I do that?

I think we are all familiar with the phenomenon of the spark of inspiration. It comes unexpectedly and often at the time when we are least prepared to accept it. For me it always seems to come with my hands are wet, so I can neither write nor type. We can help steer these ideas, I propose. We are not slave to their whims. While what I suggest may not guarantee the thoughts and ideas we want they will be more likely to arise.

That spark of inspiration stems from the subconscious, and we know from experience that we have some influence in the subconscious feedback loop. If you are foolish, like me, you have discovered that indulging in the horror genre before bed has a certain, somewhat predictable, effect on your sleep. Even mundane things we’ve dealt with during the day we may find echoed in our sleep.

Our ideas are similarly informed and influenced by the things to which we expose ourselves. So, my challenge to myself and to you is to figure out the kind of thoughts you want to think. Because the oddity of it is that thought begets thought and idea. What you think about becomes what you are more likely to think about. Once you have decided the thoughts and ideas that you wish to have take an honest appraisal of the things you read and watch and listen to as well as the conversations you have. Are they consistent with the ideas you desire? If not, perhaps it is time to make a change. For me it is going to mean less television, most of the shows I watch are just mindless escapist shows, and more reading, especially classics (I just started Oliver Twist) and my Bible and books on theology. What would it look like for you?

Good luck!

The Squire by Baronfig

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

“The Pen Is a Mighty Sword”

I will admit it, I am not the biggest fan of rollerball pens. There are a few that I like and only one or two that I love. That said, the Schmidt 8126 refill is a pretty solid refill. Sure, it’s not my favorite personally, but I like it pretty well. And even if I didn’t, the Squire takes Parker-style refills so I could experiment with one of the many options available.

The pen body itself is immaculately designed. The half twist to extend the writing tip is flawless. I can easily extend the tip while pulling the pen out of my pocket in one fluid motion. But the design is so good that I don’t have to worry about it writing all over the inside of my pocket. And the threading to replace the refill is so consciously designed that it will not disassemble in my pocket, a problem I’ve experienced before with other pens. (I’ve also had the pen in my pocket with my keys several times and can’t find a scratch on it!) This pen feels so good to hold. I simply can’t describe how good this pen feels. I’ve never held another pen that feels so carefully designed.

When I first opened the pen box I was impressed by the lovely solid weight of the pen. I handed it to my wife and she immediately declared it too heavy, but as soon as she started writing she said, “Never mind, it’s perfect!” The pen’s balance makes the weight disappear.

I got the charcoal Squire, so the box mine came in was the tiered vertical box. Pulling the Squire out felt like drawing Excalibur from the stone. Epic!!

Clearly, I love this pen. My only complaints are that the refill doesn’t leave as solid a line as I’d like 100% of the time. (It’s still pretty good though. And it’s possible that it’s just my refill.) The other quibble is that the pen barrel feels a little over-logoed. I love the sword logo, so the Baron Fig logo feels like a bit much.

Is this pen for you? If you are willing to pay for quality products instead of settling for the junk you can pick up at the corner grocery, then the answer is yes, absolutely! I backed the kickstarter and couldn’t be happier with the pen I got, and on schedule!

https://www.baronfig.com/tools/squire

On Thought and Doing Things the Hard Way

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It is a hallmark of mankind that we, like water, follow the path of least resistance. When we meet difficulty we push and fight against it. From this steady erosion of difficulty we have many of our greatest inventions. Ocean voyages are long and dangerous, so we have taught ourselves to fly. Waiting for news to arrive through the post takes too long, so we have created the telegraph, the telephone, the television, and finally, that culminating wonder, the internet. (And still we complain about our data speeds being too slow.) We have worn down the resistance we have met in the pursuit of our goals. But have we perhaps made things too easy?

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

Napoleon Hill

It is easy now to publish an idea almost the moment it enters the mind. But this can lead to shallow thoughts. Even if the idea happens to be coherent (my first ideas seldom are) it is not yet tempered and tested.

Perhaps in the march of technological progress the sweet spot for critical thinking is always a few steps behind. Every development in technology is heralded as the death of its forebears. But, it seems that after the settling in period the forebear only becomes more valuable as it becomes less mundane and more thoughtfully produced.

I loathe editing. I like to think that I do all of my editing in my head before I even tough pen to paper. In school I used to pride myself in having virtually no changes between my first draft and my final draft. The temptation to quickly type what comes to mind and click “Publish” is strong. But it is a mistake. Because while I like to think all of my editing is in my head it is insufficient work to develop the idea. I need to slow down and flesh out my ideas before rushing them out into the world.

But I need more than just to slow down, I need to have friction. I need to have the pushback for the idea to really grow and develop. I need to do things the hard way. So, from this need (and admittedly from a sense of nostalgia) I’ve developed the following system for writing.

I write my first draft in my Confidant and then type it, with some editing, on my typewriter as a second draft. The typewritten draft is the one that bears the most abuse as it is now double-spaced. And since it is no longer in my handwriting it feels less personal to correct it. I also take this chance to look for any underlying themes that had not occurred to me before, and to make corresponding organizational changes.

At this point I retype the draft again and hand that new draft over to my wife for her to abuse. With her input I make any final changes as I finally commit it digitally to the CMS. (If I entered it before I run the risk of posting it before I am ready, just to get it done.) One final read through and I finally publish.

There are several reasons I choose to do it this way. For one, I really enjoy it. It is quite relaxing and it makes me feel something like solidarity with past writers and thinkers that I admire. It is also extremely versatile, in my journal I can outline, draft, and doodle all within a few square inches. And it is the ultimate distraction-free editor. I have also heard of studies which have shown a strong link between writing things by hand and better retention and processing of the information, as compared to typing. And my own experience, while anecdotal, would bear this out.

But, most importantly, it forces me to slow down and think differently. My thoughts come to me smoother and more connectedly as I drag the nib of my pen across the page in a smooth, even cadence, as opposed to the stoccato march of a cursor across the blue-hued screen. In fact, there are some things that the most difficult part of writing is finding the most coherent string which ties my thoughts together. A sensation I have never experienced when typing my first draft.

With a typewriter, at least with my typewriter, I cannot type as fast else the arms catch and jam. This too helps me to slow down and think through the words I am using.

What is also amazing to me is how surprisingly freeing it is to lack a DELETE key. Without the ability to remove evidence of error I may start typing words and phrases I did not intend by accident or muscle memory. I am still left with those marks on the page. And more than once those marks have caused a spark and made me reevaluate or rephrase a thought or sentence, and I have been happier with the result. Inspirations strikes in the strangest of ways.

My exact strategy may not be correct for anyone else, but I think that everyone can benefit from resistance. Like our muscles, our ideas need resistance in their development if they are to be robust enough to do their work. As an aside, this is also why I think it is important to seek out opposing viewpoints. It is my opinion that a great many arguments are weaker than they deserve to be because no one challenges the paradigms in the echo chamber of similar thought.

This older way may be more difficult, but perhaps it is that which makes it better. To be clear, I am no luddite. I work in I.T. for a Fortune 500 company, and have, without exaggeration, had dreams of code and command line. (I even type all my posts in Markdown.) But my experience has been that as I have gotten more and more digital my thoughts have become more and more transitory, vapid and inconsequential. It is inarguable that the computer is the easiest, most powerful tool for writing, publishing, and general creation in the history of the human race. But, it makes it so easy that we can too easily say much while meaning little, if anything.

I propose that the superiority of the old way is twofold. First, it acts as a gatekeeper of quality. The thoughts and ideas not worth sharing are abandoned or improved at their inception. And since the development process is artificially slowed the mind is forced to dwell on the idea longer, leading to it being sharpened and strengthened.

This strategy may not be for everyone, but it certainly is for me. And I encourage you to slow yourself down and apply some resistance to your thoughts as well.

On the “Benefit of the Doubt”

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/@andyjh07

Having four kids at home, I find myself having to constantly explain to them the concept of giving the benefit of the doubt. The result of which is that the idea has become very near and dear to me. I see so many conflicts that could have been avoided if those involved understood it.

We like to think that we are good at understanding our motivations (that’s a post for another day). And because we think ourselves good at judging our motivations we justify to ourselves when we are mean or rude, inadvertently or as a side-effect of our actions.

We also are limited to viewing the world through our own eyes. As a result, we are not often privy to the appearance of our actions as seen by others. If you’ve ever watched a candid video of yourself you know what I mean. You watch yourself saying the words you remember, but your body language, your stance seem off. You remember feeling compassion during the conversation but in the video you seem almost aggressive.

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to judge another person’s intent, and without understanding intent it is seldom fair to judge another’s actions. And yet, our level of offense is so closely tied to the perceived intent. You see someone cut in front of you in line and feel she was trying to disrespect you, or someone doesn’t respond to you and you assume he is giving you the cold shoulder. (Both may have completely innocent, albeit boring, explanations.) The point is this, seldom will you find one person being intentionally malicious toward another person, unless in retaliation for some previous injustice, real, perceived, or otherwise.

There is an old maxim that states that one should never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by ignorance. I think that is very wise. The truth is that, while as individuals we can occasionally be intentionally cruel, most people don’t like to be. Rather, we are all the heroes and heroines of our own stories. There is a sort of philosophy in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game that to truly understand someone is to love him the way he love himself. So try, the next time someone causes you some injury to view the whole event from the other’s perspective. Try to understand and see how your emotions change. Try to see that person as she sees herself and to love her as she loves herself. Let that love lead you to share the most important thing in this life, the love of Jesus, who sees every intention and died to take our place.

Memories of Friday Eve

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/@anniespratt

A Traditional Friday Eve

I remember Friday Eve’s as a young boy. Waking up early in wide-eyed anticipation of what the next day will bring. There’s just something magical about Friday Eve. I don’t know if it’s the just-before-bed viewing of Twin Peaks or gorging myself on “hot dish” at Friday Eve Supper. It could have been sneaking into the liquor cabinet for the peppermint schnapps, I’m not sure.

After supper, with the hot dish still warm in our bellies we’d change into our Friday Eve jammie’s with the little button flap on the bottom. We’d hold hands and sing our favorite Friday Eve melodies.

Oh, those times

In days of yore

When Herr Freitag came a’knocking on our door

He came from near

He came from far

He came no matter where you are

Then there’s the agonizing worry in the wait for a visit from Herr Freitag. Have I been good enough? Would he bring me my shiny new Junior Outdoorsman for Kids catalog, and leave fun size candy bars in my sock drawer?

I remember, I actually caught Herr Freitag once. I woke up in the early hours of a Friday morning. It was still dark, but as I peered around I saw Herr Freitag coming in through the window, as was his way. He was dressed in his famous black sweater and ski mask. He looked at me for a long moment before he leaned in closely and conspiratorially whispered, “Quiet kid, or I’ll kick your teeth in.” I nearly fainted from excitement. Then Herr Freitag borrowed our TV. He still has it, I believe, the old fellow.

What I learned from NaNoWriMo

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This year I had wanted to write 30,000 words in the month of November. I’ve failed horribly this year. But in some ways, I’ve succeeded.

I have indeed written more this month than I usually would. I have written a few thousand words (many in letters) and I’ve remembered how much I like to write, so in those ways it’s been successful.

Especially since my goal at the start was not as much about word count as it was about building a habit of writing and a desire to do it. (Though I suppose the goal itself testifies to the pre-existence of the desire).

But what have I learned from it?

One of the things I’ve learned is that as much as I want to, I can’t write at a computer. The words don’t flow the same on a keyboard and I will always find myself distracted by a “just check”. I’ll set aside the writing for a moment, but never pick it up again. Instead I much prefer older, more elegant analog tools. A nice pen and good paper.

For myself, I think I also equate writing and thinking. It’s how I reason things out.

If I don’t write something down I won’t move past it. I will keep thinking the same thought over and over. Not like a stuck record, but more like a nagging reminder of an unfinished task; an incomplete thought.

And since I am able to write so much more effectively on a notebook or loose paper than on a computer I think I’ve started to view a notebook as a thinking tool. While I think of a computer or iPad as a distraction, an entertainment tool. The computer is an idea generator, being exposed to other people’s thoughts and ideas through their own writing, videos or podcasts. The notebook is where I flesh out my own thoughts on these ideas with which I would not otherwise have contact.

Beyond just utility, though, I’ve found that I take far less pleasure from writing at a computer than I do with a fountain pen on nice, heavy paper. And the pleasure I derive from pen and paper is a big motivator to return to writing once I’ve started, and to start in the first place.

I’ve also decided to try out a Baronfig notebook. I’ve been using Moleskine for a few years and I may go back to them, but I’ve heard great things about Baron Fig paper and the shorter wider proportions of the notebook intrigue me. Plus, they are attractive notebooks and cheaper than Moleskine.

NaNoWriMo

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/@patrickian4

November is NaNoWriMo. While I don’t have a plan to write a novel, I do aspire to write more. I enjoy writing and I think it’s important for helping me learn, think and improve myself. But, as evidenced by this blog I’m not very consistent in it. I really want to improve my consistency in writing.

My initial idea was to try to post every day during November. I like the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel by 11:59 on November 30, but as I said, I have no desire to write a novel right now. I decided to commit myself to writing 50,000 words this month, this is divided up into 1,667 words a day. I realized that 30 posts is way more than I can realistically commit to, and truth be told I probably won’t meet the quota many of the days. Though I will keep track of my progress in Drafts.

Instead of writing a novel, or writing a blog post every day I will commit to writing 50,000 words through the month, divided between my blog, my journal, and random musings. I think my journal will get most of the love, this year. My fifth child was born at the end of October which is oddly, or not, causing me to have to deal with some unresolved issues from when my fourth child, Andrew Paul was stillborn last year. Several of those journal entries I hope will make their way to this blog.

Why I Write

Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Sometimes I need to write to know what I think. My day to day musings are generally disjointed and repetitive. I arrive at a decision or opinion, if I arrive at one at all, on a circuitous and meandering neural path. It can be hard for me to reason through a concept internally. I tend to circle repeatedly through the parts of an idea that are most familiar, or least complicated. Like most, I don’t like cognitive dissonance so I try to avoid it rather than engage in the work of rectifying the discrepancies.

How I Write

To actually work my way through an issue I usually have to sit down and force myself to start writing. My own particular style of thinking via pen isn’t to do mind maps or any sort of organizational scheme that was pushed on me in school. Instead I write prose. I write it out as it comes to my head, trying to capture my thought process as it happens in the form of a narrative. That way I feel like I am able to shape it and control it. I can redirect it forward when it starts to double-back to more familiar and comfortable paradigms. The narrative form leads me forward in much the same way a story pulls the reader along on a journey. The control allows me to face the cognitive dissonance and forge a way through it.

It’s no magic bullet. Sometimes I still don’t get anywhere. Sometimes it takes me several times of writing through something and a scrapping it and starting over before I get to what I want. My Les Misérables article is one of these projects. When I started I wasn’t even quite sure what I was going for. I wrote for a while and chiseled away at my idea until I was able to see what it was. It took me longer than I like to admit to get to something I felt was comprehensible enough to share. I still don’t feel like I’m done, there’s still more there to explore. Maybe I’ll come back to it some day and expand on it.

I also write the way I speak because imagining an audience forces me to clarify and flesh my own mental shorthand. It causes me to document the memories and thoughts that lead me to an opinion so the nuances are not lost when I revisit it. It’s too easy to ignore or gloss over a supporting idea in my head when I’m just thinking. Especially if it’s a feeling from a memory or a feeling gained from an experience, but when I am writing I need to tease it out and get to the deeper meaning. And sometimes judge if it’s worth holding on to or not. Writing it also links the idea more in my head so it isn’t lost in the ether or discarded as an indecipherable scribble on a post-it. But it also often illuminates deeper connections than I suspected or would have found from the simple mental shorthand link in my mind.

Growth

In every endeavor, however small, I choose to grow. I do not want to stagnate. But growth can look very different in various circumstances. In writing I could strive for growth in a quantitative sense. This would just mean turning out more pieces of increasing length until writing is all I do in my spare time. Sometimes this sounds appealing to me, but I don’t think it’s the right goal for me. Not at this time.

My goal is communication. Better communication. My wife will tell you that I am rubbish in an argument. I shutdown and am silent, or I grasp helplessly at phrases that I think for a moment will convey a wealth of meaning but realize the moment they’ve left my lips that instead they’ve undermined or contradicted everything that I meant by them. It’s not just in arguments either, I am a horrible interview. If I haven’t thought through a question ahead of time I will sputter and stall. I have a fast memory, but I am a very slow thinker.

That leads me to the goal of writing. Learning to think faster. Practicing reason and organization of my thoughts so that I need less time to ponder before answering. My goal is to be able to share communicate in the moment with my wife. To learn, through writing, ways to form a thought and then to express it more quickly so that our conversations aren’t back and forth monologues. Wish me luck!

It’s Nice to Read Again

Thu, 19 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

The past couple of years I have had increasingly less time in the evenings. At my old job I would often have to work in the evenings just to stay afloat, as there was simply too much work for one person.

Since I’ve started my new job, however, even with all of the new things I have to learn I’ve found that I have more time in the evening to relax and recharge. And one of the things I’ve been doing with that time is reading more. Reading for pleasure, I mean, not just work related reading.

I love reading because it takes me out of myself for a little while. It allows me to shift my focus from the immediate stressors that weigh on me. I have no illusion that this is escapist, but it is, nevertheless, exceptionally rejuvenating. And who doesn’t need an escape now and again? I think it’s healthy to escape, to not focus on yourself and your troubles for a little while, it lends perspective.

And it exercises a part of the brain that is ignored far too often in adults, our imaginations. We’re encouraged to be inventive and creative in problem solving but at the same time it’s looked down on to read fiction. As adults we need to be able to think outside the box, but be firmly planted in reality. I think we treat these as mutually exclusive, but they don’t have to be. Exercising one’s imagination, easily done through reading, doesn’t cause one to loose grip on reality. In fact, I believe we can often learn more about reality from fiction than from non-fiction, but that’s another blog post.

When it comes down to it I don’t read for pleasure to escape my life; I read for pleasure to be refreshed for it.

A Mobile Culture

Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

There is a fantastic scene at the start of the movie Warm Bodies where the protagonist, a zombie named Z, reminisces about what life must have been like before the zombie apocalypse. It must have been wonderful, he thinks as he walks through an airport terminal teaming with the senseless undead, to be able to talk to each other and have a real, meaningful, human connection with someone else. As he thinks this the scene shifts to a time before the outbreak and the terminal is full of living people, each focussed entirely on the tablet or phone they hold.

The Problem

I remember watching the movie and thinking what a poignant commentary it is on our modern, mobile device driven culture and lifestyle. We’re now more connected to each other than ever before, but we achieve this connectedness by isolating ourselves from those around us. We are at a terrible in between time where technology has created a social situation for which there is not yet solidified etiquette.

But we risk more than just appearing rude. We’ve all seen the mother who at the park spends the whole time on Facebook while her child desperately vies for her attention. Or the father who keeps telling his son he’ll play catch “in just a second” while he obsessively refreshes his Twitter feed (I am that father). We continually send messages to those around us, and most strongly to our children, that what is happening out there is far more important to us than what is happening right here. What does this do to a child who cannot get his parents’ attention because they are too involved in the doings of people that, too often, they hardly know? I ask rhetorically. I do not know, but I cannot imagine it helps him grow to be a healthy, well-adjusted person. I don’t want my kids to remember me with my face always buried in my phone screen, feeling like they’re perpetually second on my priority list.

From the perspective of my six year-old daughter there is no difference between me texting my wife to clarify which brand of detergent is the one that doesn’t ruin clothes but also doesn’t cause skin rashes and checking to see if there are any new tweets (even though I checked 45 seconds ago). She can’t tell that one is important and relevant to the task at hand and one is escapist, isolating entertainment. All she knows is that I told her we’d go to the store together for some fun daddy-daughter time and I’m not present with her.

Journaling digitally is similarly troublesome. The benefits of digital journaling make it very attractive to me. I can have my journal entries available anywhere; searchable, annotated with photos, and automatically including location, weather, etc. But journaling is naturally introspective. When you journal it is you and the journal (whatever method you use). One of the detriments of digital journaling, then, is that for longer periods of time you sit staring at a screen. This can also be confusing to those around you.

The Solution

I’m hesitant to call this section the solution because I don’t know that there really is a solution. I can think of some practical steps. But I think the real solution is that we learn to moderate ourselves. We need to learn to quell the FOMO and develop the skills necessary to be present. That is the real solution. It’s learning to use the technologies that we have to serve us in a helpful way.

If I revisit the example at the store with my daughter how can I still get the information that I need while at the same time teach and model appropriate boundaries and behaviors for her. I can think of a couple different ways.

I can make an old fashioned phone call. While this is isolating me from her it is not leaving her in doubt about what I’m doing. She understands the purpose and duration of my distraction away from the time we’re spending. There’s no worry that I’ll float back to the phone call in a couple of minutes “just to see if there’s something new”, the phone call has a definite beginning and end. And when it ends I go back to giving her my attention.
My daughter is learning to read and write and so I can hand the phone to her and together we can set about the task of learning which brand we need to buy. In this scenario neither of us are isolated as we use the technology together to accomplish our goal. It also becomes a learning experience for her as I’m able to help her type and spell correctly.

Or, perhaps, if my son is riding his bike around in the back yard instead of isolating myself from by texting my wife to tell her about it, I can bring him into the conversation. “Buddy, what do you want me to tell mommy about how you’re riding your bike?” We can take photos together to send to her. I need to lead by example to show him that it’s OK to communicate with others who aren’t there. That’s good! But it’s not good to cut off those around us.

For journaling a change of habit is probably needed. For me, at least, it is much easier to remain tangentially aware of my surroundings and disengage with what I’m doing when I am writing in a physical book. It is psychologically less magnetic. So the habit that I need to develop (that I’m not practicing at the moment) is to journal in a physical book when I need to capture a thought around other people so I can still engage with them.

Moving Forward

I want to teach my children to love technology the way I love technology. But I want to teach them to love it in a healthy way. I want them to be able to be excited about the tool while still recognizing it as just that a tool, that you use and then set aside. It exists to serve you, not consume you.

For example, my iPhone has the ability to shoot video at 120 fps. My oldest son and I were playing with some wind up motorcycles. We were winding them up and sending them drag racing down a straightaway made out of blocks. Then we built a wall at the end and sent them crashing through the wall. It was fun watching the bikes crash and tumble. But we made it even more fun by filming it and then watching it back in slow motion. These are the sort of experiences and memories I want my kids to have. Memories where technology enhances our time together rather than detracts from it.

Déjà Vu

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I only feel déjà vu with negative experiences, almost never positive.

Our first three children came after completely complication-free pregnancies. Not once in those pregnancies did I get a feeling of déjà vu. Why? Because there’s nothing that sticks in the mind when everything goes as it should. But when something goes wrong the mind latches onto it.

We’re now on our sixth pregnancy. Our fourth child, Andrew Paul, was stillborn. After Andrew we had a miscarriage. With this pregnancy I feel déjà vu many times a day. There were so many events that led up to Andrew’s death that I can’t go for very long without having memories forced to the surface.

And in the latest ultrasound there were several uncomfortable similarities to our last ultrasound with Andrew. The baby looks beautiful and very healthy. But it’s still very worrying.

All we can do is pray for God to protect him, and trust Him to hold us. Trusting is so hard.

I am thankful that Adam Ford’s comic today was on trusting God.

This is one of the panels. The whole comic is well worth a read.

Live-Tweeting Despair

Sun, 08 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I watched a man live-tweet the death of his six-year-old daughter. It was horrific. Not because he was tweeting it, he was crying out in pain. It was horrific to watch it unfold.

She had cancer and he knew it was coming. He held her as she lay unconscious fighting for the last bits of life she had left. She was my daughter’s age. She died on her birthday.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Drinking from the Firehose

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I recently changed jobs. I went from being a web administrator in the medical field, working with SharePoint and ASP.Net to deploying and configuring software on Unix servers for a shipping logistics company. By my wife’s description (“He works with computers”) my job hasn’t changed much. In actuality, the only consistent thing between the two jobs is “He works with computers.”

It’s been intimidating to make such a big change. In some ways I feel almost like I’m starting over, learning all new systems. Fortunately, I’ve been playing with Unix for fun for almost 15 years, so I’m not starting from scratch. But at the start I had a few meetings where the only words I understood were the conjunctions. It felt like drinking from a firehose.

My “strategy” (if you can call it that) for learning everything I need to is based on how I’ve watched my children acquire language. This is the human mind’s first task after birth and the process has worked for many thousands of years, so I think it’s worth examining. It’s also very simple. It is natural, it’s the way I would have approached it by default, without thinking about it. And that’s part of why I think it’s interesting, because the human brain is so powerful. It’s natural approach is so effective. By mindfully approaching the subject like a language immersion study I am learning much faster than I anticipated.

When a child learns language she starts with a very simple base vocabulary and let context and usage inform the meaning of the new words as she encounters them. She also isn’t shy about asking for the meaning of some words if she can’t figure out the meaning on her own.

So that’s essentially what I did. I sat quietly and listened during my meetings and listened for how our systems are built and how they relate to each other. I usually waited until after the meeting to ask for clarification on some of the systems or acronyms so that I didn’t disturb the productivity of the meeting. I worried that asking these questions after the meeting rather than when they came up would detract from my ability to understand what was going on in the meeting. Actually, though, I found that steadily, day after day, I was building a more comprehensive mental picture of the systems. Every meeting I understood more and more.

I’m still not there, yet. But I’m now at a point where I feel comfortable, more or less, doing my job. This is really encouraging since I was very stressed about starting a job in a completely different discipline.

My Misdirection in “ Personal Development”

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been so worried about content production vs. consumption this year. It’s been stressful to look at the minuscule amount of content that I personally create, outside of work. “How am I supposed to develop myself into a better person if I don’t have this cathartic outlet?” I’d ask myself. But, I never really stopped to consider that the thing that is the most important is they type of content I consume, not create. And it’s not been enough Scripture.

The key to developing myself personally in the ways I want is not introspection through content creation. That’s just navel-gazing. It’s learning to emulate and trust Jesus more, and more deeply. How? Brought consumption of a Scripture. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” Matthew 4:4 ESV. As my grandfather has said, “You cannot be profoundly influenced by that which you do not know.”

Let’s Talk about Les Misérables

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Grace as a Destructive Force

Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash

For as long as I can remember I’ve loved Les Mis. My parents saw it when I was young and bought the recording. I’m not sure when I first heard the music, but that was my first exposure to Les Misérables. As I’ve grown older I’ve sought out more tellings of the story. I’ve seen multiple movies (musical and not) listened to and watched different performances of the music (live and recorded), and a year or two ago I finished the unabridged, albeit translated book by Victor Hugo himself. It is a work of art.

And like all art there’s always more to be enjoyed. But I want to just focus on one point, Valjean and his foil Javert. A foil relationship is where an antagonist is crafted in such a way that his traits highlight specific traits of the protagonist. In this instance (especially in the musical version) I think the foil is actually set up to highlight a third actor in play, Grace.

These are two men who are shown grace and respond in very different ways. Jean Valjean is a hardened convict who hates humanity because hate is the only thing he’s known. When the Bishop shows him grace even though he’s never been faced with it before, he accepts it. It upends his worldview and he becomes a new man. Javert is a strict keeper of the law, he believes that through the structures of law and society we ought to, and do, get what we deserve. He also recognizes the grace shown to him, but it does not fit into his rigid meritocratic worldview and it kills him.

From this we see something about grace. Grace is a destructive force. When we recognize grace it will destroy either our warped sense of self-deservedness or it will destroy us. Which will you let it destroy?