Perspective

Shira Toeplitz provides the perspective I've been looking for in explaining my stroke experience. You get better, but you don't really recover.

The last four years of my dad’s life were frustratingly humorless, especially for my sister, who handled most of his care during and just after her college years. A sudden brain injury and diabetic complications had left him unconscious in the ICU for weeks. In his early 60s, he had to learn to talk, walk, think and type all over again. He improved but never fully recovered.

Other People's Money

First I spotted the news that an Irish stamp would feature a complete short story, now comes this

The sample at the BBC's link contains a portrait of Jane and a quote—I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading. How do we start a campaign to show our support for banks notes and stamps this classy at home?

Uh-oh

I didn't really need Fast Company to remind me that I've posted remarks by Anthony Weiner here. I left them up when the stories about his behavior first broke, and they're still here. There's some lesson from high school echoing in my head that the personal life of an author can't be held against his books, but it's sounding like an awfully hard lesson right now.

Go Analog?

Fast Company wades into the handwriting vs digital debate with a helpful survey ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Martin Heidigger to Neil Gaman before concluding with a link to an article from someone who prefers to abandon analog. Patrick Rhone makes the claim that "Forming letters by strokes, as opposed to selecting each by keys, opens regions of the brain involving thinking, language, and memory that are not opened through typing. Writing, real writing, makes you smarter." The keys in the article seem to be freeing yourself from distraction changing your state of awareness. I'm struck by the similarity of thought to John Edward Huth's Losing Our Way in the World—After a year of this endeavor, something dawned on me: the way I viewed the world had palpably changed. The sun looked different, as did the stars. While the ocean didn’t accommodate my “human” need for meaning, a different sense emerged from the wave patterns that conveyed the presence of winds, shoals, coastlines and distant storms—and I'm inclined to agree.