Data, Reasoning, Decisions, and Daily Life

Life is strange. People are too. And my writing this month is too.

Day Four of this masochistic month-long writing exercise that is: This A to Z (April 2023.)–Note: this main A to Z link is not a secure link. NOT https. Don’t ask me why. Ask the organizers.

What I’m Doing This Month

I had a bit of a hard start for this challenge. Perhaps I should have explained this sooner.

I changed topic at the last minute, well for me it was the last minute; it was last Wednesday, just one week ago. I had been bouncing around as I wanted to write about time and had my outline and several posts in the sequence finished. But then I thought, “I really should finish the incomplete A to Z that I started and did not finish a few years ago on the topic of Legacy and Memory. That one I was trying to write as A to Z chapters for a book. It deserves the A to Z treatment, but it needs to be written prior to April and edited during the actual challenge.

Once I decided that I did not want to write about time or memory all month long, I came up with, All The Weird Things I Think About. I started writing. I set up the A and B post to auto-publish this past weekend. But I set them up in the wrong order. I received comments before the proper due day. I have that all corrected. It took a while. I have not played with formatting much recently. I wanted to make sure I set up the category pages properly so that when I reorganize my site, which I am working on right now, too, the categories, tags and such are well designed and will fit in properly. Most of my posts are horribly categorized. This is very embarrassing for a semiotic anthropologist, which is how I like to think of myself.

All The Weird Things I Think About

This topic is great for me as I need to decompress and relearn to enjoy just writing. For me writing this month is all about letting thoughts roll around in my mind in a mostly unconstrained fashion. Why? I have been topically constrained for too many years. It has been my choice and my topics have been passions or all consuming aspects of my life. But I wanted to reconnect with the pleasure of just writing, and finally, with today’s post, I am doing that. The first three were hard to write as just diving into the Zeitgeist and writing without a carefully crafted outline no longer seemed natural.

Previous Topics

In recent years I have written primarily about legacy. Before that I wrote about members of my family dying. Husband, and daughter, and step-daughter, and their families are all fine… but my family of origin is pretty much dead or kaput. Before that I wrote about activism, peace, and politics. Before that I wrote about the last half of the Baby Boom Generation, The Late Boomers, and how generational naming and periods covered are all screwed up demographically.This sequence of writings takes me back about 23 years.

Before that I wrote as a trades freelancer. This last was when I was first married, my daughter was small, I was finishing up my thesis on home birth and thus my M.S., and I worked in libraries and museums. Before that I was dealing with stuff that you will have to find out about in my memoir, when it is published.

So I am now 65, I feel like sewing some writing oats, being unconstrained for a bit, and just writing about whatever the hell crosses my mind.

I decided to embark upon this unscripted walk via the emergent patterns I find in my undirected thoughts. It feels good. I am of course naming the patterns I find in my musings. I was a bit surprised to find music there. There are the music references that pop into my head when I have been writing lately, which I share with you via YouTube. The stratum of free association seems quite interconnected with the music of my childhood and youth. I was not planning to share music this month, but why not.

One of the first of these that shaped my very impressionable mind, and over which every thing else I have learned and experienced since interconnected with is Tomorrow Never Knows which I listened to over and over and over again lying on my back on childhood farmhouse bed. I feel like this song was a meditative mantra that entered into and shaped my 9 year old consciousness.

All the D Words that I Researched Prior to Writing This

I woke up thinking data and describing reality. This made me think of Thomas Sebeok. His introductory book on semiotics is like my bible.

Of course I ventured into thinking about deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning.

Then I shifted into thinking about AI after reading something in the Washington Post. This got me to wondering about how much data we allow into our lives.

I’ve gone on long enough. I have to get back to daily life.

D in #AtoZ2023 – Data, Decisions, Deduction