Finding Thanks In Trials

This is from my (mostly) weekly Tuesday email, The Weekly Mixtape. I’ve decided to start posting it here for those who haven’t subscribed, but it’ll be several days later. To get it straight to your mailbox (and on time), please subscribe.

Hey Reader,

Happy Thanksgiving week. It’s time to give thanks, even in their weird year of 2020.

Motion City Soundtrack never quite got the recognition they deserved. They had one really popular song, but the rest of their (many) albums never made much of a dent in the cultural zeitgeist.

One of their lyrics that’s been coming back to me this morning is “that what doesn’t kill us makes us who we are.”

On one level, the statement is obvious…I mean, if something kills us, it would make us who we were.

But bad technicalities aside, I appreciate the sentiment behind that line. The popular saying is, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” but that’s not necessarily true, which is why I appreciate this band’s twist of words. The big, challenging trials in life certainly define us. But it’s up to us to work out how we’ll respond. Will it make us stronger? Or will it make us bitter that things didn’t work out like we wanted to.

There’s no guarantee to either.

So in this year of 2020, while I’m not completely thankful for all the things that have gone wrong, I am thankful for the opportunity it gives me to reset my priorities and figure out how I’m going to take these challenges to make my life better going forward. 

That’s what makes me who I am.

The Links

• My Latest: I’ve been working mostly diligently to get my next book out, “Taxes for Musicians.” Rather than write a whole separate post, I just copied and pasted (with some minor modifications) the current draft of one of my chapters: 10 Common Tax Deductions for Musicians.
• My kids Roblox. They loved Ready Player One (the movie, not the book, which was condescending and sexist). So, tapping into that market, the Ready Player Two book tour will be done in Roblox. (Hopefully the editors have removed the worst of the author’s condescending and sexist tendencies in this sequel)
• Is it still extreme dieting if you make it into a vaguely cultist experiment?

Service Dog Update

When we got a service dog, I was not looking for a running buddy. Heck, I really wasn’t looking to run, so needing a buddy for something I didn’t want to do would have been weird.

But as we’ve moved from puppy Sherman to teenager Sherman, he needs more physical activity. Which I really should be getting, too. So nearly every morning I’ve gotten up to take him on an hour long jog, something I wouldn’t have even thought possible a while ago.

Does he enjoy it? I have no idea. He does walk away as soon as the harness comes out, but once we get that clipped on (sometimes requiring me crawling under the table), he comes out and seems ready to go.

Now to figure out how to keep this up as the snow starts to fall…