Playing With Networking Weekly Recap (12/13/2025)
December 13, 2025·0 comments·zg
Sunday Music: Happy Birthday To Me (The Vandals)
I turned 44 this week, and like I have for almost 30 years, I played "Happy Birthday to Me" on repeat - somewhere between 1 and 22 times depending on how many loops I lost count on. The Vandals have always felt like they could be from my town, with their stupid humor and their genius at inverting symbols rather than just using them. What struck me most this year wasn't nostalgia, but how much the whole aesthetic still fits - not in fashion, but in the refusal to take yourself too seriously while taking meaning-making seriously. You have to keep making new memories while pulling out old ones. Fun comes from experiences, old and new.
Hope Is The Thing With Feathers
This week I kept returning to Emily Dickinson and a line I've written about before - "Hope is the thing with feathers." It can fly, but that doesn't mean it's flying. Hope feels like untapped potential you're aware you can tap, sitting there fully feathered, cold, idle, knowing. The thing that landed hardest for me this year was that last line of the poem: Hope will not ask you for anything. It's just going to wait for you to notice. Not everybody knows what it's like to be in the presence of hope, so I wanted to make sure you had it this week.
Root Down, In The Flow
When last-second cancellations and urgent requests threaten to unravel everything, I've learned to pause and remind myself: If you know your feet are on the ground, and where to find them, you're good to flow. It's a requirement - taking the breath, remembering you're still attached and not floating away, then getting into that headspace where you know exactly what you're doing. It takes practice and reminders, but feet down, in the flow, feels pretty good once you're doing it.
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