On the Common 091

Looking life in the eye.

Hi.

It’s the last day of August. This month has done its best to us. We had victories and defeats. Our youngest had a birthday. Our middle one moved back to college for his sophomore year. Our oldest two moved to a different address. Number four started his senior year. We learned about troubling medical results, deaths, babies, engagements, and firings. We had a big dinner party. A huge limb fell out of a tree, narrowly missing a friend’s rental car. We saw a film that many friends were involved in making. We celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary.

Oh, and it was really hot here.

On to September, anyone?

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The Part Where There’s an Essay: Tech Month 5/Bits and Bobs

I received a bit of kind feedback on that article I linked to last week. The feedback was, “Man, that thing was long.” (I told you it was.) In an effort to rationalize my inclusion of it (maybe), I decided to let you in on some things I actually use from it.

1. I’ve turned off almost all notifications on my phone. I cannot believe there was once a time when my phone told me whenever I got an email. That seems insane to me now. I’d suggest you start by peeling back every possible notification — and more is possible than you think.

2. I use Do Not Disturb mode. This is helpful for the worried part of my mom brain. I have exceptions set only for my kids, who drive around at all hours of the night and day. There are a couple of other contacts I let through. For example, if you’ve ever asked me to watch your older kids when you go into labor, you’ve found your way onto my exceptional friend list. Apart from those exceptions, you’re not getting my attention after a certain hour.

3. I use a blue light filter on a timer. Again, I don’t even notice this anymore, but after a certain hour, my phone gets dim and filters blue light. It doesn’t come back to full brightness until the next morning.

4. In the category of time-saving, did you know your phone’s browser most likely has something called “simplified mode” or something like it? I have mine set so that it gets suggested to me every time I open an article on my phone. When I click to use it, the simplified mode eliminates ads and extra stuff from the page. It gives you the article text plus pertinent images, and that’s it.

Are there any ways you’ve hacked your phone to make it serve you (and your non-digital life) better? Let us know in the comments.

I wanted to conclude this series with an offering from The Arcadian Wild’s latest album, entitled “Dopamine.”

Giving pieces of me away
My death comes by a thousand cuts, and I paid for the knife
Bleeding for a way to escape my ball and chain
The fatal clutches of father screen time

Wake up and break yourself outta here
Don’t be one of the cold souls who disappears
Stop believing and telling the lie
Why don’t you look your life in the eye?

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For the Anglophiles

Recently author Sally Lloyd-Jones gave us this brief primer on the postbox you see above:

Isn’t he handsome? He is a Victorian pillar box. Penfold Type. He’s really quite old and he’s still standing tall in his bright red shining coat. And he’s working!—that’s Queen Victoria’s coat of arms on there. 300 Penfold boxes were made and about 150 remain. They are named after the one who designed them—John Wornham Penfold (3 December 1828 – 5 July 1909). Penfold designed the hexagonal British post box in 1866, now known as a Penfold box.

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Reads & Listens of the Week

Jonathan Rogers’ weekly writing newsletter The Habit has moved to Substack!

I enjoyed Russell Moore and David Brooks’ conversation about Moore’s new book Losing Our Religion. They discuss the “allure of tribalism.”

Kaitlynn Scheiss touched on one of my pet peeves (and something I used to teach fervently to my high school worldview students, for better or worse): Politicians, You Keep Saying ‘City on a Hill’ (but it doesn’t mean what you think it means.)

This enticement to the imagined restaurant Mary Oliver Garden made me laugh. “Speaking of meals, have you decided on your entree? As Mary Oliver once wrote, ‘Eat bread and understand comfort,’ which we have interpreted as ‘Carbs make-a the people happy.’”

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It is true that if you want to write well and live well at the same time, you’d better arrange to inherit money or marry a stockbroker or a rich woman who can operate a typewriter. -Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”