ChatGPT gets poetic in spring

Hello, friends. Vancouver spring appears to comprise rain-hail-sunshine, sometimes in the span of an hour. The upside is there are cherry blossoms everywhere. Above are some blossoms from our walk yesterday in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage area of Vancouver. Looking at those blue skies, you would never guess it had just been pouring.

The other highlight of our walk was stumbling upon BKH Singapore-style jerky. A whole shop dedicated to selling to the best style of jerky! I bought a packet and tried it. It was good.

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Not much time to write this week, so I’ve let AI do some of the work. This first haiku is mine, straight from my noggin:

Busy in Springtime Haiku #1, by me

On a little break…

Spring is pretty but busy.

Tell me: how are you?

And here are two haiku from my friend ChatGPT:

Busy in Springtime Haiku #2, by ChatGPT 3.5

Days blur together,

Busy hands and racing mind.

Springtime demands much.

Busy in Springtime Haiku #3, by ChatGPT 3.5

Frenzied springtime rush,

Days bursting with tasks to do.

Busy as a bee.

All right, not too bad. Does it know how to write limericks too? Let’s test it by asking it to write limericks about Beanie.

Beanie at school, throwing her friend Zoe Monkey in the air.

Limerick #1 about Beanie

There was a young girl called Miss Beanie,

With a pink owl stuffie, oh so dreamy.

She loves pizza, it's true,

But celery, oh boo!

She'd rather have cake that is creamy.

Limerick #2 about Beanie

There was a young girl called Miss Beanie,

Who was always so bright and so keenie,

She studied all day,

In her own special way,

And became a world-famous linguist genie.

Limerick #3 about Beanie

There was a young girl called Miss Beanie,

Whose favorite pastime was reading, you see.

With her pink owl by her side,

In the woods she loved to hide,

Trampolining and giggling with glee!

These are not stellar. I had ChatGPT generate about a dozen, and these were the best ones. It kept trying to rhyme “Beanie” with “zany” until I told it that these two words do not rhyme and to stop (it apologized, so we are OK now and moving past this).

Have you gotten ChatGPT to write anything fun for you?

The ladybugs are out basking in the sunshine.

Pretty Good Things

Grief and saying goodbye

Isabel Stenzel Byrnes and her twin sister Ana were the subjects of a documentary called The Power of Two, about their battle with cystic fibrosis and their subsequent double lung transplants. I was at the movie premiere in 2011 and remember vividly how moving I found their story.

Sadly, Ana passed away in 2013. Isabel is a grief counselor and patient advocate who has personally dealt with grief for most of her life. She was on NPR’s Life Kit podcast recently—the link leads to the podcast but also a transcript of the show—discussing how to say goodbye. It’s worth a listen or a read.

Goodbyes are made harder by this human instinct to create expectations for ourselves. So I do believe that having unmet expectations is a huge source of grief. And so being able to kind of be open to whatever our lives unfold into - it can really actually help us not experience such intense grief. And also more importantly, the confidence in oneself that we as human beings, if we read about history, read about different groups of people in our country - wow. We have tremendous capacity to cope with tragedy and hardship and adversity. And you do too. And I do too. And we won't know it until we have to face it.

And we don't need to live in anxiety, worried about how am I going to deal with this or that loss, but really to trust that we will have the confidence to cope with whatever comes our way.

—Isabel Stenzel Byrnes on NPR’s Life Kit