+++ title = “02” date = 2019 +++ If you’ve never been in a rain storm in Arizona, it can be quite intense for a short period of time, and then out of nowhere, the clouds will vanish and the sun will return, like nothing ever happened. It’s almost as if someone hit the reset button, right as the storm started to peak. I was in Tucson recently for one of these storms, so I took shelter.

Maybe it’s fatherhood. Maybe it’s living in a house that I feel completely aligns with my taste and my character. Maybe it’s working a job that I absolutely love. Either way, I feel happy lately. I wake up every morning excited to be alive, excited to be a father and a husband, and excited to take on whatever challenges the day presents. One interesting sensation that’s developed in the past few months is the feeling of what I describe as a heart tickle.

+++ title = “02” date = 2019 +++ I recently finished Cal Newport’s outstanding book Digital Minimalism. I’ve got so many thoughts, but my first one is that I need to delete social media apps from my phone. I’ve now deleted Facebook, and my Twitter is set permanently on my work account (which doesn’t suck me in, because I follow a limited amount of people). Instagram is always distracting but it’s not as bad as the other aforementioned apps, and I’ve just made a pact for today not to look at it.

When I was a classroom teacher, I used to teach a course called Close Reading of Complex Text. The idea behind the course is that if you give a student a text that is just slightly beyond their reading abilities (in other words, harder than a text they could understand by reading it one time, but not so hard that they give up), they will need to work hard to use their skills and extract meaning.

+++ title = “02” date = 2019 +++ What inspires me is not mastery. I was talking to a friend of mine about my choice to play jazz guitar. The initial stages of learning this skill are quite slow, as I’m just collecting chords and playing them on the guitar (sometimes quite sloppily). “It’ll be cool when you can just make your fingers dance around the guitar like a pro,” he said.