First and never

I met a new addition to the family the other day. She was eleven days old.

It was the warmest day of her whole life the day I was there. And she had just eaten her biggest meal ever.

Firsts are fun and exciting and it’s neat to keep topping ourselves.

I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I’m never going to eat tuna ever again, and that I’m never going to be able to easily walk onto a shuttle flight at the last minute and just show up in Boston. Never is a lot harder than first, but I guess you get used to it.

The internet is like Ice 9. It changes what it touches, probably forever. We keep discovering firsts, the biggest viral video ever, the most twitter followers ever, the fastest bestseller ever… And we constantly discover nevers as well. There’s never going to be a mass market TV show that rivals the ones that came before. There’s never going to be a worldwide brand built by advertising ever again either. And Michael Jackson’s record deal is the last one of its kind… And there may never be a job like that job you used to have either.

Revolutions are like that. They invent and destroy and they only go one way. It’s like watching a confused person in a revolving door for the first time. They push backwards, try to slow it down, fight the rotation… and then they embrace the process and just walk and it works.