032522 — Blog — Rulerless

Here and now

I've been very future-focused lately. Even more so than usual.

There are layers of reasons for that. I'm fasting during the day, and fasting is hard. It's tempting to think about how I'm going to feel when I get to eat dinner in a few hours.

I'm away from my husband and my home.

Casey von NeumannMarch 4, 2022032522, 081022, 091422Comment

New norms for a new normal?

In my work with adolescents, I like to remind them that they are active participants in creating the kind of culture they want to be part of.

"I'm only able to get up in front of the room and speak," I once told them, "because you're allowing me to. "If you all started jumping up and down and screaming, there wouldn't be much I could do about it."

Casey von NeumannFebruary 23, 2022032522, 051622, 123022, 030923Comment

It's never forever

It would be nice to escape right about now.

The trouble is, there's nowhere to escape to. And even if there were, they'd probably cancel your flight out.

So here we are, dealing with a reality that is once again not cooperating with our wishes. My heart goes out to anyone whose plan—whose life—has been upended by the new variant, along with all those who were already suffering before Omicron came to town. It's really hard.

Casey von NeumannDecember 24, 2021123021, 020122, 020922, 021522, 030722, 032522, 120622 Comments

Let the leaves lie

My tiny city in Maine has a very different culture from Atlanta, where I spent most of my adulthood.

One major difference is the sound of fall. Here, it's quiet. Why? Because no one owns a leaf blower.

People do some raking, I guess. But mostly, they leave the leaves alone. Soon enough, they'll be under snow. And nobody seems to expect their landscaping to look like a golf course.

Casey von NeumannDecember 2, 2021120921, 032522, 033022 Comments

Lessons learned from twentieth century pop songs

On Friday afternoons, there's a great little show on Maine Public Radio called Down Memory Lane, hosted by Bangor's Toby Leboutillier (like many Mainahs, he pronounces all the consonants in his Francophonic name).

The show aired on Maine's NPR affiliate stations for decades and now is found only online, and only in realtime. You can find the show by going to mainepublic.org between the hours of 2:00 and 5:00 PM Eastern on Fridays, clicking on the down arrow at the top, and then clicking on "Down Memory Lane." What this looks like on a desktop computer is shown below:

Casey von NeumannDecember 12, 2019122120, 022521, 032522Comment