The idea is to do a quick update, once a week, about the week that came before. The idea isn’t mine; it’s been a thing for more than a decade. I’m not even the only person I know to do it: Don started something similar last year and I’ve seen it help him get back into regular blog updates, something I need to do for myself.
I got into the habit of using social media, particularly Twitter and IG because while they both suck for passively allowing Nazis, incels, and President Tr*mp to say whatever to whoever, Facebook can outright go fuck itself for actively adding to the world’s problems. In the process, for reasons I’ll get into another time, I mostly stopped using my personal website. But this space, in as much as anything digital can be owned, is definitely mine, while Twitter and IG and Fuck-Facebook and all the rest are, depending on the day, very likely not mine at all.
I mean, I’ll still use them in a limited way to keep in touch with people I care about. I’m not a monster.
But this is meant to take some of what’s been in my head for the last week and put it into words that you, people reading this post for your own reasons (hey, I don’t judge – you do you) can put into your own heads.
Feeling and Thinking:
I haven’t been sleeping much this week. I had a few good days of solid catching up on zzzs between Christmas and New Years, which was glorious because I’d had about a month of not sleeping well before that, but it’s slipped away from me again. I’m having a lot of inflammation in my joints right now, courtesy of my monogenic autoinflammatory disease, which means I’m in a lot of pain right now, and that keeps me from sleeping more than a few hours at a time. It’s always been a problem, off and on, my whole life, so on one hand I tend to shrug it off because I’m resigned to it, and on the other hand ow fuck joint stiffness exhaustion grr argh. I’m trying to be better about sharing. Of course when I tried that last year, I got a very close relative yelling at me about how that newsletter made them look bad, somehow, and is why that was also my last newsletter in 2019.
I should get back to that too, but baby steps.
Watching:
This week I watched both seasons of The Repair Shop on Netflix, which is so delightfully soft and charming that even the subtitles say things like “casual uplifting music”. (You know, in case “uplifting music” was too much pressure.) It’s Very Good. Kindly restorers do sympathetic restorations – which is when you want to repair everything broken, repaint/polish/replace only as necessary, keeping as much as possible of the natural aging of the piece so its history isn’t sanded off or covered up – on family heirlooms for mostly-elderly Brits. Sweet old folks tearing up over snuggling the repaired doll they were given when they evacuated during the Blitz, or being able to once again play with the 100 year-old steam-powered car their grandad got new a century ago. There are no tragedies. No sudden emergencies. Just peaceful making good of precious objects. 6 out of 5 stars.
I also watched Daybreak on Netflix, adapted from Brian Ralph’s comic. Totally different mood. Memetastic teens finding their own in a weirdo post-apocalypse. A bit gory, some tropes that seem problematic at first but resolve better than expected, evil Matthew Broderick, and an entire episode narrated by RZA. Would have liked to see a second season but this one’s already canceled. 4 out of 5 stars.
Reading:
Started Sam J. Miller’s 2018 novel Blackfish City, because I will catch up on everything I want to read eventually. I’m not far enough along to properly review it yet, but so far it’s brilliant and I’m really enjoying it.
Extra bits:
I’m drawing again. I got back into it at the end of 2019, working my way up to daily practice. Little known but true fact about me: I got a fine arts degree in 2008, in addition to my art history degree, thank you Sacramento City College. But then I didn’t draw much at all for about a decade because I was taking care of everyone and everything else. There’s no money in my art right now, and for the longest time if I wasn’t hustling to pay the bills it felt like whatever else I was doing was a waste of time. I’m still scrambling for money, but also trying to remember what it’s like to just enjoy something I’m good at, that I can do for me.
References, because this is how my brain works:
- “Weeknotes: personal, public logs in the tradition of early blogging“, Doctorow, BoingBoing, July 25, 2018.
- “Weeknotes S02 E01“, Pizarro, donfoolery, Jan 5, 2020.
- “Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal“, Wikipedia, accessed Jan 8, 2020.
- “Monogenic Autoinflammatory Diseases with Mendelian Inheritance: Genes, Mutations, and Genotype/Phenotype Correlations“, Martorana, Bonatti, Mozzoni, Vaglio and Percesepe. Frontiers in Immunology, Apr 3, 2017.
- “Grr Argh“, YouTube, accessed Jan 8, 2020.
- “Letter No. 4“, Cuinn, Letters From a Small Place, July 21, 2019.
- “The Repair Shop“, Wikipedia, accessed Jan 8, 2020.
- “Daybreak“, Wikipedia, accessed Jan 8, 2020.
- “Wu-Tang’s RZA Breaks Down 10 Kung Fu Films He’s Sampled“, Vanity Fair / YouTube, Sep 3, 2019.
- Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller, 2018.