October, my loves.

Who's got a new handle in mind for this witchy month? 🤔 Going for a run, and then I'll get spooky myself.

I have some mindless data entry tonight, and I'm in a no-nonsense 70s mood for a background flick.

Should I watch Three Days of the Condor (Redford & Dunaway), The Last Detail (Nicholson & Quaid), Get Carter (Michael Caine, baby!) or Straight Time (Hoffman! Busey! Stanton! Bates!)?

#CoSoFilms

And the rest of me, probably, too.

#Zoomies after 4 hours of Zoom!

I NEED TO MOVE MY LEGS.

😂 Okay, I have to laugh--and then I'm into meetings for the next four hours.

This is a THANK YOU letter I got from Colombia's tax service, DIAN, for submitting my taxes on time.

Funny how Canada never used to send me similar, but... do you see the # under the arrow?

Only 4.6 million of the 52 million inhabitants in #Colombia paid on time this year. Which is fair, considering that half the economy is informal, but no wonder they're sending thank-you notes to those who can and do pay on time! 😂

Today's Monday Media Review is a rough one.

In it, we discuss a recent incident at an Israeli school, and a recent documentary about a settler youth cult in the West Bank.

It should be much easier to talk about how young people have been victimized by this war, but because propaganda has trained people to rationalize the deaths of "enemy" children, it's harder than ever to talk about how this war poisons everyone involved.

And yet, that's precisely what we need to do.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/what-we-have-done-to-our-children

Okay, enough stalling. Now the ugly piece that I'm not looking forward to writing.

(One of three this week, actually. I will choose something lighter for Thursday.)

TTFN, you wonderful wastrels!

Since today got Very Philosophical on CoSo, let's end with something sillier.

In my house growing up, to make light of oneself after saying something intelligent, we'd point to our heads and say "kidneys".

What's an expression that only makes sense to your family / local in-group?

#RandomQuestions

Hey CoSo! Shall we build a @th3j35t3r appreciation post via music links tonight?

It's nearly month's end on yet another round of J covering most of the site's costs, and yet I feel like there's been a ton of nuisance digs at his work this past week alone.

We've got the tools. We know how to use them.

Everything else (e.g. the "ratio" of good and bad) is on us to get right. 👍

So who's got a tune & good word to share? (& a bit more coin to chuck CoSo's way?)

#CoSoMusic
https://youtu.be/sLm3Khusq_8

Y'know, I ain't even mad that it's been thunderstorming off and on all day. Couldn't record - power outages interspersed the glorious natural performance - but I got caught up on a few other admin tasks instead. Now to tackle general correspondence, then draft tomorrow's newsletter.

Ideally, tomorrow will be *just* quiet enough that I can get my audiobook chapters finished, and with any luck a BookTube before I dive into one last major knowledge-transfer meeting.

So, all good things in time.

I have now sent my nephew the constructive comments necessary to help him rethink this essay.

But my favourite part was when I got to his Works Cited section (reader: he cited no works in the main text) and saw that the *very first piece* contradicted his argument about women as "natural" nurturers. 😅 He didn't read it, clearly.

What I was thinking the entire time?

His mum was *not* a nurturer at first. But do I say that to her sprog? 🤐 Nope! I just talked essay techniques.

🙃 Now to record.

I am so, so thankful that we know life is more important than debate.

The differences in our points of view shape the communities we lean into & where we strive for worldly change, but...

That we can still come together at end-of-day and remember that to be *here*, alive and able to act for change, is the real gift.

So many have left us too soon.

And so much life is otherwise wasted on anger, cruelty, fear, and regret.

How important it is not to waste one second more.

🕊️ Night, CoSo.

TFW your nephew sends you an essay he's excited for you to comment on... and it's filled with a lot of reductive comments about gender.

I know it's a bid for dialogue, and the kid is still learning, so he's relying on me to be a safe place to explore what he's thinking--which I will be, while coaxing growth...

But first, I need to sit with the irony of needing to be calm in the face of sexism so I don't affirm prejudiced views, and throw him deeper into the current cesspit of teen messaging. 🙃

Alternate proposal:

Give this world back to the beetles.

They already outnumber us in biomass!

And they're amazing recyclers, to boot.