Learning & Development Love Letters to Things, Thinking & History

Infrastructure
of A Life

None of this is work product. None of it has a client. This is what happens when something snags my attention and I can't stop pulling the thread until I've accidentally connected it to three other things I wasn't even thinking about. Sometimes I love the thing. Sometimes I just found a really interesting connection between things and couldn't leave it alone.

A Supply Closet Romance

Dots, Pens &
Commonplace Books

Four things from the supply closet that turned out to be a bigger deal to me than each let on. A dotted grid, a good pen, a roll of correction tape and a four-hundred-year-old habit of writing down what matters.

The Dotted
Notebook

From architectural blueprints to bullet journals. How the dotted grid became the analog sovereignty tool for people who think in structure but need permission to deviate.

The Good
Pen

For twenty-four years I believed there were exactly two categories of pen users: normal people and snobs. A stray gel pen from my husband's pocket collapsed that binary in a single afternoon.

The New
Wite-Out

Bette Nesmith Graham mixed tempera paint in her kitchen in 1951. Seventy years later, the correction tape sitting on my desk for three months taught me what forgiveness in writing actually looks like.

The Commonplace
Book

Four centuries of collecting what matters. From John Locke's indexing system to Tiago Forte's digital repackaging. The question that never changes: what is worth keeping?

Em-Dash Unpacking

Thief by Mass
Visual Weaponization

Four marks, four heists. A punctuation mark, three dots, a five-thousand-year-old good-luck charm and a battle flag. Who took them, how the meaning got rewritten and whether the charges could ever stick.

The Assassination
of the Em-Dash

For 500 years, the em-dash held space between thoughts. Then a language model used it six times per paragraph and half the internet thinks you're a robot if you reach for one. That's not overuse. That's a hit job.

Semiotic Thief Charges
Don't Stick

Three dots have survived 2,300 years of rhetorical history, the digital revolution and the AI era without anyone managing to steal them. The ellipsis is the symbol that got away (and I got lucky to have latched on to it back in j-school). This is why.

The Case of Hitler vs.
The Ancient Greeks

A symbol meant good fortune on four continents for 5,000 years. Then a mass murderer with an art background claimed it and the original meaning became functionally illegal in most of the world. The most successful semiotic theft in recorded history.

Stars & Bars: Straight
Out of 1861 Manassas

The flag most Americans picture when they hear 'Confederate flag' was never the flag of the Confederacy. It spent 80 years in storage before segregationists rebranded it as heritage. That's not tradition. That's a marketing campaign.

Back to business

Infrastructureof A Life

Dots, Pens &Commonplace Books

Thief by MassVisual Weaponization

Infrastructure
of A Life

Dots, Pens &
Commonplace Books

Thief by Mass
Visual Weaponization