TheListServe Blog

I know it's not quite the new year yet (depending on when this email goes out), but I want to wish you all a Happy New Year! I enjoy the new year, and like many, use it as a time to review the past years accomplishments/failures and to look forward to what may occur in the new year. This past year, the big news for us was the birth of our sixth child. We hadn't exactly planned on having six kids, but she's been a great addition to our family, and certainly keeps us busy. For the upcoming year, one of my goals is to complete another mobile educational game for kids. I completed a simple math game a few years back and it was a ton of fun to develop. In addition to doing the design and programming, I also tried my hand at the music and art for the game. That turned out to be one of the hardest parts of the game to complete. I think it came out ok, but could be way better. If you want to check it out, look for Balloon Blast Math in the app store. It's amazing how impo...

1. I lost my mother to brain cancer in March 2010. Glioblastoma multiforme, a hyper-aggressive menace. Surgery, radiation, and a litany of intimidatingly-named drugs granted her three years, twice the median. But of course, it wasn't enough. It could never be enough. The disease and its remedies slowed her speech, first transposing words, then substituting the wrong ones, then silencing her altogether. For someone who had always been articulate and quick-witted, it must have been maddening. I certainly felt helpless every step of the way, watching the inexorable decline, hoping in the last days that somehow we could have just one more conversation, that the morphine drip and the pain it suppressed would abate long enough for one more "I love you" to make it through. It never did. The pain of loss may vary in intensity but it never goes away. I take some occasional comfort in one of the themes of Douglas Hofstadter's book "I Am a Strange Loop": those who are ...

For those in a rush, I offer just this quote: “If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.” – Andrew Harvey As an almost-20 year old, I feel like it isn't my place to offer others advice. (Except, maybe, to someone under 20 years old, in which case, two things: First, take education very seriously, not because it will make you wealthy or prominent, but because it will immensely enrich your life. Second, it is very hard to avoid becoming very much like one or both of your parents when you grow up. This isn't a piece of advice but rather an observation.) Anyways, I was recently thinking about getting a tattoo of the phrase, "This too shall pass," in Hebrew. (I recommend reading the Wikipedia page about this phrase, as it provides some intriguing insight and history.) My best friend text...

IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ: I need a lot of help. It would be nice if you would take a moment to share your wisdom with me. I have some questions: How did you figure out your gender/sexuality? Did it just come to you? Did you just kind of assume it and it felt natural to you? What was “society” and its norms’ affect on it? Do you think it is “wired” in your DNA or the way you were raised? For those of you who are enjoying life, HOW DO I DO THAT? What did you do to get there?? For those of you who have done the higher education thing, WHAT DO I DO? What do you think about the education system? (Google Finland’s education system for perspective.) HOW DO I LIVE LIFE? Do you have any good jokes? I really love puns. ------------------------------------ I haven’t lived a lot of my life, but I don’t think I’m going to enjoy living the rest of it. In a first-world society like ours, one popular fear is ending up on Skid Row, homeless, alone, and with no support. If you ask others their biggest ...

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” ~Frederick Buechner Perhaps my two greatest teachers have been pain and community. I first learned of pain from my father who humbly and quietly endured 40 years of kidney stones and chronic pain before cancer claimed his weary body. It strengthened his soul and was an invaluable teacher to me. C.S. Lewis claimed that, “pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Khalil Gibran believed that much of our pain was self-chosen and unlocked our understanding by being the “bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.” He went on to say that, “The deeper that so...

The twenty three years of my marriage thus far seem to have gone by so very quickly.  Perhaps I got lucky when meeting my wife, but I like to think that choosing the smartest woman that would have me figures into our happiness.  Choose your mate wisely, and then choose them every day after. I believe you become married the moment your partner agrees to marry you.  Not when you get the marriage license, or after the ceremony, but when the both of you agree.  If you think that you need the blessing of some institution before you can behave like a married couple you have abdicated the responsibility for your choice for perhaps the most important plot arc of your life. An engagement only gives your friends and family time to make travel arrangements.  Celebrate your marriage in whatever way you choose, but celebrate the done deal and not the doing. These two bits of my father's wisdom, dealing nominally with finance and footwear, I hope you find as broadly applicable as I: "There...

I've been meaning to unsubscribe from the listserve for a while now. I get really annoyed by the huge emails of life advice. For that reason I thought that if I ever got chosen, I'd send a cheese joke or a witty one liner. But when I got the email it suddenly didn't seem that simple - it felt really weird - should I really do that when I have the opportunity to speak out to more people than I might ever get the chance to again? So for better of for worse, this is what I've decided to say: I like running. I used to hate people who said they liked running. It made me feel bad when I was sitting on the sofa eating cake. Now I still hate people who say they like running a bit, but I can eat more cake than I did before without becoming a human sphere. I run for me. I run alone and I have my own targets. I race against myself. I run wherever I want to, whenever I want to. If I have had a rubbish day, I can go for a run and it makes me feel better. I'm not sure about my di...

Hello Listservians! There's a lot of important stuff going on in the world but I'd like to talk about home right now. Christmas in the US means everyone's obsessed with snow and presents and family and home. I don't like snow or rampant commericalism, and family can be tough when one side are orthodox Israelis and the other are Catholic Mexicans. But home is something bigger than family and religion. Home is history and belonging and native understanding and love of a place because it is *yours.* As a military brat, I miss out on that. There's a phrase for this, "third culture kids," or TCKs. Military brats, diplomatic brats, missionary kids - there's this pull between our passport country and the country/countries where we've grown up. We never belong entirely to either culture and we can never entirely lay claim to either place. People ask me where home is and I never know how to answer. I usually joke and say that home is wherever I'm sleepi...

When I moved to California from a tiny midwestern town in 2001, I had what I could fit into my car with me. I moved into a sublet, found a temp job, and started a zine. Attending countless punk shows during this time from Reno to LA, sleeping on couches, driving all-nighters, close friends and new friends are one in the same, but you lose track of people--I did. Time passes: career, marriage, kids. This year I got an email from my estranged step-mom hoping to catch up and reconnect. It's a nostalgic season, I have a 2-year-old daughter who has spurred me to re-size my heart, and I needed to forgive my step-mom. We exchanged a few emails, a promise of a phone call, and that was the end of it. It was a quick wash of the hands of the whole dirty business. I felt adult, matter-of-fact, professional. I could HANDLE STUFF. Later that same week I get an unexpected FedEx at my office. Unusual. It was from an old friend from my punk rock zine days. I'm instantly filled with dread....

Subject written in Kannada roughly translates to: "9 tips to make your life more comfortable" or "9 tips for contentment" All, My name is Ritesh and I am from Bangalore, India. I am engineer by profession and I'm currently pursuing my dream of starting a software product startup. In my spare time, I read as much as time permits, play the guitar, take nature walks, and enjoy birdwatching. I also dabble a bit in photography and video making. I am a big fan of satire and dark comedy, and I'm writing some material to present at a comedy club. After graduation, I found myself in an IT job and married my long time sweetheart Prateeksha. Both Prateeksha and I are rationalists and realists, and live in a crazy country called India. Having being born in an era where we had access to cable television, western media and the internet, our values are a mixture of Indian conservatism and western liberalism, and we started realizing very early on our differences in culture...

Im half Ghanaian and half Ukrainian, but I grew up in the Netherlands. Ive always been ambitious by doing things for myself, freelance, build businesses, fail, start over, succeed, fail etc. Until I reached a point where I almost forgot what I was doing and why. Entrepreneurship comes with a price and it takes a while before you feel like you have hit the jackpot, financially but mostly emotionally. The pressure in wanting so much for me turned into a daily routine of obsession and anxiety. I found everything boring and just came to the conclusion I lost my Mojo, and it was somewhere out trying to find me, But I was too tired to look for it myself. My father passed away when I was 10, he moved out to Ghana 20 years ago to follow his dream and unfortunately passed away within 3 months. So i took a leap of faith this year and decided to start something for myself in Accra and honor his leap of faith. I started 2 businesses and officially launching Access Accra a city guide and platform h...

Did you know a dog has a specific pH balance with their skin that is much different than humans? Depending on a lot of variables with the dog, their pH levels tend to be a lot higher than that of a human. So, if a human shampoo (or something worse) is used on a dog for bath time, the dog's pH level will be thrown off, creating an environment where bacteria, parasites, and viruses can cause a lot of problems. Unknowingly, many pet owners will wash them repeatedly, trying to fix the problem, but end up making the problem worse as the skin's pH level becomes more imbalanced. Also, if the shampoo makes their skin feel dry (a lot of them have sodium chloride- aka salt, as a thickening agent), your dog will scratch at his/her skin, creating areas for bacteria to attack and it quickly becomes a vicious cycle. It was with all this in mind we (my soon to be wife and I) started searching for a good, all natural, pH balanced shampoo for our 6 year old Golden Retriever, Max. Unfortunat...

When I first joined the Listserve, I knew immediately what I would write about if I ever got my turn---divorce. My own parents divorced when I was five years old, and in one of those great ironies of karma, I fell in love with a divorced dad and am now getting to see it from the other side. I have a better understanding now of some of what my parents went through. It had never occurred to me, for instance, that my dad once had to have a conversation with my stepmother where he explained how much money he made, and how much got taken off the top in child support. And on the other side, there was the time my Beloved, after spending an afternoon dealing with an ex-caused frustration, angrily vented 'well, at least I know that when he's eighteen, I can tell him everything!' I had to gently explain to him that HE couldn't be the one to do that! Here's the thing: when kids are involved, you have to be the grown-up, and that sometimes means sucking it up. Sucking it up doe...

The worst part about being self-aware and sorry for yourself is that it makes it possible to feel bad about feeling bad.  It's funny that as soon as you have ambition, other's success seems like an insult. Especially if that other's success is in the same field in which your passion lies. Maybe that's not funny.  So why am I a failure?  It's not because I've tried to be published and failed. It's not because I've tried to write for competitions and failed. And (given the fact that I make enough money to support myself, live on my own and am generally happy) it's not even that the incredible smallness of my troubles makes me feel so terrible. And here's the best part! The best part; I had a great upbringing. I'm white and male. I went to great schools and am completely privileged. My biggest problem when writing? I have nothing to write about. No foster homes. No financial struggles. No, go-to true story of hardship that just rolls onto the pa...

When I was fifteen, I looked at my 10-year-old self and thought, "what a moron." When I was twenty I looked at my fifteen-year-old self and thought, "so simple-minded!" Now I look at my twenty-year-old self and think, "so naive..." In five years time, when I'm thirty, I'll look back at myself now and I know that I'm going to have similar feelings. I hope, however, that I will at least give my former self the same credit that I do now: he knew that he was still learning and that he always will be. He knew that by making mistakes, even if he didn't know that he was making them, he was going to get better and learn from those mistakes. So, forgive your former self for the mistakes they made, and thank them for taking a bullet then so that you don't have to now. Excuse all those stupid things they said which upset other people. Forgive them for the financial decisions which left them feeling like a complete idiot. Let them off for letting t...

So...from the subject of this email, one can figure out that I didn't check my email and didn't realize that I had won the listserve lottery. For some reason, this is surprisingly common. Because of that I'm not even sure if this e-mail will make it on. About 7 years ago when I was in the middle of applying to colleges I read somewhere that the best way to write a college application essay was just to free write (within topic of course!) for a specified amount of time and then go back and edit what you wrote. This would create a genuine essay. Not sure if that actually helped me get into college but I want to think it did. I'm going to try and stick with this concept in this email. The problem (or bonus, depending on your outlook) is that emails on The Listserve can be about anything. I've seen some excellent recipes, read some very interesting stories, and have heard countless pieces of advice. We're just going to see where my mind takes me. I like peanut...

Seriously, forts are great. We should all build forts more. Not all who wander are lost. In the media, my generation (millennial) gets a lot of crap for not falling into place these days. A lot of the criticism aimed at this group centers around us not getting and sticking with jobs. Many of my friends, all recently graduated from college, have been bouncing around various internships and entry level jobs for the past 2-3 years just trying to find something that fits. I have wandered in and out of many different jobs, activities, sports, and hobbies in my life and I’ve learned something valuable from each one. Mostly, I’ve learned that if you don’t stick with something you won’t get good at it, but hey, that one takes a while to sink in. And sometimes, you just know when something isn’t right for you. Like ballet, that one probably isn’t going to happen for me (I was kicked out of gymnastics when younger due to lack of flexibility). Since college, I have grown less and less sure ...

I love to bake. It's pretty simple. Not the actual baking, that can be very difficult, just the fact that I love it. I don't find it particularly relaxing but it does make people happy and I have accomplished something tangible. I'm slowly working on learning to adjust recipes and make them my own and hope to be able to create brand new ones. My one rule/ piece of advice with baking is if the recipe calls for vanilla, always add a little bit more than it says. If you aren't a big on making things from scratch but want something that people will love: I have made this a few times and it is well received. Chocolate Explosion Cake from The Domestic Geek Ingredients Devil’s Food cake mix 3 eggs 1 cup water 1/3 cup vegetable oil 1 package chocolate instant pudding 1 cup sour cream (8oz) 12 ounces chocolate chips (I bag ~ 12oz) Dark chocolate frosting ( I jar) Directions Preheat oven to 350* and grease a 9X13 cake pan. Mix cake mix with eggs, water, and oil. Then mix in sour ...

I'll keep this short because that's the kind of emails I like :) My friend Ella is a 7 year old girl suffering from NF1, a condition that causes a lot of tumors to grow She has a Facebook page called "Hope for Ella" where you can read about her, and see the amazing and selfless things that she does (organising a Christmas party for kids affected by Hurricane Sandy, making sandwiches for her homeless friends in Philidelphia) If you have a minute, it'd really make her day if you liked her Facebook page "Hope for Ella" If you have more than a minute, you should send her your favourite joke - I'm sure she'd love it Thanks and have a great day! Steve Ngapo steve[AT]stevengapo.com Auckland, New Zealand

Having very little literary talent of my own, I'll defer to the words of another to say what I am unable to. “The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.” -- Neil deGrasse Tyson (reddit, 2012) That is all. Now get back to work! Andrea Sydney, Australia

It’s been little more than a month since my startup failed and I had been working on it for 2 years. Here’s some background: I was in pharma marketing and decided to quit my job and build an online travel startup. Neither my co-founder nor I are technical people. We put in quite a bit of our savings to do this crazy thing. Here’s why I think we failed: · We didn’t build a strong team. Everyone was located all over the world and we never took the time to really get to know people. · We ran it too “corporate”. Since both my co-founder and I came from the corporate world we had hierarchy and structure when we shouldn’t have. · Spent too much money, too fast. We spent a bucket load of money on building our website and when we pivoted to a new, much better idea all I saw was all that money being flushed down the toilet. Lean Startup made a whole lot of sense after that. · We could have been better hustlers (e.g. been more bold). I think we both had per...

Dear people, I love reading your stories. You give me the chance to share your lives a little bit. To me, this is very valuable. Thank you! Me, I am a forty-year-old single mother, about to lose my job. Uncertain times. But by now, I do want to take life as it is. I also found out that I want to dedicate it to beauty, connection and warmth. This is what matters most to me. Knowing this feels warm and sweet. So strangely enough, I have never felt happier. I remember being a child and walking home from school. I passed a field where a girl was playing. She saw me passing and she started screeming something. I could not hear what she said, so I walked in her direction; she then came running at me. As she came closer, I heard she was actually insulting me. I didn't know her, she didn't know me, I didn't do anything to her, but still she started hitting me. I ran away. This experience stayed with me. I could not understand why anyone would want to do this, and it was very diffi...

Wow…I won…I never win. I just found out that I won the Listserve…5 days ago. -___- Shame on me. Thank you, Connie Chweh, for introducing me to the Listserve…yes, you should be jealous! I’m so proud of you. I’m so happy that you’re in my life. I love you. After 22 years of existence, this is what my brain cells have to offer: 1) Bullying happens because we let it happen. If you’re a witness to it, put a stop to it. We're basically bullies ourselves if we do nothing about it. 2) Let’s finally shut up about our obsession with appearance and be satisfied already. 3) “In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” -Robert Frost 4) I’m below average to poor in math, but according to my calculations, 99% of the time, life always works out. It may not work out how you initially wanted it to, and it may take A LOT of time and “bipolarity” (no disrespect), but it’ll happen if you let it happen and it’ll happen if you make it happen. 5) Weird > Normal. Always...

Grief. I knew I would write about this the day I signed up. Despite the fact that 100% of people die, our culture ignores death or grief. When my father died suddenly at 59, I had no fucking clue how to be in this new world *without* him and *with* grief. At first there were lots of people, cards, flowers. Then everyone went back to their lives… and utter loneliness set in. I felt deserted, but now I understand that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what to do. So here’s some “What to Do’s” post-funeral to about a year later, the darkest time, next you find your friend in grief: ----- Listen ----- You can’t fill my void with words. Don’t tell me he’s in a better place, god has a plan, or any other cliché that sounds appropriate but really minimalizes my current, very real experience. He died. And no, this is not like the time your great-aunt died when you were three. Even the true stuff like ‘time heals’ doesn’t feel good to hear yet. You can simply say, “I don’t know what to say” ...

Hello everyone! I have been thinking for quite a while what should I write in an e-mail addressed to the people of the world. I had some ideas, but none that I really liked. In the end, I decided on writing down some of my thoughts-realizations that are not certainly logically connected to one another. Those are nevertheless the thoughts that I deeply belive in. First – everyone has some sad story. I have. And my closest friend, and my boyfriend, and my other friends. You, he and she as well. There are no people completely happy, everyone is afflicted with different problems in his life. Therefore, we should never judge other people easily, since we never know their story. Often people smiling the strongest are those with toughest past – but they belive in the power of optimism, they believe one should never give up and always have hope. They are right. Second – happiness is a state of mind. One can have all the stuff in the world and be unhappy, one can be happy having nothing. It’s a...

During the austral summer of 2008-2009 I spent five weeks at Palmer Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula via a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. I was there to gather materials for a series of musical compositions inspired by Antarctic environments and ecosystems. Each day I set out from the station to explore my surroundings, make audio field recordings, and collect natural objects to use as musical instruments. If the weather was fair, and winds were below twenty knots, I hopped in a zodiac and motored out to neighboring islands or worked directly on the sea. In stormy conditions I investigated the glacier and rocky moraine behind the station. I often visited Torgersen Island, home to a number of Adélie penguin colonies. I was delighted to discover that the penguins had chosen a very musical island on which to nest, as Torgersen is covered in shards of a dense, sonorous, igneous rock. The Adélies gather the smallest of these st...

...She walked round the block, from her house to ours, after her chemotherapy treatment. She didn’t wear her kerchief. The morning was light, airy, and blue. Green leaves hung heavily from strong oak branches, and cicadas buzzed heavily from within them, hidden. As Maya trudged over the sidewalk, her legs began to feel lighter and lighter. Her walk was short, and took all of two minutes. By the time she arrived at our yellow house her legs were so light, she began to float. She was in the air; only by a few inches, but not at all grounded. With purposeful movements she opened the wide, white gate to our backyard garden and entered, closing it behind her carefully. She didn’t ring a doorbell or knock. No one, besides herself, knew where she was. The garden had been watered that morning, and it was still early. Humid air was trapped below the greenery, giving the garden a damp, jungle-like feel. Maya looked over the rows of shrubbery, and the assortment of flowers, and took up the nea...

I'm a nervous female undergrad engineer at the University of Michigan, and I have this thing. A business. It all started because of a bug and an unbearable need to straighten my teeth. [Skip straight down to the ASKS if you have no patience for my running mouth.] It's the least sexy business that a student could start (sorry, no social network for cats or mobile app for dating, here.) but it works. And I love it. I find clients who need a little help optimizing their data management systems. Typically they are small businesses that I pass on my way to class or Chipotle. I get access to their excel spreadsheets and databases and convert the most redundant, messy, inefficient structures into gorgeously simple, automated files. This stuff gets me going (gets my customer's going too.) I started this because 1. entrepreneurship is a bug on the U of M campus that just won't stop biting. Dude, it's completely normal for students to kick problems in the butt by STARTING thi...