Sometimes I start a collage in my diary but then I just let it sit until it tells me what else it wants. (This one was started around Christmas.)
Schedule send
I am scheduling this blog entry to post on Monday, Dec. 14, 2020 at 8 a.m. CT.
By the time you read it, I could’ve pressed “schedule” a few hours ago, or a few weeks ago, or even a few months ago. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but whenever you read it, it will be new to you.
In an age of instantaneous messaging, I find this enormously freeing. A nice gap between writing and publishing, sending and receiving.
A bit of technology that has changed my life: Gmail’s “Schedule Send” function. (Yes, I still use Gmail, even though I know better.)
If I answer emails in the afternoon, I schedule them to go out at 8AM the next morning. This means I don’t get a bunch of replies overnight and it often gives me time to add or edit the email before it goes out.
The problem with sending messages is that they’ll get answered with new messages. If I pick a time to write all my messages, but delay sending them, that buys me even more time to be blissfully unmessaged.
I know this sounds selfish, and it is, but Schedule Send also allows me to be courteous to others: I love the world too much to send it email on a weekend. I might write dozens of emails during a weekend, but none of my correspondents will receive an email on a weekend. This is as it should be.
My dream is to never have to answer email at all.
John Waters says real wealth is never having to deal with assholes, but real wealth for me would also mean no email.
“I don’t even have an e-mail address,” Umberto Eco once said. “I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.” (This was 25 years ago, by the way.)
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things,” Donald Knuth says on his website. “But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”
One day I will either have the real wealth or the courage to follow their examples, but for now, Schedule Send makes me feel a little richer.
Related reading: Answering letters
How the days of the week got their names
Today I remembered that the ancients named the seven days after the five planets known to them — plus the sun and moon — but only three of the days correlate in English: Satur(n)-day, Sun-day, and Mo(o)n-day. The other days are derived from Anglo-Saxon names for gods:
Sunday | Sun’s day |
Monday | Moon’s day |
Tuesday | Tiu’s day |
Wednesday | Woden’s day |
Thursday | Thor’s day |
Friday | Freya’s day |
Saturday | Saturn’s day |
Here’s a video explanation:
After watching that video back in January, my son and I tried to map it out for ourselves (I believe strongly in copying out charts to better understand them):
This is the time of year I think a lot about seasons and how we’ve managed to carve up time. It’s amazing how much of this stuff we just take for granted. For example, the word “month” comes from “moon,” as the months roughly correlate to the length of a moon cycle. (This month, wonderfully, begins with a full moon and ends on a full moon.)
Here’s a lovely thought from my friend John T. Unger, who, after reading Thoreau on October, tweeted:
“Sunset month of the year” struck me this morning, made me realize the parallel between seasons and days. Spring is like early morning, summer; mid-day, fall; sunset and evening, winter; night. Damn, how nature loves to re-use a pattern.
Filed under: Time
Consider the turtle
On this day 164 years ago, my ol’ pal Henry David Thoreau wrote about finding a tortoise nest with a new hatchling:
Think what is a summer to them! June, July, and August, — the livelong summer, — what are they with their heats and fevers but sufficient to hatch a tortoise in. Be not in haste; mind your private affairs. Consider the turtle. Perchance you have worried yourself, despaired of the world, meditated the end of life, and all things seemed rushing to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with a turtle’s pace. Has not the tortoise also learned the true value of time?
I love reading Thoreau in late August. Even though my summer is much longer than his was, he helps me cool down, zoom out, and embrace the season.
How to turn your books into time capsules
Years ago I borrowed this copy of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler from my father-in-law, and when I opened it up I found Calvino’s 1985 NYTimes obit and stories from a 1983 Harper’s.
I was so surprised and delighted by these unexpected artifacts that I decided to start saving clippings in my own books. Here’s my copy of John Ashbery’s They Knew What They Wanted, in which I stuffed a NYTimes review and a photo of his collage desk.
Here’s my copy of Lonesome Dove with a July 2010 Texas Monthly map of the plot of the book and my copy of Salt Fat Acid Heat with Wendy’s piece about writers’ snacks, “The Raw and the Cooked,” from 2011:
Saving clippings this way turns each book into a time capsule. The next time I open one of these books, a paper treasure will fall out. A little surprise for my future self. (Or whoever else cracks it open.)
“Time capsules are notoriously disappointing,” writes Sam Anderson in Boom Town. “They are supposed to be magic existential wormholes to a lost reality, but instead they are almost always empty, damaged, full of junk — further depressing evidence (as if we needed any) of the absolute tyranny of time.”
These time capsules, however, have never disappointed me. They always delight.
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