Thinking a lot about nonconformity lately. For various reasons both personal and creative.
Hmm.
Category: Personal
A little end of year cleaning house
I’m usually good at keeping things tidy around the house — inquisitive and/or destructive cats aside — but every now and again things pile up. There’s shredding to be done, we’ve suddenly accumulated a large pile of books to be donated, or shipping boxes that have only since been used by cats for shredding purposes, or what have you. Eventually I’ll decide that a cleaning session is in order.
I even need to go through my emails lately. I’m usually good at those, because Sundays are when I go through them while I’m running all the PC cleaning programs, but sometimes I lag behind. This usually happens when my Day Job schedule encroaches on the time I usually do the home cleaning. Point is, I’ve gotten myself on several mailing lists somehow and it’s clear that I’m only reading maybe about a quarter of them, if that. I’ll need to go through those soon enough.
Writingwise? Well, for the most part I keep my files well organized on my Dropbox account so I know where everything is. But over the course of the year, things can pile up. Pictures I’ve transferred from my camera and my phone, image scans, work-related paperwork, things like that…some of those don’t have a specific home and end up in a File These Away At Some Point folder. Do I need to keep them? Probably not. Some I can save, but most of them I can probably delete.
I don’t think I have any stagnant projects that need refiling, as far as I know. A few backburner items (which are rightly sorted in the Backburner Projects folder) but other than that, I haven’t made any major decisions to trunk anything lately. Which is a good thing, I suppose.
Either way, I like doing this at the end of the year as part of my process to start the next year fresh and clean!
So.
This is so going to change my writing style again, isn’t it?
I’m…well, I’m a little less angry and frustrated and terrified than I was Thursday morning, but no less than I was when The Fuckwit was last in office. [Noted, he’s still not my President. I’m totally fine if you unfollow me if that bothers you. This blog isn’t going to turn into a wonkfest, as that’s not the kind of writer or person I am.]
I have plans. Long and short term, some mere ideas and some dedicated goals. I refuse to let him or any of his minions (or owners, if you really want to be cynical about it) keep me from using my words or to make me hide. I didn’t play their game last time and I don’t plan on playing it this time either.
Perhaps a *little* nervous…
I’m sure we’re all on tenterhooks as we await the outcome of tomorrow’s election. I know I certainly am, for various and extremely obvious reasons. It continues to blow my goddamn mind that some people are still contemplating voting for The Fuckwit.
(Hey, it’s my blog, I get to wax politic every now and again. I don’t all that often, so stick with me here.)
As for me, I will most likely be heavily distracting myself instead of watching coverage for most of Tuesday because I know I won’t be able to emotionally handle it otherwise. I did this back in 2012 when I was worried Mitt would win by binge-reading the webcomic Endtown. (I highly recommend it, Aaron Neathery’s storytelling is equal parts strange, heartbreaking and humorous.) I believe in 2016 I binge-watched the Gall Force anime series which I hadn’t done in ages, and 2020 I think I just focused on writing and my music collection. Perhaps this time out we’ll watch silly holiday romcoms or something.
I mean, realistically I feel cautiously optimistic. Harris has consistently proven herself not only able to go above and beyond, but also to consistently think multiple steps ahead and and think outside the box when necessary. TFG and his team, on the other hand, has consistently proven himself utterly unable to do even the most basic homework without fucking up spectacularly, and hiding said fuck-ups with distraction. And several members of his own party have even gone public to say oh christ please I’ll even vote for this cheese danish instead of him. Completely ignoring the “polls” that have been popping up as of late, it sounds like Harris has an extremely good chance of winning.
Still, I’ve come to accept the fact that I do not have the stomach or the brain to be a political wonk. I’m just too mentally reactive with such things. So I’m just going to hope for the best. I’m certainly hoping we’ve dispensed with most if not all of the faithless electors who screwed up 2016. And I’m also hoping that TFG’s minions won’t pull another January 6, because we really don’t need a repeat of that now, do we?
Well. Either way, I’ll still be here. I’m definitely not going anywhere.
Fly-by: brb, at jury duty
I’ll be taking a few days off from the day job next week so I’ll be back here on Monday!
We are hope despite the times
One, I had no idea REM had dropped this digital mix last month, but it’s a great eighteen-track compilation of what they did best in their earlier years: a strong and vocal political awareness, and a keen eye for community both local and national.
Two, and more importantly, I ask you to do the right thing. Even if you need to swallow that bitter pill because they’re not perfect. Even if they do one or two things you disagree with. Even if they can’t fix everything right away. One candidate has the intelligence and the strength to keep this country working and improving. The other is a bigot with a rap sheet, wants to outlaw several of my friends and coworkers, and wants to keep hate alive.
Do the right fucking thing and vote. You know who for.
Reading at night
I was doing pretty good there for a while. I was going through a number of books on my TBR pile (or alternately catching up on my shopping list by reading library copies on Hoopla), but that seems to have fallen by the wayside again. I’m back to rereading my WIP again, and I think that’s doing more harm than good right now. I did this before with Queen Ophelia’s War…I was revision-reading so often that I kind of burnt myself out with the story for a little bit and had to distance myself for a while before picking it up again.
Mind you, I find revision-reading one of the best tools I have when it comes to writing novels and prepping them for self-publication, but I sometimes need to learn that overdoing it leads to hyperfocusing on the problems and rarely getting any further. There has to be a balance.
Not that I’m burnt out on Theadia yet, thankfully. Just that I need to put it aside for a time at night. I need to read things that aren’t my own work. How else would I happen to discover new things that might inspire newer ideas? And not even that, sometimes it’s fun just to sit down and do a bit of enjoyable reading at the end of a long day! It’s a perfect wind-down activity!
So maybe what I need to do is dust off those books in the TBR pile and start cracking them open!
Too Darn Hot
It’s been uncomfortably hot here in San Francisco the last couple of weeks, seeing record temperatures and ridiculously clear skies. Thankfully I work in a place where temperature regulation is kind of important, so I’m spending most of the day inside where it hovers somewhere at a comfortable sixty degrees or so.
Unfortunately, Spare Oom has been a bit of a sauna at times, meaning I can’t always get a lot of work done until it cools off in the evening. Which means revision work on Theadia is falling a bit behind, but I’m not too worried about it. It’ll get there when it gets there.
It did remind me of my Boston days, especially when I lived in the Shoebox, which could get unbearably hot and stuffy during the summer even when the window wide open. The Allston apartment was a bit better, given that it was a north-facing apartment and thus never got direct sunlight, but without any AC it could still get uncomfortable. Those days I’d usually hang out elsewhere, like at a library or a record store until sunset, then stay up far too late enjoying the cool of the evening. And of course there were the summers in the Belfry…I’d often start my writing sessions after dinner when it was already cooling off.
Mind you, this is not normal weather for San Francisco. We’re more known for being firmly stuck in the upper fifties and low sixties on the good days, with the addition of consistent fog cover out here in the Richmond District. From what I hear, the weather will be dropping back down soon enough, then I’ll feel comfortable back here again.
Passing the time
So, how is my little experiment with passing the time at work going?
Well, it could be going better to be honest. I’m still finding too many excuses (and they are excuses) not to pull out my phone and screw around on Threads for the short amount of time I have for breaks. I mean, fine, it’s downtime and there’s nothing inherently wrong with using said time to mindlessly scroll social media…but like I said, I don’t want to do it anymore, and I’m trying my damnedest to get OUT of that habit.
I’m just not trying hard enough, really.
On the plus side, though…I have been doing a damn fine job of maintaining a level of Zen while at work. For a little while there I was letting myself get too frustrated and/or distracted and reactive to situations, just like I would do in the past, but that doesn’t happen nearly as much these days. Sure, I’ll get a bit snippy or grumble to myself in certain situations, but I’ll let it go very soon after and not continue to dwell on it.
And creativity-wise? I’ve scaled back the prep work, so to speak. For a while there I was carrying a small but bulky notebook in my jacket pocket, which did get its use, but I’m back to the old-school ways again, using my trusty back-pocket pad. Why? Because it provides lower expectations. I’m not writing anything big there, but I am starting to write down more lines of lyrics/poetry and the occasional WIP note. And that’s all I really need right now.
Bringing a bag…?
I’ve been toying with the idea of bringing my satchel to work. Right now the only thing I usually bring is my coffee thermos and my lunch bag, but I’ve been thinking lately about bringing just a few things more.
The main reason, to be honest, is to change some habits.
I’m really getting sick of spending my entire breaks staring at my phone and reading social media. I mean, there’s no real harm in it as I curate my feeds pretty thoroughly these days, but I’m kind of getting bored by it, to be honest. Not the feeds themselves, mind you. Just the habit of doing it every single flipping moment that I have a break. I don’t really enjoy it anymore, to be honest. I’ll check my emails or any texts I get from A, but not much else.
I’ve been thinking about it: bring in a few things I will definitely interact with: my moleskine personal journal, a word search magazine, that sort of thing. Preferably something not electric if I can get away with it. Perhaps bring in one of my empty spiral-bound notebooks for some longhand work.
And yes, that’s another reason: getting out of the habit of passive scrolling and into the habit of fun creativity at work. I’m not aiming to write a novel here (not just yet, anyway), but I think I would benefit from using downtime for things I enjoy. The tricky part here is that our break room is tiny, so I’d either need to find a spot outside (in the car if I’m driving, for instance) or on the roof. But I’ll figure that out when it comes to it.
Either way, I’m up for a change. I’m due for a change, at any rate.
Welcome to Bridgetown 