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What I Learned Over November Vacation, and a Short Story

So this is the end of my foray. It feels as if I’ve written a great journey, though it also feels as if I haven’t really written that much. I can look at the nano page and see all the posts, but I don’t have a tangible feeling of how many posts I’ve written.

I’m proud of several of the entries but I don’t feel the weight of my writing — kind of like someone else wrote them. In retrospect, this seems to follow most of my other creative endeavors.

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What’s Next?

This is penultimate post for nablomo. Actually, I discovered there’s a real thing people do called nablopomo which is basically a blog post a day. That seems to be a girl-blogger thing more than a boy-blogger thing though. Not sure. I wouldn’t want to crash someone else’s party.

After tomorrow I’ll need something to do. This is me musing about next steps. Perhaps you can suggest something!

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Dubious Conclusions

In the past couple years I’ve developed more of an ability to read between the lines and a little more critically than I used to. But it’s weird, because it doesn’t always happen. At least, not automatically — sometimes I feel really on the ball and author biases seem obvious. Other times I revisit something and I think, “man, how could I not see that before?”

I’m not sure why it’s not a consistent ability. I hope someday it will be automatic, all the time. Maybe I just need practice.

Note: I am investigating the slowness issues on this blog. This article took about 3 hours to write, which is way too long for its length. I apologize for any trouble you had reading this.

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The Life of the Party

I’ve happened across handful of articles about introverts and extroverts lately. Not sure why they’ve cropped up. There seems to be some truth to the idea of “gestalt”; ideas will come and float around when they want. Whatever, the reason, the articles have me thinking about that personality dichotomy.

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How Chantix Almost Killed Me

I quit smoking 4 years ago next April. I was able to quit through the use and in spite of a drug called varenicline, also known as Chantix. I cannot recommend it to anyone. Let me tell you what it was like.

P.s. This turned out highly personal, but I consider it a public service for internet searchers so it’s going up.

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Thanks, Ants. Thants.

Today I suffered the repercussions of too much food. I think Nicole and I are trying to recapitulate our childhoods, but +1. It’s a common malady, I think we need to decide enough is enough and just eat sandwiches.

But since I didn’t do the obligatory Thanksgiving post and because I still feel a little unwell, I’ll give you something short and sweet: a bulleted list. And then maybe a short pontification because that’s what I seem to do.

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The Name of the Beast

My daughter is slowly climbing her way up the language hill. It’s really neat to see her acquire words. Each time she we recognize that she’s trying to say a particular term for something, such as “kitty” or “milk”, it’s kind of amazing.

But she can’t say the words very well, so as we see her applying labels to things it’s really evident that she’s grasped the concept or idea of a thing. But it also illustrates to me how words largely serve to make us unhappy.

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