You can change your pen, but you’ll still have the same handwriting. Just like with chronic disease, you never really get rid of _anything – _ you just learn to manage it. That might be disheartening, but it’s actually necessary. If the goal of childhood is to end up with some idea of who you are, it might sound like a stressful task. Actually, figuring out who you are doesn’t require adding anything new to your life.

+++ title = “01” date = 2020 +++ “That’s a nice trick, but it’s not _real _magic.” Whenever I get this comment, I agree. And it makes me wonder, then, what real magic looks like, and what this person is expecting. I suppose it’s the unexplained phenomena in our lives… but is it “real” simply because it lacks an explanation? If that’s the case, then my tricks are real magic.

One of the greatest pleasures in the world is finding a word or two written in a bathroom stall, or as I once experienced, penned to the railing of the whitewater ride at Six Flags. A poet can put a couple of line breaks in, recycle a few words, and now this found graffiti can be anything to anyone.

Tomorrow is New Years Day, but only because we call it that, only because we decided that this is when the “new year” would begin. But these words like time and years are just constructs.You can have a “new year” anytime you’d like. The reason why a new year’s resolution can be functional is not because of the clocks changing from 2019 to 2020, but because in this two-week lull of winter break, everything is partially shut down.

I’ve recently gotten back into newsletters. Not ones from companies, but ones from actual people (currently, I’m enjoying Austin Kleon’s, which includes 10 interesting things to check out). What I love about these newsletters is that I’ve already given permission to the creators. I’ve already enrolled in a list, and I actually look forward to the newsletter every week. Compare this to my RSS or Facebook or Twitter feed, which basically does exactly what the word “feed” entails: it feeds me… total crap.