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I want to watch Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway. If I still lived in New York, I’m sure that I would have already. I love one-person shows and admire the insane ability of one person to carry an audience for an hour or more.

One thing that the show has given me despite not having watched it is the reminder that there are, indeed, many brilliant things; that life has many brilliant moments. There are at least a million according to the show.

1. Ice cream
2. Water fights
3. Staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV
4. The color yellow
5. Things with stripes
6. Rollercoasters
7. People falling over

Those are the first brilliant things shared in the show. I don’t want someone else’s brilliant things though, I want my own brilliant things. I’ve started a (so far, tiny) list on this website, and I’ll add to it… well… forever, I guess.

It’s nice to think of things to add to the list, and it’s nice to read the list back from time to time. To be reminded in the moments that feel less brilliant of all the moments—the many moments—that feel particularly brilliant.

It’s 20:09 here in Oakland, California. Sun is setting and I’m glancing at it through the window as I write this. Too bright still, so now I’m seeing purple blobs everywhere.

I saw an ad earlier for a piece in the Atlantic by Alan Lightman (which, cool name) titled The Ordinary Miracle of Existing. Underneath it said “being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience” and, well… isn’t it?

I saw the ad when scrolling mindlessly on Instagram, feeling the weight of a week that felt sort of off. Feeling sorry for myself maybe. Feeling stressed and a bit anxious.

I’m alive though, right?

I’m fucking alive.

It’s a miracle.

It’s a miracle that you’re here, too. That we’re here together. That we get to share this experience briefly before we’re stardust again. It’s terrifying and inexplicable but mostly it’s a miracle. You don’t expect an Instagram ad to change your day. You might expect an Atlantic essay to. I haven’t read it.

I’ll go back and forth on this. It’s a miracle to be alive but it’s okay to be stressed about things that feel small compared to death; compared to life. We need a roof over our heads. We need to eat, and to sleep, and be safe. The United States of America hasn’t heard much about social safety nets.

It’s 20:20 here in Oakland, California. Cacio is curled up next to me. The sun has disappeared behind the trees now. I want to write. All I want to do is write. You need to live to have something to write about though. Can’t only write.

I’ve got to pick up dinner. I’ll maybe finish a bit of work I feel behind on. I’ll maybe read something. Maybe write some more. Maybe sleep. I don’t know. It’s been a long week.

I hope you feel alive today.

A weird few days, not feeling myself. The days have gone quickly and everything has just sort of been more… difficult? For no particular reason. Maybe I’m just having a long, boring recovery from being sick. I’m always incredibly irritated by that. Just let me be sick or let me be healthy. Half-sick is the worst kind of sick. Not even half, just 15% or something. Look at me, just complaining about life. Sometimes it’s difficult to avoid being British—the world’s best complainers.

Head hurts.

Back hurts.

Eyes heavy.

Moving slow.

Behind on everything.

I should be thankful, really. I have plenty to be thankful for. There’s some sort of luxury in having plenty to be thankful for but choosing to loudly complain anyway. I’ve always had something to be thankful for, so I guess I’d never be able to complain if that was the rule, and what kind of life would that be? A good one, probably, but who can really say.

On that note, I’ll get off the internet, because I don’t think I’m going to find my joy here today. I think I might find it outside, or with my family, or laying down in a cool room for a moment. Really, almost anywhere but the internet.

I wasn’t feeling great about myself today, after a day where my brain felt totally scattered. Heading out on the dog walk, I was ready to mope around the neighborhood and be slightly annoyed by everything. Instead, I decided to smile, to notice everything Cacio was doing, and to feel grateful for the walk. Annoyingly, sickeningly, it mostly worked. It still surprises me that forcing yourself to smile can just make you feel happier. Like, what a weird little cheat. Glad it works though.

Missed a couple days there, but I’m back. Between getting sick and hay fever, I’m feeling totally wiped out. A good Saturday with friends planning adventures and watching a show; a lazy Sunday where I woke up late, took a few naps, and tried to recover a bit. After a busy day, even writing this feels pretty effortful, and I’ve got a whole evening to figure out.

I’m feeling some sort of itch to change what this blog looks like again, I’m just not sure what that change should be. Maybe it’s just that I need to push through and write more, or try to push projects forward so that there’s more to write about. Nothing highlights how relentlessly similar most days are to one another more-so than keeping a daily journal.

I’m almost surprised that for months I could sit down and write something sort-of novel every day. It ended up feeling sort of meh after a while, but I’m almost certain I could do it for months longer if I needed to. Maybe that’s what some writing careers are like, just churning out an only-okay idea on a regular basis. I don’t think I have the patience.

Maybe I should be finding more inspiration in the every day; in the mundanity and repetitiveness of it all. There is something beautiful in it, and I think I find comfort in it, but I suppose that doesn’t mean it would be fun to write about every day. I should re-read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and learn how to really notice. May we all notice like Annie does.

With my last bit of Codex allowance for the day, I asked for a script that would find the most common words and phrases across all of the posts on this blog so far. I liked the two-word phrases best, and I asked for the top 10:

• every day (103)
• morning pages (69)
• feel like (58)
• new york (36)
• feels like (34)
• first time (28)
• daily blog (28)
• felt like (25)
• something like (22)
• try hard (21)

Clearly I write about this blog, on this blog, quite a lot—103 mentions of “every day,” and I don’t think I’m surprised. If you write every day, some days are harder. On the days you can’t think of what to write, write about writing.

Yes I understand what I’m doing here.

Thanks for checking.

Bye now.

Today I moved my cursor over the boundary of a sidebar in some UI hundreds of times at different speeds. Designers ship where I work, and a designer had opened a pull request adding a tooltip to sidebar handles to teach users keyboard shortcuts and let them know they they could drag to resize. Looked great, very useful. We should ship it.

I realized how completely insane it is to be a designer of things for screen though, because there was just one thing that was bugging me: the tooltip appeared too quickly for me. I got a flash of tooltip when I crossed the boundary, at cursor-moving speeds I’d consider normal enough. It was maybe… 150 milliseconds from feeling great.

To designers making for screens, this will sound totally reasonable I think. I think it will sound reasonable that I crossed the boundary hundreds of times, too. To other folks, it probably sounds absolutely mad. Who cares about this tiny detail? Who will even notice? I suspect once enough of them accumulate, roughly “everyone.”

It reminded me of Ira Glass talking about adding 100 milliseconds more space between one piece of audio and the next. About the smallest of differences in when a piece of music starts when scoring the piece. Each one small, but they all add up—or at least he hopes they do. Maybe no one cares; maybe no one will ever notice.

It’s both unreasonable and beautiful to care about these details. Life is pretty short, and yet we spend a lot of it obsessing over the smallest details when it comes to things that we enjoy, and that we want others to enjoy. Yours could be about cooking, or gardening. I wish for everyone that they care enough about something.