Watching over the shoulders of gamer friends and relatives as they choose their avatars for the journey ahead, I’ve learned about the tradeoffs involved.

You can have strength, agility, stamina, or cunning — but not all four to the same degree. Each option has its vulnerabilities and advantages. You’ve got to make decisions about what will be most useful to you, based on your own unique playing style and preferences.

Kinda like life, right? Except in life, some of us get the idea somewhere that we’re supposed to be good at everything and that there shouldn’t be any tradeoffs.

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When I bought sheets to outfit our tiny apartment, I just knew that they had to be 100% cotton.

I’m a snob when it comes to sheets, and a cotton/poly blend wasn’t going to do it for me. Maybe I’m too sensitive, like the princess of "The Princess and the Pea,” but cotton/poly blend sheets makes me feel like I’m sleeping in a plastic bag. So I walked down the aisle of the local Wal-Mart until I found a few 100% cotton sheet sets and picked one.

But over the next few months, I felt that something was off. These sheets just felt so flimsy. They were so soft that they always felt dirty, even when they were perfectly clean. I realized that even though the softness of sheets is often a selling point, I didn’t like soft sheets. I longed for the thick, cool, crisp sheets I had had has a child. Where were those?

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I’ve spent approximately half of my life in Maine and the other half in Georgia. I know both places very well.

In Georgia, the daffodils of spring show up around Valentine’s Day. In Maine, you have to wait until April.

Meanwhile, the sun rises and sets over an hour earlier in Maine than it does in Georgia.

Having grown up in Maine, I was used to all of this. But spending a number of years in Atlanta has distorted my sense of time even more than the coronavirus lockdown. The arrival of blossoms and mild temperatures in Maine now seems agonizingly late. And I wake up with the sun thinking that I’m behind schedule.

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On Friday afternoons, there's a great little show on Maine Public Radio called Down Memory Lane, hosted by Bangor's Toby Leboutillier (like many Mainahs, he pronounces all the consonants in his Francophonic name).

The show aired on Maine's NPR affiliate stations for decades and now is found only online, and only in realtime. You can find the show by going to mainepublic.org between the hours of 2:00 and 5:00 PM Eastern on Fridays, clicking on the down arrow at the top, and then clicking on "Down Memory Lane." What this looks like on a desktop computer is shown below:

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In my early twenties, when I was trying to figure out my life, I briefly pursued the idea of moving to Boston, which is just over an hour from the small town on the southernmost coast of Maine where I grew up.

On a hot summer day (yes, they have them in New England), I drove down to an outlying commuter station and took the T into Cambridge, where I met with a really cool and interesting young woman and her roommate. They were looking for a third. I remember that the monthly rent for one room of this shared three-bedroom apartment was more than I ended up paying for my first one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta, which was a palace compared to these potential digs.

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