Every time I fear that Prince Edward Island has lost its mojo…

Tamar Adler, in An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, on poached eggs:

I’ve heard of a lot of perfect ways to poach an egg, I’m sure they work. The problem with them is that to poach eggs is to understand egg cooking as you can’t when you cook them any other way.

A boiled egg stays secret until it’s cooked, and a frying egg sizzles in fat, too hot to touch. But poached eggs are cracked out of their shells and cooked directly in barely simmering liquid, which means you can literally feel them as they cook. The trouble with setting a timer, covering a pan, and walking away is that you end up bound to your trick, lost without a timer, stuck without a lid.

I followed her advice and made—though did not eat, given my eccentricities—poached eggs this morning for the first time.

(Photo by Lisa)

The paper towel used to blot my watercolour brush at the Black & White.

For someone who holds himself out to be in the imagination business, I have remarkably little skill in being able to imagine physical spaces not as they are.

Witness this photo of the end of our upstairs hallway: Lisa wallpapered it last week in a bold, black and white, geometric pattern:

When she proposed the idea I was queasy: unable to conceive of what it might look like, I had to rely on Lisa’s well-developed spatial conception engine.

I trusted her. The result is lovely. Truly lovely. In ways I could not have possibly imagined—something I write not hyperbolically, but literally: my mind simply could not picture this result.

And yet it makes my soul sing every time I climb the stairs.

I have been trapped inside this limitation for a long time. Which is to say that I have trapped myself inside it. I know enough about how my mind has been expanded by sketching, by setting type, by poking at the edges of the web browser canvas, to know that it’s possible to grow. And I know that to be a good partner, to not be at the effect of another’s design sensibility, it’s the edge I have to grow.

And so off I head, to enhance that part of my brain and that part of my spirit.

Matt Stone, quoted in Anatomy of a Breakthrough:

“What should happen between every beat you’ve written down is either the word therefore or but.” He sketches the structure using a more concrete example: “You come up with an idea, and it’s like this happens’ and then ‘this happens… .’ No, no, no. It should be, this happens, and therefore this happens, but this happens, therefore this happens. We’ll write it out to make sure we’re doing it.” Stone continues, “There are so many scripts we see from new writers, where it’s like ‘this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens…,’ and that’s when you’re, like, ‘What the fuck am I watching this for?’”

I stepped down from the Publications Committee of Island Studies Press this spring. Over the years I read dozens of manuscripts under consideration for publishing; by far and away the greatest sin committed regularly was exactly this “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.”

The book for which I’m happiest having played a small role in the greenlighting of was New London: The Island’s Lost Dream. Author John Cousins is a master storyteller, and the narrative arc is in his blood; perhaps unfairly, any manuscript that came after had John’s high water mark to be judged against. 

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.