Woke up way too early this morning with uncomfortable dreams. Rather than fight sleep, I decided to pick at my phone.

Yesterday my family had a good discussion about the invasive contact tracking that seems to be heading towards us all like a loaded freight train. We’re considering our options (Light Phone is the current front-runner) but in addition to the potential security gain, there’s also the quality of life gain and that’s what I was considering as I lay there, not sleeping, this morning.

Our phones have become useful companions over the last decade or so, but are they really meant to be companions? Additionally, has society shifted significantly enough to make going offline an extremely radical choice? Is that a choice I want to make?

In thinking about these questions I decided to start rearranging all those little icons on my own device (currently an iPhone 6s). This generated new questions that I tried to answer in this experiment.

**What does the Light Phone provide out of the box? **

• Phone (includes Contacts)
• Clock (includes Alarm functionality)
• Texting (plain text only)
• Calculator

I moved these apps to the pinned items bar. These are what I would have if I switched right now. This is a workable, usable device. The only hurt I feel within what’s available here is not having rich media texting. My family and friends make significant use of the ability to send photos.

What are the Light Phone folks planning on adding?

• GPS
• Music
• Notes
• Calendar

I moved everything else off of the home screen at this point. This honestly fills a LOT of my daily use, though it doesn’t match my personal workflow. All of these apps could be replaced relatively simply with analog equivalents. Having them available is just handy and make it possible to leave the house with just wallet, keys, and phone without much inconvenience.

What else does the iPhone provide out of the box (or nearly so) that I actually use?

• Reminders
• Camera
• Voice Memos
• Mail
• Photos
• Podcasts
• Safari
• Weather

Now we’re looking at some meat and potatoes apps that I would genuinely miss. I was surprised to find that if I were to delete every single 3rd party app on my phone I would still feel like I had a very useful, dare I say magical, device.

Along with the others mentioned above, I truly do use every single one of these apps on a daily basis. Some of them, such as Reminders and Voice Memos, have significantly improved my quality of life as an autistic person. Others, such as Camera/Photos and Podcasts, genuinely spark joy.

What 3rd party apps do I genuinely use on a daily basis?

• Habitica (todo list)
• Trello (project planning)
• Bear Writer (all my personal notes)
• Slack (work and side project communication)
• Recycle Coach (because holidays muck up the pickup schedules)
• Clue (reproductive systems are weird)
• LastPass (login all the things)
• Threes (game as fidget spinner?)
• myNoise (meditation and focus)
• Workouts For Women (7 minute stretches)
• Duolino (Sprichst du Deutsch?)

Yes, for the most part I don’t need to have 24/7 access to these things. When I’m out of the house some of them won’t get any use or they’re only touched a couple times a month or when a spontaneous question or thought comes up. They wouldn’t get replaced. See caveat two below.

What would be highly inconvenient to go without when I’m out of the house?

• Bank and Car Insurance apps
• Take out ordering apps
• Additional GPS tools
• Goodreads (I track stuff I want to buy when going to the bookstore is possible again)

I won’t keep listing all the apps in detail. We’re into truly utilitarian territory here. But this is the stuff that makes the difference between having a smart phone and a simple phone. These are the “hey I have the tool, might as well use it to its full advantage” apps.

What the hell else do I have on here?

There are about 45 additional apps I have on my phone. Social media, some more games, media and streaming players, some self care stuff, and various other tools. I shoved these all into folders on the last “page”. This is the stuff I could remove and probably not notice they were gone once I break the habit of using them.

Okay, so what have I learned?

I could definitely be content with a Light Phone with a couple caveats. The tools that are currently available for it fulfill a surprising chunk of my needs when I’m out of the house. When I’m in the house I have a laptop and don’t need a phone much.

Caveat One:

I would need to carry more analog tools until the other apps the Light Phone folks have in development are completed. A GPS for the car, my old iPod Nano, a paper notebook and calendar would all get added to my bag.

In addition, to get back functionality I find vital, I would add a camera, voice recorder (or leverage my iPod), a puzzle book, and fidget toy. (or that old Gameboy I bought last year)

The only thing I would really feel I was missing that isn’t covered by this caveat is Reminders. Perhaps the coming calendar and the existing alarm would fill that void?

All in all, that’s not really too bad. This could all easily fit in a decently small bag. So what about the other apps I’d be losing in the move?

Caveat Two:

I would likely switch everything else over to my iPad. There’s a lot of stuff that I use my phone for that I don’t need to have all the time but I do like having. All those tools like Habitica and Trello and Clue do have desktop OS counterparts, but I work as a programmer and sometimes I want to get away from my desk. Sometimes I want to sit outside on a park bench, just for the fresh air. Or I want to curl up on the couch. Sometimes I work on paper but use those digital tools for references. For various reasons, it’s just nice to have the option. The other nice thing about this option is that the iPad can stay home.

In Summary

The result of this experiment is pretty straightforward. Yes, I can use a Light Phone. Yes, I can switch to using analog tools for the stuff it doesn’t provide either currently or ever. Having solidified the hypothesis here, I also don’t have to wait to try it out. I can move everything optional off my phone now, strip it down to a simulated version of a Light Phone and see how it goes.

One thing I kind of knew already but was truly shown in this process was that, most importantly, yes I can make my choices about screen time more intentional than they currently are. Reducing trackability may have been the spark behind this exploration, but the outcome is that I’m thinking more about how I use my technology and ways I can reclaim some personal power and intention in my usage of it. It is a tool and should not be using the user.

I’m folding again after a weekend of too high temps in my workspace. I just didn’t want to put poor Weathertop through that. The current process looks like it’ll take 2.3 days. I’ll check on that later to see if the timeframe has shortened. Is folding like bittorrent?

Had lovely weekend that’s brought some inner work to the fore. My current schedule is great and I want to keep it great, but there’s some work that I want to do that’s not getting done. My main focus right now is keeping that internal pondering going, keeping the door open for answers to a couple questions.

The new normal is still shifting far too much to predict anything and I find myself being in the moment far more often than not. For someone who’s struggled with burnout and putting too much pressure on myself, this is a very welcome change. Yes, despite everything.

Today so far, I’ve read about the return of the community cookbook, did my Duolingo for the day (I made Sapphire league yesterday!), and opened the window to get some fresh air.

I’ve got a lot of day job work on tap and then we’re celebrating May The Fourth Be With You in my house this evening. Which I always want to respond to with “and also with you”.

Best get to that then. Hope you have a good day. Stay safe, and not just in your body, but in your heart and mind, too.

Ever since we went to see “Once Were Brothers” at a local theater, I’ve been trying to get some words down about The Band and how I feel about the state of music in general. Now is as good a time as any with the sound of “The Last Waltz” floating up the stairs.

I’m not old enough to have listened to The Band when they were at their peak. I was a little over a year old when they filmed “The Last Waltz”, after all. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I was exposed to them in any real way. I’m sure somewhere in all my teen years listening to classic rock I must have heard “Cripple Creek” at least, but it didn’t draw me in at the time.

Something happened when they finally did click for me. I think grunge was winding down and I was moving out of my prog rock phase. Tara got into The Band first and then, as she’s wont to do, pulled me along with her. At first I had to work a little to really get them, but there was something about the way The Band played and sang and wrote that touched on something I was missing. There was a gut-punch and an elevation at the same time. For lack of a better way to put it, they felt like real music. Root in my heart as well as “roots” in their style.

I had a fair amount of immersion in their stuff at the time. I got to see Rick Danko and Garth Hudson play at The Tin Angel in Philly. I followed Levon Helm’s Barn Burners around for a bit and then went to a couple Rambles up at Helm’s farm. I knew at the time I was seeing something special, something fading. I embraced it an enjoyed it as long as it lasted.

Life moves on and phases come and go and somewhere along the line I stopped listening to them so much. Other bands came into focus, music styles changed, and my taste evolved, as it continues to do. Lately though, I’ve been feeling like something’s been missing.

I don’t listen to the radio. Top 40 has no draw for me anymore, I can’t connect with it. I’ve found bands here and there that have been played often enough for me say I’m a fan. As a sampling, Stars, The Decemberists, Titus Andronicus, Charly Bliss, The Unlovables, all great stuff.

The last year or so I’ve been finding it harder and harder to uncover new music I connect with. Around my house we say there’s too much “boop boop” music, which is the only way we can come up with to describe the heavily produced, computer-generated sounds that dominate the airwaves and charts (and ugh, Grammys) today.

But it’s not just the instrumentation that’s a challenge for me. I absolutely adore Sylvan Esso, after all, and they are purely electronic, while managing to hold onto an ephemeral balance between warmth and the digital. They are unfortunately a rare exception for me. I have trouble finding a soul in what I’m hearing out there.

For that matter, I’m also having trouble finding truly new and original sounds for all the hours I spend trawling through Spotify and Bandcamp. I listened to a recommended playlist recently. As each track came on I listened with an open mind, hoping for something new. I found myself repeatedly saying “ooh, that sounds like XYZ artist. I didn’t know they had a new thing out” only to check the playlist and find it was someone I’d never heard before. There is so much disappointingly derivative stuff out there.

I have a sense that this is where the democratization of media has gotten us. Curation is non-existent now and while I would not go back to the old gate-keeping days, there is something to be said for those DJs and others who once waded through the flood of releases for us and helped bring the cream to the top. Honestly, the same goes for books, though that’s another essay for another time.

All in all, I’ve been feeling pretty dejected about the state of music, or at least the kind I might be interested in. I wasn’t sure how to accept that all the discs on my shelves were the best I was going to get. Then we went to see the documentary “Once Were Brothers”. It was the story of The Band, from their origins through the end. There in the darkened theater, I felt my heart lift again.

Sure, I knew all the songs, but I had let them fall by the wayside. Here they were coming back to me, as if I was hearing them for the first time. I was entranced, I mouthed the words, I felt rooted once more. When I got home, I stayed up late for the first time in ages. 2am found me listening to King Harvest and wishing the night didn’t have to end.

The Band is rock’n’roll. They’re country. They’re blues. They’re Americana in such a true way that you forget they’re largely Canadian. They’re also, from where I sit, timeless. Vocals by pretty much everyone in the group, instrument swapping as easy as breathing. Lyrics of deep emotion that range from joy to pain. They’re storytellers. They’re mine and yours and anyone else’s willing to give them a listen.

I’m still not sure what to do about finding new music to listen to. I don’t like being one of those folks who stops looking because “it’s not the way it used to be”. I suppose it’s true that music isn’t like it once was. Times have changed, technology has changed. For better or for worse, the world that produced a group like The Band doesn’t exist anymore. But I’ll go ahead and say it, The Band was part of a golden era of music, one we can’t get back, but we can visit now and then.

My approach now is a mix of comfort and challenge. I still keep digging and poking and turning over rocks to find something that hits me. I live in hope and those few rare moments I’m reward it make the effort worth it. At the same time, when “I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling ‘bout half past dead. I just need some place where I can lay my head” and The Band will be there to take my load off and give me a “little love” who’ll dip a donut in my tea. Hee hee.

I’m finding that I don’t have anything in the tank on the weekends to do any fun coding. I really want to, but I’m keeping burnout at bay.

Last weekend I tried to create a simple “Where do I post this thought I had” flowchart tool. I worked on it for three hours and came away with some borked logic and not much to show for it.

This failed experiment showed me that I really do need to take the time and rest to recover those overworked mental muscles. I’m not complaining, really, as I’m learning a ton on the job. I’m becoming a better developer on a daily basis, but there’s nothing extra left when I’m done.

So, what to do? Planning!

I want to rip Plastic apart and rebuild it from the ground up. I have a lot of questions to ask myself. What do I want it to do? What does an interaction look like? Can I build it without adding any libraries? Should it even be in javascript?

Sketching out a few demo game ideas would be helpful in figuring that out, too.

This is exciting! This means that despite being tired, there is still enthusiasm, the lifeblood of any side project. Now I’ve also found a way I can do something tangible with that excitement and move the project forward.

We’ve been doing an experiment on me and my autistic, unfocused brain. Things were getting desperate last year with my depression and general mental health. Some of this was related to where we lived, but many of the symptoms were simply worse versions of what I’ve been suffering with most of my life.

My dear ones, whom I trust implicitly and literally with my life in this case, did the research and came up with a supplement, but we agreed I wouldn’t know what it was in order to eliminate any expectations I had about the effectiveness.

I had suspicions about what it was, but went along pretty happily for the next couple months. There were subtle improvements over all, but the most significant was a much less drastic and awful menstrual cycle. I have PCOS, so this is a massive, important change.

Then our move happened and they had trouble locating the supplement and I went off it for a little. It was bad. It took a couple weeks to feel the effects of not having it in my system and then, once we found the supplement again, a couple more weeks to work it into my system again.

After a round with that supplement back into my system, they did a bit more looking around since the original was difficult to source locally and told me they found a new supplement that included the original but also had the potential to be even better. I said yes to this one as well, again keeping it a secret from myself.

Cut to a month later and I’ve been feeling like something is very different. Yesterday I had a little time to think and realized that what I have been feeling is a clarity that I have literally never had before. There’s no background noise in  my mind. I’m only thinking about what I choose to think about instead of being bombarded with random, chaotic thoughts.

It’s so foreign to me that it took me a couple weeks to understand and recognize what is going on. It’s pretty life altering. I am now starting the process of relearning how to think about things, how to write, how to be creative, how to move through the world in what feels, from my past experience, like a zen state all the time.

I’m grateful for the experiment because it means I have confidence I’m not just convincing myself this is working. I’ll double down with the fact that the change was so unexpected I never could have imagined it and to me that verifies the efficacy of this supplement for me.

I’m now using Host Defense. As with anything like this, ymmv and see a professional.

Let the relearning begin.