I'm tempted to extravagant remedies, like interminable polls like:
"I'm an omnivore, and you might or might not be one, too--but if you had a huge vegetarian feast on Thursday, what would it include?"
I might instead ask the old "if you had world enough and time and no coyness and no crime, but material comfort and the ability to do what you want to do, what project would you tackle?"
I've been working on a frame-by-frame GIF animation both early this morning and late tonight. I like assembling frame after frame after frame. At the end, I'll write music and assemble the little video that will result. I think I'm onto a cool moving collage method, but we'll see when I am done. I like projects like this or creating music, because it's all about listening to myself. I wonder if listening to oneself is a help or a hurt in listening to others. It's so easy to become entranced with one's own thinking.
We drive to Arkansas tomorrow night, to visit my father and his wife, as well as, I hope, my brother, his wife and son, and my sister and her kids. I have one brother-in-law absent in Kuwait, for whom we will all be thankful and yet pray. In my family, we all talk at once, and yet we all hear one another, and the listening and the speaking all flow together.
I talked tonight with a co-worker about childhood-now versus our 1960s/1970s childhood.
When I was a kid, one left the car keys in the ignition at night. Yet I'm not sure the crime rate was that much lower. We just saw the world--and the types of crimes people might commit--differently.
Today I was taken deservedly to task for insufficient praise of a friend's picture of a corgi dog. You've got to listen to your friends' inner corgi dogs, and comment in kind.
When such things happen, I get bashful, I feel embarrassed, but I fancy that I am a quick old study, and I learn.