works of wanderlust

Category: wandering & thinking

  • who cares

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Explain a valuable life lesson you learned in 2025.

    No one cares.

    Hold up. Wait. Listen.  Whoa: I don’t mean that in a sad-sack, pity me kind of way.

    What I mean is that figuring out some perspective on the attention of others is actually, factually something that has taken me decades to put into a simple clear idea and to internalize, nearly half a century of work to break out of the patterns of my youth, and to materialize in my own mind a thought that—tho rational and clear and obvious—will still be something that it will still take me the rest of my life to ever feel comfortable settling into as a firm belief that I live by without constantly reminding myself, really: it is figuring out that no one really actually cares…

    No one is looking.

    No one is actually paying attention.

    No one is paying as much attention to you as you are.

    No one is concerned about the choices you make (inasmuch as long as those choices don’t get in their way and cause them harm or cost them money or whatever.)

    People will judge, sure. People might gossip, of course. But at the end of the day no one really actually cares enough to even think much about those things let alone put in the effort to try to stop each of us from doing and being the things we want to be.

    That can have a net negative result if people get lost down rabbit holes of weird or dangerous pursuits, sure, but the upside is that IF no one actually cares, then hell… we can all be pretty much free to create what we want to create, to draw the thing we want to draw and to sing the songs we want to sing. Anything. No one cares.

    People will pay attention, glance in our direction, leave comments, maybe even talk behind our backs, possibly orbit in our lives for a time and disrupt each of our effort to be our true selves, but no one ACTUALLY cares… at least not as much as we each think everyone does, and not with anything comparable in scale to the focus each of us puts upon our own lives.

    I spent a lot of years hesitating to make or do or say because I was brought up to think that the nattering of external commentary on the things I chose was as valuable—if not of vastly greater value—than the value I put on it for myself. But that’s not true at all.

    The reality is that unless someone has a weird sort of toxic obsession with us, which is probably way more rare than most people assume, the average person out there doesn’t really give a spit about any other average person… or us.

    Our coworkers acknowledge our value. Our friends may even like us. Our family possibly loves us. Whatever. But…

    No. One. Cares.

    Not what you choose to do and not who you choose to be.

    (And anyone who might care a bit too much isn’t worth listening to actually… so in my experience they don’t f-ing count. Micromanaging bosses. Overbearing partners. Terrible governments. Fuck em all. )

    The point being is that it is easy to get hung up wondering what people will think or say or how they will react to a job change or a life choice or the colour of your new car or the fact you stopped at the drive thru for a hamburger after work… but no one cares.

    It’s easy to assume that if you spend your evenings pursuing a hobby that you love or learn a second language or study something wild in school or write weird niche fiction online under a quirky pen name that everyone is out there is just judging and talking and wagging their fingers… but actually: no one cares.

    No one cares.

    No. One. Cares.

    And that’s a good thing. It is freeing. It leaves us to pursue being the people who we want to be.

    A lesson worth caring about. At least little. 

  • forty nine

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in terms of fitness, health, mind and body.

    Healing. 

    There was a time when, privacy be damned, I’d disclose and lament any and all of my personal ailments on a blog like this… but needless to say those days are gone.

    It’s enough for you to know that I am now in the last year of my 40s and what no one tells you when you start your 40s is that hardly anyone escapes their 40s without something on the old bod needing some fine tuning and generally more careful care. Even if you are reasonably active like me, running hundreds or thousands of klicks in a year and regularly hitting the pool and otherwise keeping generally on your feet, well, things start to wear out in this the decade leading to the half century mark… and as the kids be joking lately us “olds” get to tell everyone we’re historic and from the “1900s!” All of which means it has been a year of what I like to think of as evaluation and healing.

    This means that I have pretty much officially cut a few things from my diet.

    This also means that these days I make choices about running that are linked to avoiding injury as much as they are about finding adventure.

    This additionally means that I restarted this blog because I realize that it is part of a suite of writing that I do that contributes to a kind of invaluable mental health exercise.

    This also also means that it gets harder every day to think of myself as anything resembling “young” anymore, despite that I have a lot of friends whose ages start with a 5 or over a 6 who often jest that I’m still a young guy and to stop my complaining!

    So… ugh!

    I had to deal with the resurgence of my knee pain in 2025.

    I have been working through issues that taught me that digestive health can be a holistic experience and symptoms can manifest in ways and places you would not think are linked to your stomach and diet.

    I have had to do the hardest thing of all which is to accept that sometimes I am my own (and only) company and moral champion, and there are those rare times when no one else will have your back, even close family.

    It has been a year of growth and healing and thinking and making and being, which in a year of the world being the opposite of that has often been counter-intuitive… tho pretty rewarding in the end.

  • poetic war

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    No.

    Ugh.

    Ok. 

    I’ll bite …a little bit, for the blog.

    I was doing a little experiment the other week. I had a perfectly good reason to post a pointless video clip on social media the other day, but I didn’t want to use my main account. Nor did I want to use any of my other side accounts. So I did what any sane tech savvy nerd would do and I created a brand new account, followed no one, gave it a stupid profile name and pic that pretty much no one would associate with me, and posted my video. I did nothing special, did not share it, followed no one and did not tag it or add any meta data. It was not clever, funny, or controversial. I was merely posting it as a random clip I’d filmed to check how some function of the system was appearing. Within two hours it had received 12 likes.

    For context, we just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and I posted a few dozen curated photos representing some of my best work and amazing photography in that country, and my best post, with five hundred and fifty odd followers, got 8 likes. Eight. Just eight. Total.

    Somehow, this temporary burner account had received 50% more attention in the duration of our car ride home for a (completely random and the content was not the point) jittery eight second video of a snow plow out the front window of our car (what I just happened to be looking at while I was plotting this technology query) than for something I had purposefully shared for beauty and enjoyment …and to put a little of both out into the world. A fucking snow plow. Twelve likes.

    This really isn’t a bitter post about not getting any likes on my content. I don’t actually try to promote my stuff. I just put it out and whatever. And I really don’t even care. I’m not posting for validation. Or money. Or to be found. Or anything other than curating my own public collections of my creative work and personal giggles… whatever.

    But “likes” represent something else entirely. They represent exposure. They represent voice. They represent the attention and interests of others. They represent the choices made by programmed, unthinking, not-human algorithms, choices about who gets to see what …and when …and how frequently.

    And what most people are sharing these days happen to be things that largely represent culture and politics. And we all kind of understand that those folks… well, they are not trying to represent anything in a balanced or nuanced way. And same are even working and designing content to divide and anger us.

    Put those things together into one big brainy thought and you might get a glimpse of the major imbalance and deep illness in our culture this past year (and probably even further back). 

    I have this (probably controversial) notion that I’ve spoken aloud to a few people this past year about our culture and our political reality in 2025. It basically posits that while were all standing around here in fear of some nuclear world war three, what has happened is that the third world war has come and gone and most of us missed it.  That is, WW3 was a war of misinformation and the western world, democracy specifically, has been attacked and has lost …and now most people are wandering around in a state of post-psychic shock trauma not really wrapping their heads around that they and their families have been under literal assault and a kind of emotional and propaganda-based warfare for the last decade or so.  It didn’t ravage bodies in the physical sense, but it has destroyed institutions, collapsed trust in each other, broken relationships, and turned our path forward into one strewn with debris and rubble. It was launched by foreign states who understood that they could not win a conventional nor a nuclear war. It was fought on Facebook and Twitter and a list of other social media sites. It was launched through the traditional media who played their role as unwitting vectors of informational violence. It was bolstered by algorithms that we trusted had our best interest in mind but were really just blindly amplifying whatever seemed to be popular or match a narrative that made us each uniquely cozy and comfortable. The truth was shattered. Reality was broken. It weaponized the minds of the weak and easily-swayed. It turned friends and family into dirty bombs of radicalized falsehoods and conspiracy-laden mistruths. And even now most of us, nearly all of us, are simply in denial that it even happened… all while we keep scrolling through the same militarized platforms that caused it all in the first place and each in our own pretending that it is still all ok. 

    The battle rages unfortunately.

    That was 2025.

    Does 2026 look better for me right now? For any of us?

    Like and subscribe to find out, I guess.

  • these things are

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What object will
    forever remind you of 2025?

    One object? No. How about ten objects from the past year. Memories are not so simple these days. In no particular order…

    The Kobo eReader I bought mid-year to replace my aging Kindle marked a defiantly buy-Canadian shift away from giving all my money to American billionaires, though I still give some of it (unavoidably) that direction, I made a conscious decision to shift to a different platform for my books because… uh… terrible politics.

    I spent a lot of time at my Basement Desk this year, a place I had routinely avoided since quitting my work-from-home job in mid-2023. But in 2025 it was my coding station when I worked on my video game, the spot from where I took a bunch of online University courses, and now it’s become where I’ve set myself up a cozy writing nook.

    I got over my “I’m a biologist” anti-Fake Plants-hate and bought about ten of them to give my dark basement office a bit of colour and texture. I love plants and love botanical things, but when the option was no plants, dead plants or fake plants … well, I finally caved and chose fake plants. Uh. Thanks Ikea?

    The Aeropress Coffee Maker the Wife got me for Christmas last year became my go-to coffee device for most of 2025. It makes good coffee, pretty much equivalent to my pour over standby (in my mediocre amateur opinion) but it is plenty faster and easier to clean up. How much it features in 2026 depends on how much I stick with the coffee routine in the new year.

    Then on vacation I bought a very nice little Rice Bowl in Tokyo from an actual restaurant supply story in the cooking district. It is not a touristy gimmick souvenir, tho, but rather something kinda sorta maybe more real, and it is one of my favourite souvenirs (neck and neck in a tight race) from our recent trip. 

    That Macbook Pro I splurged on late in the year because I started doing contract work in 2025 and needed a dedicated and capable machine to do said work upon. I’ve owned a dozen computers over the years, but this is the first “my” computer that I’ve had in a while (no more family sharing) even though it is pretty much meant for doing, uh, professional work.

    Speaking of tech, I hadn’t done much with my Steamdeck for a while, leaning into playing games when I had the chance on the bigger screen and PS5, but this handheld toy makes the list because along the way of my game coding adventures this year I managed to code enough of a piece of software to boot up and be reasonably playable on my Steamdeck. That’s worthy of a mention.

    Having been that guy in orchestra who was using digital music for a few years I finally splurged and bought a Foot Pedal this year to change pages (you know, with my foot instead of my finger) and it has been game changing for orchestra and music practice. I’m no longer the only guy with his music on an iPad either.

    Oh. Right. Those Steel Toed Shoes which were my exclusive footwear working at the grocery store until about April finally got shoved in the closet for storage and hopefully I only ever need to wear them again to keep my toes safe for personal projects. Good shoes. Frustrating work.

    And finally that Mortar Board that the Kid decorated so uniquely for her high school graduation gets a special mention… and it was in the running for the solo mention had I not caved and put ten items on this list. It’s still sitting on our mantle for the moment, but it was definitely part of a memory-full day.

  • actually right

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What was your biggest achievement of the last year?

    Here it is again.

    I find I’m often getting tired of writing about my professional pursuits. And after all, sitting here penning out another post telling you all about them and how great it is going with the tech jobs is the so-called “right” answer. I’m supposed to have a shiny perfect resume. I’m supposed to have academic achievements under my belt. I’m supposed to rack up contract wins and be out her bragging about other business-type successes. At least… that’s what I’ve been railroaded to believing my whole damn life. Make lots of money. Have the perfect LinkedIn profile. Nine to five with benefits, right?

    Yet, I’m so very much realizing that I’m not that person. Not anymore, at least. Or, maybe it’s that I’ve never been him. It’s almost as tho I’m faking it most of the time, doing a solid enough job being a guy who can get shit done in technology or all the related bits and bobs in which I’ve worked for most of my life. I’m not half bad, and that might just be twenty five years of tallied up hours in that field playing out as raw experience, yet… it’s all a mask.

    See I left that world two and a half years ago… even tho the gravitational pull of it almost daily makes it seem like I will never fully escape. I walked away from “The Career” and tried to be something else, and after two and a half years I feel like I’m still explaining that to everyone, even myself.

    I panicked in my transition and I took a University program in Business Analysis last spring, finishing it up as the summer arrived. It looks nice on the resume, but until I actually lock a job in it it doesn’t mean much more than that I passed some tests and did well on some assignments. And I never really knew if it is actually what I wanted to do, but it seemed… again… like the “right” thing to do. 

    I started a small business, too, and most people in that position would be exclusively occupied with making that work and finding new customers and building and growing and on and on. I do work but it’s more just like a part time job I have, sitting over here on the desk, that makes me feel less disconnected from the world in which I was mired for multiple decades. It felt like the next “right” step in whatever this adventure was, but now it’s just there taunting me.

    But then what did I accomplish this year? Actually.

    I didn’t sell any art.

    I didn’t finish my novel.

    I didn’t complete the code for my game.

    I could give you a very unsatisfactory answer to all this tho and it goes as such: this year I’ve broken down the problem even further and revealed the raw skin under the lifetime of metaphorical wounds. I am starting to get it. I am starting to actually understand myself and the purpose of where I need to go, what I need to do, and who I need to be: it’s more than the “right” answer of a professional such and such or a guy in this or that job. It’s bigger, at least for me from my perspective it is. It may mean almost nothing to anyone else, but then everyone has their own to worry about don’t they. But I am figuring out mine… which has never been entirely clear even though I’ve always been told what the “right” answer is.  But then the right answer was never a very good answer, and figuring that bit out might just be my biggest achievement of the last year.