Category: Danny’s Updates

Now that I’ve withdrawn from social media, I find myself seeking out alternative connections and healthier contexts. Perhaps memorizing poetry might not be for me, but I do appreciate what this writer has to say about how it has impacted her life in a very positive way. Perhaps I’ll find something similar for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/magazine/morning-ritual-poetry-memorization.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Can’t access the article? Please let me know.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about learning; especially how difficult it has been for me to learn the Hawaiian language (with help from Duolingo) because I find myself going over the same vocabulary and grammar again and again, and finding new word meanings aren’t sticking as quickly as I’d like.

Realistically, my recognition has always been better than my recall, as it is for lots of people. Even so, it just seems to take me longer to learn something these days — to truly know a word or concept, and have confidence that it’s securely logged away somewhere in my brain, where it can be readily and reliably retrieved.

For a while I was concerned this might be related to the dreaded “memory issues” that can crop up at my age, but the more I think about it, the more I don’t believe my mind is slipping.  When I’m being honest with myself, I have to admit I’ve always found it difficult to memorize anything.  Take music, for example — when I was learning to play piano, I found I could sight-read very well, which actually made memorizing harder because I got used to simply reading through the music each time, and then I was mentally done with it, and hadn’t memorize a note.

There are other examples — I’m reminded of my embarrassingly abysmal performances trying to recite lines from plays and monologues in that one high school speech course I took.  And I also tell the story of looking for and finding a document online at work that explained in detail a particular business concept that I wanted to cite, and when I checked to see who wrote that document, I discovered it was me. I had not only brain-fogged some of the exact details of that business concept, but I’d forgotten that I’d written it down so I wouldn’t forget!

That’s simply how my brain works — much stronger at the macro than micro; better at grasping broad concepts, discerning complex patterns, and other mental abilities that don’t necessarily rely on specific, detailed memorization and retrieval.  That’s just me.

These days, I’m coming to accept that for me, memorization is getting even more difficult. However, instead of senility, I suspect at least part of the reason is because there’s a lot more data stuffed into my brain than when I was younger.  It seems that each new memory competes for the same dwindling available space, and sometimes it takes more repetitions to get those memories dug deep enough so that they don’t get immediately overwritten by some other trivia, and so that I can find them again later.

As I like to describe it, when I was younger, learning was more like writing on paper. One pass, and it was recorded for good. These days, it’s more like carving words into wooden — or even stone — blocks that are stored on some memory shelf. One quick scratch isn’t enough for a new fact to sink in. I have to go over the words at least a few times, and often I need to dig that chisel a bit deeper and make the cuts a bit wider before I can feel confident that I’ll be able to spot that bit of info from a distance, and retrieve it off the shelf.

Ultimately, it’s also about self awareness; becoming more conscious in each moment of my mood, what’s going on in my mind and body, and deliberately taking a more active role in those processes — including the process of creating memories. This also becomes an opportunity to appreciate those memories we already cherish, and to carefully and deliberately choose which new memories we want to add to that collection.

So perhaps these little memory challenges aren’t such a bad thing after all? Ask me again later. And see if I can remember…

My mother-in-law always insisted she never looked good in photographs, which is probably why she rarely smiled for cameras. Yet here is Kathy Morgan, clearly amused at something I must have said or done while we were waiting for Opera at the Ballpark to start, on a chilly San Francisco afternoon in the summer of 2016.

What she didn’t know was that I would immediately submit this selfie to the Opera’s social media, which flashed it on the jumbotron during intermission. Although she professed to be horrified at the sight of our faces up there for everyone to see, I could tell that she was secretly tickled to have been singled out for a brief moment of minor celebrity. In her words, it was “something,” and something she talked about for years.

Gaining her acceptance wasn’t easy, at least not at first. After all, I was stealing her favorite child away from her. What swayed her opinion (as she later told me) happened years before this photo, during one of her visits when we were still fixing up that first house. She said she wanted to help, so I invited her to join me pulling carpet staples out of the hardwood floors so they could be refinished.

As the two of us yanked and pried together on that dusty floor, she could clearly see how her son and I were a couple; committed to making this house our home, and our future. Although it was a few years before he and I were legally married, from that moment onward she viewed me — and treated me — as her son-in-law.

To me, Kathy Morgan was my mother-in-law from the start, which by now adds up to about half of my lifetime. It saddens me that she’s no longer with us as of yesterday, but I find some consolation in remembering that she was always confident that I would take good care of her son, and that I know she appreciated how I on occasion was able to add a little “something” to her life as well.

So I said this:

When The Washington Post declined to endorse Harris in late October, I was initially annoyed but decided to give them a pass, based on their reasoning that they were returning to an earlier policy of non-endorsement.

At the same time, I was reminded of one of the earliest lessons learned in journalism school, which is that the purpose of most newspapers is profit, not public service. Claiming that an endorsement of a particular candidate would compromise the Post’s independence was a weak cover-up, in my opinion, but I had hopes of a post-election reassessment, and return to earlier values.

However, at this point it seems obvious that what ended up being compromised was the integrity of The Washington Post. Today’s editorial cartoon cut amounts to self-censorship in the name of making money, pure and simple.

If I wanted information from a purely profit-driven source with little regard for balance, nuance and fact checking, and a primary focus on entertainment, I’d tune into Fox. As of today, I’m adding The Washington Post to the same category, sadly mourning a further dimming of democracy.

So, today I deactivated my Facebook account. Why?

Well, I had already closed my Twitter account about when Elon Musk took over and X’ed it. Besides wanting to make a statement about the way the platform was being (mis)run, I also was hoping to reduce the amount of time I spent on social media.

Then, I opened a Substack account, and expanded my contacts on Instagram, and if anything, began slipping into even more hours frittered away on Facebook. Maybe I was just hoping to find some redeeming qualities with social media, especially since I was initially so hopeful for its potential. It seemed a great way to reconnect with people, discover new networks and have access to lots of useful information.

Instead, social media has become a forum for with weaponized disinformation, which is bad enough in itself. Even worse are the people who believe it and continue to spread it; who rather than expand, choose to contract their worlds.

Consequently, I’ve ended my participation in this failing social media experiment. No more Facebook, no more Substack, no more Instagram, and despite hearing positive reviews of the BlueSky social platform, there’s a voice in my head suggesting that I’d only end up using it for the same diversions and distractions, so no. No more social media, period.

A true alternative? Well, besides focusing on devoting more time to house projects, yard work, landscaping, photography, writing and other avenues that entail social networking less on the internet, and more in the real world, I’ll keep up this blog, and let this be my own personal social media platform.

Moving on — I have litter boxes to change, houseplants to water and palm trees continually dropping dead fronds and seed pods all over the yard. I do appreciate you dropping by, so please feel free to check in any time.

Muchos Mahalos!