Link Rodeo! April 19, 2025
Toilets, baseball, a quote about how your imposter syndrome might be accurate, and more.
Right now we have literally a house full of artists. My daughter is celebrating her birthday and many of her friends from the art department have come over. There’s conversation about grad school, about galleries, about getting work done in small spaces, about other artists. And there’s talk about dating and childhood broken bones and TV and college professors. It’s a birthday party!
I’m closing out week seven of unemployment. Friends and acquaintances keep asking how my job search is going, and I tell them that I’m applying, and waiting. And waiting. And mostly waiting some more. I’m just about at the point where I have to decide whether to lower my standards or broaden into different fields. (If anyone has any interesting suggestions, I’m all ears.) But the weird part is that I’m not feeling particularly stressed about it.
In fact, I have been happier this past month than I have been in years. My previous jobs have been high on drama, most of it manufactured. Maybe I was spoiled in my years teaching, but in my experience, the corporate world is full of lots of petty annoyances and gossip and people trying to game the system. Boring. With that (and mostly the news) out of my system, my worldview is pretty rosy right now.
I will get a job that pays my bills.1 I’m applying to jobs nearly every day. It’s fine. One of them will work out. But—and this is the good part—I’m also writing every day. I’m doing a poem every day, and I’ve got some podcasts all recorded, and I write a little mini-essay-thing every day. I go up the canyon or to the lake and sit and write and think. And I read. My days are full, almost busy. It’s good. When I sign off that all is well, I mean it.
Anyway, here’s a few things that you might find interesting, if you’re looking for something interesting to read (or listen to):
I have a whole posse of nephews who text each other using Shavian, a system of alternative English spelling. They’ve tried to encourage me to learn it and text them in it. I have resisted. I think I want them to read this article about simplified English spelling systems throughout history.
This is an article about toilets. You may find yourself thinking that toilets are a gross topic, and that you wouldn’t want to read about them. I get it, and yet I read and enjoyed this investigation into the world of low-flush toilets, and why modern toilets are marvels of engineering. Also, why if you’re flushing multiple times on a regular basis, you’ve got an old toilet and it’s time to upgrade.2
The Memory Palace has been on my list of favorite podcasts for, I don’t know, probably a decade. I’m an unabashed Nate DiMeo fan. I’m also a baseball fan (My teams are the Red Sox, the Padres, and anyone who happens to be playing against the Yankees). This episode takes a while to unfold, and so don’t quit in the middle. It’s only like 10 minutes long. Just sit down, take a break, and listen to this experience from Willy Mays’ life, called “Teammates.”
This week I wrote a little essay about finding birds (and really about how we experience nature, or anything), a podcast analyzing Shakespeare’s sonnet #2, and I did another reel with a reading of that sonnet while I walk in the snow.
Susanna Kaysen is famous for one book Girl, Interrupted, which I have not read. But I have read her book Far Afield which was excellent. In Far Afield she tells the story of Jonathan, a graduate student in anthropology who goes to the Faroe Islands, learns the language, and lives among the Faroese people for a year. She describes their lives and homes, their diet and their whale hunts, and in the end made me never want to move to the Faroe Islands—not because it sounds unpleasant but because it seems impenetrable. If you’re not Faroese, the book seems to say, you won’t ever feel comfortable in the Faroe Islands. Anyway, this quote here comes early in the book, when the main character is coming to grips, in the loneliness of his first days in a foreign land, with the gap between who he really is and who he has always dreamed he might be. I know this might be construed as kinda depressing, but I actually find it liberating that I’m not alone in discovering that I am who I am:
A terrible question, which had never occurred to him before, presented itself: If his actions, words, and “self” were not the real Jonathan, then where was that Jonathan? For years he’d assumed that a finer, smarter, more capable Jonathan lurked in the wings waiting for his cue. But what was the cue? And what evidence did he have that the Other Jonathan was going to make an appearance?
Jonathan sat up in bed, transfixed by a new possibility: the Other Jonathan didn’t exist.
As I write this, tomorrow is Easter.3 Tomorrow we will be thinking of Jesus and eating chocolate and ham. We’ve got a forecast of sun and a temperature of the low 60s. It is also my granddaughter’s birthday, and we’ll be celebrating her and Jesus and my daughter’s birthday and just the joy of being our family and the weather and all the good things.
I hope that you have many, many good things to celebrate, too.
All is well,
Jeff4
Maybe with your help? If you’re hiring or if you know of something, please holler.
At my house, it is time to upgrade. I did not know that we needed to upgrade until I read this article. Once I have a job and a couple hundred bucks available for home improvement, I’m going to buy a new toilet.
There’s a series of posters at the Kimball Tower at BYU about Holy Week. There’s a poster for Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. They have a poster up for the day before Easter, which in traditional Christianity doesn’t have a name, but they’re calling it Spirit World Saturday. Which is nice and descriptive, and has the bonus that it’s alliterative. So: happy Spirit World Saturday!
I have said thank you to the subscribers a number of times before, and I’m going to say it again: thank you! Do you know anyone else who might find it mildly amusing or interesting? Please forward it on to them, and tell them that they should subscribe, too.