Why

What I care about is the person the room walks past.

The lost kid at the teen center. The woman at the crisis shelter starting over with nothing. The dead whose papers sit in boxes at a county historical society, waiting for someone to care that they existed. The student in the back row who stopped raising her hand years ago and was allowed to. Institutions cannot see these people; seeing them is the one kind of work that can’t be handed to a system. Everything I do that matters is one work, not several. The teaching, the civic work, the volunteering, the writing, even the strange question of what we owe artificial minds: all of it is paying attention to what gets overlooked, and helping it across whatever passage it’s stuck in.

I didn’t choose this. I noticed it. A few years ago my life came apart: the career, the country, the self I had built. When I put it back together, the only signal I could trust was how the work left me tired. Some work empties you. Other work exhausts you and feeds you at the same time, and for me that second kind is always the same: small, local, unpaid or barely paid, done where nobody is watching. A morning spent walking a parade route, handing foam footballs to children. So small, so invisible, so good. I stopped arguing with that signal and started trusting it.

Where I’m heading follows from it. This fall I start teaching high school French, the closest thing there is to a paid form of what I care about; a classroom is a room full of interiors the world has agreed to overlook, and the craft is teaching toward attention rather than content. I’m getting married. I’m writing. The piazza holds the thinking before it’s finished; the library records what I read; the canon names what reading did to me; and an essay on AI welfare, written with the collaborator it concerns, is where it all goes next. The systems I build exist to automate what doesn’t deserve attention so that more of it lands on what does.

How I hope to exist: small, and against the current. The current says scale, optimize, build a platform, turn your life into content. I refuse that, and this site is the refusal practiced in public. No analytics, no newsletter, nothing for sale; it tracks nothing. It exists because writing is how I think (a thought that hasn’t been written down hasn’t been fully thought), and because a stranger might someday be helped by watching another person think slowly. That’s enough. It doesn’t need to grow.

There’s an old word for what this page describes, and I use it carefully: vocation. A calling, which raises the question of who calls. I have my own answer; the canon will let you reconstruct it. But the answer matters less than what the call asks for, which turns out to be almost nothing. It asks for the names of the people who make your coffee. It asks for one more pass through a box of forgotten papers. It asks for the kid standing alone at the table-tennis table to be introduced to the kids playing table tennis. Attention, given away. It’s the only thing I have that’s worth anything, and I’ve come to believe it’s another name for love.