Month: January 2023

At the beginning of 2022 I bought myself an Audible subscription. Prior to that I’d only dabbled in audiobooks through the DC public library so that I could mentally escape my subway commute. I decided I’d try to absorb some nonfiction content in the same manner and downloaded a few books. Then I never listened to them. As it turns out I only listen to audio content when I’m doing something else—driving, walking, playing solitaire on an airplane—and that I couldn’t absorb the information from a book while multitasking this way.

I have encountered an approach of reading and listening at the same time. Amazon certainly pushes for this by offering a discounted audiobook any time you purchase the Kindle version of a book. I decided to give this approach a try myself and a few weeks ago ordered a paperback of one of the books I had downloaded. I am only a few chapters into it, but by having the book physically in front of me while I’m listening to it my second activity while listening to the audio is reading the text. It took some time to adjust the speed of the audio to my normal reading cadence but I’ve more or less calibrated it now. If I want to highlight something or write a note in the margin, I just stop the audio and then restart when I’m ready. I’ll keep going through this book and then assess whether it was worth the additional effort and cost involved in imbibing both formats at the same time. At this point, I’m not yet convinced. Has anyone else experimented with this method? And if you have, did it help you absorb the information or did you just find it distracting?

I don’t eat out much, maybe three or four meals a week total. In every place I’ve lived I have had a stable of restaurants that I patronize, usually no more than three or four core restaurants and then a second tier for cravings for a particular type of food or a place to go when I have visitors. Every few weeks, though, I eat at some new place. Maybe I walked or drove past it and was curious. Maybe someone told me about it. Maybe I did a search on Google Maps and it appeared in the results. This practice is a small way of continuing to expand my horizons even while remaining within my established comfort zone much of the time.

I have made two such visits in the last three weeks, both bolstered by the presence of family members to provide conversation through the meals. These two experiences offered typical results. The first place had very good food. It was a tad on the expensive side (seafood almost always is) and got loud as it filled up, but it was the sort of place that I may revisit for a late lunch or an early dinner. It doesn’t crack my core rotation, but it will find a place in the second tier. The second place, though, will not. It was a Sunday night so the place was quiet. The drink I had was very good and others enjoyed theirs also. But the food just wasn’t good enough. I ordered shrimp and grits, a Southern standard if ever there were one. That dish hardly even compared to the shrimp and grits I had at more than one restaurant in Charleston back in the fall, so that is that. It may be harsh, but new restaurants rarely get more than one audition for me. There are simply too many of them to try.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been rewatching the television series The Newsroom. There is a certain irony in me watching a show set against the backdrop of a nightly news program given how I steadfastly avoid those very broadcasts, but I wanted to watch a complete series and haven’t found any new ones that have piqued my interest recently. The show is about a fictionalized newsman and his team who take a Don Quixote like approach (if I may be permitted a reference to a work I haven’t read) and stand against the absurdities of the news cycle during the time I was in college. As many knew then and as we certainly know now, that was a losing battle. Media is in the attention business, viewers are the product, and the algorithms are improving every day.

I haven’t rewatched the show to relive the time period in which it is set or gloat over the death of old media. I’ve watched for the psychology of the characters. More than the specific events being covered and more than the interwoven romantic relationships between the protagonists, the show is about the struggles of people trying to live up to their own principles. They face public ridicule and economic consequences for trying to live out those principles. They struggle with self-loathing when they compromise on or fail to meet those principles. They are riddled with self-doubt at every step. And yet, despite all of that, they persist. Even knowing that it is all tilting at windmills, they persist. To be true to themselves, they have no other choice. In the circumstances I’m facing, I’ve found this fictionalized example edifying.

Last week I wrote about the concept of conducting a year-end review instead of making a new year’s resolution. I did a truncated version of the exercise relative to what I did at the beginning of 2022. One of the biggest things I saw was that I progressively became better at batching meetings and protecting periods of several hours in which do make real progress on work projects through most of the year but then began to let things slip. There were too many days in November and December that were chopped up by meetings over which I had some control, so I’m going to work to rein those back to minimize the stop-start nature of those days. After all, I am my own boss.

I also did quite a bit of traveling last year, but when I conducted my review I saw a marked difference in my enjoyment based on whether I was traveling alone or with a group of family or friends. I’ll try to take that lesson to heart in 2023, starting perhaps as soon as this weekend if things work out how I hope they will.

I haven’t set upon any mini goals yet, so it appears that January won’t get a self-improvement project this year. That may even be better since I’ll be starting a project well after most people will have given up on theirs. I hope that if you did set a new year’s resolution you are still on course. And if you have already fallen off the wagon, get back on it—there’s still time.