A recent travel experience did not go as I expected.

I did not discover until I was in the air that the twenty-four hours of flight ahead of me would be without Internet.

Once back on the ground, I suffered the worst jet lag I’ve ever experienced — multiple nights of lying awake for hours at a stretch, longing desperately for sleep.

It’s pretty hard not to care what people think.

For deep, evolutionary reasons, we humans associate rejection with death. No one wants to be abandoned by the tribe and left cold, hungry, and alone in the forest.

But caring how many people are paying attention -- that’s a modern phenomenon. Our ancestors, living in small groups, probably wouldn’t have been able to conceptualize metrics like Amazon sales rankings, subscriber count, or ticket sales.

My favorite Wordle days are the ones when my first guess yields five gray boxes.

Then I have to come up with another word that uses none of the letters of the first, sending me in a totally different direction than usual. No E’s, no A’s.

Most of the time, this will result in more total guesses before I can find the correct word. But that’s okay! I have six guesses in all, and that’s enough.

I wasn’t allowed to watch Saturday morning cartoons as a kid. (Yes, it killed my elementary school social life big time.) For some reason, we were only allowed a bit of Mr. Magoo before the TV was shut off and it was time for breakfast.

Mr. Magoo centers on the adventures of a hapless, legally blind retiree who has frequent brushes with death and disaster as a result of his inability to see — and his seeming unawareness that he can’t see. He bumbles through life oblivious to the danger he’s in and the degree to which other people are constantly rescuing him.