Some reports on my silly little life

[mobiusstripper]

My brain has been completely exhausted lately, so despite the long reading list I've set out for myself, it's not really coming along, I've hit pause for now on my attempted cover-to-cover read of Being and Nothingness at page 100 (out of 800) and am instead reading Caitlin Doughty's latest book Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, in which she answers children's questions about rotting corpses. For whatever reason, reading about death and decay always puts a girl's mind at ease.



According to my app, I've done about 3 hours of cumulative plank in the past year, and I'm working on getting my daily plank up to 2 minutes (currently averaging 1 minute and 30 seconds). I went for a hike the other day, which felt really nice for my muscles. I'm upset about how online I have become in the past few years due to COVID and the effects it is having on my mental and physical health. I miss being able to go to my martial arts classes and roller derby and have a job that had a strong physical component. I know I can make my own exercise routine, but I haven't been very good at coming up with one that I can stick to other than doing my daily plank exercise. Otherwise, I am quite sedentary and, given that I have poor eating habits and am staring down 30, I don't like it.

I need to find a new therapist because of the move, and I am going to start working on restricting my internet time. It's hard when all of my work is being done online, but there is also plenty of time I spend online when I'm not working, and I want to work toward reclaiming that time for myself. There are many wonderful things about being online - meeting new people, being exposed to new ideas, especially in a time when I've restricted my in-person interactions so much - but I'd be dishonest with myself if I didn't acknowledge that I use it primarily a source of instant gratification and dopamine hits. I genuinely worry about the effect spending so much time online is having on my brain. I so rarely am truly alone anymore, and I need to get back to being able to just be with myself. I need to renew my focusing on meditating (something I am admittedly shit at with my ADHD but that is still good for me), private journaling, and doing my art without something constantly going on in the background. My self-discipline is truly terrible when it comes to things like that, so I'm going to need to put my foot down with myself and develop a system.

Now that I've settled in after the move, I am going to start seriously considering looking at going back to school (again), although I really don't know 100% what I want to do. I have been considering MFA programs in creative writing, but I don't know if they are worth the time or money. I continue to be interested in law school, particularly going into labor law. Human rights law of some kind as been something I've imagined going into since high school, but the truth is that I don't know if I have the emotional wherewithal for it, which is what has kept me from pursuing it so far. I do believe I have the mind for it, but I struggle with bureaucracy and burnout. I have always suffered from being more thinker than doer. It's still up in the air with COVID because I do not want to be in a classroom environment when things are still as they are, but I also don't want to get ripped off for inferior online classes. I want to go to the best school I can get into and get the best experience I can out of it. But maybe that just another excuse for me not to shit or get off the pot and avoid taking the next step in life. I'm going to be getting in touch with the career office at my alma mater, since their services are available to all alumni, and hopefully talk to somebody who can help me pick a path and start working on it. The fact that I don't want to attend school now doesn't need to stop me from applying. I can always defer an acceptance.

I reached out to a playwright friend of mine recently - an old friend of my mother's who I got close with after I did graphic design for several of her shows back when I was in high school - and asked her if she would be interested in mentoring me. She said that she would love to, so now she is going to guide me through the process of writing my first play. I need to come up with a few pitches before our first meeting next week, so that is what I will be spending this weekend on. I am trying to decide if I should try adapting one of my existing stories or write something completely new. I will probably write up pitches for both and then talk them through with her and see what she thinks. I'm not worrying about the possibility of getting something produced because that would be premature when I haven't written anything yet, but I will admit I have daydreams about it.

My damn laptop is going in for repairs again. Fortunately, I dug up my old HP Stream, and it seems to still work well enough for me to do basic things. But this puts a wrench in my art because the Stream doesn't have enough memory to set up my tablet and usual art programs on. So I will probably have to wait until my main laptop comes back to be able to do much digitally. That's okay though because I haven't worked on my traditional art much recently, and it wouldn't kill me to do some practice there, even if it means I won't be producing anything polished or portfolio-worthy.


I also need to get my ass in gear about submitting poetry to journals. I said I would do 100 submissions this year, but so far I've only done four. I have no excuse but my sheer laziness for that one.

Comments

[purglepurglepurgle]

Sympathise re: internet-time-restriction; I go through cycles of 'restrict; oh hey it's okay; this is fun; OH NO' and repeat. :,D I held off getting a smartphone for ages; I used to have phases of burying my psp in the wardrobe sometimes because that was my portal... Something I like about dreamwidth as platforms go is that it's relatively easy to ignore (as much as anything can be, anyway). No push notifications. One thing I recommend is private browsing + logging out of everywhere by default, so you only log in when you specifically want to engage with a platform. I think Ao3 is the only thing I have logged in all the time, since that's low-drama.

idk if you play an instrument but I recommend it; you still get a bit of a dopamine hit from learning things but there's also something about it that seems to have a subconscious calming effect. It's a bit hard to distinguish cause from effect but I notice when I stop keeping up with music practice I'm less calm in general.

A friend is doing a masters in another subject, atm. The course has been negatively affected by covid; the measures they've taken to try to stop students cheating in the exams have meant the exams are all over the place; one paper super hard, another way too long, with a fiddly process where the students have to photograph the paper and attach it at the end of the exam that can be stressful to have in the back of the mind all the way through. This is a mathsy masters so things might be better on a humanities one, but just going off what I've heard, it sounds like the plan of researching + applying but considering deferring does make sense.

Good luck with the play! It sounds exciting and I am super envious. XD

There may be sommmme chance that Krita (https://krita.org/en) would work on the old laptop, if that's any use? I've never spent enough time with it to figure out how to use it properly and just use https://jspaint.app/ for everything these days. ^^' But I know that Krita can load up on mine and works with my tablet, though I'd guess my tablet is less hi-tech.

[mobiusstripper]

>idk if you play an instrument but I recommend it; you still get a bit of a dopamine hit from learning things but there's also something about it that seems to have a subconscious calming effect. It's a bit hard to distinguish cause from effect but I notice when I stop keeping up with music practice I'm less calm in general.

I have at various points in my life played piano, clarinet, and guitar, but I'm really bad at all of them. Clarinet was probably my best instrument (although I haven't picked it up in nearly five years), but I find guitar the easiest to play casually. It usually leads to me getting frustrated though because my fingers are so clumsy no matter how much I practice. I've also got no sense of rhythm.

The most calming thing for me is actually just getting in my car and driving around, especially if I can hit a winding mountain road. I feel like I ought to do it less because it's expensive re: gas money and not especially eco-friendly (although I also need to get out of the head that the fate of the world hinges on me not taking a therapeautic drive), but it really can't be beat for getting me back into sorts.

>Good luck with the play! It sounds exciting and I am super envious. XD

I just wrote up my three ideas, and ALL of them are just...hilariously, horrendously philosophical. I make fun of myself a lot for being really up my own ass as a writer, but I accept it because I'm not being pretentious. I am just genuinely up my own ass. Those are the topics I enjoy thinking about (or hate thinking about, but get stuck thinking about either way), so they are what I write about. I just have to make sure that it's not too insufferably self-indulgent for anybody else to enjoy.

As for my laptop, the problem isn't so much that it's old as that it has so little RAM and disk space. The reason I stopped using it as my primary laptop was when it was unable to download its own update.

[purglepurglepurgle]

> my fingers are so clumsy no matter how much I practice

Saaaaaaaame. I have the ear for it but not the fingers. But I figure I'll just never be particularly good at it, but I can get good enough to play little things and splice them together electronically and compose things. Or play slow moody things with a lot of distortion. :P I'm very competitive so it's slightly annoying not even being in the running for being good at it, but it still has a background hypnotic effect even so. Even when it feels frustrating in the moment, I think there's literally something about focusing on the notes on the paper that works a bit like meditation. I spend half an hour pissed off at it but I sleep better.

> (although I also need to get out of the head that the fate of the world hinges on me not taking a therapeautic drive)

Yeah, avoid that mindset!! :) Fwiw I have a 'don't even TRY to go veggie/vegan' policy for myself because when I start worrying about the ethics of my food, it's a klaxon that my mental health is in a bad way. Always feels a bit scummy if you're in a roomful of vegans, but you're one tiny grain on the beach and you gotta do what you gotta do.

> I make fun of myself a lot for being really up my own ass as a writer, but I accept it because I'm not being pretentious

Same, lol. I also have to translate myself because my 'native voice' is so dramatic and it can just come out silly or... weird. It doesn't seem to like contractions. Or rather, it leaps between an overly formal style and a super casual surfer style, sometimes within the same sentence. And given that I generally transmute my philosophical musings by way of drawerfic about a videogame from 1997, when it comes to self-indulgent, I can't talk.

Ah, sucks about the old laptop; I figured low memory means different things for different people and I know krita needs less than photoshop, but if the laptop can't handle its own update then sounds like nothing much is gonna work. :{ Hope the newer one's fixed soon!

[mobiusstripper]

>I generally transmute my philosophical musings by way of drawerfic about a videogame from 1997

Let me know if you are ever interested in having me dump 3000 words on you about why I consider "Possession" (and actually all the fics in that series) an existentialist text. (Or, if you are intrigued but DON'T want a giant philosofuck text dump about it from me, just look up Beauvoir's concept of the "passionate man" from The Ethics of Ambiguity, aka the book I will never ever shut up about.)

[purglepurglepurgle]

I reckon I'd need to read more existentialism in general first to get the most out of it, since my background's more analytic than continental philosophy, but please don't let that stop you posting it! I will meander round to it in time.

[mobiusstripper]

My background is also in analytic. I did a little bit of continental in school, but not much, and most of it went over my head at the time. I only got really into it a few years ago during a point in my life where it turned out to be exactly what I needed. Analytic philosophy is great for teaching you how to think critically and craft well-structured arguments, but continental philosophy is far more useful when it comes to questions of how to understand yourself and live your life.

If you're interested in reading existentialism at all, I think The Ethics of Ambiguity is actually a great place to start. It's quite short, and I've always found Beauvoir's prose to be pretty readable as far as continental philosophers go. It's hard to describe how that book impacted me, but it has more heart and humanity in it than the entire analytic canon.

[purglepurglepurgle]

It'll be interesting to see what I make of it! My exposure to Beauvoir is mostly via feminist academics complaining about men misreading her so said men can namedrop her in defence of their own unrelated or contradictory ideas, so apart from anything I have been intending to read at some point to see what I make of those claims. :D

I think for me the heart and humanity of the analytic canon lies between the lines. There is nothing like seeing a furious, unreasonable mob failing to appreciate the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions to give one an appreciation for a tradition which carefully delineates differences like that one. :P I appreciate that the analytic tradition concerns itself only with the business of what is true, and tries to limit itself to modest claims. But then, when I am very sad, reading science cheers me up.

[mobiusstripper]

The problem I ran into is that finding the truth doesn't give insight into what one should then do with that information. You can have all the facts in the world and still be out on your ass. Reason is the slave of the passions and all that.