Morning Coffee Roundup
Nidia (my wife's new approved pseudonym) and I are at her mom's house for Thanksgiving weekend. The whole tribe are unrepentant night owls so I am sitting with the cats doing my Sunday morning thing. As usual when I mix coffee with The Internets I get kinda philosophical.

We went to visit Nidia's step-dad and his new wife, and while we were driving home Nidia's sister said, "She never stops talking. Do you think she ever stops thinking?" It's an interesting comparison to her husband, who speaks rather less and spends his free time making furniture, desks, and anything else of wood. Barb's words dominate the conversation, but Frank's work dominates the house: the entertainment center in the living room, whose doors silently turn 180 degrees and slide back into the sides so that the TV can pull out and then turn 120 degrees with just a finger touch of pressure; rich cherry bookshelves and bedframes; the rewired, refinished kitchen.

There is this essential, eternal tension between the things that are made and the things that are envisioned; Barb and Frank epitomize that. I am sitting in this silent space posting abstractions of thought that others (few others!) might read, but to do so I must sit on this physical couch, and rely on the abilities of engineers from around the world who created this physical computer and the communication network that allowed it to happen. The couch feels more physical and real; it always seems to me that the more involved in the abstractions of thought a device is the less compelling it is as a physical presence.

I don't really feel qualified to talk about this; someone with a philosophy degree has probably already done it. But it does feel like there is this interesting dichotomy between the soap bubbles of thought that are captured, more or less imperfectly, by writers such as Somerset Maughn or Proust or Joyce and the mute but somehow more durable and believable structures of creation, like a house, or a couch, or a knife.

At this moment I spend my life more like Barb, but to be honest I want to be more like Frank. Making feels so much more attractive right now than talking. It's a feeling that's been growing steadily in the last few months.