So! Earlier I said I wanted to build up a buffer for "Drawing Every Day", but that complicated formula "30(m + 1) + d + 2" - a month and a couple of days ahead, computed by adding 1 to the month, multiplying by 30, adding the days, and adding 2 - neither "felt right" nor left me feeling secure in my "aheadness".
I had planned to work on my backlog from 2024 when additional 2025 drawings would have taken me over the magic number "30(m + 1) + d + 2", but it didn't feel right, and the work I had to do to catch up when I missed a day bothered me.
Then I realized I shouldn't be shooting for a month and a couple days ahead ... it should be more like a week. "30(m +1) + d + 7" (or "+ w") would give me a whole week to catch up. In fact, if I pushed it a bit further - getting a month, a week, and a day ahead - then even if I missed a day, I'd be a week ahead. Even if I missed a WEEK, I'd be a MONTH ahead. And if I missed a month ... I'd still have a week and a day.
If you get behind with that much buffer, it's all on you, baby.
I like this. A month, a week, and a day is easy to remember - and easy to compute, even though "30(m +1) + d + 7 +1" looks just as complicated as it was before, it's cognitively easier to process because it's all broken up into a sequence of simple operations that are easy to remember.
Now, next up ... blogging ahead! Let's start with just +1 ... this one.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Welp, I wanted a picture of my drawing context, but, hey, here's me reading at the great Green Lettuce restaurant, which has a nice high-topped counter and awesome decor, food and staff.
So I had all sorts of plans about what to cover this Lent - and I still plan to cover those topics when I get time - but I got disrupted by two urgent things: the start of Lent itself, where I successfully dragged myself out of the house to make an Ash Wednesday service at Saint Peter's in Greenville, pictured above, and then the preparations for a pre-planned discernment process the day after Ash Wednesday, for Saint Stephens in-the-Field in California, where I'm a Vestry member helping them work through a transition.
I had all sorts of stuff I wanted to discuss - such as the Seven Pillars of Christianity - but in truth I've been rapidly expanding and refining those ideas as I work, so perhaps it's good that I waited. For a refresher, the Seven Pillars of Christianity is a mnemonic I came up with:
Jesus Christ was a real historical person.
His miracles actually happened.
They give us confidence in his resurrection.
He sacrificed himself to save us from our sins.
He had the authority to do so because he is God.
He left us his Spirit to guide us.
He calls us to be a part of his Church.
But this is light on the actual content of the Christian religion, which we might call the Seven Principles of Christianity:
There is one God.
Jesus is his Son.
His Spirit completes the Trinity that is how we perceive the one God.
The Gospel of Jesus is that God gave his only Son to die for our sins so that we might have eternal life.
Jesus calls us to believe in him.
Belief should prompt us to repent from our sins.
And it should prompt us to act in ways that emulate Jesus.
And we might also talk about the Seven Sources of Christianity:
Scripture
Tradition
Reason
Experience
Authority
Community
Spirit
Each of those is something I want to unpack in this series, BUT, Ash Wednesday was Wednesday, and I unexpectedly had time to devote to it, and the Vestry meeting to help start discerning the future of Saint Stephen's in-the-Field was Thursday, and I had to prepare ... which was more important than blogging.
I operate by the Law of Prior Commitment: all other things being equal, I honor earlier commitments over later ones. Obviously, emergencies override that; if your wife goes into labor and you need to run her to the hospital, you can put other things aside, to deal with more important questions, such as, "I thought you went through menopause a decade ago" and "when were you planning on telling me you were pregnant?" and "you claim to be spiritual but not religious but I would say your commitment to your cosplay of Sarah from the Bible exceeds that of the most devoted believer" but I digress into pure hypotheticals.
But Jesus suggests that we shouldn't plan too far ahead: "Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit." Now, I wouldn't compare a vestry meeting to being put on trial, but there is a sense in which our obligations "arrest" us, stop what we would otherwise be doing, and call us to testify.
So! All of that is a very long-winded way of saying I don't have an outline for this two-day-late blogpost ... but I decided to follow Jesus's instructions and just to step out into the Spirit and say what came to me. I hope you enjoyed it, nay, I hope that something about it spoke to you in some way.
Lent twenty twenty-five, day one, posted two days behind.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Saint Peter's, and Saint Stephen's in-the-Field.
Normally Loki hates eating around the kittens, or they're so interested in his food that they ignore their own and cause him to stalk off in a huff - "Ruuude, duuude!"
But they're getting over it - I had to move a kitten, but after I did, the system remained stable for the remainder of the meal.
Baby steps are short, but they can carry you down a long road, if you just keep going.
So our older cat and our younger cats seem to be tolerating each other more. Actually, the kittens have loved Loki from the start, but he had been solitary for so long that he didn't want any new cats in his home, thank you very much. Now he willingly goes into areas which have kittens, which is a big improvement.
As I keep saying, sooner or later he's going to learn that nothing bad happens when he hangs out with kittens.
-Anthony
P.S. A blogpost a day late, but, eh, we'll get there.
SO! I went "outside my circle" today and did something different, and was about to blog about "if you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always gotten" ... but as I started to write, I had this funny feeling that I'd written about that before, and sure enough, I'd blogged about it almost exactly a year ago.
Now, I was outside of my circle today because of Lent - it's Ash Wednesday, and I decided to drag myself out to an Ash Wednesday service at the church I got married at, Saint Peter's Episcopal (the "rapture-ready" church on Hudson Road, complete with to-go box handle on top). That put me in a different physical location than normal, but it took God sending me a firetruck parked in front of one of the restaurants I would have normally fallen back to before I tried a new place - the Lost Cajun, itself part of a chain I'd been to before, but for some reason I ordered something different than normal, and got the amazing blackened catfish dish above which was far better than the things I'd previously tried there.
And, weirdly, my previous "if you do what you always do" post was also right around the start of Lent. So I wonder if there's something about the spiritual earthquake that Lent is supposed to inspire that also had sent me climbing out of ruts and seeking new experiences a year ago - or, whether that experience left echoes of memory that prompted me to try the same thing again this year.
I and a friend were joking about some problem at work and she said, "My husband has a sign that says, 'Trust God. Everyone else must provide data.'" But then it struck me: even God provides data.
God didn't have to part the Sea of Reeds to evacuate the Israelites from Egypt: He could have teleported them out - He had the technology and the budget. And He didn't have to make it showy: He could have sent Jesus to walk them quietly across the surface of the Sea of Reeds.
But He didn't do that. He parted the waters, and He did so in the most showy way, with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night to mark His presence - so that the faithful would be talking about it thirty-five hundred years later.
Similarly, Jesus didn't just do miracles quietly: He raised Lazarus from the dead publicly so we would have confidence in Him when He later came back from the dead, and He came back from the dead Himself to give us confidence that He could do the same from us at the Second Coming. In fact, He showily Ascended into Heaven in part as a way to let us know He's coming back.
There's a big trend in philosophy that says that there is no evidence in favor of religious statements, and since there is no evidence, those statements don't mean anything. But that isn't true at all - that's nonsense following David Hume's circular logic in "On Miracles". If you're not familiar with that, Hume essentially says that one shouldn't believe in miracles, because if someone testifies that they've seen a miracle, it's always more likely that they're mistaken or lying. But that itself increases the incidence of false miracles ... thus increasing our confidence that there are no miracles, which is where we started.
Much of modern probability theory is based on Bayes' Theorem, which itself was an attempted refutation of Hume's argument. Now we know the situation is somewhat worse: if you think an event is sufficiently improbable compared to the alternatives, then not only will no amount of evidence convince you otherwise, it can actually make you more convinced of your original position ... whether it was true or not.
Now, the actual problem going on isn't logical at all: it's emotional. People of a disbelieving bent don't want to simply say "I simply don't believe in that"; they want to create some structure around it which says, "No-one should believe in that." Which is how you go from saying something like "I don't find the evidence of miracles in the Bible to be credible" to "there is no evidence of miracles in the Bibles" to "there can be no evidence of miracles" to "statements about miracles aren't meaningful."
But all that's nonsense. The correct thing to say is something like, "I'm sorry, I just don't believe in your classical-era reinterpretation of a Bronze Age god. There are too many people believing in too many things, and most of them believe the things that their parents or the people in their region believe, and even if I did, the stories told about this Jesus fellow seem too similar to other religious figures of the era." And you know what? That's okay if that's your stance. It's a logical stance. I don't agree with you, but like many Christian thinkers, I don't think God is going to be particularly mad at you if you sincerely, based on your best judgment, don't find the stories that you've been told about Him to be credible.
But He did want you to believe, and He did want his believers to understand what He was capable of, so He performed a lot of miracles to get our attention. You don't have to believe that they all happened exactly the way they were recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures or the early Christian Gospels to get the point - any amount of miracles performed by God is enough to show that He is operating in the world. And the same thing is true for all of us: if we want to convince someone of something, we should show the data.
Trust God. But even He provides data, because He knows we need it to believe.
Recently Internet guru Seth Godin blogged about “Halfway Projects”: you can get value from eating half of a pear, but half a canoe is worth less than no canoe at all. I like that. It’s a great metaphor for project management, where quitting a project just before the finish line doesn’t deliver any of its value—but leaves you with all of the costs.
Now, I misremembered Godin’s example a bit - what he actually said was “half a pear might deliver 85% of its value”. But the principle is sound: half a battery charge might let you do 85% of your work … but half a parachute is definitely worth less than no parachute at all, because it might encourage you to take risks that you shouldn’t.
For project management, though, the idea helps explain my long-running idea “work just a little bit harder than you want to.” Often, when working on a project, we get exhausted, and decide to give up - but working just a little bit harder can take us over the finish line. Our instinct to save us effort can actually thwart the work we need to do to achieve success.
For example, recently I was working on a machine learning project that just wasn’t working. We’d spent enormous effort on getting the learning system up and running, without good learning results to show for it, and the arbitrarily imposed deadline was coming up to show something impressive, or the project would be axed.
But, if you know anything about machine learning, you know most of the effort goes into data preparation. We had to modify the system to log its data, massage it into a format that was useful for learning, and spend further coding effort to speed it up so it was useful for development (taking the data load from 36 hours to 36 seconds!).
The point is, we only got the data running in mid-February, and were trying to compress months of experimentation into just ten days. Finally, as the deadline approached, I got philosophical: we’d done all the work we needed to do to start learning, and my recommendation was that the team keep working on it, with or without me.
But … I didn’t stop there.
Before the final presentation, I spent time cleaning up the code, checking things in, and getting a few of the most promising programs ready to collect “baselines” - long runs of the system set up for comparisons. And the next morning, I reviewed those baselines to present a report to the team about which one was most promising.
Long story short, one of the simplest models that we tried was actually sort of kinda working. Once I realized we had a scaling issue in the output, a simple tweak made the system get even better. I spent another hour tweaking the graphs to put the human input and the system results onto the same graph, and the good results leapt out into sharp relief.
I could have just decided that the system was a failure - but then I wouldn’t have done that extra work, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. I call this the “Sunken Cost Fallacy Fallacy”. For those not familiar, the “Sunken Cost Fallacy” kicks in when you keep doing something that isn’t working because of the effort you’ve spent, even though you have a better option.
But you can’t “decide” that something is a better option because you’re a Decisive Decider™. It actually has to be a better option, or what you’re doing is simply throwing away the effort that you’ve spent to date because you want to throw your weight around. No, if you suspect a cost is sunken, there’s no substitute for doing your due diligence - is the project working?
If it isn’t, sure, then quit. But often, that little bit of extra work can unlock the solution to the problem. During my presentation, the team asked natural about the simple model that turned out to be the most successful - and those questions made me realize it could be improved. Over the weekend, I applied those fixes - taking merely good to excellent.
Last week, as of Thursday night, I was pretty down on the possibility of success for our project. But I did my due diligence anyway, and by Friday morning, I had a working solution. By Friday afternoon, all the team knew it – and by Sunday evening, I was composing an email outlining our machine learning “recipe” that we can build on going forward.
Quitting just before the finish line wastes all the effort you spent on the project. Before you quit, work a little bit harder than you want to and do your due diligence to check whether it is working. If it isn’t, you can stop with no regrets; if it is, you will have not just saved the value of your project - you will have saved yourself from shooting yourself in the foot.
-The Centaur
Pictured: The project team. Three-quarters of them want to try a new direction, but the old seasoned hand isn't quite so sure.
And now a neat idea from "Morpho": thinking about the shape of the head as a round ball with a partial cylindrical front, like a face shield. This is surprisingly useful for analyzing the shape of an arbitrarily-positioned head - just trying to make one head-shaped shape is hard, but breaking it down into pieces helps you understand where the parts of the shape are and where the lines of alignment go.
So, as many of my readers know, I’m a “theist” - a fancy word meaning “I believe in God.” More specifically, I’m a Christian - which to me, is a fancy way of saying “I follow Jesus.” But when I say “I am Christian” as a simple statement of faith, it seems to mean something very different from the many people around me seem to mean when they say “I am Christian.”
Sometimes those people say “I am Christian” in an exclusionary way; sometimes they’re almost defiant. But it rarely seems to mean “I follow Jesus because I believe He’s the Son of God.” Here in the Bible Belt, it usually seems to mean belief that the Bible is literally true, or that evolution is false; other times it seems to mean a firm comittment to the rejection of gay people or excluding women from leadership roles in the Church. I have met people for whom it was literally more important that a preacher condemned gays or rejected the possibility of women priests than it was that that preacher preached the Gospel.
That seems backwards to me. Now, I don’t want to be one of those street preachers who pronounces Jesus as “Jaaayysus” (that's wrong: Jesus’ actual name was pronounced something like “Yeshua,” which translates to Joseph in modern English) but it seems to me that people who call themselves Christians should always be starting and finishing with Jesus, a kind and forgiving man who nevertheless preached strongly about how people should treat each other better and should act with integrity. The Jesus of the Gospels wouldn’t care whether someone preaching in the pulpit was gay, or a woman, or simply hip with the latest theories of the evolution of humans from earlier hominids through a process of natural selection; Jesus would care whether that person was teaching people to be good to their neighbors and preaching the Gospels.
So I’ve put a lot of thought into what I think the core principles of Christianity are. Now, many people like to focus on doctrine - do you believe in Jesus, are you good to your neighbor as you wish they were to you, do you believe in the Trinity, and so on - but I’m more interested in building the foundations up from a truth perspective. Believing in Jesus and accepting Him as your Lord and Savior so you can receive eternal life is the standard formula, but I don’t think you should believe in Him instrumentally to get eternal life; I think you should believe in Him if you think that your beliefs about Him are actually, like, you know, true.
So here’s what I think the core seven pillars of Christianity are:
Jesus was a real historical person. Jesus was not “outside history” so that stories about him cannot be discussed or challenged; conversely, atheists who claim that Jesus was not a real historical person are far outside responsible scholarship.
The miracles of Jesus actually happened. Whether they happened precisely the way recorded in the Gospels isn’t important - when Jesus fed the crowds, does it really matter whether there were 4,000 or 5,000 people present?
His miracles give us confidence Jesus came back from the dead. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead not just as a cheap stunt, but as a demonstration of His power over death, which He exercised later at the Resurrection.
Jesus came back from the dead to save us from our sins. The reason Jesus died on the Cross and the reason He came back are two sides of one coin: He sacrificed Himself to atone for our sins, and came back to provide for us a new life.
Jesus had the authority to do so because He is God. By this point, we have passed beyond what could ever be verified scientifically unless you were there at the Creation of the world - it has to be revealed by God and accepted by faith.
Jesus left us His Spirit to help guide us to follow His example. Most Christians interpret Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three aspects of one God, which baked the noodle of theologians in the past, but isn’t harder to accept than the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics.
Jesus founded a Church which we are called to be a part of. Not only was Jesus a real historical person, He had real historical followers, and the event in which He left His Spirit - Pentecost - galvanized His followers into a Church that continues today.
You’ll note one pillar I don’t list in the core seven: His Church compiled stories of Jesus into Scriptures that are profitable for instruction. That’s because many Christians are mired in false teachings about the literal truth of the Bible or, worse, “sola scriptura,” which argues that the Bible is the only source for Christian doctrine. No. That’s wrong. Jesus’s Church came first, and the Bible is a compilation of the early writings of that group believers, a group who are still acting in the world today. The specific text of the Gideon Bible you find in your hotel room is important - it’s the primary historical text we have to learn about Jesus’s life, and Christians believe it contains within it everything you need to know for salvation - but it is more spiritually important that that member of the Gideons witnessed that book to you because of their faith in Christ, a faith that they wanted to share..
So, in sum, when I say “I am Christian”, I don’t mean that I’m trying to profess a costly set of false beliefs to advertise my membership in an exclusive club. When I say “I am Christian,” I mean I think Jesus was a real historical person, we should believe in Him to be saved, and that we should join with other Christians to celebrate His life and to learn more about Him and His teachings so we can emulate Him in our life and practice.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Lego Chester Cathedral, inside Chester Cathedral, in Chester, England.
So! After that damn climate-change-induced hurricane, we had roughly fifty trees down on our property (though it may have been much more, if you count smaller trees). But this disaster is an opportunity, as newly fallen logs still have a functional immune system for a short period of time ... making it a great time to use those logs for mushroom farming!
My wife and I have been interested in mushroom farming for a while, and our friend Brandon at I See Fungi hooked us up with what we needed to get started. One of those things was a drill bit that helps drill holes to hold mushroom spawn, as well as an applicator that helps put the spawn in the holes:
After that, you can optionally use wax to seal the holes to prevent other organisms from digging the spawn out or getting into it. The messy wax, which can be heated up on your stove, or, better, a cookplate, gives the mycelium the best chance of getting established as the dominant organism within the wood.
After getting this round of mushrooms going, my wife and I had a lovely evening at Chef 21 Sushi Burger ...
... then walked around downtown Greenville, which still had its Christmas decorations up..
A sketch based on the "Morpho" series of drawing instruction books - I think "Simplified Forms". I've also worked from their "Mammals" book but I put that on hold to dig more into the human form, which is where I think my greatest need for artistic instruction lies as of late Q1 2025.
SO! If I got my blog running back in January, and planned to blog every day, why haven’t I been posting?
Because I also wanted to draw every day … and wanted to build a buffer.
Why? Well, let’s break it down.
First, I want to draw comic books. Yes, yes, yes, I have a webcomic called f@nu fiku, but after I broke my arm, and got my laptop stolen, and found my hand-crafted blog software stopped working, and got swarmed trying to crank out my first four novels … well, after all that, I found my confidence in my drawing had collapsed.
I never was that great at drawing, frankly, but when I was working on f@nu fiku with the goal of cranking out a page a week, I never let my drawing limitations stop me. If I wanted to have an image in my comic, I had to figure out how to draw it, no matter what. But even though I wasn’t that great, I had a level of self-confidence that let me tackle whatever I had to.
But I never gave up on comics. Not only do I want to finish f@nu fiku, I have other comics I want to draw, from Cinnamon Frost and Serendipity the Centaur stories up to and including becoming the writer-artist for Green Lantern. Obviously that last one is aspirational, but I can’t frigging aspire to become the writer-artist of anything if I am not creating comics at all.
But it’s hard to draw every day if real life intervenes (like Dragon Con, for example). According to my records, I’ve tried the “Drawing Every Day” project 3 times in the past, and never made it through the full year once - I lasted 215 days in 2021 (through Dragon Con), just one day in 2023 (the layoffs), and 135 days in 2024 (through the Embodied AI Workshop).
So, I decided to do a buffer for Drawing Every Day 2025.
So, for the first part of this year, I leaned into drawing, trying to get ahead. I decided that I wouldn’t start blogging every day until I built up a buffer of drawing every day, and in an act of quixotic hubris, I also decided to start retro-drawing the missing drawings from 2024 so that I would finish those drawings as well.
But, I wondered, how far ahead should I try to get in my drawings? Following Bill Holbrook, I guessed a month, but once you’re out of January, you need a tool to keep track of what day of the year it is. I wanted something simpler … so I started to think in terms of a simple formula I could keep in my head.
Fortunately (thanks, passage of time!) months are ordered, thus can be numbered. Call the number of the month in the year “m”. Months have a notch over 30 days on average, but for a mental formula, you want to round to even numbers to keep the math simple. So 30m is a good quick overestimate of what day it is in the year.
But 30m is a variable, vulnerable overestimate, as it is more ahead at the start of the month almost 30 days less at the end of the month. You could add 30 days, but even 30(m+1) still has this variable property. So, call the day “d” and add that to the formula: 30(m + 1) + d. And that sounds great. 30(m + 1) is guaranteed to always be more than 30 days ahead.
And … 30(m+1)+d is a treadmill. Every day, you’re just at your buffer, and every day, you can’t fail to lose focus, or you eat into your buffer. That’s no good: the point of the buffer is to get your back when major life events (like Dragon Con) happen, not to put you constantly on edge that you’re about to lose your buffer.
So I decided to add a few more days to the formula. I know I typically draw two to four drawings in a session (sometime as few as one if I am busy or have chosen something complicated, sometimes as many as five if I am sketching). So adding two more to the formula gets us to 30(m + 1) + d + 2 … a number I can easily calculate in my head, and, what’s more, add to my drawings, even if I don’t have internet where I am.
It’s not perfect - when transitioning from a short month, you can find yourself a few days behind - but it’s a number so far ahead that I can skip a day whenever I have to, confident that I will be able to get back on track with the typical number of drawings I do per day. And if I am at my buffer, I can do a “retro 2024” drawing or sketch some idea not on my drawing plan (which is a whole nother topic for a whole nother post).
So. Anyway. My point, and I did have one.
Today, I reached 30(m + 1) + d + 2 in my drawing buffer.
And so today is the day I resume Blogging Every Day, with this post.
It’s good to be back.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Where I am, drawing, and writing, and one of the drawings. And unfortunately, it's too dim to do my normal photo of my drawing for today, so I'll have to scan that when I get home.
So at last the kittens get to go outside! The adventurous one, Lily, took to it immediately, but the other two were terrified, squeaking, their tiny hearts pounding ... for all of five minutes. Within ten, they started exploring, and within twenty, they were actively playing.
For now, we've turned this courtyard into a catio, because these kittens have never been outside, have almost no experience other animals other than friendly humans and our scared indoor cats, and still are pretty tiny. Our property, on the other hand, is crisscrossed by other cats, occasionally aggressive turkeys, and a fox willing to take on prey twice its size. There's also a hawk, which my wife is concerned might carry off the cats; as they get larger, I am skeptical, but there's no need to risk it until they get more street-smart.
Be patient, Lilipadski. Your time will come.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Cats in the catio, AKA the courtyard we call "The French Quarter."
Welp, I gaffed, thinking my last "blogging every day" post, #172, published on July 12, 2024, was published on time, so I should look for pictures from July 13 to reconstruct what I was doing. And so, I was going to start a "retro 2024" series of blogposts to get back on track.
BUT, post 172 was late, so it ACTUALLY should have been posted on June 20th. But, IT WASN'T, so, WHATEVER, I had already pulled up images from July 13th and sketched out a blog post in my mind, SO, here we go, NOT QUITE RETRO 2024 yet.
Wait, why am I doing this, other than my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which really should be "compulsive disordered obsession" (CDO) so not only would the acronym be alphabetical, but also the phrase would no longer need a hyphen as it was no longer a compound-word adjective?
Because it gets be back on track, that's why! Don't bother me, don't bother me.(*)
Anyway.
Back in July of 2024, my wife and I were on a trip to downtown Asheville. Before Magneto destroyed it (oh, wait, my fact checkers are actually saying it was ravished by a hurricane) Asheville was one of our favorite getaway destinations, being only an hour and a half from our home in Simpsonville, South Carolina.
And there, we found Cary Gray's Poetic Experience, where "he asks, you share, he writes." After walking past it half a dozen times, I decided to sit for a session, where Cary asked questions about me that revealed my interest in robotics, my history of love for science going back to the Greenville County Library and their great big spinning globe, and my neurodivergent social anxiety disorder.
Cary ultimately put that into a poem, which he later physically mailed to me, laser-cut onto a set of boards that I have hanging in places in my Library. I apparently don't have a picture of one of these, and am not going to hold up this blogpost, but I one quote sticks out in my mind:
"Who do I look in the eyes, and for what length of time?"
That's the story of my life, I think, or at least the story of my inner mental life when I'm interacting with other people. I loved having eyes with lenses flexible enough to support the use of contacts, but now that I'm on progressive lenses, I enjoy taking them off when I'm talking to people, so their eyes blur out just enough that I don't have to be self-conscious looking at people and can just be there present in the moment.
And I'd never have gotten a laser-engraved plaque bearing the words "Who do I look in the eyes, and for what length of time," a plaque that now hangs in a place where I see it almost every day, unless I had stepped outside my circle for a little poetry reading.
So. Step outside your circle. You never know what benefits it might bring.
Looks like "blogging every day" bombed out around July 12, 2024 ... so let's pick up with July 13, shall we?
Picking up with blogging every day almost half a year later? Oh yes, I am.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A sign, likely from Asheville. Also, bonus points if you can figure out what the title riffs on. [Oh, all right, I know it's too hard, it's from a sample in "You are Here" off of John Tesh's Tour de France album.]
