How Do We Know?

13:44 Saturday, 23 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 45.14°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 18.41mph
Words: 466

I guess one of the virtues of getting old is that I no longer worry very much about questions like the ones posed in this post in The Marginalian. There was a time in my life when these were urgent questions. Not so much anymore.

And yet we only live once, with no rehearsal or reprise — a fact at once so oppressive and so full of possibility that it renders us, in the sublime words of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, “ill-prepared for the privilege of living.” All the while, we walk forward accompanied by the specters of versions of ourselves we failed to or chose not to become. “Our lived lives,” wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his magnificent manifesto for missing out, “might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.” We perform this existential dance of yeses and nos to the siren song of one immutable question: How do we know what we want, what to want?

Much of the course of our lives is set at the moment of our conception. None of us got to choose our parents, their genes, their culture, the culture of the society they were a part of, which may not have been the culture they were born into, but is the one that will forever shape you.

Our consciousness, our experience of being, is shaped by things beyond our control. It is that experience of being that shapes our desires, and that is imposed or imprinted on us in our growing-up years. Discovering that this is all artifice, not something fixed in stone, can be liberating; but it remains present. It will always be there. It will always exist as a form of gravity, which takes effort to overcome.

So we often don't.

All that is to say Kierkegaard was correct, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

If you don't have the virtue of being old, it may be useful to consider that desire is the source of much suffering, when suffering is experienced as the difference between the way things are, and the way we want them to be.

So then, what is the utility of desire? Much of it is instilled in us by culture, for the purposes of culture and society and economics. How does it serve you?

Do your best.

The rest is not up to you. It's challenging enough to discover what your "best" might be.

And don't be attached to results, attachment being a form of desire.

Just try to do your best. That's all anyone can do. All anyone can ask.

It'll all be in the wake soon enough anyway.

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Opinionated

08:59 Saturday, 23 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 47.55°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 15.05mph
Words: 393

MacOSX Guru (alternatively macosxguru, they go by both appellations) has some thoughts about BBEdit 16.

This is the kind of "review" post I enjoy reading. I have BBEdit. I can't say I use it extensively. I think the Shortcuts piece might be intriguing.

For a guy who may seem to write a lot, I don't have very strong opinions about text editors these days. I did have opinions about "word processors," but I can't recall what they were anymore. Except we all hated Word.

Most of what I write is in Tinderbox. Second most is probably in Mail. Third is probably Messages. I'll occasionally use TextEdit.

I have no appreciation for markdown, and I fail to grasp the appeal it seems to have for so many people. I grew up with "plain text," beginning with a teletype for chrissakes. I like styled text. I'm not big on headings. Should I add headings to blog posts? I don't think so. Maybe I'd feel differently if I did.

And tables. Maybe if I used a lot of tables in the marmot.

And in the era of Unicode, what the hell is "plain text" anyway?

Keybindings? The only ones I remember are for cut, copy and paste; italics, bold and underline. That's about it. Keyboard navigation? Arrow keys or the trackpad. And I can command-tab with the best of them. For whatever reason, my mind doesn't adapt well to keybindings. It's not like I haven't tried.

Maybe it's a tactile thing? Or maybe the keyboard maestros (not to be confused with the app) are all frustrated pianists? Maybe there's a reward pathway in the brain for manipulating keys that I lack.

I do seem to have some facility for spatial interactions. Whenever Apple moves something, or changes its appearance, it pisses me off to no end.

And if I do something that requires a menu interaction a lot, I'll try to figure out a way to do it differently. Like making a web link in a Tinderbox note. I don't know if it ships with it, or it's something I created, but control-option-command-L will invoke that dialog; but it was easier to use PopClip, which is probably a spatial bias. I know where it'll appear, and where the button I'm looking for will be.

Different (key)strokes for different folks, I guess.

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It's a Journey

07:24 Saturday, 23 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 49.78°F Pressure: 1027hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 9.26mph
Words: 508

I feel as though I've been neglecting the marmot. The new house is consuming much of my attention, and it's a bit exhausting.

We're learning a lot of lessons that we will almost certainly never need to know again, so I'll pass a few along here in case anyone reading the marmot wants to design and build a house.

Here's a tip: If you're using a designer to draw plans, and an engineer or architect to sign them, make sure they use the same CAD software. Or plan to add about $1K to the cost of the review when the architect redraws the plans.

It's a long story. I'll spare you.

AKMA posted a wonderful story the other day.

The weather today is remarkably similar to the weather reported on this day a year ago. Wet and rainy. The weather data in the current posts is correct for this location.

It was nice yesterday, so I spent a lot of time outside with the weed-whacker, cleaning up here and there. The construction driveway has created a couple of islands where the mower can't reach, so we'll need to get those with the weed-eater. The county came by and mowed the side of the ditch nearest the road, so I went down into the ditch and cut down the growth in the center and the side nearest the lawn. I only did the right half of the property, divided by the driveway. I'll do the other half when it stops raining.

I'll miss The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I never stayed up to watch it at night. We don't have cable here, and our over the air reception is minimal, but I watched it nearly every morning, at least his opening monologue.

I'll never watch whatever it is CBS is replacing it with.

I got an email yesterday from Amazon that my Prime subscription would expire tomorrow. That made me happy. I haven't bought anything from Amazon since February when they started that little mini-boycott. Screw Bezos.

Again, I'll encourage anyone who hasn't already done so to remove all retail apps from your phone. Sure it makes it convenient to shop, but they're gathering so much more data about you just from having the app on your phone. You can always visit the web site using your browser and shop that way.

I went to my first Sustainable Hector meeting the other night. Starting to stretch my volunteer muscles around here, get to know some people. They had a Watershed Forum presentation the next night, talking about hazardous algal blooms. Can't seem to get away from those. There's a dumpster day/swap meet coming up in June that I'll volunteer at.

We got our permit from the watershed protection department. Had the septic tank pumped out, peered into it and decided it was functioning properly (I should hope so!), so now we get to put another one in for the new house and tie it into the existing sand filter.

Anyway, the beat goes on...

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