Open Notebook – May 2025 - Obscure Curiosities

May 1st 2025

My card for today is fitting: Nine of Sea reversed

I’ve gotten this before and it’s definitely on point. The Mystical Cats Tarot guidebook reads: “Do you believe you deserve happiness? Do you truly believe that the universe holds goodness and joy for you? The unwillingness to express your wishes and set them in motion prevents them from coming true. Don’t waste this opportunity through fear or lack of self-love.”

Apparently, Emily feels exactly like that too. And yes, we shouldn’t waste this opportunity! It only comes once in a lifetime, as Marshall Mathers said, YO!

I’m doing a focus session just for reading “Every Tool is a Hammer” by Adam Savage. I’ll just put the notes in here, as I was going to handwrite them, but that makes for more work later. I’ll use that notebook the way that Emily does… just write random ideas and phrases that I can utilize later. The problem is, unlike her, I have thousands of ideas already…

Hmm, I really disagree with Adam about Drawers, but I do kind of see his point: “Drawers are where stuff goes to die. Drawers lure you into a false sense of security by ‘helping’ you put things away and making the shop look ‘cleaner.’ But really, by putting stuff out of sight, they remove it from your visual field. They flatten the visual cacophony into a monotone, or worse they mute it altogether.”

I think when you actually set down to work on a project, yes, you should have everything out. I use drawers more as a way to not clutter up my desk, because otherwise that’s what would, and did, happen before. However, he does use drawers if he has custom inserts, which forces him to remember exactly what is in each of them and to take stock of what he has and eliminate what he doesn’t need. That’s great advice. And too many drawers does lead to forgetting what tools you even have and slows you down by forgetting what drawer they’re in. I like his solution of the ladder rack where he just sticks the handles of the tools. It looks like a mess, but I agree, you see what you have and you can find things five times faster.

I love this philosophy: first-order retrievability. If you have to go too out of your way to get something, it just throws everything out of whack by wasting time. I’M THIS WAY TOO!

I also agree that having “duplicate” sets of things in different work areas is also a great idea, even if it seems stupid to most people. It saves you hours of walking around over the course of a year. That may not sound like much – saving 10 to 12 hours a year – but it is.

“And yet, here’s the thing about evolution: it is not actually incremental. Yes, it moves slowly for awhile, but then something big happens, something ground-breaking, and that’s when the big evolutionary leaps that we can see with our eyes tend to occur.”

I’ve had a couple of these lately, both in my visual artwork and in my writing process becoming so much more deliberate and intentional. Ironically, the former goes more off gut and intuition, like my writing used to be.

Adam writes: “As a maker, I took that leap once I stepped back from my aluminum doctor’s bags and my deconstructed Kennedy stacks on rolling ladder racks and I realized that everything I was looking at in my shop was a reflection of my philosophy on making. Everything I used the most, everything I loved the most, was laid out in a way that increased its visibility or its accessibility, and was stored on something I either bought or built with an eye toward speed and agility. Everything I used least, everything that made me nuts, was always something that slowed me down. That understanding produced a leap in my creative consciousness that got me started trying to turn as much of what drove me batty into something that drove me wild.”

“In my realm, cardboard is king and the gateway drug to making…” Preach, Adam!

I love this: “As makers, we become adept at holding complex concepts and ideas in our heads that we have our own mental shorthand for. This isn’t a problem when we are working for ourselves on projects of our own. But when we’re working for someone or with someone, quite often this tendency toward internal cataloging can lead to many of the fundamentals to a project going unspoken because they’ve become baked into our assumptions about what everyone should already know. But it’s important to remember that this kind of knowledge is not so easy for civilians to engage with and process.”

Civilians? LOL! Yeah, making is war, for real. This hits on one of my biggest issues when it comes to communicating ideas.

Andrew Stanton literally says why I couldn’t write without a laptop, for the same reason!

Writing movies is really just “cinematic dictation.” Andrew says. “Well, I can do that. I’ve had movies in my head since I was a little kid,” Andrew told Adam. So have I! “And then the next half of the equation that got me over the hump was the invention of the laptop. I suddenly had no fear of writing on a word processor. Because it was sculpture. It was literally asking me to just spit crap onto a screen and then cut and paste it. The process invited messiness. It allowed slop. And I could refine later. Because of my upbringing, and I’m still like this, if I put a pen to a piece of actual physical paper it’s got to be better. It’s got to be an essay; it’s got to be good; it’s ot to sing on the page. And that stops me cold. The laptop helped me realize, oh I can be messy.”

Holy shit. I just need to spit cinematic shit onto a page then clean it up later? Huh. Why did I never think of that? I mean, I think fairly cinematically as it is. But damn, it’s that easy! Wow! And remember, this is a guy who wrote big time Pixar movies! Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, and Bug’s Life. And of course, Toy Story. Yeah…

The second to last chapter begins like this: “Humans are toolmakers. We are explorers, innovators, inventors, and what facilitates all of that is our use of tools.”

Yup. You got it. I love this: “The hammer is the ur-tool.” No doubt.

“Budding actors obsess about ‘process,’ budding writers obsess about routine, budding makers obsess about tools. Like being more worried about how to dress for an interview than how to answer the questions you’ll be asked, each imagines that the magic lies somewhere in the approach to the act of making, as opposed to the making itself.”

“The reality is that tool choice is both less important and more important than you think it is. It is less important to the extent that tool usage is entirely subjective, which means there is no one right way to do things. But it is more important, because the best tool for any job is the one you’re most comfortable with, the one that you can make do what you want it to do, whose movements you fully understand.”

Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, says, “Freeman Dyson, a famous physician, suggested that science moves forward by inventing new tools… In a broad sense, science moves forward by inventing tools, because when you have those tools they give you a new way of thinking.” Backs up my belief that everything is a science if you break it down.

Kevin continues: “What’s happening with individuals engaged in craftmanship is that when they change their tools, they have different ideas. It gives them a new different view on the world. It opens up a new possibility space. Tools are the way you explore possibility space, the space of possible things.”

And “In the beginning, when you’re young, you think you have certain choices, but oftentimes, a new tool will open up a whole new space that you didn’t even know about and the way you get through that space is through the mastery of those tools.”

I like this: “My entire organizational strategy, every second of sweeping and straightening I do at the end of each day, is about keeping up the momentum of my making.” Adam is right. You gotta keep your stuff clean so you can just come right back and work, especially after a project that’s been kicking your ass. Otherwise, you spend more time cleaning up at the beginning of the day, or worse, you try to work in a mess.

Had to write this down: “I’m a fervent believer that a shop is a holy space wherein we pay attention, like prayer, to those things that are important to us what we are doing, what we desire to make, how we solve the problems we encounter while tackling a project, and what we can achieve through our efforts. In each of those endeavors, to execute on them with rigor and excellence, we must, as with anything where the stakes are genuine, face ourselves.”

“By facing ourselves, I mean watching and learning from our own habits and making changes based on that information to improve ourselves. I mean facing down our own biases about how we think a project should go in favor of going along with where the project wants to go. Understanding this difference, between what a project should be and what it wants to be, and respecting the gulf between them, is key to fulfilling one’s potential as a maker. It is a big part of what makes a master craftsperson.”

“Making at its most basic is a process of conception and construction. They are linked but not the same. We never conceive exactly what ends up getting built and we never build exactly what we conceive. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. Facing yourself means taking responsibility for that fact, and making peace with the reality that to build something real and substantive is to give up some measure of control over your preconceptions of what you imagined you were making in the first place.”

Holy shit those are three amazing paragraphs!

What a great way to end it: “I still run into days where the build was brutal, and I can’t stand to be there one more minute. Sometimes I still need to bolt, to put an end to a crappy day and just unplug…

“On those days, I don’t beat myself up about it. I try to face myself, but I’m also trying to be gentle in the process. Present me has a quiet conversation with future me and promises that this isn’t going to become a habit. The next ady, a recharged future me usually responds that it’s okay from time to time to abandon your best-laid plans and just get out.

“It’s okay for you, too. In the world of making, there’s space for that. There’s space for all of us.”

May 2nd 2025

I’m abandoning the novel I was working on, because frankly, it’s too convoluted for me to even follow right now! If I can’t follow it, no one else can. I’m falling back into my old pattern of overcomplicating things so I can tangle myself up in it…

I think the better approach is to write something that absolutely burns down my past. Whereas my wife spent over twenty years putting out fires and saving lives in a pinch, I’m going to do the complete opposite, burn it all down so the forest can grow anew. The catharsis I need is to kill off all the things that no longer will serve me going forward, and that’s a lot. Most of my memories are already ruined by the world swallowing them or clearing them away for “progress…”

I’m turning 38 [on May 8] and I have no more time for nonsense or screwing around. After lots of reconsideration, I’m continuing to write my Life and Times autobiographical essays, but I’m going to not hold back my rage or my sarcasm anymore. I’m extremely sarcastic in real life, and while this certainly shows in my writing, I’ve held back because of people thinking I was crazy.

Truthfully, if I were crazy, I couldn’t display such logical progressions through my work. Yes, you can justify anything logically – that’s true – which in fact may as well be a throughline through some future essay series I’m yet to author… But my more recent throughline of my writings lately is pointing out just how absurd everything really is, and reminding you there is nothing you can do about it other than control what you do with yourself and try to give others a chance to follow your example. Most won’t. But when they do, you will feel pretty damn satisfied that you gave a shit. It’s all about giving a shit about the right people. Once they become drains on you, they gotta go.

Keep the good ones close, the great ones closer, and the ones who start to empty your tank as far away as possible, at arm’s length perhaps, or even further. Time to start burning down the past to plant new seedlings and saplings to grow a brand new much stronger and prettier forest.

May 3rd 2025

My card for this morning… is the XVIII moon reversed.

Cat’s advice: “You may have a hard time allowing for the possibility of things you can’t perceive with your daylight mind, the rational and analytical parts of yourself. This can block intuition and dream messages ,perhaps even erase any memory of your dreams at all. Explore your resistance to going deeper within.”

Well, I rarely like what my dreams tell me.

…There are so many forces at work in complete conflict within me right now. All those game launchers and nostalgic diversions are all battling for my attention. Now none of them want to cooperate with each other. So I’m considering ditching most of them. I tasted a bit of nostalgia with each game I attempted to play yesterday only to end up having them fail in my face. Each new layer of complexity I add trying to just play the games that used to bring me some semblance of joy just brings that old gaming laptop to its knees more often. I’d like to salvage at least some value from game pass but that’s looking less likely now.

May 4th 2025

May the farce be with you. It all sucks now.

My card: Ten of Fire (Wands) reversed

Cat’s advice: “The energy is grounding itself, and things will be calmer soon. Don’t feel that you need to rush around putting all the little fires out – they will take care of themselves or others will handle it. Don’t take on too much or dissipate your strength through fretfulness.”

…

I have a video from Maria of Strange Lucidity who promises a half-hour of “beautiful quotes from beautiful books.” 😊

So, one of the books that Maria talked about is Proofs and Theories, Essays on Poetry by Louise Gluck.

In “Education of the Poet” – “The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his (her) being on a sheet paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write, wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of will is negative; we have toward what we write the power of veto.

“It is a life dignified, I think, by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement. In the actual work, a discipline, a service. Or, to utilize the metaphor of childbirth which seems never to the die: the writer is the one who attends, who facilitates: the doctor, the midwife, not the mother.”

Ernest Hemingway, “A Moveable Feast”: she loves the part where he spends time with James Joyce.

A great passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Great Gatsby: “He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. IT was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face -the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished – and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.”

That’s some… delicious, as Maria would say… writing.

“Days of Reading” Marcel Proust’s on his philosophy of reading. “For as long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. (Or health-giving) It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thoughts and efforts of our own heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.”

OK! I’ve been reading the wrong books…

Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare! It reminds her of her year-old niece. How sweet! 😊 Also, Sonnet 55. Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, / But sd mortality o’ersway their power, / How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower? /O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out / Against the wrackful siege of battering days, / When rocks impregnable are not so stout, / Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays? / O fearful meditation, where alack, / Shall Time’s best jewel rom Time’s chest lie hid? / Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back, / Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid? / O none, unless this miracle have might / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The book that Blade Runner was based on. I do like the idea of ‘mood organs’ which I don’t think is in Blade Runner, especially one you can program.

Louise Gluck “Averno” this is a poetry collection. Maria isn’t so into it, but there’s one called Landscape that she really likes:

“Time passed, turning everything to ice.
Under the ice, the future stirred.
If you fell into it, you died.

It was a time
of waiting, of suspended action.

I lived in the present, which was
that part of the future you could see.
The past floated above my head.
like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable

It was a time
governed by contradictions, as in
I felt nothing and
I was afraid

Winter emptied the trees, filled them again with snow.
Because I couldn’t feel, snow fell, the lake froze over.
Because I was afraid, I didn’t move;
my breath was white, a description of silence.

Time passed, and some of it became this.
And some of it simply evaporated;
you can see it float above the white trees
forming particles of ice.”

“The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco

This quote is incredible: “For architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called ‘kosmos,’ that is to say ornate, since it is like a great animal on whom there shine the perfection and proportion of all its members. And praised be our Creator, who has decreed all things, in the number, weight, and measure.”

Then she read some book in German, and she dropped the book, and it was adorable <3

“The Second Sex” by Simone De Beauvoir. She’s always had great quotes, and I should quote her a lot more. To wit: “I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it any more. Yet it is still being talked about. And the volumes of idiocies churned out over this past century (and the one to follow) do not seem to have clarified the problem.”

Also, she really likes Paris 😊

From “Pere Goriot” by Honore de Balzac: “But Paris is a veritable ocean; take as many soundings as you like, you will never know how deep it is. Travel round it, describe it, but no matter how systematic your travels or your description, how numerous and eager the explorers of that sea, there will always be some place untouched, some cave unknown, flowers, pearls, monsters, something unheard of, forgotten by the literary divers.”

Damn, I hope Maria does more of these… So many things I need to find some way to work into my future essays to make it look like I actually am well-read… which I’m really not… just good at stealing quotes and remembering shit whenever it seems handy.

May 5th 2025

My card for today is the Earth Kitten reversed, of course. Am I ever going to pull an upright card again?

“You may be feeling uncertain and insecure, which can lead to hesitation and a refusal to advance along your life path. When you are afraid to move forward or reach out to explore your world, attend to basic security concerns first. What do you need to do in order to feel safe?”

I’m pretty sure this translates to the Page of Pentacles reversed.

Is youtube social media or not? [A video I watched on YouTube] My thoughts: “I’ve always thought of YouTube as a discovery platform, which has social media elements, but can be used entirely as an entertainment and educational platform without bothering with the social aspects. Shorts have become a bit too pervasive for me lately, and I only engage with them if people I subscribe to make them. Fortunately for me. I suppose, I don’t ever get sucked into the shorts black hole so many other people I know do.

…I’m more interested in the long form commentaries and discussions than the click bait and vlog-like content so many people love these days…YouTube has such longevity and as a discovery engine, it can pull up content from over a decade ago that can still find a fresh audience years later. Personally, I use the platform more for music discovery and following favorite artists, then ASMR content to help me sleep thanks to my insomniac tendencies.

But then I stumble across gems, too! There are so many people on YouTube who are brilliant and offer perspectives and insights that really make me think and start looking at the world a bit differently. I think YouTube is pretty awesome and I hope that shorts don’t inevitably ruin it in the long term.”

May 6th 2025

I did, in fact, stay up for quite awhile after I stopped writing last night. Of course, due to sleeping most of the afternoon away, my sleep schedule is completely buggered. I woke up at 530 due to simply not wanting to have nightmares anymore, informative to my true mental condition as they might be. I heard voices all night, and it turns out, I wasn’t crazy. The stupid Samsung TV thing was playing all God damn night, because I forgot to turn it off after I turned the playstation off. Seriously, what is the fucking point of that shit? I’m sure there’s something on there that I could put on that would, in fact, be somewhat entertaining but it usually plays some nonsense.

I dreamed about kids standing up to teachers, “educators,” and guidance counselors. Turns out, if one kid stands up against the tyranny of these yes-men factories that humanity outgrew decades, if not centuries, ago, the rest of the class will too! I’ve seen myself that defiance is, in fact, contagious. But after I almost ended up at the Phoenix [the “bad kids” school] due to things that I drew, rather harmlessly I might add, in my notebook, I kept quiet. I let the rage simmer and stew for so many years until it erupted in the latter half of my college career.

School held me back. Fortunately, mid-to-late Gen Z figured out how to get out before it was too late. Some of these Zoomer Lovelies I watch are figuring out now that they were on the right track but took a mighty unfortunate corporate detour in the process of trying to figure out where the hell they fit into this late Capitalist hellscape! I HATE CAPITALISM! And now a word from this week’s sponsor…

By the way, part of the reason I chose the name Phoenix, and this is a bit embarrassing… I actually WANTED to end up there. I could be as much of a shit head as I wanted there, and as it turns out the “bad kids” respected me. I was just as much of a punk as they were, believe it or not. I was a teenage anarchist. I’m now becoming a mid-life anarchist. I mean, I’m turning 38 in two days. That’s mid-life as it gets.

Well, I’m still here, unfortunately. And Emily can’t figure out why I can’t be content. Hmm, I wonder? I love it when people frustrate me, specifically beautiful femme people. I love to be vexed, confounded, and perplexed by those who are literally gorgeous walking contradictions and paradoxes of themselves…

… ah, the byproducts of living in Late Capitalist Hell.

Anyway, my card for the day is Sea King… not reversed for a change!

Cat’s advice: “Others look to you for calm strength and reassurance. The respect you have earned as a peacemaker is well-deserved, for it comes from an authentic wish to reach out to others in kindness. Everyone who is within your sphere of influence benefits from your wise compassion, which counsels without taking on others’problems as your own.”

Oh, and for too long others’ Problems WERE MY OWN! That was the only way I made the subsistent pittance I once did.

…

I’m sick of seeing all this suffering for no reason other than corporate greed and religious fundamentalism.

Like most people, Emily has nothing to be sorry about, [despite constantly apologizing apropos of nothing]. For decades, she was making due with an impossibly awkward and fucked up situation. The issue I have is not so much with your average person as much as it is their foolish belief in a society that doesn’t value them at all…

Emily is the most accomplished and successful person I know at doing things that actually matter. I told her that. It pisses me off daily that people don’t appreciate Emily like they should.

Compared to Emily, I’ve just been an errand girl and occasional curiosity when it comes to something I’ve written. I’ve spent all these years propping up others I should’ve let topple over. Emily is the first person that I found that was worth supporting. Well, and Audra. And paying forward what Emily did for me for someone truly deserving was an important step towards building karma towards my inevitable fate…

May 7th 2025

My card for today: Ten of Fire reversed. Because of course. I’m copy-pasting what it said from a few days ago:

I’ve spent so many years trying to find all these clever ways to disseminate my ideas. But really, the best way to do it is just to put them out there and let them find their own way. From whispered readings, to puppet shows, to outright in-your-face monologues… I just put my ideas into visible thoughtforms so that I can over time spin the threads into platinum-selling prose. I need to let go and let myself be the vessel through which what needs to be said can be channeled into something people may, in fact, actually heed for once.

As for Emily’s post today…

“And as the day folded into night, I found myself slipping between timelines. The past and present bleeding together like watercolors—messy, imperfect, beautiful in their own stubborn way. I climbed back into my old bed, where the walls still had faint outlines of posters long since removed, and I stared at the ceiling. For a moment, I could almost hear the soundtrack of my youth—songs that knew me better than I knew myself.”

That’s one of the most beautiful paragraphs I’ve ever read.

…

I did take a little nap but first I watched a video I was suggested by YouTube of the lovely Austrian Maria. I really love her channel and have grown rather fond of her, too. She is not only very bright and reads very closely, but is also beautiful and lovely.

One thing I’ve learned about her that I find immensely interesting is that she rarely finishes books. I find this fascinating. She collects quotes and jumps around, finishing some eventually, but she says she’s a very slow reader. I think what’s actually the case is she’s a deliberate reader… she also is Austrian, so German is her first language.

She has a video about short books, so I’ll list them here for me to look up:

This is water by David Foster Wallace, it’s a speech you can watch on YouTube.
The psychology of man’s possible evolution by P.D. Ouspensky.
Letters to a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.
The prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

I realize after a very thorough discussion of hers concerning Hamlet act 2, that all I’ve ever really wanted is for people to listen to me. The only one to ever listen to me consistently is Emily… That’s what hurts me the most, when I feel I have said something wrong, or more often, not said what I meant in quite the right way. And we live in such an impatient time, obviously, that no one seems to have much use of me.

I don’t know what it is about Maria, but it seems to me, I have suddenly through that one video realized something that her other videos led me to recently. I just want to read, write down some nice quotes, ponder them awhile and discuss them over tea (or Mountain Dew) then just lay in quiet contentment and do it all over again.

Is this how I find meaning in such an indifferent universe? Words, music, and a little unexpected beauty, all conspire to warm my heart, for long as we find beauty in what we see and hear, feel and smell, so the taste of joy becomes ever so sweet to find that maybe life might have something left for me yet.

May 8th 2025

… If I learned one thing yesterday it was that being a completionist is the dumbest thing you can do. I’ve always been obsessed with completion. I don’t mean just start a bunch of shit and leave it unfinished everywhere. You need to simply pick things up, find your fulfillment from them, and move on. This whole Completionist mindset is yet another Capitalist ideal that needs to be flushed down the toilet with my morning shit. It all needs to go. Yes it’s fine to just read one chapter, if it told you what you needed it to say… not wanted it to say, mind you!

No one can save anyone from themselves. But some people still want to be saved and will do whatever it takes. The only way out is through… but no one can do anything right entirely by themselves. Time to leave lots of things gloriously unfinished, in their ugly, broken splendor, to let the tasks that need to be finished, like getting over this depression surge, get done!

…

I last pulled the Ten of Sea card reversed on April 22^nd. Here’s what I said at the time:

“Ten of Sea reversed. (Ten of Cups) Usually that’s a positive card, but reversed?

The Cat’s Advice: “Too much togetherness can create irritability or strife in even the closest families. You may be feeling crowded now and need some space to refresh your appreciation for your loved ones. If you are in a bonded partnership and have offspring, you may benefit from spending time alone with your mate.”

This card doesn’t make much sense to me right now, except… this must be telling me this is where I’m anchored…

…

I’m getting back to the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Nothing wrong with that so far.

“Every decision people make with money is justified by taking the information they have at the moment and plugging it into their unique mental model of how the world works.”

To be fair, I don’t have a problem with money in concept. Having a freely exchangeable currency IS good for economic reasons, so many of them. But my issue is when MONEY becomes the DRIVING FORCE in our lives. That’s when everything falls apart. That’s what happened to me. Chasing money is the great capitalist delusion, and it needs to stop. Not that having money is bad – it’s good to have – but it shouldn’t be our goal in life.

I have to write this down because it’s both funny and extremely sad:

“The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 a year on lotto tickets, four times the amount of those in the highest income groups. Forty percent of American cannot come up with $400 in lottery tickets and by and large the same people who say they couldn’t come up with $400 in an emergency. They are blowing their safety nets on something with a one-in-millions chance of hitting it big.”

I never did this, of course. But so many people I know did. And never won. I actually do know someone who won, their mom got one of the smaller jackpots in Rhode Island, I believe. She gave each of her kids a million dollars. He kept working and spent the money on home improvement and saved the rest. Smart guy; he bought himself an early retirement.

“Few people make financial decisions purely with a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a company meeting. Places where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together into a narrative that works for you.”

Great point.

Starting chapter two, “Luck and risk are siblings. They are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort.”

“Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.” – Scott Galloway

Even Bill Gates got a one-in-a-million head start with a high school with a Teletype terminal. The only one at the time. Meanwhile, Bill and Paul’s friend Kent died in a mountaineering accident before he graduated high school. One-in-a-million occurrence that went the opposite way.

“You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.”

“It’s possible to statistically measure whether some decisions were wise. But in the real world, day to day, we simply don’t. It’s too hard. We prefer simple stories, which are easy but often devilishly misleading.”

Two great points:

“Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.”

“Therefore, focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.”

“My favorite historian, Frederick Lewis Allen, spent his career depicting the life of the average, median American – how they lived, how they changed, what they did for work, what they ate for dinner, etc. There are more relevant lessons to take away from this kind of broad observation than there are in studying the extreme characters that tend to dominate the news.”

It’s like a bird’s eye view. The “boring” view, just like the PNC bank ad says… that’s where success truly comes from… being “boring” but successful by being so.

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” – Bill Gates

As Housel points out though, the opposite can also be true: “Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk.”

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Emmelie posted a video about her top 10 FAVOURITE books 😀

Interesting for her to say that the list is prone to change. What’s wrong with that?

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Middlemarch by George Elliot
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

I love this quote from Tenant: “Beauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.”

The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien (interestingly she loves it more than Lord of the Rings) She calls it her Bible!

The Hunchback of Notre Dame – not the Disney version XP although she loves it a ton. As Disney films go, it gets the right vibe… but the book is difficult. Victor Hugo loves his digressions XD

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (of course)

“Teach the ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education: it is responsible for the darkness it creates. the soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness” PREACH VICTOR!

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Interesting choices, some of them completely obvious for her, but some not so much.

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I’m going through my saved articles. I found this awesome quote from an old Chris LaTray article called “A Lost Shivering Animal”:

“…at least in my life, everything that I’ve tried and succeeded at has been built on the detritus of failure after failure after failure. It still is. For every good sentence there are dozens of unintelligible ones. For every good poem there are pages and pages of uninspired ones. For every hour I spend laboring at my desk there are dozens when I didn’t. Over the years for every bowl full of raw spinach I’ve eaten there has probably been half-a-container’s-worth that turned foul in the fridge before I got through all of it because deli garbage is so much easier to access in that moment of hunger rather than wait an extra fifteen minutes to get home and eat responsibly. None of this means I’m going to stop writing sentences, or poems, or working, or eating spinach. I’m just trying to be kinder with myself for my endless failures while trying to do just a little better.”

I’ve decided, though, that if there are only a couple quotes worth saving, I’ll just put them in my reflections here and let the article go. I need to simplify everything, archives included.

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Ok I didn’t mean to watch something that required me to take notes but this video about deep reading by the Lady of the Library, Cinzia, really got my attention.

This book called “the Gutenberg elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age” by Sven Birkerts calls “deep reading” “the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don’t just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity.” I’m still finding bits of my skull about my room after reading that.

How did youtube know I’ve had intellectual FOMO for so long? That’s why I’ve been clearing out my saved articles! But as she said, knowledge comes from digesting information, not merely collecting it. I used to go through every Sunday and clear things out. I need to get back to that habit.

May 9th 2025

Today’s card is Ten of Earth (Pentacles) Reversed:

A lot of Tens, reversed, lately.

“Having a special spot is one thing, but refusing to ever leave that spot is something else. If you only feel safe in an environment that is familiar to you, you miss out on the chance to experience new pleasures and comforts, perhaps surpassing those you already know. There is nothing to fear – your support system is strong, and you will always be able to find your way home again.”

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From The Psychology of Money:

“For a critical enemy of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.” – John Bogle

Gupta and Madoff had WAY more than enough. But they got greedy and got slammed for it, rightly so!

“The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.” – Morgan Housel

“Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.”

“$81.5 billion of Warren Buffett’s $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65^th birthday. Our minds are not built to handle such absurdities.” That’s nuts.

I love Morgan’s comparison of compound growth of money to ice ages. “The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don’t need tremendous force to create tremendous results. If something compounds- if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth – a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic. It can be so logic-defying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to. And so it is with money.”

“There are books on economic cycles, trading strategies, and sector bets. But the most powerful and important book shouldn’t be called Shut UP and Wait. It’s just one page with a long-term chart of economic growth.”

“Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.”

May 10th 2025

Today’s card: XXI The world. UPRIGHT this time!

“Everything is coming together for you now and the goals you have longed for are within your reach. This is a time of completion, when something has come to fruition and can be released with a sense of satisfaction. The world is conspiring in your favor to bring you everything you need for peace and fulfillment. As your human poet Robert Louis Stevenson said, ‘The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings’ – or as cats.”

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