Category: Thoughts

Hacked

by MAÔ, posted in Organization

Well, my Netflix was hacked. Not a big deal, and with as little as I’ve been watching tv over the past month, it was a while before I really noticed.

Now Netflix had been sending me email alerts, but the culprit was in Mexico and had changed the language preference to Spanish – and thus each email alert that Netflix sent was non-English and I mistook them for spam.

I’ve recently spoken with my friend and IT cohort, and he scolded me for not utilizing two-level authentication on all of my accounts. Now, I think I’ll have to be more diligent about my security.

Reclamation

by MAÔ, posted in Advice

No matter what you do, who you are, or how carefully you arrange your days, there will be people who will want your time. Emails, phone calls, text messages, to-do lists, etc.

Spouses do them, and kids, and parents. Bosses an coworkers. Companies you purchase from, and companies looking to sell you something. Reclaiming your time is paramount to living a fulfilled life. Because if your time is always going towards other people’s goals – towards their happiness – you’ve no time left to work towards your own.

Fit in by not fitting

by MAÔ, posted in Social

We go through our days trying to be what we think we should. We don’t worry about who we are, because if we did we might drive ourselves crazy. We likely wouldn’t care for what we see in the mirror, or how we feel waking up. So we try to be the best that we can, within certain parameters that we give ourselves.

But we all feel less than, if we compare ourselves to others. Or try and squeeze ourselves into the holes that we think other people fit in.

The thing is, if we just be ourselves – be who we are designed to be – something amazing happens. We find our tribe. Even if we feel that we don’t fit, if people like who you are, they change the size of their holes. We don’t have to try and fit. They open up and let us in.

Pundits

by MAÔ, posted in Social
pun·dit
/ˈpəndət/
noun
plural noun: pundits
  1. an expert in a particular subject or field who is frequently called on to give opinions about it to the public. 
  2. variant spelling of pandit.
I’ve been thinking about this word a lot. You hear it all over the news – radio, television – especially around elections. According to Dictionary.com, the origin of Pundit comes from the Hindi pandit. And pandit was derived from the Sanskrit pandita, which means “a learned man or scholar.”
But an expert generally has a very narrow view. Outside of subject matter, experts may not focus on other fields. I wouldn’t want my surgeon to work on my car’s engine, just as I wouldn’t want my mechanic to operate on my anything.
Yet we routinely take the expert’s advice concerning more than just the subject material without consideration of any other factors. It’s our responsibility to make informed decisions. Not to rely on one person’s opinion.

Week’s Highlights

by MAÔ, posted in Social, Writing

Some of the things that caught my interest this week.

  • Beetlejuice the Musical. Well, I seem to be heading to New York in September. It’s odd how things happen so quickly. But, I’ll be attending this musical while up there, and hopefully seeing a few more.
  • The Magic Flute by W.A. Mozart, with book by Emanuel Schikaneder & Carl Ludwig Giesecke. I was tuning in to the radio station I do my show for, and heard this piece from Die , where the baritone was singing “papagena, papagena, papagena.” I thought that I could sing the whole piece, so I borrowed the music from my friend and accompanist and began working on my German… which is atrocious.
  • Online shopping vs. in-person, with relation to adverse weather conditions. Did you know rainy days can increase online sales?
  • Newly-created interest in video games, as it pertains to my weekly recording sessions, has led me to some previously-unvisited corners of the internet. If you’re looking for free games to play, try this piece from Games Radar.

But wasn’t there a spellcheck

by MAÔ, posted in Writing

Just a quick note/rant. WordPress is a platform that I do enjoy. I have the app on my iOS devices, and have it on my MacBook. Now, I usually type it up on the go – either phone or iPad – or I’ll handwrite thoughts and later migrate them to the MacBook. However, I’d always do a spellcheck on the MacBook before scheduling the post.

Now, it seems spellcheck it gone. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. I’ve not even looked into it. I just went to spellcheck, and the little icon wasn’t there to select.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

More busy-ness

by MAÔ, posted in Work

I’ve been working out a 168-hour timeline for the week, planning out days. Without overlap, it looks something like:

  • 56 hours – Sleep
  • 50 hours – Job
  • 10 hours – Writing
  • 10 hours – Dining/meal prep/shopping
  • 9 hours – Side hustle
  • 7 hours – Reading for pleasure / studying
  • 6 hours – Podcast & video recording/editing
  • 6 hours – Yoga/exercise
  • 4 hours – Music gigs
  • 4 hours – Meditation
  • 3 hours – Radio show
  • 3 hours – Nothing

Now, I rarely sleep 8 hours per night. I haven’t been as faithful in my yoga practice as I should be. And I do write sometimes during gigs when I’m not singing. So there is overlap.

The problems come when other things creep in and I have to decide which items to omit from the daily list. And things will crop up. Date night (which should be every week). The film that I just have to say (a lot coming out this summer). And other activities that require some measure of concentration on my part – I’m thinking of the garage that needs an overhaul right now.

And I look at Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule in awe, and can’t help but wonder how he managed it. (Of course he didn’t, but it didn’t stop him from trying.)

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Walking a fine line

by MAÔ, posted in Writing

I’ve been thinking lately about the types of posts I make here. Some are little thoughts I have about this and that (theatre and performance, or books I’m reading/have read);  advice I’ve been given or came across; bits of motivation; very personal thoughts on loss and struggling; finance and investing; or even poetry. All these things are a hodgepodge of who I am and what I’m thinking right now.

Some of it may be interesting to someone. Many more may not find anything here. Others may not want to read each and every post I make, because who knows what I’ll be writing about on any given day.

I struggle with that – providing content (even content that no one may see) which goes back and forth from business to personal, and relevant to downright absurd. But, it’s who I am.

I started writing this blog because I’d kept a journal since 2015. Some times I’ve written daily. Right now I’m best at weekly in the journal, with other writing thrown in during the week. But it was entirely private, and no one was going to come across it. I may even pull a Dickens and have them all burnt before I go. Who knows…

So I put it up online, just another WordPress blog. And I’ve grown it a bit. I’ve grown a bit myself. Now it’s out there for anyone to see. Maybe no one will. But it’s out there.

Counterintuitive

by MAÔ, posted in Writing

The oddest little thing has come to my attention. When I was writing one or two blog posts a week, I always seemed to find excuses for not doing them. I was always too busy.

Now, with a daily post, I don’t seem to run out of things to say. I can knock out three or four every time I sit in front of the computer. Most are short. Some are longer, and may take me three-ten tries to tie them up. But I am able still to move through my thoughts in an easier, more-streamlined way.

It’s either the commitment (though I had committed to twice a week before, which I let slip), or it’s the routine, or it’s writing so often that I don’t worry about the quality of work as much. As long as it’s grammatically correct and (mostly) spellchecked, then I’m pretty happy with the result. Even if it’s a lot of nonsense, tomorrow is another day.

Week’s Highlights

by MAÔ, posted in Social, Writing

Some of the things that caught my interest this week.

If you’re thinking about how you’ll make it to retirement, here are six suggestions from NBC’s Kelsey Butler in January of last year. I’ve been thinking about retirement accounts a lot over the past couple of months, having blown through three of them over ten years.

The Tim Ferriss podcast with my hands-down favorite author Neil Gaiman. I first read Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek last spring (listened to the audiobook, twice in a row on several trips across Florida). Gaiman’s Neverwhere I read as a high-schooler, and that was my first introduction to the author. I’ve since read just about everything he’s written, including the Sandman series (straight through and then with the annotated editions from Leslie Klinger), American Gods, Stardust, and The Graveyard Book, to name a few.

If you have an Aubible subscription, get Sam Shepard’s True West, the West End production featuring Kit Harrington (Game of Thrones‘ Jon Snow) & Johnny Flynn. It’s a free download for subscribers (up to two Audible originals each month), and it’s really good.

Unroll.me. I was slow to get this one, but it really works! I’ve gone from a couple hundred emails a day down to less than 30. I’ve still got some clearing out to do, especially across multiple email addresses. but thus far, this has been an amazing help. Plus, its single daily email with previews of each email you’ve rolled (not unsubscribed but not individually let in) gives me one place to see if there’s anything there that I need.