#3. Be The Reason Someone Loves Themselves
Yesterday, a woman in the neighborhood thought that it would be a good idea to give Erin, my wife, a letter which outlines how Erin's activities online (particularly her speaking her mind about politics on social media) was wrong and bad. It completely blindsided Erin, and not just because it was coming from someone who Erin viewed as a good friend, but because it was such a condemnation--not just that Erin was wrong, but that her wrongness was wicked.
It was a mess, and my wife cried (though she did stand up for herself).
Contrast that with a memory that came across my feed today, of something that happened to me three years ago:
Three years ago I was running a small business--nothing that was ever going to replace my fulltime job, but just a good side gig. And I devoted a LOT of time and energy to this, and it was starting to take off. And one day my manager at work messaged me to say that she had casually mentioned this side project to one of the vice presidents at the company, and he looked it up. His words to my manager, which she relayed to me, (forgive the profanity) were "Jesus Christ, this is incredible."
I was elated. This VP was not trying to pay me a compliment--he wasn't even talking to me. I was hearing about it second-hand. And this man who I respect and admire was so effusive in his praise, that I couldn't help but feel good.
It reminds me of a quote that someone once said: "Be the reason someone loves themselves." That day, three years ago, that VP (and my manager) were the reason why I loved myself. And, on the flip side, that neighbor who wrote Erin a letter yesterday was the reason why Erin cried.
It is very easy, in this fast-paced world where communications happen instantly and everywhere, for us to say the wrong thing to the wrong person. The more care that we put into the way we treat each other can make someone's day rather than ruin their week.
--Rob
Fascinating Things of the Week
#1. This week my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, but we've got nothing on Maria de Sousa and Manoel Angelim Dino of Brazil. They officially made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as having been married for longer than anyone else alive: 84 years. Manoel is 105 years old and Maria is 101 (which, doing the math, put them at 21 and 17 when they were married in 1941. (The record for the longest marriage EVER is 88 years, which was a couple when the wife passed away in 1898.)
#2. We haven't found life on another planet, but we are tantalizingly close. Four and a half years ago we sent a probe to an asteroid, named Bennu, and drilled for rock samples. Well, the rocket returned to earth and scientists have announced they've found a remarkable clue to life in the universe: 14 of the 20 amino acids necessary for life were present on the asteroid--including ALL FIVE nucleobases present in DNA. Theories as to how this all ended up on the asteroid include 1) the asteroid was once part of Earth and was knocked off during an impact, or 2) that wherever that asteroid came from may be the origin point for life on Earth, or 3) that this is all just spontaneous, and the two aren't related at all. No matter which you pick, it's pretty cool.
#3. The James Webb Space Telescope has found that two-thirds of galaxies spin clockwise, and only a third spin counterclockwise. This is weird, because we don't know of any forces in the universe that would exert that kind of power over galaxies. A lot of theories have been suggested as to why this is, but the coolest of them is that our universe--the whole thing--exists IN THE CENTER OF A BLACK HOLE IN SOME OTHER UNIVERSE!!??!! (Odds of this are incalculable, because this is all speculation at this point. But cool, right?)
#4. If you haven't heard, John Green--the author who you may know from books like The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska--for some reason wrote a non-fiction book about tuberculosis? It's called Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, and I've read it and it's amazing. Green became passionate about TB after visiting Sierra Leone and meeting a young man named Henry who was suffering from the disease, a disease which is all-but-gone from most of the world because it is entirely curable, but which is still the leading cause of death of infectious disease globally because, as green puts it "the cure is where the disease isn't, and the disease is where the cure isn't." Anyway, the thing that I love about this book is that Green could easily be churning out YA books and having a great life as a novelist, but he decided to use his voice--a voice that is much louder than other people's voices--and spread the word about this cause. It strikes me that if I, humble midlist Robison Wells, had written those exact words in that same order, the book would have gone nowhere. But this is a John Green Book, so it's EVERYWHERE. In a world where some novelists are using their influence to be terrible, he chose a different path.
Distractions and Diversions
Polyphonic's Video Essay on Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" goes into the background of the song, including the 1600's origin of the Scarborough Fair song and how it evolved over the years, combined with scraps of lyrics of an old Paul Simon song "The Side of a Hill" that he had released under a different name. It was an anti-war song ("fight for a cause they've long since forgotten" and "while a soldier cleans and polishes a gun that ended a life at the age of seven years.") The essay explains how combining these two strong songs becomes something transcendental.
Boylei Hobby Time Builds a Train. Guys, I love trains. Like I LOVE trains. And it all started when I was seven years old--too young to join the cub scouts but old enough to read Boy's Life--and I saw my first article about model railroading. I was hooked. I was in love. Trains are great. Boylei's Hobby Time is a channel that makes fun models, especially his Wild Imaginary West series. But in this one he builds a train set, from start to finish. Guys, I can't tell you how much I enjoy this video.
Simone Giertz is one of my favorite creators online for lots of reasons. For starters, she's incredibly creative: she got her start as the self-dubbed "queen of shitty robots", making machines that do dumb things. But when that had kind of run its course she decided that what she really wanted was to use all of those engineering skills to invent cool things that are actually useful--but still super quirky. And she's very funny. Anyway, in this video she builds a table that can be her dining room table but also a jigsaw puzzle table, and while you may think you know how that's possible, you will not be expecting her ingenious solution (unless, of course, you look at the thumbnail above, I guess.)
More About Robison Wells
Guys, not to brag, but yesterday I finished brainstorming prep work on my latest book project and drafted three whole pages! It’s so bad! I don’t know—maybe good? Who can tell?
