Personal¶

Audiences for Touring Broadway Shows are Exhausting

I have reached the point where I started to dread going to see touring Broadway productions, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the performers on stage.

The productions themselves are often excellent. The casts are talented. The orchestras are strong. The staging and technical production is impressive given the realities of moving a major show from city to city.

The problem is increasingly the audiences.

Over the last few years, I have noticed a steady decline in theater etiquette at touring productions. Not occasional distractions. Not the inevitable cough or dropped Playbill. No, I mean a constant stream of behavior that would have been considered unacceptable not very long ago.

For example, yesterday was Beauty and the Beast at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. The Fox! People were still up and down all night, phones out the whole time. The woman in front of me had hers up maybe ninety-five percent of the show. Scrolling. Texting. I swear to God she was on the Applebee's website.

Earlier this year I saw Les Misérables in Fort Lauderdale. I traveled nine hours each way. Hadn't seen it in thirty years. I watched more people going back and forth to the bathroom than I watched the show.

That's not two bad nights, either. Phones stay out through half the show even after the announcements. Not a quick glance. More like someone at home half-watching Netflix while they scroll Instagram and wait on DoorDash. People talk at normal volume during scenes that matter. Whole rows get up two or three times in one act. Screens pop on because somebody needs to check a text or confirm what time it is. People rush out before the end like their team is losing and they're trying to beat traffic.

The part that gets me is most of them don't seem to notice they're ruining it for everyone around them.

A Long-Awaited Exhale

For most of my life, I thought everybody's brain was about like mine. Loud, busy, and hard to steer.

I figured other people were just better at keeping theirs in the lane. That was the story I had.

They could sit still. They could start the thing they didn't want to start. They could schedule the appointment, make the call, answer the email, finish a small task, then move on with their day like it hadn't cost them anything.

I thought I was lazy. Or weak in some way nobody had named out loud yet.

School taught me how to fake my way around it.

I could read a chapter three times and come away with almost nothing. Then a teacher would tell some sideways story in class, not even part of the lesson, and I'd remember the whole thing years later in detail. I could put off a paper until the night before, write it half-crazed at the kitchen table, and get a better grade than I did on the one I had tried to do the right way.

Nobody called that a pattern, not then.

Teachers said I was bright but scattered. Smart but unfocused. Capable of more, if only I would apply myself.

I heard that enough times that it stopped sounding like an opinion. It sounded like a verdict.

And I believed it.

With a Quiet Hand

I hope death comes like a quiet hand lifting me from the backseat, half-asleep, carrying me to my bed, where, tucked beneath familiar blankets and with eyes closed, the gentle voices of those I love pass through a cracked door, holding me a moment longer in their warmth as I slip into rest.

That is still the gentlest image I know for leaving this world. Not terror. Not noise. Not some grand and blinding revelation. Just the old mercy of being too tired to walk on your own and trusting that someone strong and familiar will carry you the rest of the way.

My memories of safety began in the backseat of a car at night. The tires humming. A light waiting at the end of the drive. Low voices drifting from the front seat while I hovered at the edge of sleep. Sometimes waking just enough to know we were home, then feeling someone lifting me before I ever had to stand and drifting deeper into sleep.

One arm under my knees, one hand at my back, my head against a shoulder.

No understanding the house in the dark. Only trusting the arms carrying me through it.

I hope it comes that way. I hope I am tucked beneath something familiar. I hope the voices of those I love reach me through a cracked door for one moment longer. I hope the end feels less like being taken than being brought home.

If I am granted that kind of mercy, it will be enough.

A Kind of Tiredness That Gets Into Everything

The moment that finally made me admit it wasn't dramatic at all. Early morning in the home office, I was just sitting in my chair and I said it out loud.

"I'm exhausted. I'm burning out."

Nothing was actively wrong in that particular second. No alarm going off. No argument. No fresh bad news. Just the usual screen glow, a chair I've spent too many hours in, a few tabs open, and that strange hush that sometimes falls in the middle of an ordinary day when your mind stops long enough to catch up with your body.

And what I realized, sitting there, wasn't a feeling so much as a weight. The weight of every small unfinished thing. Every obligation with my name on it. Every text I hadn't answered yet, every errand still waiting, every decision still asking to be made, every part of life that needed some steady portion of me I wasn't sure I had available.

It was one of those moments where the boundaries disappear. Work was in it, yes, but so was the house, the calendar, the relationships, the noise, the constant low-grade management of being a person alive in the world. I remember sitting there and thinking, very plainly, this is heavier than I've been willing to say out loud.

Busy != Important

I am not naturally good at time management. I can make a list, rearrange the list, rewrite the list in a better app, and still end the day with the uncomfortable feeling that I mostly attended to noise. The inbox moved. The calendar happened. A dozen small things got handled. The important work, the thing I knew mattered before the day started, somehow survived untouched.

That is the trap. Busy feels defensible. Busy gives you evidence. Busy lets you point at a full calendar and say, "See, I did things."

But a full calendar is not the same as a useful day.

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor best known for The Last Lecture, gave a famous talk on time management that included his adaptation of the Eisenhower/Covey Matrix. The model is simple: sort work by two questions.

• Is it important?
• Is it urgent?

That gives you four buckets.

%%{init: {"theme": "base", "themeVariables": {"background": "transparent", "primaryTextColor": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "secondaryTextColor": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "tertiaryTextColor": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "fontFamily": "Clarity City, sans-serif", "lineColor": "var(--md-default-fg-color--lighter)", "quadrant1Fill": "rgba(239, 68, 68, 0.18)", "quadrant1TextFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "quadrant2Fill": "rgba(34, 197, 94, 0.18)", "quadrant2TextFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "quadrant3Fill": "rgba(245, 158, 11, 0.18)", "quadrant3TextFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "quadrant4Fill": "rgba(100, 116, 139, 0.18)", "quadrant4TextFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "quadrantPointFill": "var(--md-accent-fg-color)", "quadrantPointTextFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "quadrantXAxisTextFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "quadrantYAxisTextFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color)", "quadrantInternalBorderStrokeFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color--lightest)", "quadrantExternalBorderStrokeFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color--lighter)", "quadrantTitleFill": "var(--md-default-fg-color)"}}}%%
quadrantChart
    title The Eisenhower/Covey Time Management Matrix
    x-axis Not Urgent --> Urgent
    y-axis Not Important --> Important
    quadrant-1 Do It Now
    quadrant-2 Schedule It
    quadrant-3 Delegate It
    quadrant-4 Do Not Do It
    "Crisis deadline": [0.86, 0.86]
    "Family emergency": [0.76, 0.78]
    "Weekly plan": [0.22, 0.86]
    "Exercise": [0.18, 0.72]
    "Skill practice": [0.34, 0.66]
    "FYI meeting": [0.74, 0.34]
    "Low-value ping": [0.84, 0.22]
    "Feed refresh loop": [0.18, 0.12]

What Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture Still Teaches Us Still

Some books comfort you. Others hold up a mirror.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch does a little of both.

Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2006, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By September 18, 2007, after learning the cancer had returned and that he had only months left to live, he gave his now-famous lecture, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."

The talk became a book, but the real reason it endures is simpler than its title suggests:

That distinction matters. A lot of writing about mortality becomes soft around the edges. Pausch did something better. He stayed funny, practical, and honest about disappointment, work, family, and the ways adults drift from what once made them feel alive.

Today, him words feel especially clarifying because modern life is crowded with noise. We optimize calendars, answer messages at red lights, and confuse urgency with importance. We get very efficient at moving and very unclear about where we are going.

Pausch's voice cuts through that. He keeps asking a hard, useful question:

Validity and Consequence

The porch light flickered in the stagnant heat.

"Well, that didn't feel a bit of good. What was you aimin' for with that?" I said, my skin prickling under the weight of her stare. "What were you aimin' for?"

I felt the hackles rise like a dog backed into a corner of the yard.

"Reckon you could find a different way to say your piece?" I stammered.

She spat into the dust, her eyes as cold and gray as a dry creek bed.

"Your feelin's are valid," she said, her voice a low rattle. "But your feelin's are your own, and I ain't sayin' they're wrong. Tho the way you went and acted on 'em sure is. Just 'cause you’re bleedin' don't give you the right to stain my floors."

The screen door slapped shut behind her.

Signal vs. Noise

I can lose twenty minutes in the space between one text message and putting my phone back down. It starts innocently enough: a quick reply, a glance at a notification, one email that looks like it might matter. Then a chat badge catches my eye, a tab is still open from earlier, something needs clearing, something else looks interesting, and suddenly I am standing in the middle of my own day wondering where time went.

That is the strange part about modern distraction. It rarely feels dramatic while it is happening. It feels ordinary. A buzz on the phone. A red dot on an app. A message that might need a reply. A scroll that promises to take only a second. Most of it is small enough to justify in the moment, but together it becomes a weather system.

Lately, I have been trying to separate what is asking for my attention from what deserves it.

Noise is the stuff that asks for my attention without earning it. It is the constant stream of alerts, chat notifications, text messages, newsletters I do not remember signing up for, promotional emails pretending to be useful, app badges, algorithmic feeds, and the endless scroll that turns curiosity into a kind of low-grade drift. Noise is not always bad in isolation. Sometimes it is funny, interesting, or even useful. Sometimes it is a person I care about, reaching out for a perfectly good reason. The problem is not that every interruption is worthless. The problem is that everything now arrives with the confidence of something urgent.

Signal is quieter. It is deep work that needs a little room before it opens up. It is an unhurried conversation with someone I love. It is reading something that changes the shape of my thinking. It is being present with my family, making something with my hands, going for a walk, writing, learning, listening, or simply letting my mind be still long enough to notice what I have been carrying.

The signal usually does not shout. That is why I have to protect it.

What the Red Clay Keeps

There are places in the South where mercy rots before it ripens. You can feel it in the sag of a porch beam, in the black water holding still beneath the cypress knees, in the red clay that clings to a boot like a hand unwilling to let go. Even in winter the land keeps its fever. Spanish moss hangs from the trees like old church lace gone gray with grief. Cicadas are long dead by January, but their husks still cling to fence posts and bark, the empty shape of a thing that sang itself raw and left its shell behind.

This is the country of crumbling sheds and cedar slats silvered by weather, where small lives are counted at daybreak and losses are folded into chores before breakfast. The air smells of ping, wet straw, heat, stale prayer, and the sour sweetness of something too long confined. Somewhere a mother lowers her voice because the truth sounds uglier spoken aloud. Somewhere a father studies the ground as though judgment might be written in the red clay. Before anything happens, you already know everybody here has inherited something they did not choose and will not escape.

What the Record Shows

There is a kind of performance that no longer feels like performance because you have been doing it so long that it has settled into your bones.

Each morning arrives with its own familiar ritual: the steady voice, the practiced calm, the expression that says, "I belong here." After enough years, it becomes automatic. People hear you speak, ask for your judgment, trust what you have to say. Your name appears on work that matters.

From the outside, it can look like certainty.

But beneath all of that, there can still be a quieter voice saying something else entirely:

It has a name, of course: Imposter Syndrome. That old habit of treating your own record like disputed evidence.

That voice is stubborn. It doesn't yield easily to experience, praise, or proof. It survives accomplishment with an almost insulting ease. It can sit in the same room with a long career, meaningful work, and the respect of other people, and remain completely unimpressed.

I've spent most of my professional life inside the orbit of very large institutions, places whose names carry their own kind of weather.

On paper, my record isn't especially mysterious. I've held serious roles. I've contributed to products and open source projects people actually use. I've written extensive designs and documentation that helped people do their jobs. I've even written a book. I've earned certifications and accreditations, sometimes less out of ambition than out of a private need to quiet the voice that keeps insisting I've not done enough. I've stood in rooms where others came to listen, and I've spoken at more technology conferences than I could name without stopping to count, somehow managing not to waste their time.