What I am thinking.
what am i thinking?
It's so expensive to own a home. Well, to purchase a home. Well, these days it is. Jordan and I are looking to buy a home, something which we've saved for aggressively over the past 5 years, and we are consistently disheartened to find that the prices of the homes we're looking at have doubled, and occasionally tripled, over the course of the past decade. Houses that sold for $250,000 in 2013 are regularly selling for $700,000 today. It hurts to inherit such a painful obstacle.
These houses aren't worth more, in reality. They haven't improved. Their prices are the pure reflection of a general agreement among people. The people have spoken on their value. Their offers inform. And how does a price decline, then? The people must agree, and that must start somewhere.
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I have negative feelings about work travel. It's common for people to talk about their work travel as if it's some fancy thing that makes them interesting. Perhaps it really does for some, but I think the majority of us other travelers are just tired in the airport holding a branded bag, missing our families, and dreading arrival at yet another office building. Maybe that's just me though. Either way, I came away from this most recent bout of travel feeling positive about the whole ordeal. I had meaningful interaction with coworkers. I had fun. I wasn't expecting it. So, here are some notes-style stories to chronical some of the fun, and some of the other things too.
Most days around lunch time, I'll forego food for a walk through the woods near my house. There's generally time for food later, but the forest is irreplaceable. I make my way along the trails, my eyes glued to some non-existent thing, turning my day over and over and over again. My feet pad along the gravel, moss, and loam, and I eventually emerge from my mind. I enter back into real presence in the world, no longer repeating my upcoming meetings to myself or reviewing the long list of deliverables before Friday. I can see the North sides of trees plastered with moss and lichen. I can smell the sweetness of growing blackberry vines. This poem is about the process of that mental shift.
Little solo tasks are some of my favorite. I can do them and release my mind to wander freely as I do. Vacuuming, doing woodwork, cooking - they're mental doorways into other worlds. This poem was born from one of those little solo tasks. It may seem like I'm preparing dinner, but in fact, I'm far, far away.
This topic is nonsense, but I can't stop thinking about it. Most of the things I can't stop thinking about turn out to be nonsense at some point. It seems to be a matter of when, in the lifetime of the thought, I realize its nonsensical nature. Thoughts, when dwelled upon insularly over long periods, become like words too long-considered. They lose their form, slowly becoming foreign. Saying the word "dark" for an entire day and thinking through its letters and phonemes, will eventually leave you with no attachment to its meaning whatsoever. It will feel strange in your mouth. It will fly in the face of your educated mind, leaving you to question yourself.
But you don't have to go so far with this topic. It's nonsense in the immediate. Here's some slapdash prose: My company asked me to fly out to Austin, where we have an office of about 300 people. I was to give a presentation and lead a workshop. I’ve been designing a new way for my team to take in and process work, and apparently that’s reason enough to fly over 2,000 miles for 2 days’ worth of maundering on in front of people. Business reasoning often eludes me. In any case, I was off, bearing the corporate purse for my second-ever trip to the state of Texas (the first being a half-remembered fever-dream of a family road trip). Here are some interesting things I noted along the way:
In 1989, Bill Bryson published The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. It's taken me some 33 years to find it, but I suppose I'm almost never on the cutting edge with books. Bryson's analysis of Middle America spans across time, however. His frigid, almost reptilian insults can still wither the flowers of the South. Over the course of a long road trip from his home state of Iowa down into Georgia, up to New England, and back westward, Bryson puts America into a box with his devastating quips and observations. He captures us, I'm afraid, rather well, even if the negative tack of his humor slowly wears a reader down. In reflecting on his book, I wrote the following poem.
My job rarely asks me to travel, but it did recently. Six days in advance, my departmental leaders asked me to go to San Francisco to attend a tailored software demo at SalesForce tower. I was to be there for 24 hours or less. These are some notes-style stories from that trip.
I love the outdoors. Nature has an inexplicable allure to me, persisting and pulling at me in all seasons. The Fall - I want to walk in the tunnels of falling leaves and climb stone at the perfect temperatures for sticky rubber shoes. The Winter - I want to walk in the rain with no hood and watch the tip of my snowboard casting arcs of powdery snow to each side. The Spring - I want to hike past the endless waterfalls of my home state and slide down the sides of mountains with my ice axe ready to arrest me. The Summer - I want to make my way to the places of highest elevation, appreciating their reasonable interlude between the battering of the other seasons.
A good friend of mine got married last weekend, and I was in his wedding. It was an honor to stand next to him and witness such an important moment in his life, but it wasn't easy to get there. Preston's wedding was in Durango, Colorado. I'm in Bellingham, Washington. Flights from my tiny airport to his tiny airport were immensely expensive when I was planning my trip, so I did things the hard way. I planned a 3-day trip where the first day had me driving from Bellingham to Seattle (~2 hours), flying to Denver (~2.5 hours), and driving to Durango (~7.5 hours), then the second day had me at the wedding, and the third day had me taking the same trip in reverse. I was tired almost the whole time, but I noticed some very interesting things along the way.
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January 2023
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