quality

WDP — How Long is Long?

Fandango8 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?
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Me at 100?

Just how long is living a “very long life”? 70 years? 80? 90? 100? Methuselah’s age?

I’m in my 70s and I’m very cognizant of the tolls the years have taken on my body. And on my mind, to a lesser extent. I can imagine, should I make it another twenty years, no longer being able to live independently due to further deterioration of my body and/or mind.

So my goal is not how many years I can live, but the quality of my life for however many years I have left. If, by the time I reach 80 a few years from now, I am immobile, can no longer feed or dress myself, need assistance going to the bathroom, or can’t recognize my wife, kids, or grandkids, I will have lived long enough. Just shoot me.

But if I am still able to function independently and my mind is relatively sound twenty years from now, then let’s keep the party going.

Bottom line: It’s not the number of years, but the quality of those years that is important to me. I’d rather live a shorter, but very good life than a longer, but miserable (physically and/or mentally) life.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #220

Fandango19 Comments
FPQ

Welcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration.

By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

From a health perspective, it’s been a rough year for me so far. The gross cost for the hospitalization, surgery, and rehabilitation in the first six months of this year has far exceeded the total cost for my health during my entire life previously. And that’s saying a lot, given how old I am.

But I have to say that, in terms of the cost to me of having a significant volume of services provided to for me in the first half of 2023, I have been very fortunate. Between Medicare and my Medicare supplement health plans, my out-of-pocket expenses have been negligible. I feel very fortunate in that regard.

And that brings me to this week’s provocative question.

From your personal experience with the health care delivery system where you live, how would you rate it over all? How about from the specific perspectives of accessibility/availability, the costs to you, and the quality of those health care services you’ve received.

If you choose to participate in Fandango’s Provocative Question, you may respond with a comment or write your own post in response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments. But remember to check to confirm that your pingback or your link shows up in the comments.

Blogging Insights — Quantity Versus Quality

Fandango18 Comments

Dr. Tanya has decided to change things up a bit for her weekly Blogging Insights prompt. Instead of using the Q&A format, she’s going to provide us with a quote about blogging or writing and ask us to express our opinion about said quote.

Here’s this week’s quote. It’s from Jon Morrow.

“Blogging isn’t about publishing as much as you can. It’s about publishing as smart as you can.”

As a blogger who posts anywhere from three to six posts a day — I averaged 4.6 per day in July — I struggle with this question. Is publishing high quality posts while also publishing a lot of posts even possible?

I enjoy blogging and probably spend a few too many hours a day doing so. There are a number of prompt posts I host each week and many of the posts I publish are in response to prompts from other bloggers. So I think I’ve got the “publishing as much as you can” part of the equation down pat.

As to the other part of Morrow’s quote, I like to believe that my posts are “smart” as well. And by “smart” I mean well-written, articulate, witty, engaging, and reasonably intelligent. But I do worry that the volume of posts I churn out each day makes it tough to publish high quality posts to extent I’d like them all to be.

To use a baseball analogy, I know I’m not going to get a hit every time I step up to the plate, but I at least hope that each at bat is a quality at bat.

Bottom line, I think Morrow is right. Personally, I’d rather be recognized for the quality of my posts (i.e., “smart” posts), than for pushing out a bunch of crappy posts. I suppose I have to figure out where that fulcrum is for me and for those who read my many posts.

I suppose, too, that all of you have to figure that out for yourselves as well. I can’t wait to read what you have to say.

One-Liner Wednesday — Deep Thoughts

Fandango25 Comments

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“It is better to speak profoundly to just one than to blather at a world of idiots.”

Suze who blogs at “Suziland Too or Obsolete Childhood”

Yesterday I wrote a post in which I bemoaned how my blog stats were recently in a nosedive. I admit that I was being a bit whiny, and that’s when Suze put me in my place. She commented, “It is better to speak profoundly to just one than to blather at a world of idiots…yes, you can quote me.”

To which, knowing that today, Wednesday, is Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt, I replied, “I just may do that. Stay tuned!”

I thought that Suze’s highly inspirational and motivational one-liner perfectly fit the bill for this prompt. I believe that Suze was telling me that

  1. I shouldn’t give quantity a higher priority than quality,
  2. most of my posts are nothing more than me blathering on about nothing,
  3. most of the people who read my blog are idiots,
  4. all of the above, or
  5. none of the above.

In any event, I thought Suze’s comment was, in and of itself, profound. Unfortunately, she has now set the bar quite high for me because I feel as though it’s incumbent upon me to come up with something profound to post about.

Omigod, where is Jack Handey when I need him?3A9F642F-96FA-47D1-8E56-1EB1EA37F669

 

Quality and Quantity

Fandango15 Comments

76351817-81EE-409D-975E-FF584641CCD6Proclivity is a tendency to choose or do something regularly; an inclination or predisposition toward a particular thing.

Apparently I have a proclivity for blogging. It’s something I choose to do regularly. I am inclined to post to my blog every day. Sometimes two, three, or even four times a day.

But a proclivity for something should not be confused with proficiency at that something. Proficiency is a high degree of competence or skill, an expertise, a mastery.

I sometimes worry that my proclivity for blogging focuses too much on quantity at the expense of quality. If I cut back to just one post a day, or even one every other day, would my less frequent posts be more engaging, interesting, informative, and/or provocative?

But then I realized that, in today’s world of Twitter and Facebook and the myriad talking heads on all of the cable news networks, it’s not what you say, but how often you say it that counts.

Thank you, Donald Trump, for teaching me that.

Written for today’s one-word prompt, “proclivity.”