Todd Grooms avatar

Todd Grooms

I tapped out at work after a half day. I am just not feeling well and I wanted to rest.

Eleven Days, Post Election

I have been tuning out on news and most social media, but I have been tuning into how I feel and how I am processing where we are at. I initially felt equal parts anger and despondency. I am thankful that I sat with those feelings and did not rush to share them. They were raw and unrefined. After eleven days, they have softened a bit. I still feel sadness and disappointment, but I am trying to prevent these feelings from driving my experience.

The last eight years have taken their toll on me. My stress and anxiety levels have remained elevated and regularly peak to new highs. I don’t want to admit to the amount of time I have lost with my family due to my anger and anxiety over the news and the state of our government. I have spent too much time staring at my phone instead of being present in the moment. I lost my sense of humor in 2016 and have never fully regained it. It’s easy to blame the polarizing President-Elect, because he comes across as an awful person, with questionable scruples. However, I mostly just blame people. I blame a party who repeatedly decided to nominate the most unqualified individual to lead their ticket and the people who either decided to vote for him or those who decided to sit it out and let it happen. If you’re not going to take this assignment seriously, then why should I?

🔗 Election Day

It’s tempting to imagine that the person who would feed a group of strangers every morning just because they’re camped at his doorstep and hungry is somehow different than the person who would vote for concentration camps. But they’re the same person. We’re all the same people.

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.

I’m trying to find inspiration at the end of this week from this snippet of The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien.

💿 Merrie Land

Damon Albarn began work on this album in the aftermath of Britain’s EU referendum. I keep coming back to this album after our own referendum and I wonder what it means for our country and our people.

When I was younger, I typically counted seconds too fast; now that I am older, I typically count seconds too slow.

🔗 The Yale Review | Chris Ware on Richard Scarry and the Art of Children’s Literature

Regarding Ole Risom and Richard Scarry’s I am a Bunny:

I never read it as a child, but I can now attest to its elegant, quiet beauty, because it was my daughter’s first word book ever, and I read it to her several hundred times. I never tired of its pictures or its words, the simple zen-like magic it evokes of the inevitability of the passing seasons always somehow putting the reader in a pleasant passenger-seat view.

I adore this book and have always loved reading it with my kids.

Early voted this morning. Voting for democrats in Tennessee feels a little like pissing into the wind, but I will always vote. 🗳️

Drinking coffee and monitoring the weather as we prepare to start our week long DisneyWorld vacation. We’ve always been very lucky and have avoided significant rain on our previous trips. We may not be so lucky this time. Hoping for light rain the entire time. 🤞🏻

Twenty Years

The passage of time is omnipresent in my digital life. Photos regularly surfaces memories of past events. I frequently enjoy with these memories, but there are occasional reminders that outline just how much time has passed. A memory and reminder of my nephew’s twentieth birthday hit me especially hard this week.

I had just started college when my brother called me with the news that my nephew was born. My nephew, Dallas, was named after my brother’s favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys. Fittingly, he was born during a Monday Night Football game featuring the Dallas Cowboys. You can’t make this stuff up.

Twenty years feels impossible. I understand that transition period is in the past, but it doesn’t feel possible that it was twenty years in the past. When I think of Dallas, I still think of him as being four or five years old, his age when I graduated college. It’s wild. I was also warned about the speed at which time passes as you age, but even with those frequent warnings, I feel as though I am ill prepared for this experience.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

Quote from The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, an attempt at capturing a certain Aristotelian sentiment. I ran across the quote this morning while reading Make Something Wonderful. Steve attributed the quote directly to Aristotle, but I found the origination of the quote thanks to Check Your Fact.

Third day in a row of spending the majority of my time in my bed. Two negative rapid antigen Covid tests, but you never know. Whatever it is has really taken me down. I was scheduled to travel for work this week. Honestly dejected that I had to cancel, as I had made quite a few plans. C’est la vie.

After much consternation, I got back on my bicycle last month. Sixteen rides for over eighty-seven miles in August. Just took my first ride of September this morning. Hoping to exceed one hundred miles this month.

🔗 Ten weird NHL facts that bother me more than they should (News+)

That was the year Boston took Joe Thornton with the No. 1 pick, and at some point, the Bruins apparently decided they wanted to have both the first and the last pick of the draft. So they called up the Avalanche and asked if they wanted to move up one pick for free, at which point the Colorado staff presumably rolled their eyes so far into the back of their heads they could see the Nordiques.

Chef’s kiss.