Ask and I will answer

A grab bag of issues and postlets for the new year and beyond.

Happy birthday to me and everyone else

December 30, 2022 was my 80th birthday anniversary. I started writing a post and didn’t finish it or publish it. It was called “Happy birthday, to you, me, and everyone else”

Someone suggested that I publish my unfinished posts, label them DRAFT and finish them later. Good idea. I’m doing it.

There’s a drafts tab on my home page and if you click it right now, you’ll see there are no drafts. Whoops! Too late. There is something posted

But soon

Happy (belated) blogiversary

Dec 31, 2022 was this blog’s 10th blogiversary. Substack does not give me a post count AFAIK, but according to my blog’s sitemap, I have written 634 posts. (The number will change as soon as I publish this. I will not update this post to reflect that and future changes). Before I switched to Substack, I’d written 735 according to the count that blogger gives me, so maybe that’s right.

Here’s a link to the first post I wrote on this blog. I said these things:

I was a teenager once. Really. I knew what it would be like to get old back then, the same way I knew everything back then.

I knew what old was. It was thirty. When you hit thirty, your life was pretty much over. And then I got to be thirty, and I found out it wasn't over. It was just starting. And I realized that my teenage self was an arrogant idiot.

Now, at 70, I realize my thirty-year-old self was an idiot. And my forty-year-old self.

One of the things I’ve told our kids repeatedly: “If you don’t look back on what you were doing five years ago and think that a lot of it was stupid, then you haven’t learned much in the last five years.”

Here’s a screenshot of the photo of Nana, from that post. The one on the post is better.

What do you want me to write about?

A while back, I wrote this post about mortality with this kind of neat graphic animation:

(Note to self—now that I am 80, maybe update it?)

In the post, I recalled a conversation with one of my SBMs John. Given my increasingly short time left, I was trying to figure out what to work on.

And, John pointed out, I was most likely thinking about it the wrong way—trying to figure it out by myself, which is typically my style. If I had a short time, I’d start by contacting the people I most cared about, telling them how much time I had left, and ask them what they’d want me to do in my remaining time that would be most valuable.

And, John pointed out, the people who know me well might suggest things that I wouldn’t have thought of by myself. It was not just something that they wanted, and that I would not have known, but things that I had forgotten that I wanted and now would have my last chance to get or do.

It was a brilliant idea, and I promptly—didn’t do much. I think I might have asked and then got distracted, whatever.

So here I’m going to ask readers to add something in the comments saying what they’d like. I won’t guarantee that I will do what you want, but I do guarantee that I will answer you. Unless I’m dead. Then, I will try, but no guarantees.

If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like to comment in blogs, send me an email. You can find my email address here.

Change the name of the blog?

I don’t know. What do you think?

Pimping for subscribers?

I’m going to put one of those subscribe buttons here but with a lot of ambivalence.

I have a draft post about how subscribers are a pain in the ass (not any of you, I’m talking about future subscribers.)

I’ll try to figure it out. In the meantime, click it if you want.