old site: mrichhcirm.wordpress.com
-
About me…
Are you a good judge of character?
No…I can be a bit naive and trusting of people, and am often slow to recognize that someone else may not be acting in good faith.
-
Postcards are better than social media
My wife Kelly (hello dear) challenged me to give up social media because I seemed stressed. I had to admit I spent too much time ‘doomscrolling’.
It’s been about a week. So how is it going? Well…I have not entirely succeeded in avoiding reading posts. I have successfully avoided posting and sparring with people in the comments, though. I am definitely more calm…though I have to say it’s been a struggle to stay quiet about everything going on in the news lately.
This is what I do instead of posting on SM:
Write my reactions to the news in my journal. I need to get my thoughts out…but I don’t need to engage strangers, nor do I need anyone else’s validation.
Write postcards to friends and strangers alike. Postcards have some virtues:
1. You are under no pressure to respond quickly while news is “trending”. You are now thinking and communicating at snail-mail speed, and that’s not such a bad thing. You’ve got time to choose the right card, stamps, and content. You spend your time thinking about being concise and adjusting to your audience, not being quick.
2. Even if you use the traditional open postcard, there’s a certain expectation of privacy that you don’t really get with social media. No one’s recording or archiving your postcard, so for the most part, anything you share is hidden in plain sight.
3. Postcards are very friendly and non-confrontational. They conceal nothing and demand very little of the reader; the card will sit in someone’s box or on the desk until the receiver is ready to read it, and does not require opening an envelope or package.
4. Postcards, and epistolary (letter) writing in general, encourages you to reflect on how the recipient may understand and respond to the message. It’s always a good idea to practice adapring to your audience.
-
Thoughts
Sometimes I wish I could be as naive as the people sending me election mail think I am. Being critical, political, and above all, analytical/ pains me in ways physical.
-
Mars Colony Clown Car
Explaining the pain of living on Mars / After months of travel as peaches in jars / Is no use to Elon, or other dreamers, / or glory-hounds, or sports extremers. / They'll live-tweet a greeting from where they alight, / beckon all to follow, if they might, / and tend to their dusty burial site. (originally posted 4/12/22)
-
New name, new site.
I reconsidered my old user name: ‘mrichhcirm’, which is basically ‘mrich’ spelled forward and backward. That was easy for me to remember, but not easy for other people.
I thought a palindrome was pretty clever, but it was difficult to verbalize and thus hard to remember. Some other creators would read it back to me as ‘Mr. Rich’…and since every man in my family is called ‘Rich’ at some point, I just leaned into it.
Stay tuned…I’m working on rebuilding my content here.
Mr Rich Writes! 