ReMarkable

Today is my Dad’s 82nd birthday. Happy birthday, Dad!

I called him up, wished him a happy birthday and we spent 16 minutes and 49 seconds talking about the rainstorm we had in Spokane yesterday. 1 inch of rain in less than 20 minutes.

We talked about how it reminded me of being in an earthquake in Seattle in 2001. 15 seconds of excitement and wonder, followed by 15 seconds of awe, followed by 15 seconds of wishing for nothing other than to have the shaking stop. The timeline yesterday was a little more drawn out but it followed the same pattern: childish glee at the amount of water falling from the sky, followed by amazement at how quickly the street in front of my house turned into a sizable creek, followed by the fervent desire for the rain to stop before someone got killed.

We talked about how the rain reminded me of a couple rainstorms I witnessed when I lived in Florida. Not just sheets of rain moving across the lawn, not just blankets, but duvets stuffed with down comforters of rain. Thick. More water in the air than air.

Here’s what we didn’t talk about: how Florida rain is an unusual thing for Spokane. How a warming atmosphere holds more water vapor than a cooler atmosphere. How flooding will be a more common thing going into the future. How we humans need to curb our emissions, drastically so. Now.

My Dad is 82.

As a parent, that’s primarily what you do in the early years. You’re a caregiver. You feed, bathe, clothe, transport to medical appointments, etc. Every basic caregiving task falls to you. That’s your life.

But then, at certain point, kids generally start doing most of those things on their own. So I had to get a new job.

Rather than a caregiver, I find myself being the giver of cares.

I know an adorable young man. I have great hope for his future. And yet, his most consistent contribution to any conversation these days flows in the vein of “I don’t care.” It turns out that this line has many synonyms: Cool (said in a completely flat, even tone). Mhmm (again, no vocal inflection). That’s so great. So on and so forth.

So it’s now my job to pass along to him those things that are worth caring about. And yes, kiddo, you are right. There are things that aren’t worth caring about. Many of them. But teaching how to filter out the things that are worth caring about and giving them the attention they deserve, that’s the parenting task for today. And it makes caregiving look super easy.

Well, damn. Within a blink of the eye (on the geologic time scale) of me quitting Facebook because of my issue with the company’s seeming inability to treat its users fairly, this comes out: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/opinion/delete-facebook.html

In short, the author argues that Facebook users shouldn’t be faced with quitting or not quitting the platform based solely on privacy or ethical reasons. Rather, it is a case of whether lawmakers will step up and exercise their regulatory powers or not. By making the decision to quit Facebook rather than lean on my elected representatives to do their job, well… hmmm. That’s a good point. But for me, it comes down to who my elected representatives are. While I trust Senators Murray and Cantwell to land on the right side of the decision, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, my House representative and the closest connection to me and my life, well, she is a complete loser on this (and most other) regulatory issues. So… yes, the current Facebook issue could be and should be dealt with at a regulatory level. But so should climate change.

Until such a glorious day arrives, I just have to do what I can do at the individual level and carry on. And it seems, unless I’m mistaken here, that that glorious day might arrive sooner if the companies I’m railing against have less clout and less money to peddle their influence. That’s where individual action comes in.

It’s true. The human brain is awesome at doing a lot of things. It also tends to fail (sometimes spectacularly) in some predictable ways. Read on.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/24-cognitive-biases-that-are-warping-your-perception-of-reality/

Well, it finally happened. I was clinging to the edge of the Facebook cliff, looking for every reason to hang on. I really did enjoy using the platform. I liked staying in loose contact with a whole host of people that I don’t see on my day-to-day ramblings around town. Whose kids are graduating from high school, who is traveling to Italy, who is getting engaged? Those sorts of things.

But the Facebook B.S. just kept rolling and I finally had to pull the plug. Beyond the shenanigans of Facebook’s C-suite of decision makers, here’s the thing that bothered me the most about Facebook: it forced me to communicate in the same way to my co-workers as I would to my Mom as I would to my kids’ friends as I would to my college roommates. That’s silly. And unnatural. Each of those populations needs and deserves its own dialect and tone. Will this site solve that problem? Probably not, but at least I can deal with those issues and not have to worry about how complicit I am in Facebook’s latest round of moral shortcomings. I don’t like to worry and there are enough things in this world to worry about that are outside my control that it strikes me as somewhat reasonable to scratch one — just one! — thing off my list of things to worry about.