Hugh's Blog

Being done.

I was talking to some friends tonight, and told them I was thinking about what it would be like to be done. Then I gave them this example.

I own some cast iron cookware. But it’s to use – I’m not a collector. There are four skillets – sized 6, 8, 10, and 12 inch – on my wall where I store my cast iron cookware. I have a small, medium, and large Dutch oven, some of them enameled. Two corn stick pans, because my corn stick recipe makes two pans worth, and can’t be easily halved. And a cast iron griddle, for when I need to make lots of pancakes or tortillas.

I will probably never purchase another piece of cast iron cookware in my life. Because I don’t need any more. I don’t have use cases for other cast iron cookware. And it won’t wear out – the cast iron cookware I have will last for generations.

Also, there isn’t a viable upgrade path. There are cast iron skillets in the marketplace that cost more than mine, and that have a prettier finish, or longer handles, or whatever, but they are not better at cooking than mine is. There are reasons someone might want to purchase them, but they are not improvements on what I have.

So, since I have all my needs met, and they will last the rest of my life, and there is no real upgrade path, then I’m done buying cast iron. When it comes to my life, there is no way for anyone to make money from me if their job is to sell cast iron. As regards to cast iron cookware, I have opted out of capitalism altogether.

Now I just want to do that with every other part of my life.

Love as an ingredient.

Not far from my house is a restaurant. It’s sort of a deli, and they have sandwiches there, as well as pizza and salads.

I first ate there with my parents, when we moved to Jackson. Dad wanted to share it with us – he had to come to Jackson regularly, and it was one of his favorite places to eat.

More than the food, he liked how they ran the business. He told me a story of one of their employees, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and was soon unable to work. But they kept her on the payroll until she died, so her health insurance remained intact. That story endeared them to Dad. The food was almost secondary.

We still go there, some 7 years later. A couple of times a month, we eat supper there, and I probably have lunch meetings there at least that often. It hots lots of places for me; cost, quality, and of course, that story, and how it affected Dad. That Dad loved that place is also a huge consideration.

The staff is always a delight when we go there. They are smiling, and welcoming, and the service is always fast, and they have never once messed up my order.

A few weeks ago, I stopped by around 2PM to get a late lunch, and there was no one at the counter. And on the counter, beside the registers, was a giant self-serve tablet, like they have at McDonalds. You scroll through a menu, add items to your order, and customize each item by adding pickles, or extra mayo.

I hate these things with a passion. They cannot be clean, with everyone touching them all day. They are not fast – they are actually much slower than telling a person. They are not intuitive – it’s like getting a brand new cell phone whose settings you don’t understand. And often the ones at McDonalds do not work.

This one did not either. Ultimately, after messing with it for at least 5 minutes, an employee came to the counter to rescue me.

I get that it probably saves payroll. But it felt off-brand for this company. Out of character. It was jarring, in the same way it would be jarring to go to a steakhouse and be served surf and turf on paper plates.

And what’s worse, it ruined that story I know about them – the one where they prioritize their employees. Because the decision to replace people with a machine is not the act of love for the employees.

I’ve only been back once. The food tastes different to me now. It’s in my head, I know. But once I had believed they loved their employees. And food always tastes better when love is an ingredient.

Introversion at conferences

I used to spend a fair amount of my life at conferences. Back when I was regularly asked to speak or, more often, lead breakout sessions, I would be at maybe ten of these things a year.

But then I quit speaking about faith and homelessness and I moved to a new city and then COVID happened and suddenly it had been five years since I had been to much of anything like the conference I am at this week, put on by my denomination, Mennonite Church USA.

I don’t know how many people are here – they come and go, and other than the plenary sessions, you never see everyone at once, but maybe a few thousand?

Over the years, I adopted a series of practices to keep me sane at events like this. Mostly they were adopted in self defense, and were not planned. But this week I realized now they are muscle memory.

Most things like this love to offer communal meals, where you are expected to sit next to absolute strangers. I will only do one of those during the conference. If I need to eat, I try to latch onto someone I know, so at least the energy expenditure is low.
I always stay at the conference hotel, if it’s at all feasible. Being able to hide in your hotel room when you have 20 minutes of downtime is priceless.
I try to schedule one on one meals with people I want to talk to, or catch up with. It takes much less energy to have a one on one coffee or meal than it does to chat with a bunch of folks.
Grab snacks like individual yogurts, those water bottle juice powders, and some trail mix, and keep them in your room for when you need topping up. This also gives you an excuse to go back your room.
I accept I won’t go to everything I could. I have no FOMO.
I run on my home time zone – now Central Time. I’m currently in Eastern Time, but I’m waking up and going to bed based on CST. If the trip is less than a week, I just refuse to adjust.
Take advantage of serendipity. Tonight, my supper meeting cancelled, so I skipped the evening session and went to CookOut and had a strawberry milkshake and a chilidog for supper. Only God can judge me.

Mennonite on the move.

I’m in Greensboro, NC for the rest of the week for the bi-annual Mennonite Church USA convention, and I always feel a bit weird at things like this. I love my denomination, and I love what they stand for at their best. But it’s also always a bit surreal.

There are only three MC USA churches in my state. Our conference, the Gulf States Conference, is the smallest. It’s a pretty lonely place to be Mennonite, to tell you the truth. In the US, Mennonites are found in quantity in the Midwest and Northeast. And there are relatively none in the Southeast, especially the deep south. And I’m unapologetically Queer-affirming and am a Christian Humanist, and honestly, the denomination hasn’t always known what to do with somebody like me.

And I’m an introvert, and in general, I don’t think introverts go to conferences and conventions.

But here I am. My role as pastor at Open Door Mennonite Church doesn’t require me to go, but it’s good if I can. So yesterday I drove 11 and a half hours to get here, and arrived around 7 last night. After checking in, I went to the exhibit hall and ran into a dozen or more folks I know from around the country, and a few more who only know me from social media.

So today I shall fortify myself with coffee and sit in sessions and put my extrovert face on and hang out with my folks. And then tomorrow, get up and do it again.

I’m writing

Make the coffee, shuffle to the office, fire up the computer, because it is the morning, and that is when I write.

I don’t really know what I’m writing about, but I’m writing.

I’ve been on the road for four days, and my back aches and I’m undercaffeinated and I overslept this morning, but I’m writing.

The stack of mail on the table that waited for me to return reminds me that I have so many open loops I need to deal with – but I’m writing.

We won’t even speak of my overflowing email inbox, and the people I have let down because I am a chaos machine with poor executive functioning skills – but I’m writing.

It’s a Federal holiday, so the banks are closed and the mail won’t run and would anybody even notice if I didn’t write today, but I’m writing.

My cats missed me while I was away and are currently rubbing against my legs demanding to be cuddled, but I’m writing.

My country is collapsing and people I love are threatened and I don’t know what to do, so I’m writing.

Re: The Super Bowl and Whiteness

When examining art that confuses you, things to consider might include asking if you are the intended audience, or if this is a medium you understand. If it isn’t, perhaps ask people who do understand it to explain it to you.

Or, you can accept that not everything is for everyone, and that whole universes of art exist that are powerful and brilliant but were not made with you in mind.

Or, I guess, you could bitch that it was boring on Social Media.

One more thing for people who look like me:

The USA will be majority non-white in less than 20 years. More and more, pop culture will not feature you, prioritize your opinions, or solicit your favor. Markets will not swing based on what you want, and people who look like you will be less prominent in mass media.

You have a choice: You can see this as an opportunity to learn new things, to see art outside your gaze, to develop in understanding of the world around you, or you can complain, whine, and whither into hatred.

This is a cultural sea change the likes of which our country has never seen before. I hope we do not waste it.

The reference shelf

On a shelf over my desk, at eye level when I stand, are 8 reference books. They are mostly “How to write English good” books – a dictionary, a thesaurus, Strunk and White, Garner’s English Usage, etc. Because I preach and write occasionally about theological matters, I have an Oxford Annotated Bible there as well.

One can argue that Google is faster, and for some things it is. But my goal is not to be faster – it’s to be better.

The things that are wrong with my writing will not be improved by my doing it faster. And while the internet may contain a vast collection of information, sorting it is becoming harder and harder.

When I was a small boy in Mississippi, I would often use the word _ain’t _in speech. To which my aunt would reply, “Ain’t ain’t a word, because it ain’t in the dictionary”. It would frustrate me, but part of me really liked that there was a standard, a “right” way to do it.

That doesn’t mean I don’t break “the rules”. I do all the time. But if I do, I want it to be because I know I am breaking them, and not because I am ignorant of them.

A row of english reference books on a wooden shelf.

Mourning the days of blogging past

Trying to figure out blogging outside of the WordPress ecosystem (where I’ve been for ~17 years) is so frustrating. (WordPress as a CMS is so bulky and unwieldy, and their “website builder” direction the last 5 years or so is extremely un-user friendly.)
I know I’m entering my grumpy old man phase, but my WordPress-powered blog in 2007 was super-customizable BY ME.

With no real tech knowledge, I installed it on a server in 5 minutes.

Writing and publishing on it was intuitive.

I could Google, “How do I ____?” and there were answers on the first page of search results.

Now, it seems my options are:

Use our locked down ecosystem and if you want to change literally anything, it’s $30 a month.

Learn python and markdown, create a virtual server, and open a command line before you write a word.
Designing websites and writing on websites are different skills, different interests, and different hobbies.
I’m *this* damn close to seeing if my Blogger account is still active.

Two kinds of people

“Would you hide an immigrant from ICE?”

A friend asked me this the other day. My first thought was, “This is where we are, I guess.”

When we read the Diary of Ann Frank in school, something pretty quickly jumped out at me. Their world was populated by two kinds of people: Those who would turn them in to the authorities, and those who would not. Their world did not have the luxury of considering other kids of people.

In our current political reality, I think not much has changed. There are people who will turn in their neighbor, and people who will not. Motives really do not matter. If you turn in Ann and her family because you are concerned about the rule of law, they are as equally dead as they would be if you turned them in because you are a right-wing extremist.

The world I live in right now pretty much has two kinds of people in it: Those who would report their neighbor/ coworker / family member to ICE, and those who would not. Motives and reasons and justifications don’t really matter.

I know my answer. You might not agree with me, but I suggest you give this some thought.

Because one day soon, you might have to figure out which of those two kinds of people you are. And it’s probably easier to decide that in advance.

My news stack

Tuesday night it hit 14 degrees, which is not unheard of here, but is also not what most days are like, thank God. I didn’t have any meetings planned until lunchtime, so I decided this would be an excellent day in which to sleep in.

When I rolled out of bed at 10 minutes to 7 (I am, my wife tells me, bad at sleeping in, but to be fair, that is almost an hour and a half later than I normally get up) I padded into the kitchen and started the coffee. I noticed the sunshine coming in the kitchen window, the hoarfrost on the grass in the backyard, the cats under my feet. I feel peace and calm.

Then I realize I had left my phone in the bedroom.

As soon as I picked up my phone and scrolled though the social media feeds, I find myself getting angry about things the current President is doing. I find myself reading articles – almost all opinion pieces – about how bad it is. I feel the urge to respond, to chime in “me too!

Then it hits me – I’m doing it again. It’s me. The problem is me.

I do not have to live this way. I had a “before the phone” experience and an “after the phone” experience that morning, and trust me, the before experience was better.

The problem isn’t my phone – it’s a tool, like the hammer someone uses to hit a mugging victim is not the problem. The hammer is agnostic, and so is the phone. In both cases, the user is at fault.

I’m not so willing to give the platforms a similar break, though. Unlike the hammer, or the phone, they are operating exactly as their creator intended: manufacturing stimulation, generating outrage, pulling me deeper and deeper into engagement. If it’s designed to be addictive, and you are addicted, it’s hard to blame the addict for falling into a trap someone set for you.

The only way to avoid the trap is to stay out of the woods.

I’m not giving up my phone – given my work and the environment I live in, that’s untenable. But, I can change how I interact with it.

**I deleted social media apps from my phone.**

I still have Instagram on my phone, but I don’t get “lost” on Instagram the way I do on other apps. If it becomes a problem, it will have to go too, but I like taking occasional “in the moment” pictures and sharing them, and seeing yours.

**My desire to stay informed is at odds with my desire to remain sane.**

Unlike a lot of folks, apparently, I don’t doom scroll in the evenings. Instead, for me, it’s morning that is the problem. I’ve used my morning cup of coffee to scroll social media to see what has happened while I was asleep. But honestly, that’s a very innefficent use of time, and algorhythims are not a great filter for deciding what I should be reading.

I need three kinds of news: Global, national, and local. Of the three, arguably, the local has the most impact on my day to day life. The crime wave in my neighborhood or the selection of a garbage collection contractor has far greater impact on my daily quality of life than does the potential tarrif on goods made in Mexico.

**I changed my news stack**

Starting local, and moving outwards:

We subscribe to our local paper – [the Clarion Ledger](https://www.clarionledger.com/). It’s not a great paper – like many legacy media, it’s been gutted, but it’s at least as deep as what I would glean from social media, and it doesn’t have an algorithm. I read the weekend edition local coverage to get an overview of what’s rising to the surface.

I also read [Mississippi Today](https://mississippitoday.org/), our state’s nonprofit news organization. (Find your local [nonprofit newsroom here](https://findyournews.org/), and then donate money to them). They are the best at telling me what’s happening at the state level. Again, state level news is far more important than national in terms of my daily life. A 10% sales tax on groceries impacts my life much more than whatever happens to the national income tax, and is far more in my control to influence as well. They have an app, so I can read it in an algorithm-free environment as well.

This week, I added a subscription to The Guardian’s weekly news magazine to the mix, and installed the Guardian’s app to my phone. They are a UK based news org, and so, in an age where US media is in a flurry to bend the knee to this current administration, having a trustworthy outside perspective is valuable. This gives me both (US) national and international coverage, is well written, and I like paper-based media – the act of sitting down with a cup of coffee to “read the news”.

It’s worth noting that all of these sources cost me money. But paying to actually read news means I take it seriously, and if you are not paying for a product, you ARE the product.

I still have social media accounts, but I have to be at my desk to use them – I can’t doomscroll while sitting on my couch, watching a movie, or at the table while eating Cheerios, or, God help me, at a stoplight. No, just like we did in 1995, I have to go into a separate room in my house and turn on a machine to see that part of the Internet.

I’ll report back next month on how it’s working for me.