Smart & Pleasant New Tech

I'm on the front porch of my cat-sitting house. I've been at this house almost four months, and I go home in one more week. I've barely been able to sit on the porch this spring, it's been so cold. This week we're due for a stretch of nice weather in the 70ºs.

Finally: I went and bought a new laptop.
A MacBook Air, much like the old one, but ten years newer and "space gray" instead of silver. So fast! So smooth! So not broken and insufficient!

Penny Cooper has new tech too. ^ She has taken to wearing a hair band around her neck, as an aid for carrying things. She started when my sister got Covid and Penny hid in her mailbox with a get-well message in the band.

I. Covid Report 

Sister's Covid case was mild, like most people's I know: a few days of general gunkiness and exhaustion.

So far as I know, I haven't had Covid (unless it was asymptomatic). Many (most?) people I know have had it now--almost all my coworkers. Mostly it's been mild, but one volunteer was hospitalized.

Almost no one here is wearing masks this spring, except a few people on the bus, where mask-wearing is no longer required by law.
The other day, a bus driver even announced over the speaker,
"The mask mandate is over, you don't need to wear a mask."

Weird that he made a point of it--politically motivated? Buses are incubators of disease at the best of times--shouldn't we all wear masks on buses all the time?

Huh--I just checked that, and a study showed that regular users of public transport acquire immunity against a range of respiratory viruses and are more likely to be asymptomatic.

I rode the bus all winter, so maybe I did get an asymptomatic case.

II. Turning Off the Chyron of Criticism

Fact-checking my own assumptions aside, I'm not fact-checking individuals anymore.
Or, I'm trying not to.

I get myself in such a twist, fretting about people saying inaccurate things, which they (we) do all the time. I made some people unhappy  by pointing out their errors, and I didn't improve anything anyway. *

Of course it's good to be discerning about factual information, like how Covid spreads.
I don't mean that.
I mean, I want to interrupt myself generating a constant stream of criticism that runs like a chyron across the screen of my mind.

I came across the Daily Decalogue of Angelo Roncalli--ten simple "little" things that are hard to do.
This one jumped out at me. I thought, I'll just try that:

Angelo: "Only for today, . .  I will not criticize anyone;
I will not claim to improve or to discipline ["correct or punish"] anyone except myself."

[Me: I will not fact-check things other people say.]

Ha, right. Just try it. I can pretty easily stop myself from physically fact-checking, but every day I fail multiple times not to criticize anyone--especially at work. I'm always saying stuff like, "That guy is such a jerk."

And if I count criticism IN MY MIND, I fail all the time even when I'm alone.

I don't like it; it's a habit that's makes the brain's gears all sticky. And it's useless! It doesn't help. It's not an effective policy.

 

I watched Harvey last night. ^
Jimmy Stewart plays a crazy/holy fool, Elwood P. Dowd, whose companion, Harvey, is an invisible giant rabbit. 
(Penny Cooper loved it: "It's just like me--even though I'm visible, people think I'm not real.")

From 1950, the story's got plenty of problems, but I liked Elwood's speech recommending being pleasant over being smart.
I'm wary of romanticizing this tricky, double-twisty position:
You have to be a a crazy (and smart?) saint to pull this off, maybe.
Elwood is smart--but he's made some kind of choice to forefront pleasant.

So, I'm wary, but I keep seeing that Being Right is not all that helpful, on its own.

Ass't Man (remember him? the assistant manager I clashed so badly with?) has learned a lot in his couple years at the thrift store, but it frustrates him that people won't go along with his plans (and as a mere assistant, he doesn't have to power to discipline them if they don't).

The other day, he asked me what I thought about his frustrating situation.

Because he asked, I suggested that this workplace presented him with an opportunity to Practice Letting Other People Be Wrong.

 He had a hard time with this. He explained to me again how people were being wrong--doing things the most inefficient way, etc.

"Yes," I said. "I know. They're doing it wrong. That's the point. Let them."

It's counter-intuitive, the idea of not trying to improve or discipline anyone but oneself;
and it's funny because Angelo Roncalli (who wrote the Daily Decalogue for himself) went on to become Pope John XXIII, the man who "opened the windows of the church" with Vatican II. It was his job to teach people, and he did.

But there's magic in it, and relief.
"Put down the encyclopedia, and back away slowly."
                          ______________________

*As [various people] said,
"Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig."