5 Quick Things #323 🌻

summer camp, flip phones, comedy shows, & alien chats

Hey there,

We are in peak wildflower season around here in Central Texas! You can’t drive down the highway without being visually assaulted with all the yellows, reds, and blues of spring’s show-offs blanketing the ground. It’s a big reason this is my favorite time of year in this neck of the woods.

Earlier this week, Kyle and I mused over one of the cooler parts of it all: we’ve all collectively, societally decided that letting the wildflowers grow is good for us. The grasses grow a bit longer for the sake of these short-lived gems, we discourage folks from picking them en masse, and every seven-year-old knows the pain of your mom making you sit in the flowers doing your best to smile for the camera while avoiding the anthills and prickly pear. Poppies are popping out everywhere in our historic town, which means we’re a few weeks away from our annual Poppy Fest, and yeah… I just like that we’ve all agreed to let the wildflowers grow. There’s something solidly encouraging to know that this is still part of our collectively agreed-upon common good.

Bluebonnets at Late Afternoon (1915), by Julian Onderdonk #

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5 Quick Things ☕️

1. New episode of A Drink With a Friend! In the one I introduce the topic of localism, further building on the season’s overall theme of rootedness. What does it mean to live in your 100-mile radius? Why does it matter? How should we aim to do this, knowing we’ll never do it perfectly? Join me as I imperfectly unpack my thoughts.

2. I wish summer camps weren’t so expensive because I’m a big believer in the experiences they afford kids. I’m grateful we’ve been able to send our three kids to camp here and there throughout their childhoods, and my own childhood was peppered with good church camp experiences. This is a good essay unpacking why summer camps are worth the effort (related: I’m so eager to read

After Babel

’s next book): “Summer camps have the exact kinds of features needed to help reverse the two trends that have driven much of the mental health crisis: overprotection in the real world and underprotection online.”

3. This conversation is insanely long (seriously—how did they do it?), but I just love Jimmy Akin. I took a week, off and on, to listen to the whole thing and it was worth it. What a gem he is.

4. I appreciate Ben Goldfarb’s honest relay of his life with a flip phone—why it’s not perfect, how it makes his life more inconvenient, and yet why he still thinks it’s worth it: “The world is only growing more challenging for us stubborn flippers. Apps and QR codes expand their hegemony every year: today I struggle to park cars, enter concerts, glance at menus. Not long ago, on a street corner in Chicago, I tried to hail a cab to the airport. Convoys of Ubers and Lyfts rolled by, as inaccessible to me as a SpaceX flight.”

5. And finally, we are finally graced with another

Jess Pan

installment (mild language warning). She has a gift for stream-of-consciousness: “‘Do you still run?’ I asked the running club man and he looked furious at the question, I guess at the insinuation that you don’t run at 85. He nodded his head vigorously and looked disgusted at me for asking. I’m still reeling from the shame.”

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Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh (a re-read for book club)—on audiobook, by Jeremy Irons!

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Quotable 💬

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

-Søren Kierkegaard

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What's your favorite thing about March? ☘️

I make it a rule not to have an “other” or a general miscellaneous category in my unimportant weekly poll questions—and yet I accidentally did it last time with the option of “general spring delights” as your favorite thing about March. Too broad, I say! What is it that you like, dear reader: birdsong? The dawn of green? Trees in bloom? You must choose!

I’m over here vacillating between wildflowers and garden-starting…. I’ll go with wildflowers because they’re so short-lived—I’ll be in garden heaven for the next few months (until the heat apocalypse arrives).

• Spring Delights: 61.6%

• Thawing: 17%

• Wildflowers: 7.6%

• Garden-Starting: 6%

• Baseball/Sportsball Season: 4.2%

• Autumn Delights: 2.2%

• Community Events: 1.4%

Find this week’s poll here.

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Quick Links 🔗

• 📐Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

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Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What’s one small thing you could do this weekend to support your 100-mile radius?

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Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. How is this not crocheted?