First Personal

What’s the Big Idea?

There are those right now who are asking us to be bigger people. Us as a country, as a society, to be bigger. To expand, to embrace a bit of discomfort, to open up, breathe deep until it hurts, stand up taller until we feel our spines unfurl, look around longer and harder. At our own communities, at our own neighborhoods, open the locked drawers where we harbor doubt,

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Friday

I am looking at my email inbox on one monitor and the cursor last highlighted a robo-generated email from Amazon asking me how I liked my clip-on guitar tuner. I am also looking at the New York Times website front page on the other monitor (I have two monitors because of work) with a few pixels showing at the top of a huge full-width ad for the ShowTime show

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Halos around the moon

I went to the eye doctor recently because, well, I turned 65. Medicare. Time to fix all the things. Tick tock. My ophthalmologist, Dr. P, is a young man in his 30’s who tends to say “Okay then, my friend” as he holds his laptop with one hand like a tray of hors d’oeuvres and shakes mine with the other. If I had to guess, Dr. P is a

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Babysitting Lainey: A story of courage

So Tuesday night was our first babysitting gig with our new granddaughter Lainey who was exactly one month old on Thursday. We’ve had this on the books for quite a while and during that time I’d built up a fair amount of first-time-in-32-years anxiety about it. For Sara, this would be the first time she’s changed a diaper or tried to solve the Chinese puzzle that is a onesie

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To all those millennials I’ve judged for being addicted to their phones…nevermind.

The screen on my fetish/love object is just bigger than yours (27 inches), which means I can’t drive a car with it or use it in a crosswalk thus becoming a human weapon of mass distraction but other than that…I’m clearly just as obsessed and addicted to my device. Hello my name is James… How did I realize I’m powerless over my 27” iMac? All it took was 3

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