Rebecca Foust’s collection in Only is achingly touching, especially when she writes about her children. She shares the birth of her son:

my son was born. The cord was torn
too soon, so they cut off

his head to save his heart. He lived
for a long time.

I am not quite sure what she meant by “so they cut off his head to save his heart.” My other favorite poems in this collection include “Thirteen,” “Self-Improvement,” “Collaborator,” and “Abeyance.”

Elisa Gabbert’s Normal Distance is accessible and relatable, especially when writes about suffering, death, and boredom. I am still a novice poetry reader, which means I don’t understand everything I read, but I enjoyed the entire collection, in particular: “About Suffering,” “New Theories on Boredom,” “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” and “Madness.” Her writing is clear, lyrical, and delightful.

It’s not my hands that are shaking—it’s my mind.
Cut off my head!
That’s where the pain lies.

Mishima believed sincerity was found in the entrails.
This must be a mistranslation.
I think he meant reality.

Hope is the dark part of morning,
The trees and not the sky behind.
A glimmer without a color.

Most people want justice
But in absence of justice
They will take vengeance.

As if dying was peak existence.
We called it sweet
In the cherry season of history.

Elisa Gabbert

A 14-year-old girl who came out last year as a bisexual stabbed her arm to attempt suicide. I sincerely wish she is doing OK and hope she can find the helps she needs. She is Ted Cruz’s daughter.

I made a major MODX upgrade from version 2.8.4 to 3.0.2. It took me several months to test to make sure everything works as expected. When I attempted to upgrade from 2.8.3 to 3.0, most of the dynamic pages broke. I am glad that I made the exact copy of the production site and made the test upgrade first. If I did a live upgrade, it would have been a disaster. Fortunately, version 3.0.2 fixed all of the issues.

I work with the alumni staff to update the alumni landing page. The featured stories are dynamically pulled in from our spotlights. When we want a spotlight to appear on the alumni page, we simply check the alumni box under news categories in the template variables.

We launched a new blog, Voices for Liberty, for the Liberty & Law Center using WordPress.

I have been cleaning up Google Analytics and moving from UA to GA4.

We have lots of tracking on our site. Google Tag Manager alone has 27 tracking codes ranging from Google Ads to Google Conversions to LinkedIn. In addition, we have a few pixel trackings. Since I don’t have access to Google Ads or Linkedin Ads accounts, I can’t tell which tracks are still active and what types of data are being tracked. Should we put together a privacy statement to be more transparent with the users?

There was a metal band that was just called Death.

I used to think I wasn’t afraid of death, but actually what I wasn’t afraid of was being dead.

You can’t attend your own funeral, but you have to attend your own death.

You are going to die of something.

I hope I die of boredom in my sleep.

Do you ever remember being so excited about the future you were afraid you might die before it happened?

I mean, who cares, of course, democracy is dead.

Death wish, free will, cause and effect, happiness as misery.

I wonder if the wealthy dinosaurs were the last to die.

Hemingway titled a book Death in the Afternoon, which is the best possible name for a cocktail, then invented a cocktail named after it. I am extremely jealous of this whole move.

I don’t actually want to die laughing.

“Only one image of Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe has been authenticated: a watercolor portrait painted several hours after her death.”

There was 100% a culture of dead bodies are cool.

Is a beautiful woman still beautiful even if all men everywhere are dead?

Vanity ends with death.

Who wants to be present in the moment? I want to die when an asteroid hits my cryogenic chamber.

Naps, but for death.

You can’t actually sleep when you’re dead.

The secret to immortality is boredom. If you’re bored enough you’ll never die.

Die with dignity like Benjamin Guggenheim.

Death by attrition. War of natural causes.

Death has an anchoring, as in dragging-down, effect, so, don’t die.

“Sex” and “death” kind of rhyme.

You can sleep in your deathbed.

Sappho: “To die is evil. The gods think so, Else they would die.”

Cry now, die later. Move to Europe, smoke and die cool.

I want to die someday.

I don’t want to die laughing.

Elisa Gabbert

Once as a kid, I was so bored at my parents’ office that I made a deck of cards.

How bored are dogs? Pretty bored, I think.

I wonder what would bore a tortoise.

I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring.

It’s almost like there should be different words for “boring because simple” and “boring because complex.”

You can call this banality versus tedium, or “bad boring” versus “good boring.” Kubrick movies are often great while also boring.

Whether something is boring or not has nothing to do with how good it is.

You could also call “boring because complex” interesting-boring (boring in an interesting way) or slow-interesting (interesting, but at a pace that sometimes resembles boredom).

To state the obvious, all good poetry is slow-interesting.

I often wonder why having a beverage makes something boring more interesting.

I wonder why we don’t get bored in the shower.

Michel Siffre lived alone in a cave in Texas for six months and got so bored he contemplated suicide, making it look like an accident.

I heard on the radio that lazy people have higher IQs—because their minds are more active, they don’t get bored doing nothing.

I don’t think this is true.

Some people outside are having a boring conversation about dogs in general.

When it rains it’s boring.

When it rains it bores holes into your body. Turns out it was acid rain!

Being so bored you actually start crying must be a transformative experience.

Just speaking for myself here but I love being bored.

Like to me, sex is not art. Once it’s over it’s boring again.

We’re in the bargaining stage of civilization, and it’s boring.

Civilization got bored with itself.

Pretty cool how we’ve evolved to find peace boring!

A boring man war movie.

“This is boring.” “No, it interrogates boringness!” “This is doggerel.” “No, it interrogates talent!”

What, poets can’t be bored by eclipses?

How boring not to have a crush on anyone.

You can only be bored almost to death.

Did you ever have a kiss so bad you felt like you were the bad kisser?

I think this is related to how boring people make me feel boring.

Did you know that you can trick people into being more interesting by being more interesting yourself?

I used to be bored around my parents, which made them boring. In my thirties I was shocked to learn that I didn’t know everything about them.

So if you have to spend time with boring people, try being DAZZLING.

I’m glad Andre Gregory knows the Andre character is a “raging narcissist” mansplaining bore.

My most common thought while lucid dreaming is “God, what a boring dream.”

My TED Talk topic would be “Jiro Dreams of Sushi Is Not an Enjoyable Movie.”

I would just make people watch it and stop it every now and then to say, “See? This is boring and oppressive.”

A totally fascist approach to sushi.

Execution in art has become a great tromping bore but: sorry artists, you still have to execute.

I sometimes think After Hours is the worst movie that’s anyone’s favorite movie.

I associate it strongly with Joe Versus the Volcano, since I think of both as somehow “angry boring.”

It takes a special kind of mediocrity to be offensive and boring at the same time.

I’m so over the “boring on purpose” defense.

I think I mean if the language is boring there should at least be some emotions or ideas or something.

Boring through, or thoroughly boring?

I was very boring today.

Sometimes the dystopia was boring.

At least everyone was boring at the same time about something inherently interesting.

Elisa Gabbert

Part of suffering is the useless urge to announce that you’re suffering.

There is no other way to say it: I’m suffering. Just to say “I suffer” helps.

I read somewhere, “we become lyrical when we suffer.”

Happiness is suffering for the right reasons.

First-order suffering is second-order happiness.

You have to suffer for beauty? Because you have to suffer.

We pride ourselves on a high quality of suffering.

Turgenev was born in 1818 in the Province of Orel, and suffered during his childhood from a tyrannical mother.

In the past their suffering was less absurd.

The problem is, everything’s worse. Like, paper or plastic? We’re all still going to die suffering.

I value being alone with my thoughts, but it’s weird to say, “This thing that makes us suffer less, we have to stop doing it.”

Isn’t it kind of the point of culture to assuage our feeling needless and alone?

How does one suffer “gladly,” exactly?

At least the rich get to suffer in comfort.

It makes the life feel longer. Live to suffer another day.

One’s past suffering can be a great source of comfort. A torturous luxury. Velvet upholstery.

Suffering is happiness, after forty minutes of desolate shuffling. The point is, life is suffering.

About suffering, no one is ever wrong.

Elisa Gabbert

No need to involve the Supreme Court. I design wedding websites for anyone. Check out my portfolio.

I haven’t been following hip hop in a while. I feel antiquated, but I have to pay attention to Pusha T when he comes out with a new album. Twenty years into the game and Pusha still proves to be a lyricist. With Pharrell and Ye holding down the productions, Pusha continues to push his coke rhymes. Listening to the soulful sample in “Dreamin’ of the Past,” I wish Ye would just shut the fuck up and make beats. As for Pusha, I wish he can move beyond his drug-slinging comfort zone. Even the dope is showing its expiration date.