dual personalities

Good Wednesday morning to you. I come to you from my living room couch where it sounds like my upstairs neighbor is continuing her month-long quest to feng shui her apartment while her dog jumps around excitedly, possible chasing a ball.

Here is an actual email subject line I received last week:

Is this as bad as Nordstrom calling me plus-sized?! Maybe this is some sort of weird COVID thing? I don’t know but I hit delete. I’m not helping Wayfair’s Open Rate with that one.

At work, I recently learned that I have to design and build a float for the Bicentennial Parade that’s coming up in a few weeks. I am actually pretty stressed about it because even though I have lots of experience riding on floats, I usually don’t have to construct them! And by construct, I obviously mean find people in the office who can do this for me.

Anyway, last night I was doing some research and I found a great website full of helpful inspiration from a company that sells float decorations. I love these photos of floats of yore:

Sadly, I can’t figure out how to make an Elvis replica fit with the “Missouri History” theme, but someday…

In other news, this arrived in my mailbox today so I can look forward to flipping through some pages of muted colors and advice about slowing down. I kid, but I do enjoy the magazine.

I glanced through it and was surprised that Joanna’s editorial note was a bit, shall we say, it had a tone.

“Part of me wonders if social media, or the sport of scroll and click, has shifted the way we approach understanding one another. If the quickness of it all and the immediacy that we’ve learned to live by–the ability to approve or dismiss with a tap of a button, to comment quickly and without a filter, to click and read only the catchy headline–have weakened our ability to see deeply and hear genuinely what others have to say. More than anything, I wonder if it’s lessened how much we try.

It’s as if somewhere along the way we forgot that we are real and complex human beings whose stories run deep and that sometimes the truth sits below the surface.”

Joanna Gaines

To that I say, welllll duh.

I’ll admit that I thought about ending this blog post here with a pithy comment about humanity, but I think Jo continues and hits the really important point. We can’t accept that this is how we all live now.

“Then there’s me, the one who wants to right the wrong. Who wants to call foul because I thought we all knew to play fair.

I know I’m not the only one who has felt this way–misunderstood, misrepresented, missed altogether. Not by a long stretch. And I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of feeling stuck in the muck and mire of a social culture that is robbing us all of deep and true connection–of joy, peace, honest understanding, and empathy.

Maybe you are too. And maybe now is the time to declare that we’re not willing to give that up. Not yet.”

See what I mean by a tone.