Dear President Trump, Looks like you’re keeping it light today with just three things on your schedule so far. Probably good for a Friday that falls on the 13th day of the month since I bet you can’t help but worry about such things. I just looked up why people are superstitious about Friday the … Continue reading Dysfunctional family dynamics R US
Psychological Constructs
Exploiting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Dear President Trump, Sunrise this morning was at 6:34, which means we are solidly back in the kind of dark/light cycle where sidewalk tripping hazards are a thing again. I had a taste of this the other morning, but fortunately the sidewalk didn’t fully catch my foot so it was a small stumble instead of … Continue reading Exploiting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Cognitive dissonance and gaslighting aren’t the half of it
Dear President Trump, I’m not sure how I missed them both over the last couple of days, but this morning I saw two rather stale Op Ed’s that were pretty interesting to read as companion pieces. The first was by Kathleen Vohs who dove into a detailed explanation of cognitive dissonance. I’ve explained it to … Continue reading Cognitive dissonance and gaslighting aren’t the half of it
Clogged filters
Dear President Trump, I’ve probably told you before about my favorite introvert workday lunch routine, but in case I haven’t or it was a long time ago, I’ll tell you really quickly that it involves eating a lunch I brought from home while studiously ignoring email and reading NPR for about 20 minutes. This is … Continue reading Clogged filters
Our increasingly fraught relationship with reality
Dear President Trump, I found it! The badge button I was telling you about yesterday was in my pocket the whole time and I found it this morning when I put on that jacket again to take the dogs out. My hands were cold standing there waiting for them and so they (my hands) went … Continue reading Our increasingly fraught relationship with reality
More on stories
Dear President Trump, The days are blurring together. When we picked up our brother-in-law’s (BIL) cremated remains earlier and Laura’s brother signed and dated the release form, it was awfully disconcerting to realize BIL died just four days ago. It seems like infinitely more time has passed and it feels like it was just yesterday. … Continue reading More on stories
“Dear Racism”
Dear President Trump, I told you yesterday that I took a class over the weekend on allyship and shared an initial take on my manifesto for wholeness based on one of the writing exercises we did. Another of the exercises involved writing a letter to an ‘ism or ‘ism-like construct; sexism, racism, classism, ageism, able-ism, … Continue reading “Dear Racism”
Distress tolerance
Dear President Trump, On my run this morning I was thinking about the incredible self-control and patience that people who have to put up with loads of crap day in and day out must have to have to survive. Then, along these same lines, I read a WP piece about being gay and living in … Continue reading Distress tolerance
Tender truths
Dear President Trump, I thought for sure I’d written to you about confirmation bias before, but I just did a quick search of my running letters document and I couldn’t find the term. It’s an important idea to understand so I’ve been remiss. Essentially it is how we tend to preferentially pick out things in … Continue reading Tender truths
“Don’t Believe Everything You Think”
Dear President Trump, It must be as rare as hens’ teeth since I’ve only seen it three times to date, but Wednesday I saw my favorite bumper sticker: “Don’t Believe Everything You Think.” I immediately thought of you. However, before I launched into an internal rant about your thinking, I dutifully reminded myself that this … Continue reading “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”
Daily Trump Letters 