Secret to happiness: "If you often find yourself eating food you like in the company of people you like, you have probably done something right with your life."

Feb: You Wary

February 26th, 2024

One pretty much has to be wary these days given the state of the world; unease is pretty much the baseline existence. Even amidst pleasantness, I can be out enjoying some unseasonably warm weather, and then stop to think “Why is the weather unseasonably warm?”*

And yes, a lot of the constant wariness is political, but everything is political these days, from what you eat and drink, to what you read, to certainly my two most recent columns, whether I’m writing about Black History Month or the increasingly distressing killing spree of Johnny Murderface.

These remain the proverbial** “Interesting Times”, and certainly anyone following the news regularly is already exhausted and doesn’t need me to recite*** a litany of ways in which things are bad. I am attempting to stay afloat and find the good, which for me has largely been good food and video games. My mother reminds me that her method of finding the good is to do good, but she has always been a kinder person than I am.

Not that I never do good — indeed, I always hope that my columns might infinitesimally bend some people’s thoughts towards a better world — but I’m much more cognizant of the old airplane maxim****, “In case of high pressure, put your own mask on first”*****, and the global forecast continues to call for ceaseless high pressure for the foreseeable future.

But I’ve got Shepard’s Pie and a Gamepass subscription, so tonight I’m doing okay, and perhaps later this week I should try to do something pro-social.

* Insert your own meme picture of a goose chasing me while asking this.

** Is a curse a proverb? I can’t really call it curseal Interesting Times. I only wish they were cursory.

*** Unless I was doing it in rhyme or something. Maybe in April.

**** “Surely you can’t be serious!”

***** People’s refusal to put on their own mask on at all is another reason things seem high pressure

Everything Is 20 Years Ago

January 17th, 2024

I no longer have a sense of time.

For years I haven’t known what day it is, aided by the fact that as a freelance writer my work is largely unrelated to the day of the week*. But I think the pandemic really kicked that into overdrive, and that combined with the natural acceleration of time due to aging**, means that I often not only don’t know what year it is, but certainly don’t know how long ago things were.

This is not an uncommon experience; many people my age feel like the 90s were just one or two decades ago, and can simultaneously feel that 2015 was so long ago that it feels like a whole other lifetime.

Regardless, one of the things about getting to this age is that many things actually were 20 years ago, as I mentioned about starting my relationship 20 years ago last month, and as I now reflect that 20 years ago this month marked the release of my first published**** book. It was, of course, a great pleasure and thrill for me to finally feel like I had a book out in the real world, published by a company (Barnes&Noble) people had even heard of, no less.

But also, the book was a collection of weird groups and the intro was all about how weird isn’t bad, you just have to find your people. The good news is, finding your people has become a lot easier these days, thanks to the Internet and whatnot*****. The bad news is, an increasingly-large swath of the country seems to believe that not only is being different bad, but that it needs to be attacked/destroyed/outlawed/erased to the point where even learning that other people exist and lead different lives and have their own joys and struggles is now controversial.

This is a damn shame, and is also largely opposed to what I’ve come to realize is my primary moral principle: “People are people.”****** Not terribly complex, but surprisingly unpopular. Still, if you’re going to live by a moral code, you could do worse. Of course, there are those who hold themselves above other people, like some kind of superman, and that reminds me that my latest column is a little Superman parody that is my favorite thing I’ve written in a while:

The Adventures of GovernMan

I know, that bird joke in the opening is ridiculous. But what can I say; bad puns are my kryptonite.

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* Notwithstanding my column deadline, natch.

** I have often thought that our experience of time accelerates at a steady rate as we age, and that there must be some analog to the calculable acceleration of gravity (9.8 meters per second, per second) to account for how time seems faster every year. Maybe years go by 9.8% faster every year? I don’t know, I’m no Einstein.***

*** Although on occasion people have remarked upon the similarity of our hairstyles.

**** Technically I think I wrote my first book in 3rd grade for a Young Authors contest, I believe it was about dinosaurs and preceded the book of birthday poems I also wrote in elementary school as a project. But I certainly wouldn’t call either published.

***** The glorious powers of whatnot are truly unmatched.

****** Consider it a condensed paraphrase of a Terry Pratchett quote I can’t seem to find about how most problems start when someone decides a certain group of people are lesser and shouldn’t really be treated like people with full rights.

The Tiniest of Celebrations

December 31st, 2023

I enjoyed a very low-key New Year’s Eve. I got to go for a walk with a few old friends in the afternoon (always a delight!), and now I am back home and my big excitement for the evening will be opening a fortune cookie.*

This is good, actually. Having established that most eventful excitements these days are negative ones, I have arranged my life to be one of quiet contentment, which is very good for me as a person, albeit not very good for me as a blogger.

Still, one advantage of being a writer is that I always have something new to share. My last column of 2023 is very well-spiced with puns, so please enjoy my Season(ing)’s Greetings. My newsletter is also moving platforms, due to the impending closure of Tinyletter, so if you’d like to get an email every two weeks or so with my latest column and various rants and rambles (with silly jokes in parentheses), then you can subscribe to my new Buttondown newsletter here:

Powered by Buttondown.

That will sign you up for semi-monthly nonsense*** labeled “Seth Says (Parenthetical Digressions)”, which as you’d expect, will include me saying things and then digressing quite a bit. Lest I digress overmuch here in this more concise blog, I will simply bid you all a happy new year, and now I’m off to listen to my new year’s song.

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* eating the fortune cookie will be less exciting. Which doesn’t say much for fortune cookies, given my that my general appreciation of eating cookies has oft caused people to confuse me with someone blue and furry.**

** although it could just be the lack of shaving and occasional depressed mood.

*** but, like, the fun “this weasel is wearing sunglasses” kind of nonsense, and not the “can you believe this messed-up world” nonsense. Because yes, I can believe the messed-up world, and I do not like it.

Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid Of A Bomb

November 29th, 2023

A classic quote (and scene) from the original Batman movie.*

Today, I find myself needing to figure out what to do with a lot of random thoughts. They are too many and too disorganized to put in my column regularly, although irregularly this week I have put them all in my annual Thanksgiving leftovers column that uses all of my disorganized random ideas. But generally, I have slightly higher standards for my column, and those random thoughts need to go somewhere else.

I had been putting them in a semi-monthly newsletter, because I believe a torrent of my random thoughts should always be opt-in, and for the past nearly two years, had been sending it out via a service named TinyLetter. Well, I was notified today that TinyLetter will cease to exist as of February, because the company that owns it (MailChimp) wants to focus purely on monetizing newsletters, and writing-focused newsletters have gone to SubStack, so most newsletters should fall in one category or the other and the midpoint of TinyLetter will no longer be supported.

My newsletter was never intended to be monetized; quite the opposite, it was intended to give me a space away from all my paid freelance writing to rant and ramble without worrying about writing how anyone else wanted me to. So MailChimp seems like a bad fit. But while my newsletter is writing-focused, my newsletter is also pro-equality, pro-trans-rights, pro-humanity, etc., thus making it a potentially bad fit for Substack, which as reported has a bit of a Nazi problem.

So I’m not exactly sure where my newsletter will end up***, but I will certainly be posting about it when I come to a decision — which I guess will happen no later than February. Meanwhilst, this is the lull month between Thanksgiving and Christmas that always feels like not real time****, so I bid you all a happy holiday season, a reason to finds things pleasin’, and not too much freezin’ and sneezin’.

* I love Michael Keaton as much as the next person**, but no, I mean the ORIGINAL Batman movie.

** I mean, obviously depending on who the next person is.

*** Or if it will end. Ulp!

**** Certainly, my clients rarely seem to book real time during this span.

All Hollow’s Eve

October 31st, 2023

I bet some of you are thinking, “Doesn’t he know it’s actually all hAllow’s eve, hence hAllow e’en?”*

But frankly when it comes to this particular evening, pumpkins are a lot more likely to be hollowed than hallowed, unless your name is Linus Van Pelt. And most spooky stuff is more often associated with hollow than hallow. Hallow always sounds like a British chap greeting someone, whereas the dark empty void of the hollowness brings spooky things. The headless horseman wasn’t in Sleepy Hallow. It’s Hollow.** The horror movie is Hollow Man, my favorite metroidvania is Hollow Knight. etc.

Speaking of Halloween, my latest column has some unexpected costume ideas, so although it’s probably too late for tonight, you can get a head start on next year’s planning if you are a ridiculous person.***

Of course, probably more important is my previous column about the meaning of life, but then again, is anything important? Maybe not, maybe it’s all empty, and there’s something sacred about that. Hollow, Hallow, Goodbye.

* Okay, technically I suspect very few of you think using words like “hence” and “e’en”, but a) I do, and b) even if you don’t, you may have had a differently-phrased but similar thought.

** “It’s -Hedley-.”

*** Ridiculous people are my target audience anyway.

Ad Astra Per Aspera

September 6th, 2023

It’s difficult to get to the stars.

The other month I subscribed to PC Gamepass in order to finally play Psychonauts 2 (great game, even if I still prefer the original), and then I realized that Gamepass subscribers can play Starfield for free. I definitely want to play Starfield, so I downloaded the 120 gig pre-install. But it requires 16 gigs of memory, and I only had 8.

My computer was having memory crashes anyway, so it seemed like a fine time for a memory upgrade at my friendly local shoppe. Things are running more smoothly since upgrading, but it turns out Starfield also requires an SSD, while I still have an HDD. So I put in an order for an SSD, and that should also improve the speed of my computer for all my other activities.

And good thing, because Starfield will have to be delayed, since it also requires a newer graphics card than I have, and unlike more memory and an SSD (both of which will be a boon to my regular computer use), I really can’t justify* a new graphics card on my old computer. At least the memory and SSD should be transferable to a new computer when I finally upgrade.

Meanwhile, things should be slightly faster while I’m browsing the web. And speaking of which, don’t miss my latest newsletter and column about spiders.**

*I mean, of course I could justify it by saying there’s a climate crisis and covid and we could all die at any time so shouldn’t I be playing the best and newest video games? It turns out, potential imminent demise is an easy way to justify lots of things.

**Hey, there’s a spider on your back! I guess maybe if that was true for one person reading this, at least the warning wasn’t in vain.

A Lovely Day

July 30th, 2023

I’m trying to soak in and enjoy the weekend, made much easier by two factors: The pleasantly cool weather we’ve had (compared to previous weeks), and the fact that my weekend has a lot of free time since I have no big freelance projects at the moment. (Obviously, enjoying my life does require money, so it’s good that I have had some smaller freelance projects in the previous weeks and most recently have been doing some interesting ghostwriting work for a long-term client, but this weekend landed empty which is fine by me.)

My intentionally uncut yard has continued being visited by various wildlife, so this weekend has also seen visitations from a cardinal, a butterfly, and a bunny rabbit, all of which I have spent some time just staring out the window at from a few feet away. It’s nice to just soak in the majesty of the natural world every once in a while.

This is ever more important for me to keep in mind since I’m the type of person who could easily assemble a big list of complaints. I’m also the type of person who could make them all rhyme and put them into a song, so if you’d like to sing along, here are My Least Favorite Things.

As I was just saying in my most recent newsletter, we all have the urge to complain from time to time, but it’s really much better for everyone if you can at least make your complaints entertaining. Admittedly, I’m probably biased as a humor columnist. But can you imagine if every town meeting had all complaints presented with some entertainment value, humor and/or rhyme? That could be amazing. I’d be tempted to wish for it if I weren’t distracted by this ancient monkey’s paw I just found…

No Rest For The Wicked Tired

June 26th, 2023

With apologies to Ogden Nash, how can anything vincit omnia // when it can’t even beat insomnia?

I had basically no sleep two nights ago, and a sub-par sleep last night, and I am very glad that I had mostly already written my upcoming column and only had to put some final tweaks on it today, because my brain is not function* at 100% capacity.

I think the combination of high heat and early morning construction sounds certainly doesn’t lend itself to restful slumber, and I’m already given to weirder sleep schedules when my partner is away. At least I’m still managing to make myself tasty food. The other night I made a modified migas, because you can’t go wrong with Mexican cooking. We all want more tacos.

And today I made fried rice. Even though it had the red of Sriracha, orange of carrots and peppers, yellow of pineapple, and green of peas, the lack of the latter half of the rainbow means it doesn’t reasonably qualify as “Pride rice”, thus denying me the thematic segue I wanted for my most recent column, about how Pride Month is the American Ideal.

Although I guess I cheated and just did it anyway. And really, what’s more American than that?

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*And no, I didn’t even mean to leave off the -ing there. This footnote is being added retroactively** to explain that’s just how bad it is.

**This footnote is being added proactively, before I finish typing the above sentence.

The To Don’t List

May 27th, 2023

I guess an actual to don’t list would be a list of things not to do, like “To Don’t Today: Gamble, Get Drunk, Die of Heat Exhaustion”. Apparently I should just avoid going to Vegas.

But what I was thinking about was not things that I mean to not do, but things that I mean to do and then don’t, which is how my to do list ends up functioning. Basically, anything due for a client gets added to my calendar and is always completed on time because I am a professional, so that takes priority. Then I have various other time-sensitive commitments or plans which I also add to my calendar, and those tend to get done as well.

And then there’s the third category of things, which are things I sort of mean to get around to eventually but there’s not really a hard deadline on them, nor is there any external party* awaiting progress reports. And at the end of a day where I’ve been working on the first two categories of thing, I don’t really want to do more work, I want to just sit back and enjoy some leisure-time reading.

Currently I’m on book 62 of Bleach, because I read the first few and I’m a completionist. And I dunno, there’s something nice about finally reading all these big popular manga serieseseses.*** But also, it means that “find person who will fix roof siding” is pushed back another week.

In my defense, that’s an item I’ve actually tried repeatedly to address, the fact that a single piece of siding just under the roof has fallen off, but the roofers say it’s a siding problem, and the siding people won’t take jobs unless they’re re-siding a whole house, and the general contractors only get back to me when the 95 moons of Jupiter are all in perfect alignment. And the ones who have gotten back to me won’t fix that anyway.

So at some point I should probably call another dozen places, but it’s not going to happen today, and tomorrow’s not looking too good either****.

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*The only parties I throw are internal parties.**

**Sadly, sometimes my stomach throws an internal party and I’m not invited but things get a bit too raucous. Then I yell at my stomach, “Keep it down!” That’s my acidic wit. I can’t help it, it’s just a reflux.

***I believe the correct plural is “seriespodes”.

****In terms of calling people, that is. In terms of enjoying a long weekend, tomorrow is looking great.

National Poetry Month

April 22nd, 2023

I guess I could write this whole blogpost in rhyme,
But conceivably that would take up too much time,
Unless I just type straight away and don’t edit,
Okay I guess I’ll do just as I said it.
I’m writing a poem every day (this won’t count)
By the end of the month 30 is the amount
Of new poems I’ll produce, which to make very clear
Is more than I produce in the rest of the year.
Although most of these new poems don’t rhyme and don’t meter,
Thus making them less cool for your average reader
Expecting a poem to sound like Dr. Seuss,
(Even though my poem senses have gotten more loose
Over time, while my jeans have only gotten tighter.
Just kidding, I’m sweats only now. I’m a writer!)

And anyway, even my brand newest column
Is in rhyme this month (though it is a bit solemn)
It’s an important topic, and though it’s not fun,
It’s a fact that we all need to face: It’s The Guns.
You may be rhymed out after reading this blog,
Which I guess is my fault. That’s an “oops” from me, dog.
But it’s only one month every year that it happens,
And hey, it could be worse, at least I’m not rappin’
Although if I did it would have better flow,
Since I no longer rap Seuss (I did long ago),
And then speaking of my raps, I’m once again sharin’ the
Multi-award-winning Hamilton parody
That I co-wrote with Sam Hammersley and
Thom Mesrobian, honestly it’s pretty grand,
So as musicals go, a political one,
I can recommend this, and it’s called Simpleton!

Otherwise, things continue on here much the same,
Eating tasty food, Genshin Impact is the game,
And I’m writing freelance for the clients that pay
(So if your friends need great writing, send them my way)
That’s about all that needs to be said in this post,
So I bid you good day, and some cheese on your toast.