Yet Another Refugee from Livejournal

"How to Decide What to Do" is the title of a recently-added page
of my “site” at The Well, located
at

https://people.well.com/user/edelsont/philosophy/01-intro.html

All that's there, so far, is the “Introduction”
… which is full of promises of what is to come.

I have unexpectedly developed a case of writer's block: I
haven't written even a line, yet, of the (or any) following
segment.

I do have a possible inkling as to why.  I was operating
under an assumption about what writing this “book” would
entail.  To wit, that it would require me to be completely
“open” about my inner, emotional life: to be prepared to
lay bare any relevant detail about my fears, desires, or any sort
of feelings.

And I didn't feel able (or, perhaps more accurately, willing)
to do that.  I still don't.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the project is
doomed.  I have a faint glimmering of an approach that would
allow me to write the thing, without doing the [emotional] Full
Monty to quite that degree.

It would not be exactly the same book, but I think maybe I could
accomplish my central goal.  I guess you — and I!
— will have to wait and see whether this works out.

I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.

I really, really don't like summer.  Not in any of the places that I've lived since I left graduate school in 1972, at any rate.  All of those places have been in the Eastern time zone of the USA, and you will note that I now have completed fifty-one years of not liking summer.

What don't I like about it?  The weather, obviously.  The heat, and the humidity.  That's what you get in the eastern US.  Okay, bits of New England are partial exceptions, but still.

Would I be happier in a place like New Mexico, where it gets pretty hot but is always much less humid?  A few years back, I thought so.  I spent a non-trivial amount of time there, most recently in August of 2019, for the purpose of testing that hypothesis.  And what was my conclusion?

Strictly speaking, I suppose I would be happier there, weather-wise.  But not enough so.  I could conceivably still decide to move there, but, since that last trip, any real enthusiasm for the idea has pretty much evaporated.  Like summertime rain there: at times, you can see rain in the sky above you, but it doesn't reach the ground.

For that matter, my history of trying to escape from typical Eastern summers goes further back than that.  It was a big part of the motivation for the last move I actually did make: from the Raleigh area (in the region of North Carolina known as the Piedmont) to the Ashville area (in the western mountains of the same state).  It's the same story: I do like the summer weather here better than I did there, but not nearly enough so to make me glad when the summer begins.

In short, I really don't like summer.

It has come to my attention, however, that not everyone feels the same way.  There are even some, bless their strange little hearts, who enjoy what it's like in summer even in a place like Raleigh.

I invite you to tell us how you feel about summer weather.  About summers where you live, or — if so moved — about those in some other place you've been.

"You don't own me."  Those are the words I submitted to Craiyon; it gave me back nine pictures, as usual; and together, the words and the pictures make up the artifact shown below.  Take a look.

These are the darkest Craiyon pictures I've posted yet.  Literally; and also, ain't nobody looks happy here.

This didn't surprise me: at an intuitive, emotional level, the pictures seemed a good match for the words.  But the "logical" part of my brain begged to differ.  It spake thus:

"If Person X doesn't own Person Y, isn't that a good thing, not a bad one?  Nobody should own anybody, right?  So when interpersonal non-ownership is asserted, one would expect the feelings inspired by this to be happy, not sad."

So why aren't they?

This is a real question.  I invite you to think about it.