Thursday, September 12: Discuss ways that blogging or social media has changed you. (late again)

Short (and late) post, so I apologize in advance.

I feel like the effect it's had on me is one that is pretty common to most of my generation, or at least those who pay attention to the internet at all. I'm more impulsive and much more conscious of any and all feedback (and sometimes get worked up over minor things). The most far-reaching thing, however, is how it's impacted the way I express my opinions, online or in person. The internet is a dangerous place to be passionate about anything, and I feel like a lot of people adopt a sarcastic, detached tone even about things they care about just to avoid the possible reprisals people have against those who are too sincere (and getting blasted by people policing how much you care can be just as bad as flame wars based on differences of opinion). I'm definitely a victim of that affected detachment and sarcasm, and that definitely spills over into real life, though being conscious of it means I work against it whenever I do catch myself starting to go into that mode of thought.

The most material day of the month!

Wednesday, September 11: Share links to your favorite online shops, preferably with a few photos of your favorite items in each shop.

This one's easy - I've got pretty simple tastes, I feel. 

Harry's Blades

I've always been on the lookout for a better shaving experience, partly because there's something very grown-up feeling about being diligent about one's grooming, and partly because I've got somewhat sensitive skin and I'd rather not destroy it with cheap razors and the like. Harry's is a really inexpensive way to get a much better shave than I'd ever had before. You can even set it up so that fresh razors are sent to you at an interval you choose, making sure you'll never run out. Pictured above is the Truman set, which I've been making good use of for a couple of months now. 

Frank & Oak

I won't lie, I probably wouldn't have given F&O another look if it weren't for their Hunt Club - every month when a new collection comes out, you pick three items, they're sent to your home, you have a few days to try them on, and whatever you don't like you send back (and you're only charged for what you keep). Being able to accumulate store credit and their regular sales mean you can easily try out new things without the fear of being stuck with something that doesn't work on you at all. Pictured above is one of the first items I ever got from them (and that I instantly fell in love with) - a simple blue merino wool cardigan. 

Good Old Games

I was always a video game nerd, and I never had a particularly good computer until late in my college years. Thus, I ended up turning to DOS games and other old programs, knowing they were A.) cheap and B.) almost certain to work on my computer. I'd get them used, and that was hit-or-miss, but there were occasionally really amazing ones that I'd become almost obsessed with. Once the store near my old house that sold those used games went out of business, it was impossible to find those old games... until GOG.com started up. Founded by the Polish game studio CD Projekt (as a labor of love paid for by the revenues from their first blockbuster video game, The Witcher), GOG gets the rights to old computer games that are out of print and offers people a legitimate way to purchase them. They've also recently gotten into the indie game market as well. The above is one of my favorite childhood games, one that was pretty much impossible to procure until GOG came around. I'll be grateful to them for a while for the many grand nostalgia moments the site has allowed me to enjoy. 

More Blogtember (and a day late, at that)

Tuesday, September 10: Describe a distinct moment when your life took a turn.

There are many such moments in all of our lives, I believe, but given all my concerns about career-related matters, the moment where I became convinced to pursue this life path is the one that sticks out in my mind the most right now. 

Until the middle of my senior year of high school (in fact, shortly before application season started up), I was convinced that my pursuit of higher education would be in some literary or other humanities field - if not writing, which I was always nervous about given my harsh self-criticism, then at least in analysis of some kind. I did, however, try to keep my schedule as balanced as possible, and given the competitive nature of my school I was in quite a few AP-level courses. 

One of those was a physics course I took with one of my favorite teachers, and he was very keen on sharing his passions, and how physics fit into them. When he first started showing us various engineering principles in action, I didn't give it much thought. But once we were all immersed in the material, there was a moment where everything clicked and I found I really enjoyed it. I was just sitting at a desk trying to work out a problem with the other students at my table and I realized I was really enjoying myself. Working through the problem didn't feel like a slog, it was challenging and it was engaging. I did some more research on different disciplines of engineering and in mere weeks I was sending out applications to engineering schools, all those English and Comp-Lit programs fallen by the wayside. 

Blogtember - the personality test.

Monday, September 9: Take this short personality test and respond to your results. 

I'm not particularly impressed with being called an ENTJ, for two reasons - first, if I recall correctly this is a pretty condensed, simplified version of the Myers-Briggs test, so I don't know that it's particularly accurate. Second, all of my indicators were very slight on each axis - less than ten percent tendency toward any of the factors, so the very strongly worded, concrete description of my personality from the above link seems particularly off.

I suppose on a more profound level, I always get a twinge of skepticism when a new personality profile system makes its way around the internet. The above test seems to be gaining popularity, and Myers-Briggs in some form crops up every few years, but the two big self-diagnosis things that really got old for me fast lately were introversion and the autism spectrum.

I don't discount the comfort that it brings to many people who read up on it and know nothing is wrong with them. But all too often, I encounter people who hide behind these descriptions to excuse something as innocuous as occasional social awkwardness, and that strikes me as both incredibly self-limiting and somewhat disrespectful to people for whom these things are a genuine issue (and something to overcome, rather than something to rationalize one's behavior with).

Each one of us has our extroverted and introverted moments, and we may tend toward one or the other, but I've always felt like that could be influenced by so many different factors - as could any of the factors in these various personality profiles. We're humans, not personality profiles. We're fluid and we adapt and change to the circumstances that surround us, and while some things may stay the same, not everything can, so let's not let an online personality inventory force us into one way of thinking - about ourselves, about others, about anything.

Friday, September 6: A story about a time you were very afraid.


I find myself pretty fortunate, especially in this respect. While I've gone through plenty of frustration in my years, I haven't had too many instances of primal, visceral fear. I think the most vivid memory I have of that is when I first visited relatives across the pond, and sustained the first major injury of my life.


This part of the family lived in a rural area in northeastern Poland, and given the distance between neighbors, the easiest way for a plucky eight-year-old such as myself to get around was by bicycle. There weren't too many spares around, but my uncle found an older one missing a pedal that I was able to use (carefully, he insisted). I jumped at the chance to finally enjoy mobility, and quickly grew used to the somewhat strange experience of biking on one pedal and one pedal spindle.


One day, I was standing behind the bike when for reasons my memory has decided weren't particularly important, the bike dropped, spindle side down, onto me. I had never noticed, but the end of the spindle was very, very sharp - sharp enough to go right through my foot between two bones. Aside from the pain, the overwhelming, irrational fear that I had was that this injury was one I couldn't heal from. Seeing clear through my foot to the ground on the other side was too much, and I was just about overwhelmed by the feeling that I'd never walk right again, or that being so far from a hospital I couldn't get proper medical care - all this against a backdrop of constant sharp pain.


My uncle arrived shortly and cheered me up pretty quickly on the way to the doctor. It turned out that there wouldn't be any permanent tissue damage because of how cleanly the sharp spindle had gone through. But for, a whole day (an eternity in kid time), I was terrified that all my family were wrong and I wouldn't be able to walk, so I avoided putting any pressure on my foot at all. Of course, my fears were overblown and within a day or two I was walking normally again, but it's one of my most memorable harrowing experiences.

Day 3. Pass on some useful advice or information you learned and always remembered. 

This was actually a little harder than I thought, because while I've been told a lot of witty or brilliant or simply pithy truisms over the years, none of them could easily be recited - I mostly internalize. But since the sun's down and there's not a whole lot of today left, there's two pieces of advice or information that immediately come to my mind. The first is something that my parents told me when I was being picked on by one particular kid at school and had no idea how to react. I can't remember the exact wording, so maybe it would be best for me to paraphrase:

If someone tells you something that upsets you, whether they mean to hurt you or not, take a second, just one second, to think through before you respond. That one second may mean the difference between really understanding the situation and simply making it far worse.

Blogtember, Day 2: three months of freedom

All right, folks. Just to prove my commitment to the cause, here's my second post of the 'Blogtember' series. Today's prompt:

Wednesday, September 4: If you could take three months off from your current life and do anything in the world, what would you do?

This question seems like it ought to be a no-brainer (especially if you establish that money isn't an issue during these three months). Given three months with no obligations, the obvious choice seems to be a whirlwind travel itinerary. I hate to disappoint you if you thought I was leading up to some sort of snarky contrarian response, but that's exactly what I'd do.

There are two major reasons I want to travel: discovery and reconnecting with distant family, so I'd probably split those two right in half. So, without further ado, a brief and woefully inadequate travel itinerary for a 90-day period:

Seven days each in Warsaw, Bialystok, Munich and London, for my extended Polish family across the pond (and yes, that's 28 days already!). Big groups of relatives, so I'd probably be kept busy by what they wanted to show me as much as what I wanted to see on my own.


Seven days each in New York City and Pittsburgh, for the American branch of my extended family (I'd kindly ask you to refrain from letting my family know I'd like to enjoy New York City for my own reasons, as well). In both of these cases, my relatives all have day jobs, so I'd likely get to spend a good deal of time catching up with old friends and just exploring on my own.

From here on out, it would be all about satisfying my own sense of adventure, or to reconnect with old friends. Five-day stints in Minneapolis, Portland, Vancouver, Austin, Montreal and San Diego. I'm sure none of those have the immediate glamour of Paris or Tokyo, but given how rarely I've gotten to travel, I'm going for breadth of experience here.

And of course, I'd round things out with my last eight days in Chicago - giving me a splendid opportunity to catch up in my hometown and settle back into the pace of things before returning to the real world. After all, an early return is the perfect opportunity to unwind after a whirlwind of travel.

Dusting off, catching up and shaky Blogtember commitments

By now you're so familiar with the assertions that they register as nothing more than blogging tropes: it's been too long, I need to focus on this thing more, I need an outlet, et cetera. Yes, all true, but I'd like to break the chain there by admitting I really do have time to write, even if only a little bit. And, truth be told, t's not just a matter of writing, but more constructive self-reflection, and maybe a little self-discipline to boot. Even in the midst of what's a pretty volatile time, I want to make sure I set aside some time to regularly engage the part of my brain that's been lying dormant since... well, since my newspaper days, and maybe even longer. 

And thanks to the wonderful Becca I've found something that I hope will get me back into the game. This Blogtember business seems right up my alley, as it's got ready prompts, structure, and generally accessible subject matter (me!). True to myself, I spent so much time thinking about this throughout the first day that I never actually got to do it - and upon waking up this morning, barely remembered what I was going to write in the first place. So today's a double-post for the purposes of catching up. Do forgive me for the delay, won't you? 

Tuesday, Sept. 3: Describe where or what you come from. The people, the places, and/or the factors that make up who you are.

My parents come from similar backgrounds, but their diverging life paths and associated experiences have given me a perspective I'm pretty glad to have. From childhood, my father took care of his family and could confidently be called blue collar, moving from farm work in the Old World to factory work in the new. While I'm glad to have inherited his work ethic and his general tolerance, I'm also happy I've come to value leisure more than he does. And I think his sense of contentment with very simple comforts is something I've inherited to a degree (but still strive to live up to). My mother rose from a very humble background to become a fairly influential attorney before moving here and becoming a homemaker, and while her life gave her a somewhat negative reaction toward the political system under which she lived, the lesson I took away from her experiences was that any system in which large sums of money are the biggest barrier between you and your dreams is a system that doesn't give everyone a fair shake. I guess ambition, too, but the social justice thing is probably a more important component of my day-to-day functioning. 

Both my parents valued reading a great deal, and some of my earliest memories are of snatching old magazines or newspapers and pretending to read alongside one of my parents. While I'm no literary buff, the joy that books bring to my life is immense. 

I'd be dishonest if I claimed that being raised Catholic didn't have an effect on me. While I wouldn't call myself particularly pious, I think that background did teach me a lot. I learned how to function in a community where I don't often get along with (and sometimes entirely disagree with) other individuals, even while working toward the same goal. I learned that people are flawed, but for the most part they try to be decent, and I should work on the same. And as a child, priests taught me more than anyone about allegory, ambiguity and just how open to interpretation everything is - that rarely is an idea perfectly clear or set in stone. 

And finally, the great city I was born and raised in. From childhood I got to experience it in several different ways - warts and all - and what's resulted is a complex, qualified admiration and a fierce pride in where I'm from. Whether it's my own ethnic background that I continually enrich my knowledge of thanks to its history, so heavily intertwined with that of this city, or exploring the diversity on offer, I always feel as though I'm learning something new about my home. I'm not sure I could ever leave - not for long, that's for sure. 

I think that's a good start. Let's hope future prompts take me far less time to think about.