You really don’t want to see my desktop
Oh, hi friends!
What can be rearranged? Or put in order?
I participated in an hourlong Zoom webinar yesterday with the playwright Will Arbery, who wrote The Heroes of the Fourth Turning. I was expecting a lecture, then an audience Q&A.
Instead, he shared his desktop screen with everyone who was watching. His background was a sweet old photo of his dad and his sister who has Down syndrome. “Because it makes me happy,” he said.
And then he started poking through the folders on his desktop, narrating his career as a playwright, from when he got rejected by Yale’s MFA program year after year to his latest works.
It was unusual, refreshing, real.
And it made me realize that my very cluttered desktop wasn’t doing me any favors. The filing system I started three years and dozens of projects ago no longer makes sense.
If my work isn’t organized, how can I organize my thoughts?
Time for a clean sweep.
Right click, rename, click, drag, create new folder.
What can be rearranged?
Put in order?
What can you let breathe?
“A drained wash of yellowish light came from a single bulb on the lip of the stage. Each Broadway theatre has one: a ghost light, which goes on as soon as the house clears out after a performance. Every theatre, it’s said, is inhabited by a ghost. The light keeps the ghost company, or acts as an offering to keep away curses, or illuminates the stage as the spectral performer plays all night. The upshot of the superstition is that, real bodies be damned, some implicit spiritual theatrical event is always under way, wherever there’s a stage. The ghost lights on Broadway have been shining uninterrupted since March.”
This is a very small crumb from a really beautiful (both words and design) piece in The New Yorker about 24 hours in New York on April 15, 2020. I like to think of the waiting lights.
A Bit of Good News
Well, well, well. Guess who hatched yesterday?! Yes, a baby falcon (called an eyas) burst out of his shell on Monday afternoon at 55 Water Street (he's hiding under the mother right now). Three more eggs to go…
PS — If you'd like some friendly accountability and a fresh start every morning, please join me and my brother Eric for the 10:11 Club — every weekday morning at 10:11am ET (or whatever time zone you're in!), we're starting our day together and working toward one goal until noon. We'd love to start our morning with you!
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara