In other news – the car is fixed, I picked it up today, and the guy named Ricky whose wife hit it and drove away took care of it. They even cleared the old fogged-up headlights even though they didn’t really have to do it – and it’s so nice at night!
The Uber driver, Mohamed, is returning my work phone that I lost.
We really truly must trust in inherent goodness of strangers – it makes for a better world when we all do it.
“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
-Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)
We talked a lot about her at tonight’s coop shift while I was bagging and labeling raisins (Thompson, black, org.).
I need to read more of her.
A conference call with a client tomorrow – their phone systems were down today, and hopeful that they’d be restored tomorrow.
Also, because of the gross mismanagement, their beautiful city is going to run out of water on April 12, and they are going to shut off everyone’s tap, and everyone will have to line up at designated water distribution points to collect 6.6 gallons per person per day.
But we will be talking about our system’s features and adding more user licenses. Not about the water.
kindred spirits who you should never say a word to
People in ride-share taxis who ignore your hello as you sit next to them.
thin places
I think I remember a place like that. Total middle of nowhere empty place in the mountains near a large Asian city, where I met the same taxi driver – twice – I think there was only one taxi in that village – who spoke unnervingly fluent English and said he worked in intelligence services during the time when they were at war with us. That place was a little spooky, but not in a bad way.
Working from home today, but so don’t want to work!!!!!
In my note to Mark Zuckerberg (which you probably want to read first), I urged his team and other technologists to reimagine their products as “practice spaces” — virtual places where people practice the kinds of acts and relationships they find meaningful.
How to Design Social Systems (Without Causing Depression and War)
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
The rain ended
tinfoilparachute 