We’re not even a full week into the month and October is already proving to be a little much: we’ve welcomed a new nibling into the family, it’s been a year since Ivory’s father was laid to rest, and this weekend we celebrate our first anniversary as a married couple.
If there’s anything I’ve learned to appreciate as an adult, it’s the bittersweet nature of events. I’m assuming it comes with time, because the longer you’re on this planet the more likely you are to lose someone, and to think of and miss them during big moments. So, here we are, looking forward to meeting our niece in person, celebrating a year of love and commitment, and at the same time faced with the reminders of loss.
Last week, I pulled out the ham bones we’ve been saving and made some split pea soup. It was appropriately cool at the start of the week, and the idea of a pot of soup seemed soul-warming, especially thinking of my Grandma Marie, since I use the recipe she gave me to make it. But then, I was surprised to end up dreaming of my other grandmother, my dad’s mom, the night after I made the soup. Grandma Doris was also a wonder in the kitchen, especially when it came to delicious baked goods, so it probably wasn’t much of a stretch to be thinking of her, but it’s been so long since she was in one of my dreams.
I can’t say I really put much stock in it meaning something to dream of someone you’ve lost, it’s not even something I really clung to or thought of as important; I’ve always considered that to be what memories are for. Still, in the last year, I’ve found relief the mornings I’ve realized I had a dream of Moxie, even if it was just something brief and inconsequential. There was an equal amount of relief to have dreamed of Grandma Doris, especially because we were having a conversation about how people show you they love you, and that not everyone shows it the same way. She also demanded I give her the biggest hug, and the last time I would have done that was probably close to 20 years ago at this point. The dream ended with a bunch of bumble bees the size of canaries showing up around the tree in her front yard, so things really took a turn…
I’ve thought back to that dream a lot in the past week, probably because of some of my internal frustration when it comes to communication, and the emotional distance that seems to widen between myself and certain people. When I wrote about saying goodbye to Grandma Marie, I mentioned how glad I was I got to know her as an adult, and that’s very much something I missed out on when it came to Grandma Doris. I wasn’t even out of college when she died, and there was a lot I didn’t know about myself then. I often wonder what she would make of my gender and sexuality, would it be something contentious? I can’t lie that I’m glad to have skirted the “difficult” talks with my grandparents, helping to maintain a little more sweetness in my memories instead of some of the bitterness that could have been there.
It’s about to be a busy weekend. We’re attending a Yarn Tasting tomorrow, and have family coming from out of town. So, I’m about to shut my brain off for the next few hours after what was a pretty busy week.
I’m hoping I’ll be able to post a bit more here next week. As my scrolling of Bluesky increases, my need to pour words onto a page decreases, so that’s something I definitely need to keep in check.
I saw someone on Bluesky comparing that scene in so many disaster films, where hundreds of people have survived an event and are then rewarded with the relief of being reunited with their family and friends to the feeling they get seeing a familiar face showing up on Bluesky. I know the feeling all too well.
There are also so many people I’m missing. Some of them don’t have accounts and remain on Twitter, others created placeholders and have yet to interact, and others seem to have vanished into the ether. Bluesky seems to offer new options pretty much every other week these days (actually working hashtags might be on the horizon), but I have a feeling it’s very much going to be what Twitter used to be. That thing people heard of but rarely used or didn’t understand. Truth be told, I still sort of stumble over how to talk about it when I mention something I saw to my wife or a friend. I have yet to use “skeet” (it feels almost as awkward as “toot” did when discussing Mastodon), and I’m pretty sure it’s not well known enough for casual users of technology to know what it is.
I don’t want it to be Twitter, with the algorithm and the outrage machine, but I do want everyone I knew under one umbrella so I can stop trekking back to the hellsite once a week to see what I’ve missed. I sort of treat it like an experiment I can only observe these days. I don’t like or retweet anything, the only thing I will post is an update if I have an invite code to Bluesky (there’s actually one available as I write this, if someone out there is interested). Sometimes, I have to remind myself not to engage, but the reminders are less necessary than they were a month ago.
At some point, maybe I will stop going back there, but Bluesky doesn’t have enough of a finger on the pulse of the news cycle for me to completely abandon Twitter, even if it’s only to pop back and scroll through the trending topics as a refresher on whatever is going on politically or culturally.
In other news, check out one of the Northern Flickers that have been hanging out on the lawn outside of our apartment. They’re a little chatty and very skittish, so I had to lurk on the balcony with a long lens camera just to get this mediocre photo. They’ve been interesting to watch, since the 6 or more of this particular guttering pace around the grass pecking at it with determination at times.
Having spent the summer with every manner of fan circulating air around our bedroom (and the rest of the apartment) it became next-to-impossible to hear any of the sleep podcasts we like, without blasting the audio in a way that wasn’t remotely restful. The past two nights, things were finally quiet enough to try listening to them again and we both slept so soundly; it was such a relief.
Considering I’ve spent most of the summer sleeping with earbuds tuned to YouTube commentators gossiping about drama, it was past time I went back to something more geared towards sleep. The silly thing is, we both basically crash the second the podcast starts, because we had a pretty good habit going before we gave it up; there’s something about a soothing voice telling a story that just makes the entry into sleep so much smoother, and in turn, it just makes it easier to stay asleep.
I’ve used a variety of sleep podcasts over the years. There was Sleep With Me, which had such an extensive back catalog, when I first discovered it, I would just queue up 8 hours worth of episodes and let it play all night (I eventually found the “creaky dulcet tones” less restful and a little too quirky to use it to actually fall asleep, it’s only good when I’m straight-up exhausted).
Get Sleepy, was my go-to for a long time, until they got syndicated advertising that would play just after the introduction. I have nothing against ads in a podcast, but it’s one thing for it to be an ad read from the host and a completely different thing when it’s a State Farm ad that’s set to music and entirely different from the tone of the rest of the show.
The makers of Get Sleepy also came up with The Sleepy Bookshelf, which just takes stories in the public domain and breaks them up into pieces and reads some of the story a couple of nights a week. The only times that one hasn’t been good for sleep was the torture of Journey to the Center of the Earth (I found it too claustrophobic and a lot of the story was just too creepy), the Beatrix Potter Stories (I was obsessed with being able to hear The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin in its entirety), and the end of Anne of Green Gables (it actually forced us to turn the lights on so I could find a tissue I was crying so much).
Our tried and true sleepy standby now is Nothing Much Happens. I had actually forgotten that was an iHeart podcast, because it doesn’t do ads the same way so many of their shows do (annoyingly, with the same 3 ads every 20 minutes). If you’re looking for something to help you sleep, I can’t recommend it enough. We rarely make it into the story portion of the podcast these days. I was surprised that even when we picked it back up again, it was very easy to fall into the routine of taking a couple of deep breaths, mentally sending some relaxation through my extremities, and basically zonking out for the night.
As I look back through this post, I keep seeing I have something against advertisements, except that’s not actually the case. If you ever get to listen to my “the MLB doesn’t want me to watch or listen to their games anymore” rant, you’ll hear how I actually enjoyed all of the local Boston ads when I would listen to the Red Sox streams; it set the scene for me basically, and I wasn’t ever annoyed to hear those. I only gave up on streaming the radio games when they started playing generic ads over the local ones (and coming back to the game in the middle of at-bats. With the ad reads that used to start off Get Sleepy, when they were in the voice of the creator, I really didn’t have a problem with them. I just don’t like listening to ads that are aggressive in their need to sell me something, especially as I’m trying to fall asleep. I also gave up on any iHeart podcasts when they played the same three ads every 20 minutes, regardless of the length of an episode. I’m sure the goal here is to make the ads so annoying to compel listeners to pay for the premium service, but persistent demand avoidance means if I “have” to do something I’m much less inclined to do it.
I’m a little embarrassed at my persnickety attitude when it comes to something so random. “How strange to be so opinionated about when and where ads should play.” But, I guess that’s where things are on a Tuesday afternoon.
I can feel the malaise of “life after Blaugust” beginning to creep in. I noticed it first with how completely silent my Mastodon feed had become, and now I can feel it in my reluctance to open up a new post and click and clack some words on to a screen. Bluesky seems as bustling as ever, while Twitter (the place I haunt in silence, unless I have a Bluesky invite code to share) exists as a shell of the thing I used to love; and I don’t know what to do with that. Some of this is down to that disconnect I still feel when it comes to so much of social media these days. I enjoy following along in the conversation, but participating in it has felt… off.
It reminds me a bit of the time that I had a conversation with a former employer, and as I was reflecting back on it later I was ticking off all of these boxes in my head, thinking about how I had successfully managed to offer her a compliment without it feeling forced or weird, and how we’d managed to have a somewhat lengthy conversation without any of the lulls I tend to find so disconcerting. I was congratulating myself on having successfully “peopled” without including any of the cringe-inducing mannerisms or comments I would usually berate myself over for days after.
Social media feels a bit like that to me now. Like, I know all of the rules to the game, I can follow other people playing the game. And then it’s my turn and suddenly I’m stymied and over-analyzing every possible thing I could say and I just sit there until my time is up and think “maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.” Granted, playing the game of social media is actually just a dopamine slot machine I feed mental quarters into and hope I’ll hit a jackpot at some point. I feel like I’ve gotten terrible about hitting the jackpot these last few years. And, then I get annoyed at myself because no one liked that thing I said, and then I’m annoyed for feeling annoyed.
I try my best to focus on just posting to post, to maintain the habit, because I know that siphoning these words off from my brain helps me function. I don’t know what it is about curating my thoughts for public consumption that is so ridiculously helpful to me. I just haven’t figured out how to turn these sorts of things into a conversation. That’s always my issue in the end. Even in actual conversation, sometimes, it feels like I say words but they just result in a dead end. It’s unproductive, or at least, it feels that way.
I can’t help but to wonder if I did actually gamify my day-to-day activities when it came to people, how would it work out? Would it let off some of the pressure, because I was trying to follow some rules? Would my brain turn on the “it’s just a silly game” track and force me to devalue the entire experience? I talked myself into buying dice at ConVergence this summer, and they’ve sat virtually untouched since then. For a while, I was thinking about trying to do solo RPGs or just trying to use them with some basic character building, just to get a feel for the mechanics. But, then Blaugust happened and all of my gaming habits were benched as I devoted my whole self to this place. Now, as all of the obvious subjects have been exhausted, my mind flits back to the math rocks sitting in their respective containers, all looking very pretty, but entirely unused.
I busted open this 3-D printed turtle egg with so much excitement
So, what’s next? Will I go back to the obsessive D&D googling habit I was cultivating in July? Probably not. I think things are still cooking a little bit. It’s like there’s an idea sitting there, but it needs to germinate a little longer before I can figure out what to do with it. Hopefully ruminating on that here hasn’t exposed it too soon, since I suffer from “startitis” and exacerbate it by revealing my plans too soon. It’s like I out-run the dopamine or something.
I take for granted having grown up learning and speaking in English. As a language with a reputation for stealing the good bits from a bunch of other languages, there’s a part of it that could almost feel universal. And then, I hear a something that’s not entrenched in the realm of English as I’m familiar with it, and it feels like such a stupid thing to know. Especially when there are prettier and somehow more evocative languages.
Every year in elementary school, we would have a week or two with students from the high school who came to teach us German. It was always German, which was my secret frustration as a kid. For a long time, I think that was the only foreign language offered at my small K-12 school. At some point, Spanish entered the ring, and then I would live in hope that we’d get Spanish II students in our classroom for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t ever to be. When it came time for me to pick a language in high school, I chose Spanish out of pure spite; I wanted nothing to do with German.
I think I also chose Spanish because on some level, I could see such clear lines between it and English. Our first day of class, the teacher did that immersion thing, where she spoke in Spanish the entire time. I’m not sure how the rest of the class felt about it, but for me personally, it was fascinating. I still think back to that first day of class sometimes, because it was probably the most fun I’d had with pure learning in a very long time. It was so easy to do high school by rote and memory, and for some reason it felt like that practice went out the window for the final hour of that first school day.
I didn’t have any more immersion in Spanish until I took a lone semester of it in college. In retrospect, I should have taken more of it, because there were days when I would be walking back to my dorm room and it was like my brain had jumped to a different track and my thoughts were in (admittedly jumbled and jerky) Spanish, and I enjoyed that feeling. I didn’t have that happen again until I went on an extended Duolingo jag; coupled with stumbling into a telenovela. There were some weird dreams in there, and I would wake up in the morning with the idea that my subconscious was doing a lot of work to internalize this other language… and all of the drama in the life of Ana Leal.
That accursed Duolingo owl entered my life a decade ago, and has routinely guilted me into maintaining our relationship ever since. Has it made me a better speaker? Absolutely not. In terms of reading, writing, hearing, and speaking Spanish, I would say I’m most proficient in reading and writing (with the assistance of Google’s multi-language keyboard). Listening is best accomplished with subtitles (because: reading), and I’m a reluctant speaker; I loath the awkwardness of being bad at something. Also, until pretty recently, the app was terrible at understanding anything I said in Spanish.
I tried using Duolingo to learn Portuguese, because “it’s a romance language, it’s not the same as Spanish, but it’s close, right?” That lasted maybe 3 days and I was so annoyed at all of the different branches the language took in sound and spelling that I gave it up. Before Duolingo, I had a brief flirtation with French, because I found an online friend who is French Canadian. We exchanged some mix tapes, and she sent me a CD full of music in French. I’ve never tried to get the owl to teach me French though, I’m not sure it would go well.
I forgot how much I wanted to learn French after listening to this song.
The closest I will ever come to learning a different romance language is Italian, since my first 6 years of piano lessons involved a lot of vocabulary lessons and identifying what the random italicized words mixed in with the notes meant. It’s very specialized, entirely sporadic, and basically not useful to my daily life until I decide I need to start sitting down at a piano everyday.
Instead, I’m making tentative steps to learn Irish (Gaeilge), because it just sounds interesting.
I saw someone describe the feeling as “going feral” when they got to Gaeilge at the end. Feral feels a bit extreme to me, but it was something visceral, for reasons I cannot describe.
I’ve been thinking a lot about language lately. Some of that is down to Hozier’s new album, and the inclusion of Gaeilge in the lyrics of “De Selby (Part 1).” But, it’s clearly not the first time music has pulled me towards a language, or that listening to music with something other than English has been a more emotional or meaningful experience to me.
Always happy tears with this song
In the days when I listened to nothing but music podcasts (when I wasn’t listening to actual music), All Songs Considered turned me on to Sigur Rós. Before then, I think I had maybe listened to a handful of their songs, always the very ambient ones that played over random moments on TV shows. When the brass started at the beginning of “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” I was taken aback, and then more thrown by how joyful it all felt. I tear up listening to the song, because it’s so intrinsically happy. I don’t know why happiness makes me cry, but that’s true of pretty much any intense emotion in my experience. To listen to something that sounds like distilled joy is going to bring it out in me, especially if I haven’t heard to it in a while. I know none of the lyrics to that song. I’m familiar with all of the vocalizations, because I’ve listened to it for 15 years, but I couldn’t tell you what any of it means. Sometimes, I wonder if what I’m hearing and identifying as words is correct. But, I also know that this group plays with their lyrics, and some of it is actual Icelandic, and other parts are… something else. I remembered it being referred to as Hopelandic, I guess in Icelandic it’s known as Vonlenska.
I can’t say which language in music will hit my guts and which one won’t. So much of it comes down to my mood I suppose. It doesn’t all have to make me cry for me to want to listen to it again, because I certainly had fun overplaying “Dragostea Din Tei” in its heyday on the internet.
I can only picture one thing when I hear this song, and it’s none of its original singers
But, not every piece of music featuring a foreign language will strike some hidden chord inside me and turn my brain into a sponge for the language. It would be nice if it resulted in me being multilingual, but mostly my memory contains snippets of lyrics I may or may not be able to translate. If it’s in Spanish (and I’ve listened to it enough times) I can probably figure out the words, anything else… maybe I listened to it on repeat and ran the lyrics through a translator enough times that I memorized it?
This post has gotten away from me… it sat in my drafts folder for a week, precipitated by listening to “De Selby (Part 1)” and then marinating in the back of my brain while life went on. There are so many languages I want to know, but can’t find the right avenue to learn them. I live in Northern Minnesota, where an effort is being made to include the Ojibwe language throughout our community, and the only avenues I find to learn are the content creators who take the time to share it. It seems fanciful to think that learning to understand those words might give me a greater appreciation of where I live, but I look at how much appreciation I get from other things where I’ve been able to see the influence of the language, and maybe it’s not that much of a stretch.
I’ve never been one for big celebrations. In theory, they sound fun, but in reality I’m almost always ready to tap out about 45 minutes in. The very premise of deciding to get married with a ceremony and a reception was honestly, horrifying to me. It’s odd, 6 years of competitive speaking, and still, somehow the idea of being the center of attention for the better part of 4 hours sounded like some sort of ritual torture.
In retrospect, there were several things that saved us. For starters, my aunt Beth catered, and I don’t think anyone can complain when you have a buffet of excellent food on offer, punch to drink, and some appetizers to snack on while things get reorganized. We also didn’t throw a monster-sized bash, and I’d like to think things moved at a brisk enough pace that no one was really stuck waiting for something for very long.
I’m always worried about whether or not everyone had a good time when they were there. I remember after my high school graduation party I was sort of bummed out that I’d barely gotten to talk with anyone, even though I’d managed to greet anyone who came through the door. I worried about the same thing in the time after my wedding. I especially worried about whether or not my family enjoyed themselves. I barely got to talk to anyone aside from when we were lining up to process in and out, and the brief turn we took making the rounds before dinner started. It seemed like a poor reward for inviting them to this big day. “Here, show up, march in, I’ll wave at you a couple of times, you can eat some food, and we’ll go about our lives!”
But, then I started going through our photos (we’re still working on putting together an album) and I was looking through them all, letting Google tag faces and find people for me, and I found this great series of photos of my wife Ivory, twirling with our nieces. It was before the ceremony, when we were getting all of the group photos completed. My mom and grandmother were seated off to the side, and my grandmother has this bemused sort of smile on her face, watching all of them twirling in their dresses.
It’s the kind of thing that gets lost in the chaos of a big day, but it was a relief to see a little moment of delight, even as things were bustling along. Because, of course people tell you they had a great time, or they rave about the food or whatever, but there’s nothing like a candid photo to tell you other truths that could have been missed, I guess.
This weekend, there was a kiss of red and gold on the tops of the trees as we drove around the state. And tonight we have our first frost warning. This is the difficult thing about fall, when it seems like it’s so far off, and then suddenly it just jumps in front of us for a little scare. I’m trying to burn a reminder into my brain that I need to collect our extra sheets from the garage and gather all of the plants underneath them tonight if I want a few more weeks with our flowers. They’ve all been doing so well, and it seems a shame to leave them to the cold just yet. Plus, I have some work to do with our growing geranium collection before fall progresses too much further.
It feels like I’ve barely spent any time outside, between the relentless smoke and air quality issues and the general heat and drought making being the outdoors more punishing than enjoyable. I also know we’re barely through September, and these past few years we’ve had some furnace level heat waves late into the month. Of course, several people at the knitting group I attended last week warned us the rodent invasions were beginning, and the persistence of mice trying to winter inside is an indicator we’re in for a rough cold season.
No one could say for certain what “rough” meant. Will we be buried in snow? Will we have months long cold snaps necessitating 2am visits to our garage to run the engine in our car (We don’t have a block heater)? Will it just be relentlessly brutal? All I know for certain is: it will be winter, and we’ll have some snow, we’ll be cold; the quantities and duration of these things are never completely accurate in their predictability.
I’m also not ready for the seasons to change, because it’s such a tangible reminder time has followed through on its demand to march forward. The holidays are going to be rocky this year, the way they were rocky last year, and the way they’ve been rocky after any major loss. I’m not sure I’m ready for that side of things. I feel insanely prepared for all sorts of other things, like making a half dozen pies (because for some reason we possess that many pie dishes), but being prepared to do that isn’t going to make up for the absence of my grandmother in the way I actually want it to.
So, I’m going to just put blinders on and stumble into whatever comes next and probably forget mid-way through why everything is so difficult and then be reminded out of nowhere and fall apart. Which isn’t actually anything new, in the grand scheme of things. But, it never happens the same way twice, so I’m sure there are surprises waiting for me around a corner in the future.
I don’t want to think about what I was doing 22 years ago. It feels cliche to rehash it at this point, because my story is the same as everyone else’s. It also feels wrong to think about it now. I think a lot about the obsession everyone had with the American Flag in the aftermath, and how that flag has been twisted and manipulated into propaganda of every kind now and mostly I feel disgusted. Part of that probably comes down to every civics-centered event I participated in between being 16 and 17 years old, and how much was hammered into my head about how you treat the flag. I watch what people do with it now and mostly I feel like an idiot for having so much reverence for an object everyone else has decided to manipulate rather than respect. So, that’s how I’m feeling about things today.
I’m also just struggling a little bit in general today. Being out is the most exhausting experience at times, especially because I just don’t know how to be out, for myself. I don’t know how to interject the correct pronouns into a conversation. It feels like I’m just too afraid, too unsure to take the chance. Most of it comes down to practice, but when safe spaces are so difficult to come by, that leaves a lot of awkward places to advocate for my pronouns, for myself, and considering how averse I am to conflict it just becomes “easier” not to say anything. It’s not actually easier, but it avoids the awkwardness of exposing all of my weak spots to people who may or may not understand, who might just choose unkindness rather than acceptance.
I’m resisting the urge to just pour everything into this blog like the journals of my adolescence. I’m hoping to start doing some morning pages again, so maybe there will be a bit more in the way of mental clarity for this place. Those pages are where it’s completely acceptable to say anything, no matter how taboo it might be. Technically, I know I can say whatever I want here, but some of the things I want to say… well they’re better off said directly to someone if they’re ever to be said at all. Or, I could just take a big chance and spill everything that’s bothering me out into the void and bank on it going unseen, remaining unaddressed until the end of time. It’s one of those bad habits I’ve had for… basically my entire life. Rather than have the tough conversation, I just wait out the immediate need to talk about whatever has come up, and then I can pretend to move on because everything is fine. It’s like I had the conversation, except I totally didn’t, and it just builds up as this invisible wall between myself and others, until it’s so tall and heavily reinforced that it’s seems insurmountable. It’s not healthy, but considering I don’t know how to properly have anything resembling a difficult conversation or an argument, avoidance is a skill I rely on, way too much.
Happy Monday, everyone. Apparently it’s going to be a long week.
Here’s a photo of Chanski looking alarmed… possibly annoyed as a reward for getting through this post.
You know the fable about the ant and the grasshopper? I’m feeling just slightly like the grasshopper right now. I’m not sure it’s possible to get to the end of summer and not have a bit of regret about the things I should have taken care of during the appropriate season.
Part of my regret stems from the fact that things are about to get busier again, after a relatively quiet summer. I’m not sure I’m ready for the busyness. There’s going to be travel, and more socialization than I get in a week, let alone in a day, and I’m going to be away from home for repeated stretches again. There are little plans all throughout September and October, and then Halloween will be here, and we’ve been discussing a costume for months.
It’s an odd echo from a year ago when we were scrambling to do wedding planning and it was as though somehow the big day had managed to sneak up on us (of course, our first anniversary is mixed into the “little” plans in October). Things were a bit more chaotic then, which I can’t really say is a comfort this time around, because there are still big ripples from that chaos coming through right now. Funny how time works like that (time blindness too).
With all of that busyness in mind, updates here are going to be pretty brief for the next few days, and it’s possible I will just make a habit of going quiet over the weekends or holidays. I’m definitely still building up my stamina to keep doing this on a near-daily basis. Weirdly, it’s easier to imagine doing posts for 31 days straight when there’s a goal post in sight. But just doing them to do them? That’s somehow completely different.
For some reason, it’s difficult to be mindful about this place on the weekends. Saturday and Sunday are pretty much always where I will struggle, because those days are without form and structure. It’s ironic (I think?) to have 48 hours completely at my disposal, no work, no major commitments, and to somehow be unable to remember to do this one thing for myself, even when I remember to do it 5 other days in the week, when I’ve committed large chunks of my time to work and the necessities of daily living. It’s not a habit yet, which it turns out are things I have to aggressively cultivate in order to get them to stick. Maybe by next year this will be more ingrained somehow. That’s a long way away though.
The past 24 hours should have been like that refreshing plunge into something cold after being in a hot tub or a sauna. Instead, every window is tightly closed because we’re still being blanketed with smoke and our air quality alert is probably going to be extended for another day. I’m hoping maybe it will clear up tomorrow, but this particular cloud ambled as slowly as possible across North Dakota before it showed up here, and I don’t have much hope that it won’t take its sweet time putting Minnesota in its rearview mirror.
Talking of other things that are being left behind, if anyone (I don’t know who is reading this blog besides my wife) would like to see what all the fuss is about when it comes to Bluesky I have another invite code burning a hole in my pocket. I think for the time being, Bluesky invites might be all that shows up on my Twitter feed, although, it feels like you have to talk about it in code or risk Twitter banishing your post to obscurity.
I’m not sure what we’re calling that place these days. I’ve seen it referenced as the following:
Birdsite (sometimes un-named birdsite?)
Hellsite
Xitter
Twixxer
Is anyone actually calling it X without mentally (or literally) rolling their eyes?
I did take off all of the blinders (read: Firefox extensions) I had employed to make the site bearable, which means now the stupid logo appears everywhere, and I am offered the useless For You page. I think this was sort of me putting some more nails in the coffin, because it’s time to stop closing the curtains to the ugly truth that’s been lurking outside for a while (I really need to stop mixing my metaphors…). Between the anti-trans and white supremacist rhetoric that’s run rampant there, Twitter is just one more place that’s not for me. Of course, there’s also a chance that maybe just the entire internet in general is not going to be for me if KOSA becomes an actual thing. It’s wild, the first place I actually started feeling comfortable enough to be myself and attempt to spread my wings could end up off limits, or at the very least severely restricted, and then what?
I suppose there’s still the option to just go outside and touch grass. Of course, the smoke needs to clear up before I feel comfortable doing that… and we’re right back where we started.
I’ve been settling in at Bluesky, as Twitter seems to be doing everything it can to embrace becoming a hate mob. I’m getting a little better about the reflexive actions I used to take. There’s this muscle memory when it comes to always opening a specific app, or the address I type in when I open a new tab in a web browser. I don’t know what I’m looking for when I go to Twitter these days… but after the last 24 hours, I’m pretty sure the main goal is trying to find the best angle to get a clear view of the car wreck, which really isn’t that productive.
With that in mind, someone I recently started following decided to engage in an ice breaker and asked “you are handed a banana. how do you respond?” One of the replies was “iii am aa banana” which was followed by “My spoon is too big” and I was somehow transported back to a college dorm room where someone was showing me Don Hertzfeldt’s short film Rejected for the first time.
I’m uncomfortable with the knowledge this is 23 years old.
I love the beginning of this film. It’s so delightfully odd and weirdly quotable in that way things used to be when I was a teenager. It’s the sort of thing you could just interject into conversation among a group of friends, and it’s like starting a game of pinball or something, where these non sequiturs sort of pile up as the ball zings around the table. I think something about it came up when we were at ConVergence this summer, and seeing it referenced again “so soon” after made me hungry to seek out the real thing and re-live it. And then I remembered how weirdly bloody it gets in the middle. This was the first time I’d actually sort of admired the visuals from that, where every stroke from a red marker was vivid on my flat screen TV, something I probably couldn’t appreciate before (also maybe because a little ball of fluff kept crying “my anus is bleeding!” while all their friends just keep saying “Yay!” over and over again). It gets strangely dark at the end, but it’s still fascinating.
Before the days of YouTube, an AVI file of the film existed on my perpetually-too-small computer hard drive, until it was burned to a CD (I didn’t have a DVD burner), and then I just sort of forgot that it existed; like every other thing I’ve put away for safe keeping. I have a lot of bits and bobs on CDs. I have no faith any of them are remotely readable, and even if they were, I’d probably be at a loss to explain why I felt I needed to keep them. The nice thing about digital hoarding these days is everything can just be plopped on an external hard drive and sit there comfortably, not taking up much space, just waiting for the day I decide to take a stroll down memory lane (assuming the hardware doesn’t fail).
As I was thinking about that film this morning, I found myself sort of transported to another time, where I’m sitting in my family’s den and my parents are discussing some (seemingly) obscure piece of media. My dad is trying to describe it and jog my mom’s memory enough that she can fill in the gaps. I was trying to imagine describing this thing to someone decades younger than me, who had never seen it before. It kind of defies explanation. I think I would always sort of stumble at showing it to anyone else. It starts off zany and devolves into something gruesome and I find it strange to insist someone “has to watch it!” when maybe they’ll just think it’s gross and that I’m weird for suggesting it.
I’m starting to wonder if instead of re-releasing old movies, my generation’s thing is going to be reliving compilations of early 2000s media, because we got to have some pretty good internet in its early days. I’ve been seeing a lot of it pop up lately, as others bemoan the very real fact that time has marched on. The Badger Song took Bluesky by storm over the weekend. I can only imagine what will show up next.
I’m pretty sure it would be impossible to be raised by my mother and not develop some sort of crafting hobby. I grew up wandering fabric stores and spending Saturday afternoons watching a bunch of people “birth” quilts they’d made in a day. At some point, I sewed and tied a small baby blanket for a friend’s new sibling, spent most summers learning some sort of new beading project, and was addicted to my Klutz friendship bracelet book. Somehow, I didn’t totally pick up crafting with yarn until I was 18.
There were a couple of aborted fiber craft attempts. My grandmother tried to get my sister and I to make some garter stitch dish cloths on some re-purposed double-pointed knitting needles. There was also a frustrating evening crowding around my mom on our loveseat trying to imitate her as she crocheted these delicate heart-shaped sachets. It took having just enough downtime during my first semester of college for me to decide to pick up knitting. I managed a scarf and then somehow decided a whole afghan with cables was the way to go.
Knitting was easy for me. There were certainly challenging patterns and difficult stitches, but I didn’t have a lot of the troublesome issues I see new knitters have: dropped stitches, extra stitches on the end, or not being able to tell where I was in a pattern. It was a great use of time, it was fun, and it got me hats, scarves, mittens… just warmth, which is something I’m very concerned with when it gets cold outside.
I think the one area where I did experience some challenges was tension. I knit a lot of patterns that didn’t require much in the way of gauge swatches or very specific size requirements. Unfortunately, I had very loose tension (I didn’t hold my yarn tightly at all when I wrapped my stitches), which I didn’t actually notice until a couple years in, when my sister and I decided to knit “spa sets” as Christmas presents and the bath mitt I had made was much bigger and floppier than hers. I knit pretty loose for probably the first 10 years of the hobby, and then I went down a rabbit hole where I got a bit obsessed with how Stephanie Pearl-McPhee tensions her yarn. It was like watching a magic trick, because somehow she wrapped stitches in her right hand, without having to let go of her needle. I knew about “picking” but this was almost like the “throwing” style I was used to, except you didn’t have to lose hold of the needle.
This new style of holding the yarn changed a lot about how my patterns turned out. I had wanted it to make me a faster knitter, but I think it probably ended up making my stitches a bit neater along the way.
Twenty years after learning to knit, I’ve started to pickup up crochet, a thing I’ve done very sporadically in my life. If there’s one thing I know about it, crochet is excellent when it comes to shaping things. With that in mind, I sat down to master the single crochet stitch and I made my wife’s birthday present. That was sort of the gateway.
I’ve been a bit wary of busting into my stash of variegated yarn to crochet. Part of it was just not having the various crochet wraps and stitches, but I’ve also been a bit picky about “pretty” patterns. I managed to make a small asymmetrical scarf and then decided something more even should be next on the list. After an evening of scrolling through Ravelry’s patterns, I came across the Mutabilis pattern.
Apparently this can be a cowl, a hat, a scarf, a headband… any number of things!
The section at the bottom of the photo is how this started, and you can very clearly see where I decided I wanted to hold the crochet hook differently. It completely changed the way the yarn pooled. And then, it changed again when I picked it up a couple of days later and things were more humid and sticky, so the yarn wasn’t moving through my fingers the same way. It’s wild to me, that deciding to angle my hook a different way, and some sweat can have this much of an impact. I still have a decent-sized ball of yarn, which I got from The Yarnery a year ago, as part of their One Yarn Collection.
Part of me wants to find a similar yarn and then knit a project with a similar pattern, but then switch through my original throwing style, and picking, and the cottage-style knitting I do predominately and see just how differently the yarn will pool. Except that I’d really prefer consistency, which is probably why I’ve avoided doing much crochet with variegated yarns in the past, because I know I have a lot of work to do when it comes to the tension. Usually, this inconsistency would bother me, but I keep sort of picturing that first section as the brim or something, so I’m probably 95% okay with it (even though that’s really how I wanted it to pool the entire time). If I had started the pattern with a different hook, I probably wouldn’t have this drastic of a change, so even that can have an impact I guess.
This is always the hard part when it comes to learning a new skill, where I know what things are supposed to look like, but executing things to get the desired effect is still a bit of a challenge. I think I’ve learned enough to want to stick with it a bit longer, I guess we’ll see how consistent things are in the future.
And Blaugust 2023 officially comes to a close. I’m relieved its over, especially since the slog of work this week has meant writing posts was akin to pulling teeth at times.
I’m hoping I’ll come up with something more interesting tomorrow, considering it will be the first day of September, and the start of a long weekend.
I’m going to do my best to keep posting here on a daily basis, whatever that means. Because, it’s easier to post here than it is to post anywhere else, if I’m being completely honest. The flux of social media at the moment leaves a lot to be desired in terms of where it makes sense to share anything.
I’m glad to have Bluesky as an option, especially since Twitter seems like it’s about two steps away from requiring some sort of blood sacrifice to keep using the service, while everything else is subsumed by the Zuck. WordPress certainly has its issues, but at least this website is mine? Right?
I’m definitely still trying to find my community when it comes to this whole blogging thing. I’m just not sure where it is yet, so I’m going to keep sending these little pings out into the universe of the internet until I see what comes back. (As long as its not spam, because I have no patience for any of that).
It’s kind of a shame that social media wasn’t a thing when I was a teenager, because I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything to look back on that would tell me when I got my drivers license. There might be a reference to passing my test in an old journal, but that seems unlikely. At best, maybe it would be in a chat log on an ancient computer I no longer have in my possession. As I’m thinking back on it, I know that I took the test in the summer, probably in 2001, maybe as late as 2002. I waited as long as I could manage to actually take my drivers test. I waited so long that I ended up having to get my learners permit re-issued because it expired.
I hated everything about learning how to drive. When I was 14, my dad drove us back to a secluded county road and had me get in the drivers seat to practice. In retrospect, I don’t know how I managed to move the vehicle an inch, let alone drive down the road. The worst part, was when we came to an intersection and he told me I needed to make a right turn. Except that the only things I’d driven previously had very tiny steering wheels, and apparently full-sized car steering wheels require a bit more rotation (and speed) in order to initiate a turn correctly. I think I maybe got us around that corner and then declared myself done, because there was no way I was going to drive on the paved highway that would take us home.
At 15, I took the written test as a sort of rite of passage with everyone else in my class who was eligible (because at that point, taking a drivers training course was a quarter-long class offered at my high school, and at the end of it, someone would come up and let us sit for the written exam). Somewhere, in that initial year of my learners permit, I took the required 10 hours of driving instruction with an official instructor, and then… I’m not really sure what happened.
It’s not like I didn’t practice driving, because that definitely was a thing that I did. Did I practice parallel parking or corner backing? Nope. Did I practice coming to a complete stop at a stop sign? Definitely not. Did I drive a vehicle without one of my parents in the passenger seat? Yes, on multiple occasions, all of them very much against my will, hating every second of it.
I’d say that actually taking my behind the wheel test is as close as I’ve come to being dragged into something kicking and screaming. It started off poorly, because my parents didn’t have a copy of our vehicle’s insurance in the car. We spent 20 minutes getting someone to fax a copy of it to the DMV, by which time I’d already had a meltdown about how I didn’t need “to learn how to do this, I’m going to move somewhere that has trains and I’ll take the bus.” So, all of that hung over me while I finally took the test and didn’t do a good job of visibly looking both ways at intersections, or coming to a complete stop, or managing to do anything that resembled a decent parallel parking or corner backing maneuver. And I failed.
I think my dad thought it was going to be a “get back on the horse” course of action, by running an errand after my failed test and leaving me in the car with the directive that I would be driving us home and he expected me to be in the drivers seat when he came back. I spent the eternity of that errand mentally wrestling with myself about what to do, because I failed by driving the way I watched him drive for my whole life, and now I was going to have to get behind the wheel and do more (to me, utterly pointless) driving? I’m not sure I’d completely committed to the idea of never driving again, but I certainly didn’t want to drive anymore that day.
I was wearing nice shoes, shoes that wouldn’t have been good for walking. So, I entertained the idea of going over to Target and spending whatever was left in my wallet on a pair of crappy canvas shoes and a bottle of water and then just walking home. Home was over 25 miles away. It was late afternoon, so I’m not sure how long it would have taken for me to arrive at my destination. I still think about that sometimes. What would have happened if I’d done that? What would my dad have thought, walking up to the car and finding it empty; me, nowhere in sight?
Instead, I was in the drivers seat, and I drove us home. I’m not sure how the steering wheel didn’t melt from the inferno of rage coursing through me. I can still feel it now. The impotence of it all, just boiling inside of me, with no way to release it.
There’s a nice ending to this story. I went back for another 2 hours with an actual instructor who got me through parallel parking and corner backing, and then I somehow aced my test with the same examiner as my previously failed one. He didn’t even dock me for points after I painstakingly waited for someone at a crosswalk who wasn’t going, and wasn’t going, and then totally started crossing the second I decided to take my turn at the intersection.
But, I’ve never really shed the big “what if?” of the hour after I failed. It’s such a weirdly immature regret to have, that I didn’t just throw a total tantrum and basically run away for a few hours. Part of me wishes I’d been that committed to just never learning how to drive. It would have been wildly inconvenient, especially living where I do now, where having a car is pretty much a necessity to live and work. At least maybe I would have gotten someone to say “you’ve made your point” and we could all have moved on from there.
As failures go, it was probably a good time to have started doing poorly at things, considering how often I coasted through things before then. A nice preparation for adulthood where suddenly actual planning and effort is required, and I couldn’t depend on either cramming the night before, or having a subject just be easy for me. In retrospect, that’s probably when a lot of things did start to get more difficult, so it was really good timing.
It’s weird what stays with you. Part of me wants this memory to be a triumph, because I did manage to do so well when I re-took the test. But if I had it to do over again… I’d rather not fail. I’d rather not have been crying and upset in the minutes before taking the test, and feeling so angry in the hours after. I’d rather have been more prepared. At least I can still learn lessons from my 16 or 17 year-old self.
I took a nap on my lunch break today. I’m not sure it really solved anything, but It’s made getting through this afternoon less of a trial compared to yesterday. So far, my prediction the week would drag by has been entirely accurate. I am still hopeful by the time Friday rolls around I’ll somehow be astonished it’s already here. But, I’m probably going to be more concerned about September starting.
I’m still grappling with some writer’s block, because exhaustion plus hormones is a powerful combination against anything resembling productivity.
A couple weeks ago (or maybe longer than that) I saw a TikTok from Elyse Myers about how someone asking “what’s your favorite song (or book or movie or whatever)” isn’t a quest for you to dive back through every catalogued memory you have and find the book/song/movie that’s your absolute favorite, and they’re going to know if you get it wrong; they just want to get to know you. This sort of thing often trips me up when it comes to answering writing prompts or responding coherently every time my wife and I have been drifting off to sleep and she’s asked me to tell her a story.
I used to think it was my mind going blank, but I’ve since reconsidered and it’s quite possible my brain is offering up every possible idea able to even passably fit under a prompt’s umbrella, and everything is so loud in my head, I’m not hearing anything.
I think the trouble I have with writer’s block is usually some part of me gets louder in those moments and rejects any ideas out of hand, even though there are probably some decent ones in the bunch. That loud part also seems to spend a lot of time focusing on how difficult (nay, impossible) it would be to write about something. Which, if you think about it, is a great way to just avoid doing any writing at all, because it’s so challenging and time consuming, and why would I want to spend my time writing something crappy when I want to be writing something brilliant and amazing?
The scary thing about doing Blaugust, and hitting publish on posts as a means to fill a quota, is I share things I otherwise wouldn’t. But, a lot of it, is content I don’t really find interesting or worthwhile. Lists of songs or TikTok creators aren’t the sorts of things I spend my time thinking about on a daily basis. Outside of meeting an arbitrary goal, will I continue to throw together words about these things? It seems unlikely.
This is where the writer’s block makes me stumble. Because it’s so easy to be overly critical about the worth of so many subjects. I keep thinking about my posts on certain topics as definitive statements, but that’s foolhardy considering how things can change, and my opinions certainly aren’t static. However, I don’t have it in me to circle around the same three thoughts week in and week out, at least not publicly. That’s the sort of thing I save for my Morning Pages, where I noodle on something sporadically for weeks at a time until I can finally make sense of it.
I’d like to write something humorous at some point. Whether it’s re-telling some ridiculous story or just sharing something fun and silly, but every time I try there’s a hollowness to it, at least there is from my perspective anyway. I’m not sure I’ve really nailed down the “comedy = tragedy + time” formula I’ve seen touted everywhere on the internet. Or maybe I’ve internalized it so well that I just can’t even retrace the steps it took to get there.
So, that’s where things sit right now. I think I’ve referred to Blaugust as a roller coaster a couple of times, but as we get to the end of the month, it’s entirely possible it was just the long, slow, climb at the beginning of the ride. This is the part where its almost to the top, but I can’t see when we’re going to make that plunge down the first big hill. That’s always the scariest part of a roller coaster to me. After that, everything is happening too fast to really worry about it. I find the concept of that intriguing, but also terribly frightening. I’m not sure that makes it any different than most elements in my life.
I knew there would come a point when even having suggested themes wouldn’t be enough of a boost to get me over, around, or through a bit of writers block. I’m going to engage in the exercise of writing and posting through it instead of succumbing to it today, but I’m pretty sure it will be a frustrating experience for everyone involved.
I might be a little bit ready for summer to be over. I’m not ready for winter to get here, but there’s a hint of fall in the air (and literal colors changing on some trees) and I’m looking forward to closing a window at night and not wondering when I’m going to wake up and feel like I’m being stifled with humidity. We’re also going to be under another Air Quality alert tomorrow morning, in the Orange zone. I thought 2021 was bad when it came to smoke, but it’s just been so persistent this year. It becomes a question everyday if we can leave the windows open or not, and our electric bill skyrockets because the only way to not feel like we’re just breathing our own breath all day is to run the air conditioner. At least if its freezing cold outside I won’t feel like I’m depriving myself of something by keeping the windows closed.
It’s been a while since I felt this way about a Monday. I’m sure a good chunk of that comes down to having a poor night of sleep and a smaller amount of caffeine this morning. It’s incredible how much of an impact a disruption to routine can have, because I’m dragging in a way that I haven’t at the end of the day for a while. It’s the sort of feeling that makes me look back through the day and wonder where I should have taken a nap. It’s not like I didn’t get things done, but all of my mental energy went to work today, and I’m left with very little to offer here. It’s not the first time this will happen, and it certainly won’t be the last. This is where the scheduling of posts and working ahead are going to save me, but I actually have to do that to save myself, which isn’t exactly fair in my opinion. But, it’s not like time travel exists , offering me the ability to go back and prepare something ahead of time.
I guess at least my Bullet Journal has been on track for the past couple weeks. After my last little rant about it, I spent a some time looking through my schedule, figuring out where some things were falling apart, and it’s ended up serving me pretty well for the past 3 weeks. It definitely helped me catch up with some things I’d fallen behind on, which is exactly the point of it. Part of it may also be down to getting a new desk and reorganizing my workspace, because for some reason that sort of activity always seems to give me a renewed sense of purpose. I’m not sure how long I can keep riding that wave, but it’s doing something for me at the moment, I guess.
I’m three-quarters of the way through Tress of the Emerald Sea. Maybe I’ll finish it tonight, I guess we’ll see just how awake I am for any reading as the evening progresses. So far, I’m loving the crazy magic system (even though it’s completely terrifying), and I adore the narrator. I can’t say this about everything Brandon Sanderson writes, but this book makes me stop and re-read things sometimes, just to savor them. It’s making me think about re-starting my commonplace book habits, because there are some things that I read and I just want to keep reading them over and over again, the way I will put a song on repeat. Sometimes its fascinating subject matter, but a lot of the time it’s stuff that I sort of feel like I could have written, but not in the “anyone could write that” kind of way. It just sort of feels like somehow it came from my own head, even though I know it didn’t. It’s just… truth, or something like it.
I’m trying to think of a “fifth thing” to write about here, since that seems like a nice, round number for some reason. But I’m coming up blank again. So, I guess that’s it for today. It’s also probably the bloggiest blog I’ve written in I can’t remember how long. I mean, a weblog is just a collection of thoughts, I suppose they don’t all have to have some detailed, over arching theme, right?
The final week of Blaugust starts today, and the theme of this is week is meant to be Lessons Learned.
Considering I only just learned about Blaugust, an event that’s been happening for 10 years or so, everything about this has been a bit of a learning experience for me. I’m finding out I still have a lot of things to learn about the fiddly bits of using WordPress. And that the landscape of the days of LiveJournal when I used to post more regularly as a blog are LONG GONE, and it’s just not the same.
I’ve also learned that this exercise is practically the same as all of the other writing exercises I’ve participated in over the years. So much of what it boils down to is just putting something together and hitting publish. I think the thing I’m less enthused about is how necessary photos feel to this exercise now. I try not to just string together walls of text, but I think so much of the nature of reading things online these days is that they’re broken up by contextual images just to give the brain a bit of a break, and as someone whose writing has encompassed novels and English Literature papers… very little of that involves finding and incorporating images.
I think the photo element of this feels like the biggest hurdle at the moment. I need to start navigating some fair use options when I don’t have something in my own photo library, and I really don’t know anything about that. Growing up in the age of internet piracy and just outright hotlinking things without a thought for where they originated is not a great foundation as a base of knowledge.
There are also a lot of things I haven’t done much of this month since I decided to put this much time into my blog. I find it amusing that the bulk of the individuals I’ve seen participating are very into video games, and the one thing I’ve barely touched this month is my Switch. Things kind of come and go that way. I’m at a pause in Breath of the Wild, because I’m pretty sure the next thing on my docket is Calamity Ganon, and I’m not ready to face him yet. So I’ve basically been wandering the world a bit aimlessly trying to figure out where I still need to locate some shrines and what I need to do to build up my health and stamina some more. I shudder to think of anyone who devotes time and actual effort towards this sort of thing, because I’ve engaged in some of the most haphazard nonsense when its come to that game, but it seems that sometimes that’s just how I go about things.
I was hoping for something a bit more profound today, but we went to bed pretty late last night, and then I was up unreasonably early this morning, so my brain is a bit loopy and it feels like things are firing a bit haphazardly. We didn’t end up going back for the marina concert last night, but Pride was fun nevertheless. We did decide next year we might try to bring our camp chairs or a blanket and just find a spot out of the way where we could sit and craft for a little while. Part of it is being there for the experience, and being the introverts that we are, sometimes its enough to just be on the periphery. We both sort of had a moment yesterday where we would like to have stayed, but we had sort of maxed ourselves out somehow. I think that’s the thing that I was talking about when I mentioned yesterday that I’d like it to be a bit more like ConVergence. There are just options there to check out for a few minutes and then re-engage. But for us, we were either there, or we weren’t there wasn’t really a good way to step aside or leave and then come back later without just totally leaving and then coming back later. We’ll see how we feel about it next year, if we’re able to have a more concrete plan of approaching the experience.
Tomorrow is Monday, the last week of our summer here, before everyone goes back to school and we all start acknowledging the changing color of the leaves. I’m not sure I’m prepared to embrace that, so it probably means this week is going to be something that simultaneously drags and flies by, as has most of August. But, we have some fun planned for the last weekend of the month, which I’m looking forward to, so if it does zip by, that might not exactly be terrible.
It’s the end of Blaugust 2023’s Motivation week, and it’s Saturday, which means I’ve got no structure for anything in a post today.
It’s also Pride Weekend in Bemidji, so I’m a bit wrapped up in getting myself together to participate in our local festivities.
Aptly, Cat Valente just shared a post on her Substack about corporations “celebrating” Pride, and kicked it off by noting that we’re in fact two months past Pride Month.
For Bemidji, I think this is the third year of consistently hosting a public Pride event. When I was in my twenties, there was a group who hosted a potluck in a city park, and one year they held an actual parade. The unfortunate thing, is that until pretty recently, the queer community of this area has seemed pretty fragmented and also insular to me. It’s not like there weren’t people within the spectrum of LGBTQ+ identities here, but it felt next to impossible to find them.
The first time I spent any amount of time with people in the queer community was over a decade ago when our state was voting on writing a same sex marriage ban into our constitution. Before then, there were a handful of people I met in college, a couple of adults I knew of as a child, and the vicious rumors generated by the teen-aged gossips of my tiny high school.
I can’t say that I’m deeply involved in the community here. I’m awkward, shy, and so easily overwhelmed when it comes to peopling at times, that even though I’ve tried entering the various LGBTQ bubbles that have been put up it’s felt akin to traveling to the moon. Even today, in theory, I am looking forward to going to the festival this afternoon, and entertaining the thought of going back for the concert at the marina tonight, but the reality is that I will go and then struggle under the weight of being perceived, even in a space where I’m “allowed” to be myself.
I think I want it to be the same as when I go to ConVergence, but it can’t be that way. I’m not driving hours away, I am still very much on my home turf, and being “out” here still feels like a gamble most days. It’s hard to turn off the mask here, because the mask means safety, even in a space where it might not actually be necessary. At best, I’m hoping to turn down the “passively queer” filter I tend to apply to myself (so as to escape the notice of the bigoted), but I have pretty low expectations of my success in that regard.
This is where that corporate Pride post really spoke to me earlier in the week. Living in an area where public Pride events are only recently becoming established, being able to walk through Target and find a section covered in various rainbows and other pride flags is just such a relief. In this age of the internet, I can order whatever I want, but to be able to have a tangible (if very temporary) footprint of my identity within the borders of where I live? It’s a respite to me.
It bothers me that things went so poorly this year for that little section in Target. I saw multiple reviews on TikTok, of all of the merchandise they were releasing, and there were so many fun and campy things, and it seemed like such a good vibe. And because queer joy is apparently antithetical to some people’s own existence, it became controversial, and suddenly we can’t have nice things. It made me a bit worried about how things would go when August rolled around here. Maybe I’ll have an update on that score after I’ve gone out into the world…
I’m happy there’s an event to go to, thrilled even. The best thing about these sorts of events is just the reminder that I’m not alone out here. It’s easy to lose sight of the others, but having a moment to congregate and remember that I’m not the only one is a good thing. Last year, it was the first bright spot after we had COVID. This year? I’m not sure exactly what it will be, but I’m pretty sure there’s joy to be found there, possibly in some unexpected ways.
I’ve been a fan of fantasy fiction for pretty much my entire life. I re-read some books to tatters as a kid, because I just enjoyed the stories so much. As an adult, a friend introduced me to Elantris by Brandon Sanderson, and that was my doorway into what I now know as the Cosmere. After that, I devoured the first three Mistborn books and sort of lost myself to a lot of fantasy fiction, some higher and some lower.
I can’t claim to be a devout fan of Brandon Sanderson, because I’m very behind in certain series and haven’t even started others, but there’s something about his work that I find fascinating. When I found out about his rules for his magic systems it became even more interesting to me for some reason. Something about the way he builds his worlds made them easier for me to inhabit. With his Stormlight Archive books, or the Mistborn books, I catch myself thinking about parts of the stories when I’m not reading them, but thinking about it as though it’s real life. Literally, there have been moments when I’ve wished for tin or pewter, and I’m no mistborn!
March 2022, when the Year of Sanderson Kickstarter was announced, I was immediately tempted to sign up. First, it was just going to be for digital copies of the books, but then the print editions sounded like they were going to be so fun and interesting, and then I kept thinking about some of the themed swag boxes and after doing some math and making some choices about where I was going to spend my money for the next 12 months, I decided it was going to be worth it to sign up for the full year experience.
It started off a bit slow, because fulfillment of a project of this magnitude is quite an undertaking, especially when you have the most successful Kickstarter project of all time. Eventually, boxes started showing up, and I have yet to be disappointed with anything I’ve received. The foiled print editions of the books are gorgeous, the themed extras have been fun and surprising, and it’s just been cool to have something show up as a surprise once a month.
I have an odd collection of enamel pins that has grown a lot over the last decade, and after regretfully losing some of them, I’ve become a bit protective about wearing them. I ended up getting a bulletin board, so my collection of Cosmere pins adorn the top, with my plan to fill it out quite neatly by the end of the year.
I’ve kept the cards from all of the pins, since I’m not familiar with every world in the Cosmere (yet).
Of course, the point of all of this was the four new books, and I’m ashamed to admit that until this week, I hadn’t actually gotten around to reading any of the three I’ve received. I’ve become a bit utilitarian about my reading lately. For a long stretch, the only things I’ve read have been for the book club I meet with once a month. And my version of reading has been finding the book on Audible and listening to it at 1.5x speed, the day before we meet to talk about it. It’s not a very satisfying experience if I’m being honest. Some of that comes down to the variety of genres we choose, but sometimes it’s more about just rushing through the book and not bothering to take the time to connect to the story.
A few weeks ago, we stopped by our local library because I needed to fix an issue with my (under-used) library card, and we ended up wandering through the stacks and taking some books home with us. I managed to power through the graphic novel on cults in America (didn’t love it) but then stopped short a quarter of the way into the queer thriller I had chosen. I don’t like how picky I’ve gotten when it comes to certain genres, but I also know that sometimes I just have my limits about some things.
After dinner the other night, I was halfheartedly reading another chapter in the thriller while Ivory finished the dishes, and she decided she was game to read for the rest of the evening. Except, I wasn’t going to read any more chapters of a thriller before bed (it seemed tantamount to pouring nightmare fuel directly into my brain). I ended up pulling my copy of Tress of the Emerald Sea off the shelf where it has languished since its arrival.
We settled in, and I’m now kicking myself for having this book in my possession and not bothering to look at it beyond the pretty cover and illustrations. I don’t want to give anything away, but what a strange world this story is set in! I’m only just starting Part Three, but so far, nothing has gone the way I anticipated, pretty much from the very beginning. I’m being surprised in pleasant ways though. There’s also a lot of humor, which isn’t ever something I seek out in my reading, yet I’m always pleased when it crosses my path.
Tress and my Soonie Pup currently occupy my nightstand
Until my library books a couple weeks ago, I’m not sure when I had last read a physical copy of a book. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to books at work, doing chores, in the car, and I’ve amassed a collection of ebooks on a few different services. I’ve also had to grapple with the reality that physical books take up space, which is at a premium in our apartment. Books are also heavy, and when we pack them all up to move some day in the future, I’m not sure how happy I’ll be hauling them out. Still, there was something nice about reading through a few chapters before bed without a screen shining in my face, or my brain focusing on a speed reading narrator while playing a game on my phone. Of course, reading right before bed isn’t always the wisest option, since there have definitely been instances in the past where it’s been next to impossible to put a book down; even when I’m looking at the other side of midnight with a full day of work ahead.
Still, there was something reassuring about sitting down with a tangible object in front of me. Also, having an idea of how far I’ve gotten was nice vs “how many times have I swiped or scrolled” being an indicator of where I am in the book.
I’m too much of a worshiper of technology, and too practical about our space to be a Luddite when it comes to books. But, I know I should make more of an effort to sit down and read through the copies I have in front of me (completely ignoring the backlog of books I’ve got in my Audible library and wishlist).
There are always books to be read, games to play, projects to finish, words to write. There’s so much to do, it’s just always about making the time to do it.
I wish I knew what compelled me to keep doing this. There’s going to be a need to replicate it outside of August, and I don’t know what it will be that keeps me coming back.
It seems a bit spammy to post nonsense here daily, but I can also tell that without making it an almost-daily habit I could probably lose track of time and go another 6 months without posting anything. That 6 months would be perfectly fine without me writing here, but I’d be annoyed at myself because I paid money for this website and then I just let it sit here, unused? How wasteful! How terrible! I’d also be annoyed because I’m almost never regretful that I took the time to sit and write, even if it’s only 100 words. But, I’m always disappointed in myself when I actively choose not to make the time for it. (Anyone sensing a theme for my overall Blaugust 2023 posts?)
It’s entirely unoriginal, but I probably get the most motivation to try something from watching how someone else does it. It’s probably why National Novel Writing Month has always been so appealing to me. 30 days, writing 50,000 words in a mad dash? It’s total insanity, but look how many people attempt it, and are somehow successful! It doesn’t result in a published book, but the thing for me, for a long time was just that I had taken the time, put in the effort, and proven that I could somehow string a bunch of sentences together into a story. The downfall (and the thing that always torpedoed things for me after November) was running myself ragged inevitably left me burned out and in need of a break. Ideally, I’d emerge from NaNoWriMo with an established writing habit, and continue through the rest of the year and all of the next with an innate ability to write over 1500 words a day, huzzah!
That’s never how it works.
In a way, November is both the worst and the best time to have the NaNo exercise, because for most of us in the US, there’s a built-in 4-day weekend towards the end of the month to make that final push if we’re running behind. But then December comes and do I have the time to hang up lights and decorate a tree, bake cookies, knit presents, shop for what I can’t knit, engage with all of the holiday festivities and still write every day? It’s the ultimate test of my willpower, and I fail at it, every time. And I tell myself, I’ll pick up the routine in January, a very useful resolution for the new year (because those always go so well for me). But by that point, the sun has barely been out for a month, and if my vitamin routine has been disrupted the way everything else has I’m probably so deficient in Vitamin D that it’s another mark against me. Plus, I’m usually just generally exhausted from spending the last week and a half of the month running around in the middle of snowstorms on the daily. So, anything I write in January feels like the worst thing I’ve ever written and concrete evidence of my inability to do anything correctly (because I catastrophize like a PRO!).
It’s a lot. And its a whole lot of nonsense. The nice thing about Blaugust appears to be that you write what you write, because it’s the exercise of writing. Which is a lot like NaNoWriMo, except that there’s a chance more people will see it than if I wrote a story where the climax probably included something like “[they all do magicy things here, and win the day],” because sometimes you just can’t be bothered to craft the intricate plot points necessary to flesh out overcoming that final obstacle in the heat of the moment.
Blog posts don’t really work that way. If you have something you’re going to put brackets around to fix later, then the post isn’t “ready” to go up, and you’ve got to fix it first. Although, there’s probably an argument to be made that you just lay it all bare to someone and say “[I have a many thoughts about this thing, and it’s going to be a subject all its own someday].”
As it gets towards the end of the month, I’m strategizing about how to maintain some of the momentum I’ve built here. Maybe it will be looking at my energy throughout the week and focusing on those days as writing days, so I actually start scheduling posts to come out at a time human eyes will see them. Or, maybe I’ll keep poking at this place everyday to try to ingrain the habit I’m trying to build. Providing myself some alliterative framework to fall back on if I’ve got nothing else to write about is my go-to strategy for the moment. I’m not sure how long I can maintain that before I get tired of it though. I also have a document I’m using to hold some ideas of where to go next. I’m wary of planning though, because my penchant for black and white thinking tends to lead to me scrapping things completely if they don’t go exactly as I intended.
So far, I think motivation for me has just meant trying, because sometimes that’s all I can do.
