Friday's little things
I actually decided to start this on Thursday afternoon after a wonderful walk, coffee, and some delicious fried rice my wife made. I often sink into some YouTube history documentaries that I find. Sometimes binge on The Ancients on YouTube or Spotify. Or just let a thing drone on like today about the world's earliest city. What caused this city to come along. How have historians and archeologists covered this and shown some of the dynamics of culture change. New views on how a city evolves and what it takes. There are still wonderful history documentaries hosted by real people and not the AI drivel that seems to threaten to overtake the real things with stuff with mistakes, lack of any sense of realism, and how it all overtakes then algorithm in favor of more the drivel.
That's how my Thursday becomes less and less in favor of relaxing. My wife enjoys the cooking and visiting with her friends here or going and doing things. Today she is cooking soup for tomorrow's meal. I get Khmer food every so often but most often western food with touches of khmer seasonings.
Since I changed writing and deleted my mastodon account, I find myself wanting more of the things like creating blog posts, writing longer things for the blog, and reading with the kindle app on the iPhone. Today is really no different. I kinda feel this loss of a place to go scroll and get frustrated so I am pretty sure I did the right thing deleting my account. It had become less to me and I stopped enjoying the interaction. The voices there all strained to be heard and I found myself disliking a lot of the shouting, the polls, the politics. It's easier to just take a hike from the social network and let it play on past me.
When I moved to 11ty to blog, I realized how I wrote could also change. I could make things more basic. Use a different markdown editor. Write my journal differently. It's easy really to blog from the Mac or the iPhone so I still can write from either. What I enjoy more is the idea of some basic ownership of the site. Yet I also know ownership includes big players like GitHub and Netlify. I think I am okay with those relationships for some time. I always do think of changing though. I kinda thought of using bearblog and going back to Pika or maybe Blot. All of those services and platforms are great and I have enjoyed using them. Right now though, I don't pay for any of the services. I can write as I please, use my custom domain, enjoy the sense of ownership I do have, and not pay.
Now the history drones on and I listen about how different developments changed the course of history in Uruk. I love history and archeology. Especially when people now call upon them to ask and answer questions about what happened and why. Each one I think has only a piece of the equation. History needs something else that gives up the material culture to reinforce or question what it finds. Archeology needs interpretive voices that cross over. As a one time archeologist, I remember my mentor discussing its limits so many times. His favored saying was,
you cannot excavate an idea
For this something else is needed. From the flaked stone tool to the idea in the mind of the person that prepared it. I think on this progression a lot from some things I once thought of in the Mojave Desert doing prehistoric archeology.
Now I find myself stuttering along and the words fail. I'll see you when I do my coffee walk on Friday. Talk about Friday things. Tell you about what I see then.
Friday coffee things
This morning at the usual time its the walk for coffee. Just down the street and around a corner is Coffee Bean. A nice and peaceful little space where their son will come out and talk to me every so often. He's very accomplished at speaking English and loves to tell me his school stories and things he reads. For my part, I enjoy sitting at this table and listening. It is only really hundreds of feet from our house but might as well be miles. Easy to find a place here and just go every day but that is not what I enjoy. I like a different place so will walk a little or farther on a day to have the change.
Today it's close. Time to sit at this table I love. See Siem Reap go by. Always feel welcome here and the coffee forever holds me over as the words get done.
Like now.
The stop at Coffee Bean is my stop.
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