David Allen, productivity writer and author of one of my favorite books, Getting Things Done, has famously said that the mind is for having ideas, not holding ideas. That is to say, we are at our best when are being creative, thinking up new solutions to old problems, and generating ideas. What we’re not good at is remembering all of our appointments in our head, which is why we need a calendar.

+++ title = “10” date = 2019 +++ “Don’t scratch your itch,” my mom would say when I got a bug bite as a child. “It’ll make it worse. Let the medicine do its work.” The medicine could be anti-histamine, music, or Advil. But we refuse, don’t we, just to let the medicine do its work. We’d rather scratch because it feels satisfying than sit with our discomfort, keep our hands off of it, and let it evaporate.

These days, a meme is how people describe a picture that has text over it in a particular font. It’s a piece of art that captures the zeitgeist of internet culture. But the meaning of the word has changed. Memes may look a certain way, and they can be emulated with apps and generators… But it used to be that a meme meant something more specific. It referred to a specific photo, video, or idea that went viral, that was modified and bastardized, beaten to its very last breath.

Occasionally, you might hear people say, “eh, they sound like they’re trying to sound like Bob Dylan.” Replace Bob Dylan with whomever. They say it like it’s a bad thing, but it’s a good thing. That means that the part of them that may have been inspired by Bob Dylan (or artists that inspired Bob Dylan) are shining through more than others, at that particular moment, and for that particular listener.

+++ title = “10” date = 2019 +++ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… all of them have “like” buttons (and some have more). But none of them have “dislike” buttons. There are anger buttons, sadness buttons… but no dislike. No thumbs down. There are good reasons for this, though I don’t know if these are the reasons that there aren’t dislike buttons. For instance, seeing a dislike number next to your posts might cause self-consciousness, and might cause you to post less, which is the opposite of what social media sites want.