This is issue four of my newsletter. People I've been sending it to all year continue to find it for the first time in their Spam folder, so I will continue to lead with this reminder that you can unsubscribe anytime or read how/why I started this.

I had an onsite (remote) job interview this week, and it marks a milestone in my life project. It reminded me how it feels to live my life in character (in a good way).

Professional drag / Worksona

As RuPaul says, we're all born naked and the rest is drag. When my associates in Thinky Feely Tank talk about doing a thing “as drag” (parliamentary process, chores, work in general), what I hear is an intention to approach it as play, and with intent to subvert something about the archetypes we are embodying in the performance.

Right before COVID kicked off, I was inhabiting this amazing version of myself in both my professional and my personal life. I was doing work at my day job that was energizing and felt impactful. I was finding new social connections that brought alive parts of myself that I had either forgotten or had never known existed. I also did my first drag-drag performance at a house party, and it felt like the culmination of all my inner life & creative dreams that had led up to that moment — like I was telling a truth that I discovered as I was telling it.

The character that I was bringing to my work environment also felt like a truth that I was discovering in the telling. I connected with people across the organization and I faced hard problems with resolve. My “work drag” character was like an exoskeleton I was wearing to give myself super powers.

Then the pandemic hit, and my professional persona slowly withered. The feedback loop at work shifted from positive to negative. Less and less did I feel that I was operating from a place of integrity. I kept plugging away, but my heart was in it less and less. Nor could I conceive of any other work that I would rather be doing. It happened so slowly that I hardly perceived the shift, or how wide-ranging the change was.

This time of unemployment has given me the space to really reconstruct the inner parts of my conception of self. Since last September, the job interview process has been a venue where I have incrementally & intentionally reconstructed the work-drag persona that I want to be performing at my next day job. What is the best self that I can bring to work? The self who will be able to show up for work that is really energizing and fulfilling, and who can thrive in my inner selves and my non-work existence?

Constructive delusion

I have been mulling an idea of “constructive delusion.” Some notion that it can be useful to discover an idealized version of yourself that you can intentionally think of as a character you're playing. I'm not certain whether this is the same thing as delulu being the solulu. The best part of that linked article is the formulation that “instead of becoming an obsessed fan of an idol, you become an obsessed fan of yourself.” I might construe ‘constructive delusion’ as “striving to act as the self that you would be an obsessed fan of.” On the other hand, maybe this idea is just a re-invention of masking Autism (I highly recommend Dr Devon Price's Unmasking Autism to everyone regardless of what you think your neurotype is).

Spiritual Technologies

Googling about worksonas, I came across this interesting “Faith-Life-Work” consultancy that collaborates "with faith-based organizations to design curriculum that brings together themes of faith, life, and career"

This reminds me that I hear there was a commercial during the Big Football Game for Hallow, a “Prayer & Meditation / Daily Rosary & Catholic Bible” app, which bills itself in the App Store as “the #1 prayer app for Lent”, touting the possibility of “the most powerful Lent of my life.” It has on-demand prayers read by Liam Neeson, Mark Wahlberg, and famous clergy.

As of its C round, Hallow has raised $105 million from investors including voracious billionaire Peter Thiel.

I'm curious to hear anybody's thoughts about spiritual tech entrepreneurship, and especially about venture capital getting involved in GodTech. (TheoTech? SoulTech?). Peter Thiel in anybody's church app seems kinda bad to me.

Hallow has a blog post What to Give Up For Lent in 2024: Practical Fasting Ideas for Lent and I have skimmed it to look for things to react to. I dig the equal time+emphasis given to almsgiving. I am amused/dismayed that one of the fasting ideas for teens is “Fast from social media for a day” — since it is apparently unthinkable to fast from social media for 40 whole days. Even for adults, it suggests you could “give up certain social media sites”, but fine ok also maybe you could just “limit them to certain days/times of day.”

OTOH the above-the-fold bit concludes with Pope Francis's lovely assertion that fasting can be

learning to change our attitude towards others and all of creation, turning away from the temptation to ‘devour’ everything to satisfy our voracity and being ready to suffer for love, which can fill the emptiness of our hearts.

and I couldn't possibly complain about that!

So the job interview

I felt integrated and energized by today's job interview, and I have to credit the company for the quality of their hiring process and their interviewer training. One of the interviewers said "pretend I'm totally determined to hire you and we're trying together to build the most impressive case for that, that puts you in the best light." And I kind of felt like all of my interviewers were doing that.

I don't know how much of the positive energy today came from the way the interviewers listened to my answers, and how much of it is because I was finally giving answers from the heart of my integrity. Many other companies' behavioral questions have felt suuuuper pro-forma & pretty shallowly engaged; but then again, to some degree I think I had been answering many of these questions in a shallow & deflective way so there wasn't much to engage with. I usually see some flashes of my superpower-self in any job interview... but this week that persona came to stay.

In order not to attract any negative attention from the Fates, when I say “crediting the company” I mean it anonymously for now. If I get an offer you'll surely find out which company it was. If I don't get an offer, I might just build my own version of an idea that I came up with as an answer to one of their questions. Surely my interview NDA doesn't give them rights to ideas I came up with during the interview! If anyone ever tried to claim it could, I bet I could find an awesome lawyer to represent me in court.

Anyway, the point is how long it has been since I have felt that way about/after a job interview. And how rarely it has happened in the past. How the conditions of my life during the pandemic drove me to numb out my feelings of out-of-integrity; and how I am lately regaining that sense of integrity, this time with mindful purpose.

How could I not be my own obsessed fan?

I encountered this wall-sun composition yesterday

My current cookie obsession

Chocolate Chip Wheat Germ Cookies

adapted from Beyond Kimchee

When I worked in San Francisco, the most indulgent possible thing to get at lunchtime was the Wheat Germ Chocolate Chip Cookie from the chain (now greatly diminished in range) restaurant Specialty's. This cookie is a decent approximation, and now I suspect I would prefer it to the Specialty's version because I like the al dente rolled oats and I'm using the nuts that I enjoy the most. Apologies to my celiac friends; I have tried flax seed as a substitute for the wheat germ and it is definitely a good cookie, but it loses the jenesaisquoi of the wheat germ that really defines this cookie for me. A nut-free version could be really lovely with sunflower, pumpkin, and/or hemp seeds!

Ingredients

• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup wheat germ
• 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup dark brown sugar (reduced from 1/2 cup)
• 1 egg
• 3/4 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup chopped walnut
• 1/4 cup pine nuts (remember you can toast them if you like)
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Line a cookie pan with parchment paper or baking mat; set aside.

Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, oats, and wheat germ together; set aside.

In an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars on medium speed until fluffy. Add an egg and vanilla extract. Beat well for 2 minutes.

Add the dry ingredient mixture and stir until just combined. Stir in the chocolate chips and nuts.

Using a cookie scoop or spoon, take 3 tablespoon (or however much) of dough and roll into a ball. Place cookie balls on a prepared pan, spacing apart about 2-inch in between. You can press down the cookie balls slightly if you want. Bake them in a preheated 350˚F oven for 12-14 minutes. Let the cookies rest on a pan for 2 minutes. Transfer them to a cooling rack and cool completely.

Don't miss

Trevor Paglen's Doty is streaming at E-Flux through February 18th. Big X-Files vibe:

a 60-minute interview with Richard Doty, a former employee of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland AFB, whose responsibilities included recruiting spies and disseminating disinformation regarding alien and extraterrestrial intelligences.

Doty's talk ranges from his involvement in fake alien abductions to his certainty that extraterrestrial aliens are regularly visiting Earth. He often uses “UFOs” to mean specifically “extraterrestrial-origin spacecraft” (as opposed to “unidentified flying object”) and sometimes I hear him pronounce it like “yoo-foes”, which is charming. And the kicker disinformation advice:

what you always wanna do... is you wanna start with fact and end with fact. Everything in between can be bull. But you gotta start with fact and end with fact.

Samia and I joined a new gym last month and the gym employee told us there was a room for “aerobics”, which he pronounced ”eye-robics.” What a thrill!

The competition to computationally extract text from the scorched papyri excavated at Herculaneum has awarded its grand prize. We now face the ridiculously exciting prospect of a flood of new Classical texts coming to light. Bloomberg's story about it is pretty good, if you haven't already opened a Bloomberg link this month.

Air Canada found responsible for lies its support chatbot told, at it should be.

mildly interesting

Every now and then I take Benadryl to help me sleep. Last week I took a benadryl and what I got instead was the weirdest feeling in my legs. I felt like I needed to stretch them, to move them, . Apparently diphenhydramine can give you restless legs and apparently that is what restless leg syndrome is: not twitchy myoclonic jerks, but the unquenchable sensation that your legs need to be moved in some way. It's very weird and so now I won't take Benadryl anymore so I'm just stepping up my sleep hygiene.

Until next time (March 3 at 7:23 AM),

Orión