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I bought some wired earbuds this week and it reminded me how great simple tools can be. They don’t have noise cancellation, the cable occasionally gets caught on things, and I can’t charge my phone at the same time, but in some situations they’re just perfect. I’ve been enjoying analog tools in general. A regular watch. Pen and paper. A 35mm film camera. This shouldn’t feel like a whole thing, but it’s a thing.

When I resubscribed to the Atlantic recently, I subscribed to the print edition. It’s nice, actually, to have your choices be limited. The bottomless pit of words on the internet can be overwhelming. I’m always looking for the very best words on the internet, but I spend all of my time looking and none of my time reading. Sitting down with a magazine means that you might not be reading the very best words, but… you’re reading.

There are so many ways—increasingly; endlessly—to get exactly what you want delivered to your eyeballs or ears or mouth, but it’s so easy to get exactly what you think you want, and for it to just feel… fine. There’s something about engaging with the world more simply that can make it feel more wonderful. I’m tired of trying to find the perfect thing, and exhausted by the tools that claim to help. I yearn for a simpler time.

I was speaking with a colleague today about publishing something every day, and they said that they’d struggle because they want things to be perfect. The funny thing is, the only way I can personally get past that feeling is precisely by publishing every day.

For me, now, publishing every day is the thing I’m perfecting. The daily practice is the thing I want to get right, rather than any one individual post. I still want any essays I write to be great, but knowing that there will be hundreds of other posts takes the pressure off.

I’m also champing at the bit to write an essay now. To publish something. To write something deeper and sit in it for a while, whilst still coming back to write in this journal every day. I got a bit burned by the daily non-journal posts, but it’s coming back.

After a few weeks not writing morning pages, I also want to bring that back into my practice. It had become a negative place for me and the positive stuff overlapped with this journal too much, but there’s something missing and I want to figure out what that is.

I stopped by South Park Commons this evening to see Rasmus Andersson in conversation with Soleio. In one of my favorite answers, he talked about MeWare, ThemWare and UsWare—the idea that you could make things for yourself, for others, or for both. Rasmus has mostly worked on UsWare, and that’s the kind of stuff I like working on, too. Interesting enough that you want to use it, useful enough to others that you have enough reasons to make it. I sometimes wonder what this (public) journal is.

After a brief-ish hiatus of publishing things other than these journal entries, I’m finally going to get back to it. I think one consequence will be that this journal gets even more scrappy and temporal. I sometimes drift into article-adjacent (which is fine) but I never end up satisfied. I get caught somewhere between a quick thought and a bigger thing that I don’t actually honor with the time it would take to articulate.

I should probably create some proper space for this stuff. My one massive page with hundreds of posts is starting to strain a bit, and now that I do have hundreds of posts I sort of want them to have a better home. There’s probably a post I could write about that, to be honest. I was re-watching Wilson Miner’s great talk from Build recently, and it was a good reminder that the spaces we create on the web are important.

It’s my birthday today—4/20, which in California means that everyone seems to be celebrating me. It was a quiet birthday, just like I wanted. Aneesah, as usual, made me feel loved, and I’m feeling grateful for this life of mine. For growing old together (and growing together) with my best friend. I’ve come further than I thought I would, and have farther still to go, but the best part is all of the unknowable stuff in between. I often feel like I’m not doing enough, but reading Aneesah’s thoughtful message today reminded me of just how much has happened in the past year. It’s easy to take things for granted. It’s nice to be reminded that we should not.