Whatever you end up writing, it’s just the best you could do on some particular day. You always do your best — it’s just not always that great.

Writing is merely a job. It’s just something you do, and if you’re lucky you get paid to do it. Every single time you sit down and you write something, you give it your all; you put everything you’ve got into it and … who knows what happens. Maybe nothing. (But it’s your nothing, and you earned it.)

And then you do it again the next day. And the next.

Language Is About Simplification

Very finite words must represent an extremely complex reality — not quite infinite, but close.

In the end, rendering reality into language has its limitations.

What terms sink into ambiguity?

How do you balance the simple vs complex?

At what level is too much detail lost? (And are you willing to accept the compromise?)

Goy vs Yid, Wrong/Right, Native/Colonizer, et cetera. Binary vs Non-Binary. Popular alternatives come and go. And two is rarely the true number of choices in a situation. Usually it’s at least three or four, if not seven.

We don’t have much evidence to measure the past; we have to infer a lot and make a lot of guesses. Many of them probably are wrong. Writing down some version of the past is just a starting point; it’s not the end.

And there’s a lot of courtesy in language, which makes it cloudy.

~

Unintended homonym: “finite” rendered as “fine Knight” (renderer’s capitalization).