Social Media

On cancer and quitting, hidden things and life well-lived

In the past I’ve put links to posts and articles I particularly enjoyed in the sidebar, under the “In Brief” heading. In the spirit of Change and Redesign, Etc., I’m doing away with that. And I’m going to compile them into a Friday Links post. Which was something I did when I very first had a website, back in 19diggity9 or so. And I “designed” a graphic to go along with it. With dancing sausages on it. Because of course that’s what I’d do.

Anyway, here are some things that caught my eye this week.

  1. Eden Riley so perfectly captures the confusion and helplessness of having a loved one with a terminal illness in her heartbreaking post “Half the Moon is Gone.”

    They still couldn’t take Jim. Don’t they understand what kind of guy he is? How hard he’s worked? Send me somebody to blame, Universe. It feels nice when there’s people to blame. I drove around town for heat packs while his biopsy got cancelled again and it’s the end of the world as we know it but people still honk when I drive too slow.

  2. We have a rather large quitting of things in our past, and so Katherine Stone’s “On Why Quitters Do Win” resonated with me Something Fierce. As trying and kind of terrible as that time was, I don’t think we could’ve gotten where we are now without first going through that.

    You don’t have to check off all of the boxes, or be a renaissance woman (or man). You don’t have to carry out every creative parenting idea you’ve ever seen mentioned on Pinterest. … And as for all those things you can’t stand but are making yourself do right now because you saw it on morning TV or Twitter, quit. Quit right this second.

  3. I hope this, too.
  4. Natalie Dee gets me. She just like gets me, you know?
  5. Count Robert de la Rochefoucauld’s obituary is the most exciting obituary I’ve ever read. And I’ve read a lot of obituaries. (via kottke.org)

    En route to his execution in Auxerre, La Rochefoucauld made a break, leaping from the back of the truck carrying him to his doom, and dodging the bullets fired by his two guards. Sprinting through the empty streets, he found himself in front of the Gestapo’s headquarters, where a chauffeur was pacing near a limousine bearing the swastika flag. Spotting the key in the ignition, La Rochefoucauld jumped in and roared off, following the Route Nationale past the prison he had left an hour earlier.