Thursday. Thoughts.

It's like a runaway train’s on my neurons. 🤦‍♀️

Gratuitous Boston picture from Tuesday night. (#2 below.) #nofilter

Thursday Thoughts posts are handy—they give me a license to freewheel and freestyle about whatever is flying around upstairs. They force me to focus, but not too much, giving me a low-stakes opportunity to sort through my brain rubble, to sift the dusty piles in search of any lost gems, to sweep what remains away, and to give it a quick shot of dust remover to clean out the crevasses…leaving my headspace relatively clean, the perfect pigeon’s nest for whatever thoughts decide to fly in next.

Without further ado, let’s just open the mental floodgates, shall we?

1. I read this sweet and sad piece over the weekend, and one line in particular touched my soul.

   So, find the people you want to be around and be around them. Invent a ridiculous excuse to spend an afternoon in their company: Go shopping for Scotch tape, watch them buy groceries, whatever. Call the person you love most, right now, and say, “I have to buy ink cartridges for my printer. Would you like to come along?”

   So let’s make “shopping for ink cartridges” our secret code for “let’s go have a drink and catch up.” Because I am sure so many of us are overdue for social time. But even so, if you don’t have time to see someone you’re missing but are going shopping for ink cartridges and want them to come along, call them. I know if you call me I’ll be there.

   It reminds me of when my younger sister had one, then two, then three kids and she was still working, leaving little free time for her, let alone time for me to see her. So I used to call her all the time to ask her if she was going on any errands and I’d invite myself along. While I had no personal interest in making returns at Baby Gap or restocking hand soaps at Bath & Body Works or helping pick out a new rug for the back room at Home Goods or going grocery shopping at Shaw’s, I had tremendous interest in seeing her—so I joined her for all of it. There was a long stretch when that was the primary way for us to get any quality time together and almost 25 years later I swear our relationship is that much stronger because of it.

2. Speaking of sisters, I’ve mentioned that my older sister’s oldest daughter is a freshman at Northeastern, and it’s so nice having her close by. They live in MI and our visits have always been regular but infrequent (though I have always been attentive to and invested in building and maintaining relationships with them across the miles). Anyhow my sis is in town for work for a few days this week, so on Tuesday Kerri and I picked my niece up, street parked (Score! No games or concerts at The Gahden!) by my sister’s hotel in Charlestown and we all walked to dinner (Monica’s Trattoria) in the North End together. We hit Modern Pastry afterwards and enjoyed cannoli by the fireplace in the lobby of the hotel before we said our goodbyes and safely delivered my niece back to the dorm and came home. It was a quiet and chilly-but-gorgeous night in the city (as the pic above attests, I think), and even though my nephew got sidetracked by work and he and his gf couldn’t make it, it was a prefect night—the energy of one young person is enough to invigorate me, to remind me of all the possibility that is out there, and to give me hope for the future. And it’s always great seeing my Michigan sissy! (Side rant: WTF is up with airline ticket prices? They suck at what they are supposed to do, safely flying people to their destinations on time, yet still they get away with totally gouging travelers…I have gone to meet my sis and the girls (this year it will be one girl as college and hs breaks don’t align) in FL over February vacation for years and this year I can’t find a ticket priced such that I can justify buying it. I even considered driving, but don’t get me started on gas prices…and it’s probably not the smartest idea, me and the Murano and 1500 miles, solo. But still. I’m so sad. I’m still trying to find a flight. 🤞🏼)

3. Speaking of family, my 80.5 year-old mom is a real Wordle savant. You don’t know what pressure is until you wake up to a text saying “Wordle in 2.” She’s unreal.

4. Watched the Grammys the other night and knew exactly zero acts nominated for Best New Artist. That shook me. I gotta get more relevant. That said, when Lizzo won her award for “Record of the Year” I loved seeing non-winners Adele and Taylor Swift going wild and happy dancing in support. Girl power is real.

5. The other day I got an email from Lululemon featuring a—wait for it—bodysuit. (Gasp.) I broke out into a cold sweat remembering the bodysuit days of my childhood and when they made a comeback in my mid-20s. What’s next? Stirrup pants? Perish the thought. Just thinking about a bodysuit makes me feel like I have to pee really bad and maybe am not going to make it. (If you ever wore a bodysuit, you know exactly what I mean.) Everything that goes around comes around. Keep your head on a swivel because the latest bodysuit resurgence proves that they may come around again.

6. If it’s true that 48-year-old Leonardo di Caprio’s new girlfriend is 19, I have no words. But I do have a sound: “OINK.” 🐷🐷🐷

7. I read a really disheartening story about Marie Kondo changing her position on tidying up and it not being magically life-changing after all—apparently, no matter what brings you joy, life has a funny way of getting in the way of life, and things get messy no matter what. Go figure.

8. Anyone else wish that the in-home replay review featured in the Progressive commercials was real?

9. My standing desk has three pre-set height settings. The first two always made sense to me—the obvious “sitting” and “standing.” But the third button’s been sitting there gathering dust all these years, perplexing me. Until I was eating a bowl of ramen for lunch the other day and broth was flying everywhere and I instantly knew what the 3rd preset was for—slurping. Raising the bowl up to chin height was a real ramen-at-the-desk game changer.

10. So glad I was out Tuesday night and had an excuse to not watch the SOTU. Sadly I got home in time to hear Sarah Huckabee Sanders spew her sputum. Someone should have told her that wearing a cream-colored outfit while throwing pile after pile of steamy, stinking shit at the American people was ill-advised. No way that was gonna end well.

11. That 1.75L bottle of bourbon didn’t stand a chance this weekend. (And yes I shared it.) (And that someone brought a smoker along to infuse our Old Fashioneds made it that much better.)

12. Speaking of the weekend, there was just enough low-key debauchery that when I finally got “active” sweeping the floor in the rental house Sunday morning, my Oura ring actually registered it as a workout. (Everything really is relative.)

13. I’m going to touch on ChatGPT at a most surface level now. When I first heard about this AI tool it was in the context of a) helping students cheat and b) putting everyone who writes anything out of a job; my knee-jerk reaction was one of devastation. As someone not working and not by choice, the idea that there will be even fewer jobs out there was a gut punch. But the bigger issue is the one that really scares me—if no one writes anymore, where will our hearts and souls and imaginations go? Are chatbots where unique individual personalities go to die?

    Admittedly, I don’t know much more about the tool and its application now, but I definitely have a different take on it. Because there were no actual hockey games to be played last weekend (too cold!), and we’re not the types of people who spend the whole day drinking (or are we? 🤣🤣🤣) we went into full learning-lab mode. First thing we did, inspired by social media (duh), was the “let’s throw pans of boiling water off of the deck and watch it freeze in midair” experiment. Success!

    

    A pot of boiling water thrown into a -10° morning. (How about those views, though?)

    Kerri introduced ChatGPT to the group by interacting with it to write a song about pond hockey in the style of Taylor Swift, clearly demonstrating its real-world application. We had a musician in the group (an actual musician, as in one who makes music for a living) and she readily agreed to write music and tackle the (few needed) lyric edits. I’m not sure exactly how long it took all in, but I’m guessing it took less than an hour before the musician had draft lyrics on which to work her magic, and another hour until we had a song. During the course of the day there were a few minor edits and some rehearsal, and by the evening we were in full amateur recording studio mode, ready to make our first collaborative production. Obviously we couldn’t have done it without a musician, but at the same time, how long would it have taken her to write a song like this from scratch? So in any case, because this project married technology and heart and soul, I guess I’m sold on it as an enabler. But not as a replacement. Sometimes I think we tend to misuse technology advancements, but if we use chatbots “correctly,” it will drive efficiency by reducing non-value added time (or low-value added time) spent on whatever thus giving us time to spend on the high-value stuff.

    Anyway, here it is:

Lucky number 13, so let’s call it a day at an even baker’s dozen.

Happy Friday Eve one and all. I hope you have a fun Super Bowl watch party planned and that whoever you’re rooting for wins. As long as you’re rooting for the Eagles, that is. (Family ties—Philly b-i-l.) 😂🦅🏈

Thanks for being here with me. Your investment of time and attention means the world to me. For reals.

Love you too.