A recent travel experience did not go as I expected.

I did not discover until I was in the air that the twenty-four hours of flight ahead of me would be without Internet.

Once back on the ground, I suffered the worst jet lag I’ve ever experienced — multiple nights of lying awake for hours at a stretch, longing desperately for sleep.

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Even as a college student, the only practical career I could visualize for myself was to be a teacher.

I didn’t know much about other careers, and my obsession with music precluded my pursuit of even learning about them. So when I went to college, it was to study music education — a worthy compromise.

I never could have imagined where I’d end up. After all, when I was a kid, there was no Internet.

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It’s pretty hard not to care what people think.

For deep, evolutionary reasons, we humans associate rejection with death. No one wants to be abandoned by the tribe and left cold, hungry, and alone in the forest.

But caring how many people are paying attention -- that’s a modern phenomenon. Our ancestors, living in small groups, probably wouldn’t have been able to conceptualize metrics like Amazon sales rankings, subscriber count, or ticket sales.

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Among Aimee Mann’s many beautifully poignant songs, there’s one called “Save Me,” that includes the lyric, “Can you save me from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they could never love anyone?”

And there’s a similar sentiment expressed in “Ray,” from her 1995 album “I’m with Stupid”: “I think I know another lonely exile when I see one/And you appear to be one.”

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I have had an uneven tennis season.

I started back to the sport at the end of February and benefited from being in Atlanta, a tennis mecca if there ever was one. I had lost most of my tennis friends when I moved away shortly before the pandemic, but I worked my way up to playing five or six days a week through a combination of clinics, flex league matches, and casual play with friends and family.

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