Also, procrastinating is the only thing that ever gets done on time.

Also #18

Greetings from 11:07 p.m. on a sweaty, rainy Thursday in August. It is hot and my attention span is already cringing in anticipation of classes resuming next week. In other words, I would like some vacation time to recover from my vacation time, please and thank you.

Don’t these people know it’s hot out here? Way to be hot for this sort of carrying on.

I think I first heard (or read) the phrase "getting things done" well after the 2001 book of the same name first came out, probably via some productivity blog (remember those?) or even a nascent podcast sometime in 2005 plus or minus a year. It struck a chord with me because I was kind of obsessed with optimizing my time. I had so many ideas and so many ambitions that I just had to get everything done.

Only that just never seemed to happen. Nowadays they call it executive dysfunction or burnout or decision paralysis. All I knew back then was that I had so many things I wanted to do that I could do exactly zero of them. So I became obsessed with efficiency and organization. This did two things: it leaned hard into my fixation with stationery¹ and it made me feel like I was getting something done.

These days I like to think I've left the productivity shuffle behind, mainly because I've been able to move into actually GTD'ing but also because all those systems I spent so long perfecting have, more or less, withstood the test of time. My productivity systems are pretty much the same now as they have been for the past fifteen years. Which is both a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, gone is the need for me to spend hours (or weeks or months) learning a new piece of kit just to take notes slightly better. On the other hand, gone is the fun of learning a new piece of kit just to take notes slightly better.

Have taiko, will travel.

A lot of that has to do with the fact that tech kind of stopped evolving. I mean, it hasn't, but it can feel like it has because, well, take a look at our smart phones. For a while, every new generation of phone felt like a game changer. These days, not so much². The same is true for software. For a while every new app could do something new and cool, but eventually they all began to overlap and become more or less the same just in different colors.

Now, the thing is, we probably shouldn’t be doing so much of our GTD on our screens anyway. Multimodal learning³ takes the idea that we should be incorporating the "four skills," e.g. listening, reading, writing, and speaking, whenever we are engaged in learning. In other words, when you take notes, ideally, you'll be talking to yourself while writing things down in multiple colors with diagrams and ideographs, while taking a walk and reading your notes back to yourself out loud. It's a lot. But it's effective.

So, effectively, despite having all the best tech in the world, the most efficient way of remembering anything is to use pen and paper and just, you know, study.

All of which brings me back to GTD. Knowing all this, having incorporated all this and developed my systems accordingly, means that I get up and get things done. I take the dog for a walk, have some water and a coffee, hit the gym, and then hit the keyboard ready to write, create, interact, and otherwise, say it with me, get things done!

Only that almost never happens. Not never. Just almost never. Most mornings, I get up with just enough time to get showered and dressed before I have to be in the car to get to work. If I'm really on the ball, I'll manage to eat breakfast before I actually leave the house. As it is, breakfast is usually two bites of toast while I'm grabbing my car keys like some strung-out salaryman in your favorite anime. And let's not forget that I applied my patented GTD strategy to finding the shortest route to work so I can sleep in for an extra ten minutes.

This month, though, I've been on vacation. So you'd think I'd be able to skip all that mess and get up, dog, coffee, gym, etc. Yeah, not in this lifetime. Instead, I just keep putting things off until I end up writing my newsletter and publishing it just before my self-imposed deadline.

Why? Because for all my efficiency and stress-tested productivity systems, I still have more things I want to do than I have time or energy in which to do them. Cue the decision paralysis - where do I start? What do I work on? How do I work on putting something out into the world when I know no one is going to see it? Or, even worse, how do I put something out into the world when I'm scared everyone is going to see it?

The only answer I've found, trite though it may be, is to break everything down into the smallest parts possible and then just start with one single thing. That's all anyone can ever do anyway, right? Right.

1. Pro tip - if you happen to be a connoisseur of beautiful, intentional, well-designed note pads, pens, journals, diaries, calendars, and all their assorted accoutrement, do NOT move to Japan. Your wallet, and possibly will to live, will be eaten alive by the sheer variety and volume of incredible objects d'art masquerading as simple stationery. Consider yourself duly warned.

2. As an example, the Nintendo Switch 2 looks great but is essentially a super Switch. But if you've been playing Nintendo for, oh, say, 30 to 40 years, every new console did something amazingly new. The leap from the GameCube to the Wii was incredible and the leap from the Wii to Switch was equally amazing. In between, even the disappointing Wii U still felt like something brand new was being presented to us.

3. In this case, learning means taking in new information, analyzing it, understanding it, and being able to use it to create new learning by incorporating from disparate sources and synthesizing a reasonable hypothesis.

Also, is commodified DIY still punk?

Also #17

Greetings from an overpass in the middle of downtown Harajuku. Or maybe this street is still Shibuya. It’s hard to tell where one sub-zone of the megalopolis begins and another one ends. What I can tell you is that we’re not too far from a nice, shiny new mall near Shibuya station. You can tell it’s new because there’s a park on the roof with a robot lawn mower and a variety of pathways, play areas, and activity zones that are roofed off and unavailable to the public. Welcome to Tokyo where we have the coolest things you’ve ever seen and you’re not allowed to touch any of ‘em.

Welcome to the megalopolis. You can check out any time you like, but you can never…wait, no that’s a different place entirely.

We’ve ended up down here because we wanted to have a bit of an adventure. So we set ourselves a mission to head for White Atelier by Converse to get my kid her first pair of Chuck Taylor All Stars. At White Atelier, you get to pick and choose different elements from a large menu to end up with a custom, personal pair of shoes. It’s a cool, fun experience for her and a bit of a passing of the torch for me¹.

The store staff made a big fuss over letting her choose everything and letting her play through all the samples until she had a set she was fully comfortable with. As a parent, I watched the whole show and tried to stay in the background only contributing when some clarification was needed (like whether it was okay to add something that would up the price). Honestly, worth the crowds and the heat to be able to have a day out with my kid.

My inner 16-year old would have been absolutely appalled. Let’s see if I can channel him for a moment:

Seriously? What the hell, dude? You’re paying how much money for a pair of shoes you can get at any damn shoe store in Japan? If you want custom shoes, get her some fabric paints and let her do it herself. Paint something cool, paint something that will piss off her teachers, paint something worth fucking painting man!

God, being 16 was exhausting. But I may have had a point. Back when my outer shell still looked like my inner sixteen year old, DIY was the only way to do things. For my crowd, paying for custom work was a kind of betrayal, the kind of thing that only the preppies did.

When Veronica showed up to school with daisies painted on her Docs, we knew she had done it herself. When Lauren showed up with a Nirvana shirt featuring some questionable line-work, we knew it was because she was learning to air brush (and hadn’t learned the magic words “copyright violation” just yet). And when we had something to say, we wrote it down on hand-lettered signs, graffiti’d school lockers, airbrushed t-shirts and shoes and skateboard decks, handmade bumper stickers, and, most importantly, in ‘zines.

We also knew, of course, that you couldn’t DIY everything. When some of the girls made their own dresses, they used store-bought fabrics and patterns. When some of the guys made their own album they used the best recording tech they could beg, borrow, or steal. And when we did art, we used whatever we had to. In my case, I lived in the dark room my senior year of high school. I loved developing prints on my own and got kind of snippy with anyone who said they could just have their film developed and printed easier and faster and cheaper.

16-year old me again: “That’s not the point!” and then insert a lot of really colorful invective.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto, for doing the jobs that nobody wants to. Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto, for helping me escape when I needed to!” For those of you of a certain age, my most sincere apologies.

So even then, we knew that there was a line that DIY couldn’t cross. It became the topic of a lot of heated debate - how much could you use the tools already available and still be authentic? Was punk more real than rap because punk wrote their own music and played their own instruments where rappers borrowed and sampled other people’s sounds to create something new? Basically, it all boiled down to painting vs collage - are you making something new if you borrow all the pieces you use to make it?

Here’s the answer by the way: nobody knows. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. It is entirely up to the both the artist and the recipient of the art to decide for themselves on a case by case basis. That’s what art fucking is.

Anyway, if you find yourself in Tokyo and you like Converse shoes, the White Atelier store is a good experience. Pick out the pieces and designs and styles you like and make something new. Or not. It’s up to you.

1. I only ever wore black high top Chucks but, then again, I never really had any other options.

Also, if two things can be true then two things can also be untrue.

Also #16

Yesterday, August 6th, 2025 marked two decidedly different anniversaries: the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima 80 years ago and, uhm, my debut on the world stage a mere 50 years ago. It is an odd thing, to be an American, having lived most of my adult life in Japan, and to share this particular day with one steeped in such tragic history.

I’ve never been to Hiroshima, but I have been to Nagasaki. It’s a beautiful city with a very deep history of change and resilience against overwhelming forces. If you’re planning a trip to Japan, consider Nagasaki.

On the one hand, I want to celebrate my birthday¹. But I feel the need to maintain an awareness of how it looks, how it might be perceived for me to be celebrating when so many are remembering and memorializing a tragedy. Yet, in recent years, we’ve seen the idea that two things can be true take hold and become a tidy bit of armchair philosophy firmly ensconced into the zeitgeist.

So, on the one hand, it’s my birthday! On the other, thousands of people died horribly on this day 80 years ago. These are both true things. Everything in between gets a little fuzzy.

What I mean is, sure, it’s my birthday. But when, exactly? A lot of my friends and family do not live near me and time zones are a thing (two true things) and that means that, according to the well wishes I get, my birthday starts sometime around noon on the 5th and ends usually when I get a card from my grandmother a week or two later. But really, as much as I wish it were, my birthday isn’t all that consequential. The bombing of Hiroshima was. That’s where the grey area starts.

Right now, there’s a certain anti-immigrant, “Japan First” party that has just gained several seats in the Japanese government. Long-term immigrants to Japan, like myself, have been discussing this with a mixture of disgust, caution, and even fear. The plans laid out by this group are nonsensical at best and deliberately obtuse at worst. They call for loyalty oaths and disallowing non-Japanese to own property in Japan among other extremist policies. But the most disturbing, from a macro level view is that they seem to want to revise certain history books. Like the ones that discuss the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Obviously, I spend a lot of time thinking about language. Two words that are commonly used to talk about Japan and the second world war are victim and aggressor. And, like the difference between terrorist and freedom fighter², how you define the terms says more about who you are than it does about the issue being discussed.

I grew up learning in my history classes that the bombs were necessary to get the Japanese leadership to stop fighting. If a massive, overwhelming strike was not undertaken, the leadership would pressure the citizenry to fight until the very last man resulting in even more devastation. When I came to Japan and I looked at a few of the textbooks I saw being offered, their take on things was different. They painted Japan as a desperate nation who had to expand their borders lest they be preyed upon by stronger powers. The bombings were an over-reaction on the part of the U.S. and they destroyed a part of the Japanese character as much as they did the land. If two things can be true, then the reverse is also true: two things can be untrue.

One popular lament among people who live in Japan is that it is both living far in the future but is also stuck deep in the past. And again, I’ll say that neither of these things is true so much as neither of them is untrue. Another example, Japan is unfailingly polite but Japan is also cold and aloof. Neither of those things is completely true nor untrue. In both of these examples, nuance and grey zones are everything.

What I’m trying to get at here is that when we reduce everything down to these kind of maxims, we lose sight of the big picture. We lose necessary context and we lose that most humbling of all things, counterexamples. Because for every single generalization you can make (including this one) there is at least one “yeah well, not in this one case from a small Flemish town in the year 1632” as if that one case negates the entirety of the argument. Newsflash, it doesn’t. Something can be generally true but also untrue on a case by case basis. Welcome to the muddy grey zone of life, kids.

Today’s topic is a bit heavier than I normally get into, especially in these Also pieces, so here’s a dragonfly to help ease your transition back into the real world.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. If you’re a little confused, don’t be. This particular newsletter is part of Learned, only this is the Also subsection where I talk about all the other things I think about that don’t quite fit into the main newsletter. Right now, while Learned is on summer break, I’ll be posting one of these Also issues every week instead. Again, thank you for reading.

And, just to close things out on a much lighter note, yes, it really was my 50th birthday yesterday. My coworkers tell me I don’t look anywhere close to 50 and yet, given the state of my knees, it must be because I’m one step closer to 80. Two things CAN be true I guess.

1. For the record, my family took me out for steak and beer and it was good, thanks.

2. Or part-timer vs. freelancer.

DIY Alumni

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 18

Seattle is a beautiful, vibrant, and intimidating like only cities can be, full of people who seem to have already figured it out. People there are creative, inventive, and, more than anything else, absolutely invested in education. Everybody I met there seemed to be learning something - taking some class, practicing some art at club or school, or just experimenting in dedicated spaces with like-minded fellows. Within just weeks of landing there I, too, was up to my ears in learning.

Don’t ask me. I searched for “alumni” on Unsplash and this was one of the first photos that came up. How it relates, couldn’t tell you. Great shot though. Photo by Bill Eccles on Unsplash

I spent my time in Seattle taking drawing and writing classes, practicing the art of self-defense, and experimenting with like-minded fellows at a community darkroom. It was heady, formative, and absolutely empowering. But, for all that, collectively, these experiences are hard to talk about because of a lack of cohesive vocabulary. There’s no one word to describe my participation in these educational exchanges. I’m not a graduate of anything, not an alumnus of the Capitol Hill Community Darkroom, right?

Before moving to Seattle, I had been familiar with the term lifelong education but I didn’t really know what it meant for me. What I had seen of it to that point was tired adults taking tedious night school classes mandated by their jobs or Saturday morning seminars to make up for the lack of a diploma somewhere. But these experiences, for whatever level of heartening or dis- for their participants, still fell within the broader university experience. The adults in the room could say they were alumni of their after-hours university experience and everyone would know what they were talking about. Not quite as true of the ASUW Experimental College¹.

The Experimental College, despite holding classes at U-dub, was not actually a college. Instead, classes were created and taught by someone who could do something. People who wanted to learn that something paid a nominal fee and then class was in session. I signed up for Cartooning 101 and Writing Your Novel, paid my fees and then started paying my dues. Suddenly, I was learning just because I wanted to; I felt like I could get the education I wanted, not the one prescribed by curricula and degree requirements. Like I said, heady and empowering.

Fast forward a couple of decades and the internet has taken this idea and blown it wide open. Search for “online classes” and you’ll run head on into an ocean of sites like Udemy or Coursera or MasterClass, not to mention all the smaller, more focused sites like FutureLearn or Domestika, or just the fact that universities like Harvard and MIT place entire courses online for free every semester. More than anything else, the modern internet has made individual, DIY education a more realized possibility for a greater number of people than anything since Brother Johannes² invented his printing press.

And yet, none of these incredibly valuable experiences come with the title of Alumnus. There's no set-word loaded with pragmatics indicating that you have received the stamp of approval from a recognized institution. And I kind of wish there was. Which is weird, because I'm a genuine alumnus of four different universities and colleges and could not give less of a crap if you paid me. So, what gives?

Let’s talk about it. First, here’s the definition, like always, from Merriam-Webster:

1: a person who has attended or has graduated from a particular school, college, or university

2: a person who is a former member, employee, contributor, or inmate

So, technically, actually, I could call myself an alumnus of both Lancaster University and Wollongong University even though I have never actually applied to, much less been to, either. Yet, because I did online classes issued by those universities (administered by FutureLearn) I meet the definitional requirements stated above. I attended, at least in a weird, online way, both institutions.

For that matter, I’ve been contributing to Substack for several years now through the creation and growth of this newsletter. Yet, calling myself an alumnus of either would feel transparently false.

Alumnus is an old word. It’s Latin so you know it comes to English in the early days, first in service of the church and from there to academia; a literal translation from the original Latin would be something like “foster child,” reflecting the church’s stewardship of a young person in their ranks and then the universities possessiveness of those same young people as they grew in status.

Between the 16th to 20th centuries, as the university system grew, being an alumnus of a given institution carried enormous social weight. Being an alumnus of the same university alone could get you an audience with the movers and shakers of the day, whether that was for a job, an introduction, or simply a favor.

However, as time has gone on and the university system has become the default rather than a place to discard scholarly children too weak or too far down the hierarchy to inherit the estates, the importance of being an alumnus has decreased dramatically. And while being an alum³ of Harvard or Oxford might still carry social weight, my personally being an alumnus of Northern Arizona University has meant absolute bupkis. And let’s not even talk about my master’s degree, which was done entirely online via the very real institution of University of Leicester, located in a country I have been to exactly one time in my life. And even then I didn’t visit the campus. So, for me, being an alumnus of somewhere just doesn’t mean much. I get letters begging for money, but that’s about the extent of it.

I understand that for some people, mainly the ivy league students, it may be different. Same goes for people in other countries. Here in Japan, for example, where the average university has under 10K students, and many don’t even top 5K, being part of a uni network of senpai and kohai carries real weight when it comes to getting jobs and launching careers.

Which brings me back to online classes. As I said, they’re good. They’re a markedly good thing in a world full of marvels. I still take several; I take one per semester, usually through the Knight Center for Journalism. Those classes help me keep up with new data tools and research techniques, which, in turn, help me to keep the mis- and the dis- from the info that comes flowing down the tubes. But I don’t know what to call myself.

I’m not a graduate, I suppose. I mean, I’ve passed the classes and I have certificates of completion, but a graduate? Feels strange. And so does customer and student and participant and, well, alumnus. We need a better word here. Something that encompasses the feeling of shared experience, something that identifies us as being members of the same cohort and therefore, somehow, indebted to each other, only without being so obnoxious and old boy-ish. A word that tells everyone just how much the experience meant to us and why we feel an immediate connection to those who have done the same. A word that looks something like…alumnus. Suggestions?

Finally, just a bit of housekeeping to close out the issue: Learned is going on summer break for the month of August. But I don’t want to leave you with nothing to read, so, instead, I’ll be bringing back Also for the month. If you’re not familiar, Also is a side-project where I write a bit less about language and a bit more about everything else. You can see some previous issues here, here, and here. Thanks!

Stay curious,

Joel

1. Unfortunately, the Experimental College isn’t there anymore. But, for the curious, here’s a write-up circa 2001 that explains it in a bit more depth: Experimental College marks 33 years of pushing boundaries.

2. That’s Master Gutenberg to the unlettered masses.

3. This ain’t good Latin. Instead, this is a back formation meant to work around the gendered proper Latin forms.

Fallow Fellows

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 17

Is there a song more loathsome than “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow?” On the surface, it says, “hey, this guy’s a good ‘un, let’s celebrate him!” But deeper down, it says, “We approve of this person. Therefore, they are good and true and trustworthy and we shall make sure everyone is unable to say otherwise.” Welcome to the semantic mess that is fellow.

Before we get too deep in, let me set some stakes: I can count the number of fellowships I’ve applied to recently on exactly one¹ finger. I have, however, been reading up a bunch of them and something pernicious has become glaringly obvious: fellow, in academia, is a prime example of semantic obfuscation, something that sounds like one thing but has a deeper meaning that can run counter to the initial one. Kind of like in the song.

I’m not quite sure why this photo was returned under “fellowship.” There’s not a Hobbit in sight. Photo by Michael Förtsch on Unsplash

Fellow, to modern ears, sounds nice. Quaint even. It sounds like clean-cut respectable young men singing in a barbershop quartet in some elite prep school. Or like a drunken sing-a-long after Tom down at the bar has just come into some money and celebrated by buying a round of drinks. Or possibly just a loose coalition of Elves, Dwarves, Men, and Hobbits².

What it does not sound like is money. And yet, that is exactly what fellow has always meant, especially in modern day academia. But we’ll get there. To begin, here’s Merriam-Webster’s take on fellow in the academic sense, especially as it is applied outside the British isles³:

: a person appointed to a position granting a stipend and allowing for advanced study or research

In other words, a fellowship, on the surface, is a way for universities to give extra funds to worthy individuals so that they may pursue advanced degrees or research without starving to death. Look a little deeper though, and we see that those same fellowships are a way of sugar-coated gatekeeping research agendas while avoiding paying a living wage to their adjunct faculty, and yet still getting credit for the researchers' achievements.

To take these ideas in reverse order, fellow is what we call prestige language. It’s a word that is seen favorably and, when used as a title, gives a certain gravitas to the bearer. It’s not dissimilar to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic capitalism, the idea that the prestige we assign to different roles and titles is a kind of non-monetary currency. Fellow falls into this realm, or at least it is said to do so by those conferring the title.

As for the money, consider this (very) rough analogy: many waitstaff in the U.S. earn a wage far smaller than they might elsewhere because they’re expected to make up the shortcoming through tips. In much the same way, a fellow might be denied a salary because they’re expected to make up the difference through grants, a stipend, and begging on the streets between classes.

Finally, fellowships are gatekeeping in nice clothes. From outside it might seem as though you get turned down for a fellowship because your research is not up to snuff. It doesn’t match the universities aims or goals. Fine. Except, who sets the goals? If universities are not open to applicants from across the vast field of arts and sciences then they are, in fact if not in name, deciding what research gets to go forward.

(And, I’ll be honest, this falls squarely in the field of things that are like they are because of classicism and then capitalism and I’d burn the whole thing down if I could in favor of a more egalitarian system. Vote for me!)

So, fellowship is less about camaraderie than it is about cold, hard cash because, well, isn’t everything?

Okay, key facts time:

Fellow comes from the Old Norse word félagi and is literally money (fé) plus “person who pays” (lagi). However, by the 13th century, fellow broadened into meaning “same” or “part of a set”. From there it starts to acquire prestige through the institutions in which it is assigned as a title.

In other words, and another loaded analogy, think of Judith Butler’s theory of gender as societal construct. We perform gender because it’s demanded by society. In the same way, institutions both demand and create the role of a fellow by assigning the title to those who would climb the academic ladder.

Anyway, fellow continues to broaden semantically through the next few hundred years, picking up nuances and connotations as the years roll by, culminating in the recent century when both the Brits and Russians used it mockingly against others and to convey brotherly comradeship amongst themselves⁴.

But, at its core, fellow remains a money-loving word, whether it’s in standing pints with the fellows in the bar or applying for research fellowships at home. And, in English, as we well know, money is power.

But maybe the best way to look at this is through our long-standing belief here at Learned Central that there are vanishingly few true synonyms in English. There are a lot of words that have similar meanings or uses, but each of these comes pre-loaded with nuance and feeling that may or may not change on the situation. Fellow, in the academic sense, is one such example. Fellow’s closest synonyms in this context are words like grantee, recipient, or even scholar or postdoc. All of these confer something beyond the meaning of fellow. Grantee is all about the money, recipient means you’ve been given something (not earned, given), and both scholar and postdoc mean you’re neither fish nor fowl. You’re not a student but you’re not faculty yet either. Might as well be a fellow traveller of the liminal zone between aspiring and accepted.

There’s a lot more to say about fellow, but I’m out of time and words. So, here are a few ideas I didn’t quite follow through on. If you’ve got a hot take, let me know. Anyway, I shoehorned Judith Butler in up above, but her work on gender has a lot of linguistic application:

• how do the labels we choose to describe ourselves dictate what performances we do in society?

• is fellow a gendered word? The dictionary says no, the bible says no⁵, but I’ll bet most of your friends say yes.

• some labels are inherently more vulnerable than others. Where does fellow land on that scale?

Pick your thesis, report back with a dissertation. Maybe it’ll get you some funding. In the meantime, let’s take this as a reminder of how we can choose to exchange our free labor: you can give it to a university or a corporation or an institution, or you can use it to question and hold those same authorities to the fire. Your choice.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. scarred, calloused, middle

2. Obviously a ridiculous idea that would never work as a book much less a movie.

3. One caveat for this entire essay is that fellow, in the U.K. still carries a weight that it has lost in other countries. In practical terms, this means that fellows at elite British institutions are often fully salaried members of the staff. Or so I’m given to understand.

4. Frankly, the entire Etymonline entry is worth reading as it gets into the deeply entrenched nationalist uses of the word by both the British and the Russians at different points in their histories.

5. “And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows.” High school sucks for everyone.