This morning I found out I owe my dentist $1200. This is, arguably, my fault: they presented me with a treatment plan while I was sitting in the chair last week and I scanned it and said "yeah, go ahead", without clocking the part where my dental insurance doesn't cover 90% of what they were doing. It's hard to focus on the fine print when you're actively sitting in the chair, but I should have known better. It is also my fault that I'm in this position: I didn't go to the dentist for several

A fairly embarrassing development of the past year is that I talk about Atomic Habits a lot now. It's the kind of airport book that I usually sneer at, and it is not what I would call a good book: it's poorly written, it makes a lot of assumptions about my life goals and personal capability that I do not appreciate, and most of the advice in it did not really work for me. I just want to enjoy my life and be able to do things I care about well, and I look to advice books to

Greetings from my second heat wave in as many weeks! Since my last update post I have been extremely busy - I moved into a new apartment, and have also not been home for more than two weeks straight since May.

Things I did

• Cleaned out my mom's old house in WV, finding a lot of fun mementos.
• Moved: arguably this does not count as "done", since we still haven't hung the art and I am still setting up my closet and office, but the new place is at least livable now.

A couple of months ago there was a minor thinkpiece trend about the push, especially among Silicon Valley types, to be "high agency". It feels somewhat appropriate to be writing this after the hype cycle has passed since I consider myself at best a "medium agency" person, but I've been chewing on it for a while and figured I should finally write this down. I'm not sure if people are even still talking about it this way or if they've moved on to Marc Andreesen's favorite self-improvement technique - I'm not on Twitter and I

A thing people tell you a lot when someone dies is that you need to process it. It was never very clear to me what that actually means. I know everyone meant well but mostly when people told me this, or asked me how I felt, it felt like I had failed some sort of test. There was some process I was supposed to be going through, some new understanding or perspective I was supposed to find, but all I ever really had to say was some variation on "my mom died, it sucks, I'm sad about it." This