Fear, Flailing, and Figuring It Out

Plus: What delighted me and an update on my book draft.

Hi, it’s me.

Around the turn of the century (😂😭😵) Bryan became friends with a writer who is now a multiple national best selling author, and the story of how they met is interesting in today’s context of Elon Musk’s government take-over.

While meandering through a Christian bookstore, Bryan came across a book with an interesting title and cover—both a bit edgy for typical mainstream Christian book publications at the time. He bought it and took it home, where he noticed a website address of the book’s title printed on the back cover.

Bryan, being a tech guy who was early to creating websites, found it fascinating that this edgy book in a mainstream Christian bookstore already had a website when that sort of thing wasn’t the norm yet. But when he navigated to the web address, he discovered there was no website. In fact, the web address was available for anyone to purchase.

Concerned, Bryan emailed the publisher to let them know the domain address they published wasn’t secure. They gave him the brush-off and said they’d let the author know. A while later, the author reached out to Bryan via email to thank him for the heads up and let him know his publisher was handling it.

Bryan, sensing low urgency in the author’s tone, replied, “I don’t think you understand. I could buy your book’s domain and have porn on it in ten minutes.”

“Ohhhhhh….” he said, finally understanding. And that is how they became friends.

I tell this story because it’s the first thing that came to mind when I found out Musk had wrestled control of our nation’s payment system. And now Wired Magazine, a tech journalism publication, is reporting¹ that two sources confirmed Musk staffers have admin access, giving them the ability to rewrite code in those systems.

Now, I’m not an expert on cyber security or coding or government policies and procedures, but I have a rudimentary technical understanding that this is a Very Concerning Situation with potentially devastating security risks. We’re in, I could buy this domain and fuck up your shit territory.

The Oceans Eleven gang would be impressed with this heist.

Prevailing advice has been to not spiral into despair and paralysis over the sheer volume of information coming at us, but to focus on a few issues and figure out what we can personally do. I’m pretending I know how to do this, but I don’t actually know how to do this.

But let’s set aside *gestures at the world* for a moment….

What delighted you this week? I’ll go first: I just got home from my first hot yoga class in eight years, and I FEEL GREAT. I love hot hatha, and I haven’t gone in forever because {reasons}, but I’m so glad to be going back.

I hope you are well.

Until next time,

Jen

p.s. By the way, I’m sorry to be so current-eventy this week. I don’t know how to compartmentalize my life by not writing stuff like this. But honestly? The newsletter’s tagline is personal stories about fear, flailing, and figuring it out…and, well, I’m doing a lot of fearing, flailing, and figuring it out right now.

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What’s Happening With My Book Draft

I’m writing a memoir about parenting for those who are a parent or have a parent.

It explores family culture—both the ones my husband Bryan and I grew up in, and the one we created with our own kids. I write about the tricky and sometimes uncomfortable conversations that often come up in parenting, including topics like death, faith, racism, sex, and mental health, among others. It’s kinda funny, a little irreverent, and super duper honest about the hard stuff.

My goal is to finish the final few chapters of my shitty first draft by April, so I can take a break to enjoy spring in my garden and figure out my next move on the manuscript.

Here’s an update: I’ve written about 🥳 1,000 words per week 🥳 since the beginning of January (give or take)! I ghosted you on a few editions of this newsletter in the process, but you promised you’d be okay with that. 😂 At the encouragement of my son, who’s also writing a book, I switched to tracking a weekly word count goal instead of time spent writing. This has helped reset my expectations every time I sit down to write—if I meet my goal in two hours, I stop; if I’m struggling, I take a break and come back later. This feels more rewards-based instead of, I don’t know, prison based?

Celebrate with me because yay we’re excited!

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What’s Happening In My Garden This Week

It’s snowing in Seattle! I love the winter garden.

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Stay In Touch

1. “Despite reporting that suggests that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.” (WIRED, Feb 4. 2024)