My new thing is saying “Good morning” to people I do not know. No more casually looking away as we pass on the street, citizens! Enough of that! Good morning, grandfather dropping his granddaughter off at daycare. Good morning, restaurant worker emerging from the back door of the kitchen to smoke a cigarette (15 feet from the door, if you please!). Good morning, man sitting on the freezing park bench and wearing a 10-gallon hat, whatever your story is I don’t even want to know please don’t ask me for money as I’ve none, but good morning to you sir.

The result: I am forced to be less in my head, less at war with my thoughts, more bright, more outwardly focused, more aggressively hopeful about the day.

Good morning, internet.

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  • peptalk

~Or: Writers Are Jerks!~

The good news: there’s actually no such thing as Writer’s Block! There are only Things That Keep You From Writing.

More good news: there are only two (2!) things that keep you from writing! They are: Inability to Start, and Inability to Finish. If you can steer clear of those two, you’ll be golden! OK!

So: how to steer clear? Good news! The Inability to Start and the Inability to Finish both spring from the same source: Fear of Failure!

So: how to avoid Fear of Failure? More good news! I have the answer! You sidestep Fear of Failure by Not Caring. You make of yourself a recalcitrant, pig-headed thing. Stubbornness is your watchword! If, every time you sit down to write, you remind yourself Not to Care about the outcome, you’ll be well on your way. Go ahead! Don’t care! Don’t think ahead! Be a jerk about it!

But: some bad news. This is not how we Good People are taught to act. Behaving like this goes against every gentle, caring, civic-minded bone in our bodies. Who likes a stubborn jerk, a lumbering oaf who acts without forethought and does not care what the outcomes of his actions will be? Not me! Not any decent person!

Reflect on that and be freed of your artistic obligations for the evening.

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  • peptalk

1. No laptop in bed.

2. No internet for at least 30 minutes before you got to sleep.

3. Nothing on your feed reader that posts more than X times per Y.

4. Being bored does not mean you have to check your email.

5. Don’t only read websites related to subjects you know inside and out.

6. For every X feeds that you add to your reader, remove Y.

7. Don’t read email on your phone.

8. If an email upsets you, never respond immediately.

9. Think about the motivations behind the blogs you subscribe to.

10. Don’t read the comments.

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  • peptalk

I started my day off this morning by getting what I felt was a fairly nasty email from someone. I showed it to Rosalie and she said, well she said a lot of outraged things, but one of the things she said was “And tell her that it’s not very pleasant to receive an email like this on your birthday.”

Which I won’t, and of course even though I do think the email was intended to make me feel bad, the person who sent the email had no idea it was my birthday, or that her email might be the first thing I read this morning, and that it might therefore color pretty much everything that came after it. It’s her right to send an email that is maybe not 100% kind, and surely I did something, inadvertently or not, to her to make her feel like sending me that email. I forgive her.

But it does make* me think about how I interact with people online, and maybe a good rule of thumb, when you have something negative or not 100% kind to say to someone, is to assume that it’s their birthday. Think: If this was my birthday, how would I feel about receiving this email? Would it keep me from enjoying the cake and presents and whatever else maybe a little bit? Because I was opening some Amazon boxes from Josh & Alex this morning and I have to say I was not 100% present in the moment, since most of my brain was stewing over how to respond to that email.

So my plan from now on—please hold me to this—if I feel wronged or outraged or annoyed by something you do, will be to assume that it is your birthday, and I will temper my response in a way befitting your special day.

*This didn’t make me think about this, I was already thinking about it due to something that happened yesterday, but I will talk about that later. Lucky you, you’ll have more to read from me on this topic of how we comport ourselves online.

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  • peptalk