At some point in my twenties, my mother mailed me a collection of letters I had begun writing as a child but never came even close to finishing. Generally, they went like this:

Dear Grandma:

How are you? I am fine.

And that was it.

​I imagine that as soon as I wrote those words, I would sit there for a minute wondering what I could possibly say to a woman in her 80s or 90s whom I barely knew. And then I’d take off—to watch Sesame Street, maybe, or to roller-skate, or to play with my parakeet.

In adulthood, I’ve gotten much better at follow-through. But Exhibit A, below, demonstrates that I’m not entirely cured of project abandonment syndrome. It’s a screenshot of blogs that I have begun to write but haven’t come close to completing.

English morphs. (Abandoned July 3, 2020.)

People often complain to me about the “misuse” of words and grammar. But the fact is, language changes constantly. That’s why we don’t speak anything like the characters in The Canterbury Tales. And it’s why the twelfth edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, published in October of this year, contains more than 5,000 new entries.

It’s not just sick being used to mean impressive or literally being used as an intensifier. Spelling changes too. For example, as late as 1972 (when the following ad was printed), Sanka was still using the spelling caffein (no final e).

At some point between 1972 and now, the spelling became caffeine. Today, if you visit Merriam-Webster.com, you won’t see caffein at all.

So, the next time someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn to lament the way modern word usage differs from what they were taught in sixth grade, I will just type a 😁 and share a link to this very blog. 

Anger is inefficient. (Abandoned January 10, 2022.)

​I only had a visual for this one—a screenshot from Facebook:

I’m struck by the fact that I’ve been ruminating about the hostile, intolerant, judgmental, polarized climate in the US for the better part of four years now (probably longer). Just recently, I’ve been fantasizing about making a T-shirt like this:

Other shirts might read: Ask questions and listen. Or: Try to understand instead of trying to win.

My point then, and my point now, is that too many people like to ascribe motives to others (see the screenshot above), while too few seem willing to ask non-judgmental questions in order to learn why others think what they do.

Not that you asked, but it is my belief that we need to stop making assumptions, stop depicting those with different perspectives into cartoonish villains, and stop interpreting the world in black and white (or blue and red).

Here, I will again make make a plug for Braver Angels, an organization dedicated to helping Americans “practice courageous citizenship across political differences.”

​I have Disastro-Vision. (Abandoned July 24, 2024.)

I’d jotted down a few notes for this one:

That character on Electric Company who read the warning signs too slowly.
My well-honed ability to recognize cults and psychopaths.
My tendency to explore all the things that could happen (catastrophizing).

This blog was going to examine (and probably justify) my tendency to look out for every danger in every situation. I’ve written about this sort of thing before (claiming that worrying is my superpower), but I must have planned to plumb the depths of my “Disastro-Vision” in some new way.

Just now, I searched for the Electric Company cartoon mentioned above, but I couldn’t find it. As I recall, the story arc went like this: Cute little man approaches a sign with a word like DANGER. The poor guy is not a strong reader, so he slowwwwly sounds the word out over and over, never realizing there’s something like a pallet of bricks dangling over his head. He scratches his head in confusion just before getting crushed to death by the danger he failed to recognize.

Aaaaand, scene​!

Now that I’m contemplating this terrible plot for an audience of children, I have to wonder if I made the whole thing up.

Cookbooks and other quixotic ... (Abandoned August 28, 2024.)

​I didn’t even complete the title of this blog. 🙄 But again, I know what I wanted to write about.

I was considering how human beings do a fabulous job of wishful thinking, and how cookbooks are the very embodiment of our self-delusional optimism.

If you’re anything like me, when you flip through a cookbook in a bookstore, you see the recipes (and often, appetizing photos), and you imagine sitting down to enjoy the dishes portrayed. You envision serving them and receiving appreciative compliments. You trick yourself into thinking that if you just buy the book, those wonderful experiences are sure to follow.

Conveniently, you forget about reality.

Those recipes require planning and shopping.​ You invariably have to track down ingredients you don’t own, like tamarind paste or blueberry vinegar. Every new recipe is a time commitment and a risk—who among us hasn’t labored long in the kitchen to be met with a disappointing failure?  And then, whether the results are sublime or sorry, every cooking endeavor requires cleanup.

So is it any wonder that my cookbooks sit on my shelf, collecting dust and mocking me? 

Oh, but we love to hate. (Abandoned November 3, 2025.)

I barely began this one. I wrote:

I saw this bottom-of-the-article ad today, and I thought, “Lordy

And that was it.

I don’t even have the screenshot I captured that day, but it was one of those bottom-of-the-page clickbait ads trying to tempt you with some secret the medical establishment is allegedly hiding from you. The headline was along the lines of “Doctors hate him for revealing this one weird trick.”

I was thinking about why that headline was chosen, and why humans have such an attraction to hatred, resentment, conflict, revenge, and the like. (You might be noticing a theme with me here.)

But now, I’m going to completely abandon that topic and tell you what I learned while researching those bottom-of-the page clickbait ads. They have a name! And it’s both perfectly accurate and remarkably disgusting. (I have added it to my list of terrible words just for the way it sounds.) Please enjoy my link to the Wikipedia article entitled “Chumbox.”

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go delete everything in my drafts folder. Thanks for inspiring me to get this done!

On with the blog.

​My life contains a lot more barking than I’d like. Please meet the cast of characters who make my days cacophonous. 

Say bow-wow to Jasper.

Pictured above is the poodle who lives next door to us, Jasper. Jasper has the privilege of a doggy door, so he often strolls into his backyard and announces to the world that he exists. “Woof, woof!” yells Jasper, “Woof, woof!”

Over and over and over and over. And over. And over again. “Here I am!” he proclaims to his audience in his good-natured monotone. “Right here!”

Finally, though, a blessing. Silence. Ahhhh.

“I’m still here!” he continues. “Right here!” And on and on and on.

Sometimes (too often), Jasper incites our dog, Freddy, to descend into self-destructive insanity. Freddy will slam his front paws on the wooden fence, jump up and down on his hind legs, scream-bark, and scratch and BITE THE FENCE. Behold the alarming evidence:

Speaking of Freddy.

Freddy’s barking is the absolute worst. Not only because it is so shrill, loud, and percussive that it often makes me scream involuntarily, but because he still barks at my husband.

Mind you, we’ve given this dog a safe and loving home for more than five years now. And Freddy actually has only affection for my husband. But there remains some deep-seated impulse in our dog’s little brain to sound an urgent warning when Bob (the aforementioned husband) signals that he’s about to stand up. If Bob closes his laptop, say, or subtly moves his ottoman, Freddy goes into full-throttle five-alarm civil defense alert mode: “Warning! Warning! The man is on the move! REPEAT! The man is on the move!” And heaven help us if Bob should open the front door to go get the mail. “CODE RED! I REPEAT: CODE RED!”

If you want to try to unravel Freddy’s trigger-prone disposition, you can read about his difficult early days and his slow, slow acclimatization. Bob and I just resignedly treat him with radical tolerance—and 10 milligrams of fluoxetine (aka Prozac) twice a day. Freddy continues to make microscopic improvements over time—I predict he’ll keep mellowing out gradually until he finally reaches some kind of normalcy right before he dies.

If the recorded dog were real, I imagine it would look something like this illustration from iStock:

I often activate this ridiculous apparatus when I take our garbage cans out to the alley. Occasionally, the recording will inspire other neighborhood dogs to demonstrate their own very real barking abilities.

The effect: irritating, ineffectual, and baffling.

Barking is the opposite of conversing.

All three of the above noisemakers leave me with a single simple question: WHY? Why do you continue to bark, Jasper? We all know you exist. And Freddy, why on earth are you barking about the nice guy who takes care of you? And really, what’s with the blatant barking machine?

(Bob posed some version of this last question to the machine’s owner, and got a response along the lines of “Your dog barks,” as if this explained anything.)

Though I know that dogs do communicate with one another, generally barking is a one-way street. The barker has a message and is intent on delivering it, whether it annoys you, startles you, or confuses you.

People bark too.

Here’s the tonal shift I warned you about. Feel free to stop reading.

There’s a lot of barking behavior among humans these days. Posting partisan memes on social media. Holding up flags. Hanging up banners. Wearing t-shirts and hats emblazoned with slogans. Such displays serve a dual purpose: to earn validation from like-minded people (mmmm, dopamine) and to send a salvo to “the other side”—to ring their proverbial doorbell, throw a message in their face, and run away.

I believe we need to do better than barking. We need to intentionally let go of our instincts, bravely let down our guard, and sincerely seek to understand why people hold different political positions than we do. Not to argue with them; not to win them over. To listen openly and treat them like the human beings they are. To see them as our fellow citizens instead of our mortal enemies. And maybe even find some common ground.

If this plea upsets you, if you find yourself rushing to tell me about moral imperatives, standing on the right side of history, or similar, pretty-please take a deep breath and release it slowly. Maybe a few times.

Like dogs, we have visceral instincts that make us feel threatened and react impulsively. But unlike dogs, we are equipped with the superpower of a vast, nuanced language. With it—and with precious sentiments like trust, compassion, and yes, humanity—we have the ability to hold constructive conversations that can bring us understanding and connection.

If this makes any kind of sense to you, you may want to check out the US organization called Braver Angels, which, as their website explains, “is leading the nation’s largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic.” I’ve attended a couple of events, and they gave me an unprecedented sense of relief and hopefulness. It was beyond refreshing to be among people who held different opinions but shared a desire to respectfully listen, learn, and identify areas where we can agree.

Jasper literally just started barking. I believe he supports this message.

Thanks for reading all the way through. Comments and conversations are welcome.

We did it again! 🎉 A big group of my college friends and I rented a house and enjoyed four soul-nourishing days together.

We’ve been pulling off these reunions for twelve or thirteen years now, depending on whether you count 2020 🦠, which we skipped. This year, eight of us convened in Boise, Idaho (a city I loved visiting solo back in 2019).

I can’t even tell you how entertaining and restorative these gatherings are. How packed they are with love, laughter, and support. My friends and I look forward to them for months, and afterward, we savor the memories.

In case you’ve ever yearned for a reunion with your friends, I’m going to share our well-honed approach. Steal anything that helps you spend quality time with the people you love.

Our getaways go from Thursday until Monday. Even though we’re sorry when the long weekend is over, four nights is a good amount of time to relax and reconnect.

Our scheduling stays the same, year after year. We used to spend a lot of energy hunting down days that would work for everyone. Now we know when our reunion is happening well ahead of time.

We alternate the east and west sides of the country. To goal is to be somewhat egalitarian about the onus of long travel distances, though our friend in Barcelona remains unfairly far from all our USA choices.

Our destinations tend to be mid-sized cities. We avoid huge metropolises like New York City or Chicago. We enjoy hiking together and hanging out at our rental house—maybe doing a little shopping. We’re not looking for a frenetic vibe with a long list of must-see destinations. Ideal locations have included Santa Fe, New Mexico; Asheville, North Carolina; Santa Barbara, California; and Stowe, Vermont. (I reported on New Orleans here back in 2018.)

Airports matter. Sometimes our destinations require a long drive from an airport (like Chatham, Massachusetts, last year). We’ve been tremendously lucky in such situations, but you’re introducing a huge risk when your rental house is far from the airport. If one person’s plane gets delayed, transporting them to the house can become a challenge.​

We conduct a poll to identify our destination. We collect suggestions for a while and then use Google Forms or Doodle to identify our winner.

Sometimes we use polling to pick a rental house. We seem to use Airbnb a lot, though I imagine there have been some VRBOs too. Strong advice: Make sure your rental house has plenty of bathrooms.

We use a shared Google Sheet for all our flight information. This makes it easy to figure out who among us should rent a car, who will get ferried in each car after arrival, and what time groups need to be at the airport on departure day.

The Google Sheet can include other information too, such as group activities to consider and the address of the rental house. It’s helpful to keep everything in one bookmarked spot.

The first destination on Thursday is the grocery store. The beauty of renting a house is that you can eat many of your meals there. We load up on grazable goodies: olives, cheeses, hummus, crackers, chips, wine, etc. and we tend to spend our first night feasting on our smorgasbord and catching up. We always invest in at least one sheet cake.

We often create a shared shopping list ahead of time. This can be done in the same Google Sheet as mentioned above or in the Apple Notes app. A shared list can help when a large group is shopping together—items can be ticked off as they go into a shopping cart so you don’t end up with duplicate items.

Make sure you plan for caffeine ingestion. Some of my friends are tea drinkers; others go for coffee. Don’t forget to pick up half and half or whatever your people enjoy in the a.m. And if someone in your group drinks decaf, make sure that the package is well marked and noted. (Peet’s did me dirty in Boise and I accidentally went a whole day without my life force, caffeine.)

We often go to restaurants for lunch, rather than dinner. Dinners at the house are relaxed and unhurried, and we don’t need to drive anywhere. And if you’re lucky enough to have friends like mine (looking at you, Nikki, Kristin, and Becky), someone in your group might be able to orchestrate/prepare an amazing meal for everyone. One year, Nikki surprised us by preparing delicious dishes in advance and feeding us like royalty all weekend long. It goes without saying that everyone should pitch in with cleanup.

Splitwise makes it easy to divvy up costs. I’m sure similar apps exist, but we’ve found Splitwise really easy to use. We do not use Splitwise to reimburse one another, though, because it can be a hassle in that regard. We use Venmo and then manually check off our payments in Splitwise.

We’ve never brought our spouses or kids. (One exception was a year that coincided with our college reunion.) It goes without saying that we love said spouses and kids, but we’re looking for completely undiluted catch-up time.

We create—and cherish—shared photo albums. The photo above was captured on Nikki's phone by a friendly passerby in Boise, but we can all access it, thanks to the wonders of technology.

I’m already getting excited about next year. Maybe we’ll go to Charleston, South Carolina. Or Chattanooga, Tennessee. Or Savannah, Georgia. Even thinking about spending quality time with dear friends in a fun location is a treat. I hope you can get inspired by the notes above and make your reunion dreams a reality.

I just learned that today is Love Your Pet Day. Silly, really, to designate one day of the year for pet owners to do something they ought to do nonstop. But it gives me an excuse to talk about Freddy.

You may know Freddy from his rocky adoption odyssey or his slow-improvement narrative. Or maybe you’ve been subjected to his glass-shattering bark over the phone or in person. (If that’s the case, I’m sorry.)

Before I go further, I’m going to break in with Freddy’s alleged genetic breakdown, in case you’re wondering. Yes, I’m one of those people who indulged in a doggy DNA test. It was something of a joke gift to my husband for our anniversary—a silly indulgence. But interesting, really, since we’d always assumed we had a thirteen-pound Jack Russell–rat terrier mix on our hands. Nay! Here’s what Embark says about our pup:

Freddy is a truly—truly—strange dog. Highly neurotic, he’s on the maximum dosage of fluoxtetine. But that med doesn’t seem to touch his defining idiosyncrasies.

In the same way that he is a combination of black and white, his behavior is built of competing contradictions. He’s a four-legged paradox.

Almost every day, I drive Freddy to one of three lovely nearby spots for a walk. Once I’ve collared, harnessed, and leashed him, he is raring to go to the car. He’ll even scratch at the door to the garage and/or the car.

But when we arrive at our destination, I have to pry him out of the car. Here he is, on the passenger-side floor, silently screaming, “Noooo! Don’t make me go outside in the fresh air!”

There’s an upside to his weird walking anxiety, though. First, Freddy never stops to sniff or relieve himself, so our walks are delightfully efficient. (I don’t even carry poop bags—I gave them all away.) And second, Freddy is completely nonreactive to other dogs. If they bark, if they stick their noses between his back legs, he just broadcasts, “I don’t want any trouble.”

Toward the end of every walk, he will start to pull the leash a bit, eager to return to the car. Such torture he endures, going on the very walk he hurried to initially! 🙄 Sigh. It’s just the way he is.

The other bizarre behavioral contradiction centers on my husband, Bob. Bob has never been anything but loving, patient, and kind to Freddy since the day we adopted him in the summer of 2020. In the right circumstances, Freddy returns the affection. And yet. If Bob is sitting in his comfy chair and moves to get up ... if he dares to close his laptop ... Freddy will flip his lid. He’ll go into full alert mode, barking a warning to me: “The man is moving! The man is moving! Danger! Danger!” His hackles go up. The decibels of his horrible, screeching bark hit the red zone. He doesn’t threaten Bob; he just wants the world to know that the y-chromosome monster is up to something.

I so often wonder what makes our dog the way he is. Was he abused as a puppy? Neglected? Or is he just genetically predisposed to hardcore, crippling worry? (Bob calls Freddy Don Knotts sometimes.)

We’ll never know. We’ll just keep proving to him over and over that he’s safe and that we love him—and not just on Love Your Pet Day.

That headline sounds way more salacious than it is. I’m not talking about anything erotic here—just a powerful, persistent wish of mine.

Here it is: I want to time travel, but in a very specific way. I want to

• Easily go to any place and time I fancy (only in the past; the future spooks me)
• Remain invisible, unnoticed, and entirely safe while I’m there
• Retain the use of all five of my senses
• Be dressed comfortably—I want to experience the weather, but I don't want to suffer from it
• Have my husband accompany me, and be able to converse with him without anyone or anything around us noticing

I want to hear what English sounded like in Jamestown in 1607. Hear Old English in 1000 AD and Latin in 1000 BC. I want to hang out among Neanderthals. Visit 9000 BC and see what life was like at Göbekli Tepe (maybe sneak a taste of whatever they’re eating). I want to walk in the filthy streets of the world’s biggest cities when they’re packed with horses and humanity. Experience the odors, the cacophony, and the social behavior. I want to smell the exhaust and hear the engines of the earliest Model T Fords. I want to observe the night sky from a lightbulb-free planet.

More than anything else, I want to rewind time more than 66 million years so I can get up close and personal with DINOSAURS. Can you even imagine? Hearing them roar ... feeling the ground vibrate from their footsteps ... watching a Tyrannosaurus murdering its next meal. I want to inhale that extra oxygen and marvel at all the bizarre flora and fauna. (Being imperceptible means that no mosquitos or other creatures would ever bite me.)

Similarly, in a more recent era, I’d love to get close to some wooly mammoths,* saber-toothed cats, and—above all—giant sloths. Actually, I might go on an extinction world tour and check out some dodos, elephant birds, and maybe the Titanoboa (a snake that was something like forty feet long and 2,500 pounds). 

It’s all a nice dream. But alas, it ain’t gonna happen.

So instead, I indulge in the next best thing: old stuff. I’m not talking about visiting grand cathedrals and monuments—rather, I crave anything that reveals the experience of day-to-day life. I want to know where people slept and what they ate. What did they wear? Where did they eliminate their bodily waste? How’d they attempt to care for their teeth and trim their toenails? What songs did they sing? What games did they play? How did they treat one another? What did they smell like? ​

I stare at daguerrotypes, including post-mortem photographs (👈 don't click on that if corpses upset you). When I discovered the early-20th-century color photos of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, I absolutely swooned. They show the actual vibrant hues of people’s clothing, and for me, they serve as a magical portal to a much earlier time.

​I follow social media accounts with names like “Abandoned Places” and “Ancient Marvels of Mankind.” I can’t get enough images of Pompeii—the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD is the tragedy that keeps on giving.

I delight in a well-stocked antiques store, but I especially appreciate those antiques that still remain in their original locations—things like hitching posts, milk boxes, boot scrapers, and, of course, cobblestones. I adore ghost signs and other types of old signage.

One of my favorite ways of slipping into the past is through old print advertising. A visit to the Internet Archive or Duke University’s John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History can entertain me for hours. Old ads show us a lot about the hucksters of the era, sure, but they also hint at what the general public struggled with and cared about. Here are three ads I found this week, captioned with what they tell me.

Oh, advertising! There’s so much about you that’s disturbing, but you do such a wonderful job of helping me step back in time (and appreciate my ability to return to the current day).

*Did you know there’s a project to bring back the wooly mammoth? Horror movies just write themselves, don’t they?
​

The word euphonic perfectly sums up a theory I have. It means “nice-sounding,” and Merriam-Webster specifies that it often describes “the acoustic effect produced by words so formed or combined as to please the ear.”

The word euphonic is itself euphonic, and here’s why, I believe: It has a stressed second syllable: you-FAH-nick (in the US, that is—see the blue image above).

I can’t explain why (maybe you can, in the comments), but I feel that words with three or more syllables and a stressed second syllable are often the best-sounding words. For example*:

emphatic
vehicular
bombastic
calamity (my favorite word)
exculpatory
recidivism
velocipede
rapscallion
infantilize
barbaric
insidious
pernicious
voluptuous
etc., etc.

Sure, there are plenty of great monosyllabic words—shank, shiv, minx, jinx, and so on—but when I look at my ever-growing list of favorite words, I’m struck by this second-syllable phenomenon.

Phenomenon: There’s another one. Phenomenal, right?

​*Even example falls into this stressed-second-syllable category, but it’s used so frequently it can’t feel too thrilling.

When I was in college, I took an archeology class. Archeology is the study of human beings through the artifacts they leave behind, so when I was assigned a paper on the topic of my choosing, I decided that the “artifacts” I wanted to examine were full-page ads in Life magazine. I’d analyze them to see what they told me about the society that shaped them (or vice versa). I can’t remember the exact date range I focused on, but it was wide enough and far back enough that I got to delve into all sorts of wonderful old ads in the college library, all in the name of archeology. Those were good times.

I still love looking at old ads. They’re such fascinating time capsules. I enjoy seeing bygone products and strange social conventions; plus, I’m captivated by the ads’ art direction, imagery, typography, and copywriting. 

Today, we have the beautiful convenience of the Internet Archive. So let’s look at some of its treasure, shall we?

Now, using Santa and Christmas to hawk cigarettes is nothing new—advertisers did it for many decades. But this particular ad makes me wonder. Why did they go for such a fiendish-looking Santa? He looks ... depraved. Drunk. Sinister. No child of mine would be allowed to sit on this creep’s lap. 

I’m intrigued by Murad’s mysterious tagline, which delivers its social-proof allure in just two words: Everywhere—Why? I believe it’s shorthand for, “These Turkish cigarettes are smoked around the globe. Why do you suppose so?” Answering the “Why?” is really beside the point—Murad’s alleged popularity was the enticement.

As for the quotation marks around the word GREETINGS: Do they mean that Santa is muttering that word through his smirking lips clamped around his Murad? Or are those scare quotes?

Finally, notice that 15¢ price. You won’t be surprised to learn that this ad ran more than a century ago, in 1915. 

Oof. Where to begin? The ludicrous mechanism and straps? The preposterous before-and-after fakery? The aggressive stoking of insecurity? Or the way this huckster shamelessly dubbed himself a “face specialist”?

This 1915 ad features an electric product it calls “Nature’s own remedy for muscle-fatigue and wornout nerves.” I didn’t think that Nature used a plug or batteries, but what do I know?

Nowhere is the price of this product mentioned. We only know that it “[c]osts little and quickly pays for itself in INCREASED PHYSICAL AND MENTAL POWER.” The Monarch Vibrator Company would mail you their product for nothing. Presumably, once you knew the benefits, once you’d learned “the real joy of living,” you wouldn’t be willing to part with it. 

Exhibit D—beer for the whole family:

You know what you don’t see anymore (at least in the US)? Small children in beer ads. You don’t see beer described as “honest” or “wholesome” or “for the whole family,” as in this 1911 ad from Blatz Brewing Company.

You also don’t see hand-lettering like that anymore. Just look at those B’s!

In 1903, to send off for this “absolutely harmless” soap that “never fails to reduce flesh,” you didn’t need a street address. You just mailed your $2.00 to “Norwood Chemical Co., St. James Bldg., N.Y.,” and you’d receive your two cakes (not bars, but cakes!) of La Parle Obesity Soap. If we’re to believe the internet, that price tag would be more than $70.00 in 2024.

Seems preposterous, right? Who would ever fall for such a thing, right? Until you discover that people are still making the same nonsensical claims even  as I type this. 👇 🙄

This is only a small sampling of the advertising delicacies available on the Internet Archive. I suspect I’ll be back with more soon. Stay tuned!

I received this message on LinkedIn yesterday:

I had not written on this topic. I’d never even thought about the relationship between these two words. I couldn’t imagine what contentment had to do with containment.

I was all too familiar with the ubiquitous noun “content.” In fact, I’ve railed against that term. I hate the way it’s used these days to refer to so much writing—including blogs like this one. To me, it just connotes “void-filler,” and it’s an insult.

But how about the adjective content, describing a state of contentedness? What was that all about? I went straight to the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary and got the answer. 

In other words, if what you want falls pretty well within the bounds of what you have, you’re content.

Interesting, right? It immediately made me think of two things.

One was a powerful photography exhibit I saw many years ago at the art museum in Lakeland, Florida. In each photograph, a family was posed in front of their home with all their possessions. The families were from around the world, and I remember the shocking surfeit of stuff* Americans owned compared to their counterparts in other countries. You couldn't help but wonder, as you looked at these photos, what we really need in our lives, and why we’re so driven to acquire more and more things.

By the way, you can get a book of these photographs called Material World: A Global Family Portrait. And the irony is not lost on me that I’ve just invited you to acquire something. (Plus, I used an affiliate link so that I could acquire something myself—0.0004¢ if I’m lucky.)

The second thing I thought of was a scene involving two yachts. I’d read it in the delightful, entertaining, and informative book by Richard Conniff called The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide (another affiliate link). The scene took place at a time when

... Oracle’s stock was soaring and Larry Ellison briefly passed Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to become the world’s second-richest person. Ellison was celebrating aboard his 243-foot yacht off Capri. Then he spotted a 200-foot yacht heading out on a twilight cruise to the village of Positano. It was Paul Allen’s Meduse ... Ellison ordered his captain to crank his yacht’s three engines to full speed. He overtook Allen’s yacht at forty miles an hour, throwing up a huge wake that sent Allen and his guests staggering. “It was an adolescent prank,” Ellison told The Washington Post afterward. “I highly recommend it.”

Don’t recommend it to me, buddy. I think it makes you sound like an insecure, childish fool. I can’t imagine feeling compelled to do such a thing.

​The book is filled with anecdotes like this—of obscenely rich people not merely displaying their wealth, but rubbing others’ noses in it. Conniff explains that such behavior is natural, because we’re mammals who want to achieve and demonstrate dominance.

Yes, I’m a mammal. And I’m not an ascetic, by any means. But I don’t run with the crowd that yachts around the Gulf of Naples. So the “adolescent prank” above just strikes me a bizarre and kind of ... pathetic. It’s the very opposite of contentment. It’s not enough for this guy to be be the second-richest person in the world—he has to literally push his zillionaire adversary around with his huge pleasure craft. I mean: 🙄.

Contentment gets the suspicious side-eye in America, particularly on LinkedIn, land of hustling, humblebragging overachievers. According to all the “boss babes” and “bropreneurs,” you must never stop “crushing it.” You have to “stay hungry,” even if Americans have so many calories available that staying slim has become a $90 billion industry. “Never settle,” we’re commanded. “Manifest that shit.” (A search for that sentence pulls up five thousand results on Etsy.)

I have goals, sure. But when I look at the Venn diagram of my life, I know I’m living very happily inside my “what I have” circle. I love it here. I appreciate it here. I’m content here.

Ohhhhhhh. Now everything began to make sense. (Why did it take me so long to figure this out?)

I decided to go right to the horse’s robotic mouth:

There you have it. AI says that “price-slashin’” is “just a fun and informal way to describe” something.

No, it’s not. It’s weird and awkward and distractingly hokey. It took up a lot of my brain-space today.

So let me say this to Priceline and others of their ilk. Please listen to this living, breathing, HUMAN copywriter. Your brand matters. It is the lifeblood, the heartbeat, the personality of your company. With just a pinch of exaggeration and poetic license I’ll say that it’s the very soul of your company. It’s what makes human beings (read: customers, potential customers, partners, etc.) remember you. Understand you. And ideally, LIKE you. Take care of your brand, for crying out loud!

Penny and the rest of her AI brethren do not care about your brand. The question is, do you?

Recently I gave a CreativeMornings FieldTrip presentation online. I began by asking attendees what words, punctuation, or grammar they struggle with the most. Several people mentioned the semicolon, and one participant wrote this:​

The poor little semicolon! So misunderstood! So unfairly reviled! Even after serving us for so many years as the friendly emoticon wink. ;-)

Please allow me to demystify my friend the semicolon. I want to allay your fears and enable your enjoyment. 

First, forget the word colon and instead think of the semicolon as a period riding around on the shoulders of a comma. It’s kind of like a hybrid of those two punctuation marks, but it has very specific uses. Two, to be exact.

1) It enables two conceptually connected sentences to hold hands.

Sometimes you’ll have two sentences that feel like they belong together. Rather than separating them with a harsh full-stop period, you can let them indulge in a public display of affection by placing a semicolon between them. Like so:

You want to raise Madagascar hissing cockroaches; I want a divorce.

I guess I’m past due for an oil change; my engine appears to have caught fire.

His phone never leaves his hands; I shudder to think of the microbes it hosts.

That “man of God” sure owns a lot of Lamborghinis; I guess he’s answered the age-old question, “What would Jesus drive?”

(Notice that the first letter following the semicolon doesn’t get capitalized unless it’s a proper noun or the word I. You’ve turned two sentences into one.)

​2) It tidies up and clarifies complex lists.

Usually when you punctuate a series of things, commas will easily do the job of separating one thing from the next. Like this:

I notice you’re buying rubber gloves, a ski mask, a gun, and bleach.* Got plans for the weekend?

But sometimes, the items in your series are complex:

• Bacon Level, Alabama
• French Lick, Indiana
• Zzyzx, California

In this case, you could use semicolons to separate the three listed places:

The shell corporation had offices in Bacon Level, Alabama; French Lick, Indiana; and Zzyzx, California.

Those semicolons reduce the chaos and make things easier to read, right?

Another example might be:

The featured speakers at the triplets convention were Huey, Louie, and Dewey Gravelpit; Sandy, Mandy, and Candy Shrinklepie; and Ed, Ned, and Fred Pseudonym.

That’s it! Now you know how to use the semicolon!

To review: You can use a semicolon 1) to bring two sentences together or 2) to keep several complicated phrases apart. Either way, it’s making the world a better place.

Thanks, semicolon; I'm sorry I've been bad-mouthing you for so long.
​
The semicolon never hurt anybody; it only wants to help.

You don’t need a PhD to use a semicolon; it’s here for everybody.

I could keep doing this all day; instead, I’ll let you go forth and punctuate.