I’m All Lost In, #80: Planning; Paying; and Visiting.

I’m All Lost in…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#80

1) Planning (ahead)

It’s Spring. And the 65 degree weather has inspired me to seize the day. Suddenly I’m planning the future.

This is a notable change in M.O. for me. I’m someone who relies on the structure of recurring weekly rituals as a repetitive bass line for improvising the week. From working out of PubliCola’s Philip Marlowe-sized office in Pioneer Square every “Playpen Wednesday” to submitting my poetry every “Submission Sunday” to writing this very column every Friday after work at Otherworld Wine Bar over the ambient din of snobby DJs and groups of young tech employees flirting with each other, I riff on these weekly set pieces to score my week in real time.

Now, however, slowly but surely, I’m taking control of my time. For starters, I proactively lock down Saturday mornings in advance, starting on Tuesday when I log onto the Seattle Parks & Recreation website and make a tennis court reservation. Then, I send out a “first dibs” bat signal to the small, group-text thread I’ve organized of potential opponents; last Saturday I ended up playing T. Suarez, a guy my age from work. He’s a gracious and sincere tennis pro type who still plays in local tournaments. I’d never faced off against someone who hits as hard, low, fast, and tricky as him. He beat me 6-0, 6-0. But it was a blast. With his streak of one-two-punch serve/crosscourt return winners, friendly tips, zoom-in advice on my serve, and a plastic bucket of Penns (it was too damp out for his ball machine, apparently), I got a welcomed and de facto tennis lesson.

Volunteer Park, Lower Court 3, 4/19/25

This new micro bit of calendaring is paying off; the courts have been slammed lately with hopeful duos showing up, racket bags in tow, thinking they’ll be able to just grab a court. Well, good luck comes to those who plan, and reservation in hand, I, for one, have been starting every Saturday with a morning tennis match.

This small-dose of planning also seems emblematic of a grander trend. Just this week, after years of sneaking out of their invites, I cordially RSVP’d to hippie technocrat nonprofit Futurewise’s annual fundraiser for May 24th; it’s at a sustainable ag co-operative farm in Woodinville. I also bought tickets to a May 27 concert at WAMU Theater. I’m seeing moody psychedelic guitar meditators, Khruangbin; they’ve been in heavy rotation in my after-hours apartment ever since I came upon their lulling jams late last month.

There’s also some bigger planning afoot: I bought tickets to the Mubadala Citi DC Open, the 500 level pro tennis tournament in DC, my hometown where I’ll also visit my mom and then take Amtrak up to NYC for the weekend. I sent a buzzing email to my New York pals this week giving them details.

This hardly counts as spreadsheet neurosis, but something about the delicious longer hours has me wanting to take hold of them.

2) Paying

Easygoing places that should know better—Hood Famous Cafe in the ID and Aviv Hummus Bar on 15th Ave. E. in Capitol Hill being the latest offenders—are making dining out feel like cyborg capitalism closing in.

Call me a Luddite, and I am a bit of one. But when an otherwise cozy joint insists customers become staff (host, waiter, and front counter) by scanning a QR code to access the menu to fill out an order to pay on your phone, the mood goes from night out to the “And begin” moment during a final exam.

Even young, tech savvy XDX (she works at Apple), who I met for dinner at our old favorite Aviv on Tuesday night, was flummoxed by the new cranky ordering interface. The cramped iPhone process led to a rushed and discombobulated order that was more us throwing our hands up in exasperation than perusing the baba ghanoush.

The computations of capitalism are even more dispiriting at a daily oasis like a coffee shop as yet another part of the day becomes an iPhone-forward experience and yet another set of employees becomes displaced. Typing your name, address, billing address, credit card expiration date, and CCV onto a touchy phone-screen app to simply pay for a morning cup of coffee kind of defeats the pleasure of stopping in for a morning cup of coffee. That is to say, dehumanizing restaurants and coffee shops is the opposite of restaurants and coffee shops.

3) Visiting (often)

I joined Bluesky in August 2023 in a fit to crash Elon Musk. But posting on Bluesky seemed kind of like going with the salad instead of the tater tots. And it didn’t help that the site seemed a bit needy with those buy-one-get-one-free invite pleas.

While I certainly sensed an urgent increase in traffic immediately after Trump’s election, Bluesky still didn’t feel like a main arterial.

This week, I noticed that has changed. Bluesky is suddenly the first place I visit (repeatedly) daily—not the NYT anymore, nor my email, Instagram, Facebook, nor, as I was doing passively and questionably in 2024, TikTok.

I can’t say I’m addicted or smitten with anyone on Bluesky (so, no must-follow recs yet) though I do have my favorites: M. Nolan Gray , Jamelle Bouie, Ryan Packer, David Roberts, Erica C. Barnett’s dispatches from city hall, of course, and God bless NYT Pitchbot, whose mind games must baffle the NYT’s stumbling-to-understand-what-the-problem-is editors.

….

In conclusion this week, I leave you with

… the Overheard Quote of the Week from J—, a barista at Fuel, the airy coffee shop on my block (where they don’t use QR codes to place orders). She was filling in a coworker about an apparently problematic fellow and this jumped out: “He goes to Burning Man. I feel like that already explains a lot.”

…the Local Politics Quote of the Week from Kirk Hovenkotter, the executive director at pro-transit nonprofit Transportation Choices Coalition. He was doing the fundraising pitch at King County Executive candidate Claudia Balducci’s campaign kickoff breakfast. After hyping her successful decades-long fight to bring light rail to the Microsoft suburbs he noted sly: “There’s Bellevue city council video to prove it.”

….and a Follow-up item. In last week’s post I wrote: “Not only do I now need to write a new PubliCola column about this unpave-paradise provision, but the concept of redeveloping park & rides into housing seems like a prompt for a poem as well.”

I didn’t write the poem, but I did write the PubliCola column.

“Gaining this flexibility,” Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer said, “would be really important to help both the state and King County Metro achieve their shared goals around transit oriented development and building housing conveniently near frequent and reliable transit service.”

You don’t have to convince me, Jeff. Turning parking into housing is an urbanist’s version of turning swords into ploughshares.