Good morning. Hello. How are you? #369
Bunnies! Taxes! Spring! Supreme Court backing! Matt Gaetz is gonna get off. Um. I mean, go free.
Good morning. Hello! How are you? I am okay. I had a weird dream where I was back working in the human part of the ad world, and I was concepting ad campaigns for the Joe Biden presidential campaign. There were some really good ones. I was very proud of myself. Never mind they were, you know, six months too late. Dreams. What can you do. Feeling a bit better today. I mean, both my middle fingers are arthritic but, you know, the existential angst has subsided, which I feel good about, and the outrage at our failing country has settled back down to levels at which I can function, which I do not feel particularly good about, but also, you know, need to get some things done today, so I will do my Hail Marys and move on. Is that how Hail Marys work? I don’t know, I am not Catholic. I’ve only ever been to a Catholic service once. It was very short, I was very thankful and announced to my mom I wanted to become a Catholic. She wisely ignored that.
Programming note: Gonna do the Q&A edition tomorrow. If you have a question you’ve been dying to ask me, now is the time! Q&A! Woo!
So yesterday on my 750 words I did actually endeavor to go ahead and write that list of everything terrible in my life. The genius move though was I tried to do it while on a conferenced call, and I am terrible at multitasking these days (Emma maintains I have always been terrible at it, but I believe there was a time that I was brilliant at multitasking, but that time is over). So it ended up just being a quick bulleted list, instead of the paragraph or so for each item I originally envisioned, wherein I wallowed in the misery of the item under discussion and really felt good and bad about it. But since it was a bulleted list, and it petered out after like 12 or so items, it really seemed quite manageable and a bit preposterous to think that a bulleted list of 12 or so items could ever lay me low, so in the end the whole endeavor ended with a whimper. Which was probably for the best. So I am a bit better today, thanks for asking.
Good news! The bunnies are BACK. Emma and I saw our first bunny on our evening walk yesterday. It was just a little baby bunny, but bunny it was. This really does help make up for the fact that the Cherry Blossom tree is already all done. God. That was so quick.
See? That photo is super zoomed in and you can still barely see him. But you know, he is a bunny harbinger. Where there is one bunny, more will follow.
Spring is really nice. The next week will just be 70 and either partly sunny or sunny every day. We did have a nice rainstorm last night, but it kindly waited till about 8 PM when we were done going outside. Excellent timing. I wouldn’t say the pollen is completely washed away, but it’s getting there. And I don’t have to water the plants today, which is nice. That is already getting to be a pretty serious chore for me. I gotta get the drip irrigation installed, but it’ll be at least another couple of weeks before I get there. Until then, finding a spare 20 minutes in the day is no easy task. Plus all those old wives tales about watering in the morning, or evening, or not watering in direct sunshine, etc. etc. People have lots of opinions on the matter. Alas I do not have the luxury of such aquatic paranoia. They get water when they get water.
That other Rick Webb dude has signed up for another dating site - Our Time. This one is SO SCAMMY. First, you can just click on a link in the email and it takes you right to the profile, LOGGED IN. No password. But it doesn’t matter because even though their FAQ page lists how to delete an account, that functionality is conveniently not actually working whenever you go up there and attempt to delete the profile. I know I could just route the messages to spam but it makes me upset and I want it gone.
There’s a photo of the guy. He’s old. Now I just feel like this is the internet preying on old people and it makes me feel bad.
Got a busy day today, three meetings and a podcast interview. Exciting. Don’t know the guy, don’t know the podcast, but I usually say yes to these things, why not. Oh wait I lied I do know the podcast. Well, I know the publication with which the podcast is associated. That’ll be fun. I will post it for you in the future. Probably. Unless I really mess it up. Like that CES panel in January that I told no one about because I did so badly. Or that time I yelled at an asshole and stormed off the stage during a panel for the AICP. I but I don’t expect any of those shenanigans today. It should be fine.
That’s been sitting on my desktop for a few weeks. I thought some day there would be an appropriate moment to throw it in one of these emails for you, but there hasn’t been, so you get it today. I’m a bit all over the place today. And I don’t have a lot of notes in my little scratch pad about topics.
It’s tax day! Well, not really. But it usually is. Our accountant got our taxes done two days ago, and amazingly we don’t have to file an extension this year. I wonder why he bothered to get them done early. I wonder if accountants are annoyed with these extensions because they are super sick of having their intensive workload go past the April 15 cutoff date and cutting into their golf game. How busy are personal accountants (as opposed to, you know, auditors at EY or Withum or something) after tax day? Is their life pretty chill from May to January? Are they like teachers, except their summer is eight months of the year? Should I have become an accountant? Is it too late?
As usual I don’t owe anything because I have a normal ass job that takes taxes out of my paycheck, and Emma owes a bajillion dollars because she is self-employed. She gets to use the SEP trick, though. I miss the ole SEP trick. Pay yourself a bunch of money and your tax bill will go down. Not by a lot, definitely not a lot compared to how much you have to put into the SEP, but still. Paying yourself money to save money. What a great gimmick.
I got this pulldown menu on a 2-factor authentication screen on a website yesterday. Never mind for a moment that the website should, you know, let people use an authenticator app or a hardware key, and of course it was a financial site because, paradoxically, financial websites are the absolute fucking worst when it comes to 2-factor authentication, but, seriously what is THIS:
All I want is a fucking bank that lets me use Authy or a YubiKey. Seriously. Why is it so hard.
I have a prediction on the Matt Gaetz stuff: he is going to get off scott-free. Why do I say this? Because he is exactly the sort of smarmy, smug asshole who probably keeps exact track of when girls turn 18 years old. Also it turns out the Justice Department has had his phone since December? Yeah. If they were gonna move, they’d have done it by now I think. God, he is going to be even more insufferable.
In more fun news, a bunch of Democratic house and senate members filed a bill to expand the Supreme Court to 13 members and I am here for it. It doesn’t have a snowball in hell’s chance of passing, but I still appreciate the cage rattling. I want Amy Covid Bash to think she might lose her job if she goes too rogue. Everyone thinks FDR’s court passing scheme failed, but I’d argue that it didn’t. There aren’t exact parallels — FDR really was blessed with a spate of retirements, and those retirements took a while and Biden might not have a while — but I still think the switch in time that saved nine is our best model for right now, even if it is often misunderstood.
Today’s mix is a W Hotel Lobby in a better world mix. I wonder if I should change the name of these to “Indie Rock Retirement Community Lobby,” except i think that genre would be slightly different. More guitar stuff. I was gonna put Shriekback’s “The Only Thing that Shines” on this mix, but weirdly the most popular Shriekback stuff is currently not on Spotify, though I am sure it used to be. They have all the (really very good) later albums that people don’t know about — fun fact Shriekback have been making an album every couple of years across the 2000’s. Their greatest hits is on Spotify but Nemesis, Everything that Rises and Fish Below the Ice are all removed from it. My Spine is the Bassline is on there, though. It is all very weird.
…and once again I spend all my time talking about today’s mix talking about a band that is not, in fact, on today’s mix.
Ok, well, kind of a spotty edition today. Not my finest work. Bear with me I am trying to get through this life without falling apart and sometimes you gotta, like, write about your tax returns or something.
Questions! Leave a Question for the Q&A!
i hate when the other ivelisse estrada signs up for tinder with my email address!
You have the desire and ability to write so much every day. Do you think it helps you cope with stress/anxiety or is it more of a mechanism for capturing the moments in your life? Why do you write?