Reiner and Brooks’ evening routine never changes: they sit and talk “about everything”, then have dinner in front of Reiner’s massive TV while they watch Jeopardy!. It seems like a pretty great life, and it is.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a better friend than Carl,” says Brooks.
“My God, the thought of being without him – the world would be too bleak!” says Reiner, and Brooks’ face falls a little, as if he is envisaging all too clearly a world without Reiner.
“Now, come on, Carl, let her ask some questions,” he says.
I tell them I just like listening to them talk to one another.
“But you might want to ask about something specific, and Carl will be ready, willing and able to answer anything,” says Brooks, buoying them both along.
Reiner puts his hand on top of Brooks’. “Always,” he says.
‘Love and free food’: Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner share the secrets of their 70-year friendship
Month: June 2020
Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile.
Judith Guest, Ordinary People
Coronavirus: Day 100
We’ve done it, folks, 100 days!
Also happens to be Father’s Day. Which has been a great day. Ventured out to the beach with the family. Felt a bit like normal.
Also happens to be the longest day of the year. Which is neither here nor there.
Let’s see what the next 100 days brings.
If You Feel Like You’re Regressing, You’re Not Alone
“Then the second phase hits: a regression phase, where people get tired, lose their sense of purpose, start fighting about the small stuff, and forget to do basic things like eat or drink — or they eat and drink too much.”
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
On Note Taking and Task Management
Tim King’s post really speaks to me:
Welcome to the Note Taking Apocalypse
The choices you have to select from are incredibly vast. From uncomplicated apps like SimpleNote with tiny footprints, right up to the immense behemoth that is Microsoft OneNote, there are plenty of options.
The hardest part for anyone remotely interested in a solution among this immense array of software is that each and every note taking app developer to date has decided to reinvent the wheel every time they’ve turned on their compiler. It gets even worse once you open the door on purpose-specific note taking applications.
I’m constantly on the hunt for better apps, page layouts, systems, whatever to do a better job of taking and organizing my notes and to-dos. There’s an entire industry dedicated to this kinda stuff, and going down the rabbit hole can be exhausting.
This isn’t so much replacing my note taking as much as my task list, but lately I’ve been using Notion.so to organize some of my longer term projects. There are a million templates and varying layouts, but what’s best for me is being able to build out a spreadsheet and then see it in calendar format with the flip of a switch. It also has a bookmarking feature that I like, but I haven’t replaced Pocket yet since Pocket will also let me easily reblog a link to J’s Notes via IFTTT.
For notes, it’s still trusty ol’ pen and paper. I’ve become a big fan of the TUL discbound notebooks for the ease of moving stuff between notebooks and the quality of the paper. I’ve put together a custom dashboard for my weekly schedule and tasks, but that’s kinda gone out the window the last few months because of the plague.
There are probably better systems and apps out there and, believe me, I’m gonna find and try them. But Tim King’s point above shows the biggest limitation: having to start over just to try something different is a pain. But also the nature of the beast.
Pursuit as Happiness
That year we had planned to fish for marlin off the Cuban coast for a month. The month started the tenth of April and by the tenth of May we had twenty-five marlin and the charter was over.
Coronavirus: Day 94
We’ll hit day 100 this week. A lot of things have changed as of late. But in a lot of ways they’re still the same.
Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
Johan Huizinga
Has pandemic pushed us into a post-human future?
A few days ago the dry cleaners who moved into my building over a decade ago, shut down. The pandemic’s pause took a heavy toll on their business, and it became virtually impossible for them to continue. I didn’t even get to say a proper goodbye.