11 December 2023

I spoke to my cousin yesterday, it may be the first time ever we’ve had an adult conversation. Age is tough to understand, everyone is constantly an age they’ve never been, constantly becoming someone they weren’t before. An expression I like is that a person can’t be a prophet in their hometown, the reason being because those that grew up around that person see them as their younger self and not who they’ve become. What was nice about my conversation was we were getting to know each other’s grown selves, putting aside the past. It doesn’t matter if someone used to fill their mouth with hotwheels, hopefully they’ve stopped before turning 18 and if they’ve stopped it doesn’t happen anymore so it isn’t accurate to pair a personality with what they used to do. Another expression my wife shared recently was if your local mall is still trying, then so should you. Now the mall near you may not actually being trying, but the sentiment is the same and I didn’t want to name my local mall. The idea is that malls had a pivotal part in culture, if nothing was happening on a Friday or Saturday night, we could always go to the mall and it would be packed with excitement. Malls started to disappear possibly as all brick and mortar stores disappeared. The homogenous nature of super stores such as Walmart and Amazon took away the burden of shopping, with it went the excitement and discovery in walking through a store. Pretty frequently I see people online asking for book recommendations, there used to be stores that only sold books, a person would curate what books go on display then anyone walking into the store would see a list of book recommendations then could actually look inside the book before buying, and look at more than a couple pages too!