I thought my finger was on the pulse of significant browser developments, but this one I missed completely: URL Scroll-To-Text Fragment.

Here’s the URL for a post on Lisa’s blog, for example:

https://lisachandler.is/pressure-summer/

Down in the text there is the sentence:

To cherish every memory.

It turns out that I can link directly to that sentence, and have it highlighted to boot, like this:

https://lisachandler.is/pressure-summer/#:~:text=To%20cherish%20every%20memory.

Pulling this apart—it’s all documented here—I add these to the URL:

• #:~:text=
• the text I want to highlight on that page, with special characters, like spaces, %-encoded.

There’s more in the documentation about linking to, and highlighting, a range of text, with a start and end string; for example:

https://ruk.ca/content/asking-questions#:~:text=And%20what,something%20sticks.

will link to and highlight the paragraph that starts with “And what” and ends with “something sticks.”

This is a browser feature I wish had existed from off the top—and that I wish I’d learned about earlier—as referencing sentences or paragraphs in my blog posts is something I do all the time.

There’s a browser extension that helps with making these links easier; right now it doesn’t appear to work for the latest Safari, but there’s a bookmarklet that does.

(Note that this isn’t a universally-supported feature, and Firefox specifically doesn’t support it).

It’s summertime, and I’m wearing a T-shirt today, a rarity for me, as my uniseasonal wardrobe is anchored in short-sleeved button-down shirts.

This shirt is a special one: two years ago this month I made a sketch of Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row. I posted it online, where personable Receiver partner Chris Francis saw it and asked me if they could use it for their staff shirt that Christmas. I said yes, of course (Chris and I have a long history of working together on coffee-related printed works). I received a couple of shirts by way of thank-you.

Today was, I think, the first time I’ve worn the shirt around and about.

Me, from the back, wearing the Receiver Coffee shirt (credit: Lisa Chandler)

For almost a decade I’ve been using Fastmail as my email provider. Switching to Fastmail followed 15 years of various and sundry ways of hosting my own email, on various and sundry hosts I owned or controlled, some of which were located 10 feet below where I’m writing this in my near-200-year-old clay-floored basement (perhaps the least optimal place for a missing-critical data centre).

Eventually the weight, emotionally and technically, of self-hosting my email—managing spam, primarily, but also keeping my SMTP and IMAP servers up to date—got the best of me, and I went looking for something I could pay for that would relieve my of all that. At the time there were a lot of bloggerati recommending Fastmail, and so that’s where I ended up. I’ve never been unhappy I made the switch: Fastmail has “just worked” from the beginning, and it has continued to evolve its user interface, its functionality, and its support systems over the last 10 years. I wholeheartedly recommend it to people who come looking to me as an alternative to using “free” services—Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, or their Internet provider’s locked-in email systems.

Many years ago my friend Stephen went to a conference of librarians in Winnipeg. He flew on CP Air, which tells you how long ago it was. Something got bungled on his return flight, and he got bumped. But CP made the bumping so effortless and beneficial to him—the compensation he was offered was enormous for the time, enough to fly almost anywhere, for free, that CP flew—that his story about the trip, which could have been a negative one, was, instead, unreservedly positive. He told it many times over.

Last week, Fastmail had a rare outage that affected a small percentage of users. Fastmail itself wasn’t down, but it remained unreachable to parts of the Internet, including my own, and so I was left without email for a good chunk of a day. It was a pain in the ass, especially when I needed my email to receive things like TFA codes to login to websites. The experience didn’t sour me on Fastmail, but it did make a dent.

Today, though, Fastmail published an account of the outage. It’s well-written, clear, and technically detailed. And it’s honest.

Beyond being data mines for advertising (and, presumably, AI-model-training), “free” email services are also opaque technically. The reason I maintained my own servers for so long was because I wanted to understand (and control) something so vital to me; I wanted to have eyes-on the infrastructure. I don’t have the same degree of control with Fastmail, but when Fastmail publishes a diagram of its network, by way of explaining what went wrong, it gives me comfort that there are real people operating real networks and data centres, people that I can contact for support, and people that care that my email doesn’t go away, because I’m paying them to do that.

In documenting the outage, Fastmail did for me what CP Air did for my friend Stephen, turning a negative into a positive, and prompting me to laud rather than lament them. If you’re looking for a new home for your email, go there.

My friend Ian lamented, in 2004, in but enough about me, our societal lack of intrapersonal curiosity:

Having just returned from another evening deep in the flats of Hollywood, I (shockingly) have a complaint. And this complaint is not even California-centric; it’s just as bad in New York City. Namely: WHY DON’T PEOPLE EVER ASK YOU QUESTIONS ABOUT YOURSELF?

Seriously, I’m not making myself out to be some sort of bastion of social etiquette, but I always ask everybody I meet at least 5-10 questions about their work, their passions, where they’re from, what they’ve done they’re proud of, even slightly personal queries like “are you happy?” I do this because I’m easily bored, and everyone has a story, and there’s always SOMETHING that will briefly excavate a fascinating aspect of an otherwise-tedious-seeming person.

And what does the world ask me? NOTHING. And it’s not just me, I listen to other conversations, I am a damn good verbal sociologist, and it seems like nobody asks anybody anything; they just wait their turn to hurl out their yawp, and hope something sticks.

It’s a post I’ve turned over in my mind dozens of times in the 19 years since I first read it.

Over the last few years I’ve discovered that, despite near-constantly insisting the contrary, I am an extrovert, not an introvert. I’m an extrovert who never learned how to be one: growing up in a generally asocial family, I didn’t learn the basics of social lubrication, the simple conversational techniques, the ways of being comfortable.

A breakthrough came when I realized that, give or take, nobody has reached zipless extroversion: learning this was huge, as it allowed me to view myself as being on an even keel when wading out into the crowd. 

Another breakthrough was discovering that following my natural curiosity and asking questions was a ticket toward the social lubrication I sought.

Yet another was when I realized that it wasn’t solely about lubrication, and that I could, indeed, foster real connection by being curious. 

Being genuinely curious upon meeting someone, and having them rise to the challenge in their responses, is a delight.

Being genuinely curious upon meeting someone, and having them rise to the challenge in their responses, and return the curiosity volley, is intoxicating.

In one of the versions of my Bumble profile I wrote:

I am inveterately curious, interested in a lot of things, a specialist in none. I easily fall into rabbit holes. I thrive in the presence of other curious people. 

That Lisa is so good at asking curious questions is one of the reasons I no longer need a Bumble profile.

Which brings me back to Ian’s question: why don’t people ever ask you questions about yourself?

If curiosity is lubricating, and connecting, and a way of fostering connections, why is it so rare?

Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John offered some thoughts in their 2018 Harvard Business Review article The Surprising Power of Questions:

Why do so many of us hold back? There are many reasons. People may be egocentric—eager to impress others with their own thoughts, stories, and ideas (and not even think to ask questions). Perhaps they are apathetic—they don’t care enough to ask, or they anticipate being bored by the answers they’d hear. They may be overconfident in their own knowledge and think they already know the answers (which sometimes they do, but usually not). Or perhaps they worry that they’ll ask the wrong question and be viewed as rude or incompetent. But the biggest inhibitor, in our opinion, is that most people just don’t understand how beneficial good questioning can be. If they did, they would end far fewer sentences with a period—and more with a question mark.

There’s a passage early in The Joy of Sex, in the section “women (by her for him)”:

No obsessive views about reciprocity – who comes on top and so on evens out during the passing of time: there can be long spells when we are happy to let you do the work, and others when we need to control everything ourselves and get an extra kick from seeing how we make you respond.

In their Harvard Business Review article, Brooks and John write much the same thing about good conversation:

A conversation is a dance that requires partners to be in sync—it’s a mutual push-and-pull that unfolds over time. Just as the way we ask questions can facilitate trust and the sharing of information—so, too, can the way we answer them.

In improv we talk about how the best scenes involve “an exchange of gifts.” This is true in conversation (and sex): we are at our best—we learn, feel, connect better—when we are curious, when we seek the intimacy of the dance, when we find our way to trust and sharing.

And perhaps that is one reason why good conversation (and good sex, and good improv) is the exception rather than the rule: it requires uncommon vulnerability, a willingness, in the curious question, the extended hand, the brave fall into a scene, to trust that our partner will be there to catch us, to return the curiosity, to be alive in the moment with us.

John and Brooks finished their article with:

The wellspring of all questions is wonder and curiosity and a capacity for delight. We pose and respond to queries in the belief that the magic of a conversation will produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Sustained personal engagement and motivation—in our lives as well as our work—require that we are always mindful of the transformative joy of asking and answering questions.

In Ian’s post:

During a particularly bad fuckup this week, in which an actor felt grossly mishandled, I listened to her on the phone and said, with emphasis, “I HEAR YOU.” The conversation melded into delight as soon as she heard those words.

Ian ended his post “But do me this favor: at some point today, ask somebody a question about themselves.”

I ask you the same.

May you find transformative joy and delight.

I had Kraft Dinner for lunch on Sunday.

For normal humans this would be unremarkable, but it was my first time eating Kraft Dinner. I’m 57 years old.

At some point I simply decided that I wouldn’t like Kraft Dinner.

That I wasn’t a person who ate Kraft Dinner.

I imagined it would taste like bubblegum and basketballs.

We carry around mental models of who we are, the things we do and don’t do, the kinds of friends we have and don’t have. Where our upper limits lie.

“I don’t eat Kraft Dinner.”

But deeper.

I recently read about “life quakes,” a term coined by Bruce Feiler, in the book Anatomy of a Breakthrough by Adam Alter:

“These are the wolves that upend our fairy tales,” Feiler wrote about lifequakes. Lifequakes are sticking points, Feiler noted, because they place roadblocks in whatever path we are following. They prevent us from pursuing the lives we previously imagined living and so leave us stuck as we attempt to construct revised lives in their wake.

I have lived through a series of lifequakes in recent years, and I have needed to construct a new life in their wake. As much as this has been all manner of debilitating, it has also presented me a chance to retell my story to myself. Some of these retellings have been involuntary, others I’ve had to reach for, still others seem tantalizingly just out of reach.

It is destabilizing to walk through this: as much as there are exciting new things to try — horseback riding!, improv! Kraft Dinner! — there is the absence of familiar guideposts that makes a boomerang back to old ruts, in roads that no longer exist, alluring. There is an equal and opposite tendency to chart wildly ambitious courses through unfamiliar seas because, well, what’s the worst thing that could happen! And the tension between the two impulses.

Alter writes on about lifequakes:

The most important feature of lifequakes is that they’re hard to predict. You don’t plan for a lifequake the way you might anticipate an impending plateau, so instead you need to develop a general tool kit for managing unwanted change. “Life transitions are a skill,” Feiler wrote. “They’re a skill we can, and must, master.” A particular lifequake may take you by surprise, but recognizing that lifequakes and other profound sticking points are inevitable puts you several steps ahead of the many people who respond first by asking, “Why me?!” 

At my most optimistic, this skill at life transitions is the one I hope I’m cultivating: gifted a decade of lifequakes, big and small, I’m learning to see them, and to see myself and how I react to them, and getting better at seeing the opportunities chaos offers.

It turns out Kraft Dinner is tasty.

Who knew.

Jeremy Cherfas is in the Italian countryside, and has too many zucchini:

It is a pretty isolated spot, which means the old trick of driving into town with a basket of produce and depositing it on the back seat of anyone foolish enough to leave their car unlocked at the height of zucchini season will not work.

This recalls a time in the late 1980s when my roommates at 640 Reid Street and I, faced with a similar over abundance of zucchini, organized an all-zucchini meal (zucchini fritters, zucchini boats, zucchini cake, etc.).

From The Transgender Family Handbook, an essay by Theresa Thorn, When She Says She’s a Girl, Trust Her. In part:

In hindsight, my firstborn, who had been assigned male at birth, had been trying to signal to me about her gender for a while and, without understanding the harm I was doing, I had been subtly dismissing her hints and gestures. I knew trans kids existed, but I hadn’t thought my kid was trans, which led me to discourage her from wearing a dress on Picture Day (“It’ll be confusing”) and repeatedly cut her hair (“It’s just easier this way”). To me at the time, these had been simple exercises of parental judgment. To my child, they had probably been rejections. By spelling it out in no uncertain terms on the night of the reception, she told me she needed me to start really seeing her. And I honestly wanted to. I wanted to understand every corner of this mysterious little person I helped bring into the world. But to see her for real meant I needed to trust her in a way I never really had before.

Laurie Brown, and the Pondercast podcast she partners, are dipping below the horizon.

In writing about this, Laurie describes this “disappearing act”:

So, what’s next?? There is more art waiting in the wings that I can concentrate on now. I can also learn to live unseen and unheard. After being in the public eye/ear for almost forty years, I know there are important lessons for me here.  So, my next act is a disappearing one.

Pondercast has been an important soundtrack for me in recent years, with its zenith coming, for me and Olivia, in 2018 when we went to a live show in Wolfville. That was a loving, connecting trip for us when we really really needed a loving, connecting trip, and Pondercast was the supportive glue that stuck it together.

No sentence sums of the zeitgeist of the last 4 years for me better than this one, from October 2021:

There is an upside to music dropping out of your life, and that’s having it return.

Having those words to accrete feelings around helped me dig myself out of a hole that I’d been digging for a long time. For that I’m truly thankful.

So long for now, Laurie.