Envelope / Develope

In one of my technical wanderings I stumped on Paul Graham's " Life is short " essay. The real title should be "eliminate waste and bullshit from your life", which happens to be one of my rummages for a while. It so happens to look at my interactions with other people and introduce in them a third person (me, as an observer to my interaction), then or later and ponder at the time what is bringing me the whole discussion with them, is any joy of having time around them? Sadly for some of my social interactions there is still a lot of waste and technical verbosity which does not fulfill my goal for authenticity and meaningful conversation. Unfortunately some of my conversant counter-parts are totally unaware of the deep habits they are living their life, or the mental representations we are rounding whenever we talk. The same blurbs are starting well in advance, you have heard them several times. It might be as well my not-confrontational style, to not cut the bu...

Dating around fifties I met this surprising middle age single woman. In incredible shape, independent and recently grand mother. And it blew me away. I wanted to hug her, just to feel the pulse, the vital force pushing a single mom to look as she looked, warm, smiling and not bitching about her life. It is rare not to blame life or people around you for your failures. When you survive life's blows and come back smiling you have me in your corner!! For some inexplicable reason all my personal achievements diminished and were dwarfed by her accomplishments. And I am a widowed dad, and everybody says I am doing an incredible job, proud of my little girl and of our efforts to live a meaningful life - whatever that means for us. But her questions are giving me pause, sometimes. Recently Emma, my daughter, came back from school with a sad face saying "we are the only ones without a normal family" and suddenly the onus was on me - why can't I find a...

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash    Hey Marci, Just to rephrase you, I cannot say exactly where are you in my book but definitely in the 5 nines based on BMI and how you look. But these factors may not be on my conscious criteria when I meet women. For sure I don't meet women who cannot enjoy an outdoor activity - and people around me know that - and not having the BMI within acceptable norms. Even then, sometimes the spell bursts when they open their mouth.  I half-jokingly accepted Adriana's challenge to see other women in US just because my sieving rate is quite high. More so, I don't actively do it (maybe I should?), I let things/life unfold. What I can definitely say is that you impressed me and it is not happening frequently (maybe because I am a Sagittarius). And even in those rare cases my rationale/analytical mind constructs hypotheses why I should turn around and keep looking, which I did after our first encounter - and the dist...

You stop and look back, in time.  I have this image in mind, where the portrait of a person is taken when she is half-turning her body towards the camera. It seems like her life is going forward and the portrait is just a step-back in time, literally. It froze that moment, where the spirit is paused but the life continues without you really participating. It is not my contraption, is a signature of many ads and commercials, but the significance seemed fit for my post. Do you have doubts about your life, about your decisions which were not yours, in reality? The agency problem came back to me when my daughter announced she is making her own choices, from now on. She's six. Tough to argue! When was the worst case of day-dreaming in your career, what was the decision made out of fear or just inertia pushed you in? How did you escape, do you (now) recognize the pause in the brain waves and do you jump in a repetitive mechanics of your body, just to get rid of the obsessive feeling...

Duolingo is a nice application I used to open everyday, until I felt betrayed by the games the company is playing but also because I reached a plateau where my level was not advancing at the same pace. From that moment I reached back to normal books to continue my quest of learning another language. On the way I identified the real reasons the app is failing for large categories of people - learning is not the same for everybody. So here is my journey and the house of cards motivation collapse which lead to a "meeh" kind of approach for this type of application. My native language has a Latin origin, that means it is close to Italian, Spanish and has many similarities with French. I decided to learn Spanish and jumped on the bandwagon with the lessons every single day. And here I hit some of the app learning problems: the subjects of the sentences are of no value for real life giving me points or gems is a real turn-off; gamification is for certain group segments if I c...