2023/01/01 stray thoughts

more thoughts and things

casually reusing the layout from the last post but otherwise there’s no particular relation

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This morning I woke up about forty minutes after my alarm would have gone off (7am), which is new and surprising considering I turned my alarms off on purpose & got to sleep pretty late last night (after midnight, which can be early by my standards but I’m trying to lower that bar by going to bed when it gets dark out, New England “congrats, it’s 5pm, it is now pitch black outside” winters be damned). It’s nice to think this might have something to do with having a window slightly open; there’s an old pothos plant (older than me!) that usually sits in the upstairs hallway by the window, but it’s currently displaced courtesy fake but whimsical little Christmas tree. Instead it lives in my room and has been sparking a surprising amount of joy by simply Being There; even as some leaves yellow (I’m told this is normal for winter), there’s a new one growing at the end of one stem, and yet another stem is sprouting. Is it usually growing like this or is it because I’ve been watching it more, watering it about every other week for a change? When I first moved it I was wondering if it was dead.

Anyway, I’ve been sleeping with the plant-window shade slightly open, so if and when I sleep in, the plant can still get the first rays of sunlight. My sister, hearing about my newfound habit of getting up with my alarm exclusively to open the window (and then usually go back to sleep but still), called me a “plant mom”; I prefer “plant dad,” like when we used to play with little dinosaur figurines as kids and pretend to be their overlording but benevolent human parents. “Dad (not male or female but undefined other thing)” is very #gender, I think.

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I didn’t get up when I woke up, though; I usually don’t. Some days I find this kinda depressing, like damn, there’s really nothing to get up for?

What’s the point of having a regluar schedule if you’re not getting anything out of it?

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After idly websurfing for a few hours I actually got up a little before noon, made a bagel, looked outside. A tree fell in our yard recently, blown over by a winter storm, but it’s been struggling for a while; it has a twin, maple of some sort I think, and the spring difference—one thriving, budding; the other stark as winter—was pretty jarring. I recently went on a small bingeread of the blog (the… person? writings of? how thin this line is) headspace-hotel, who’s been writing about plants lately. This immediately feels like an understatement to the point of disservice; we didn’t evolve to live in flat squares, and what’s the purpose of tidy squares of grass, really. There’s almost definitely a name for this sort of sentiment.

The other day I actually went outside to walk around the yard, for a change, shocking. It is bizarre seeing a tree from an angle humans almost definitely weren’t meant to: from the “top,” looking in. On closer inspection the trunk was riddled with what I (later, after some cursory internet research) thought might be mild slime flux, swaths of charred-looking black where the twin is a healthier greige. (Feels extremely weird to use an interior decorating word, greige, grey-beige, in the context of tree bark. I don’t know a better word for that particular tone, though. It’s certainly more textured than any wall.)

Also, it had a boatload of little holes, lined up in clustered rows. This is apparently the work of a sap-sucker woodpecker; I’m not sure if the rot came first or the bird, because I haven’t actually looked closely at this poor ?dead (or at least felled) thing in years.

When woodpeckers put all their focus on a single tree and begin aggressively feeding from it, this usually indicates illness in the tree or bug infestation problem.

The other tree stands relatively untouched. A woodpecker (different kind) did watch me as I took photos, though, and hauled itself higher when I tried focusing on it.

Anyway, I thought all this was neat. Thought, while waiting for my bagel to pop up & looking idly out at the chilly midday, that this would make a nice little blog post.

So here we are.

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I want to use my blog here more often. The closest thing I have to a social media presence is uploads on deviantArt, and particularly the monthly sketchdoodle roundups. But for the past ~3 months those got bottlenecked by the arbitrary self-imposed idea of “you have to finish X before you can tackle Y and Z”—something I probably gleaned from one of a mountain of Productivity Advice™ tip-lists, which has not been particularly helpful to me and if anything actively harmful. Also, aforementioned roundups (in their current giant PNG wall form) are not particularly good for sharing non-image media like, say, 3D work videos; nor do they inspire me to mention anything that wasn’t somehow art-related.

Privacy’s one thing. But do I have to be an enigma?

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I think this next year I want to be weirder. I wasn’t sure how to define this, when my therapist asked; paraphrasing, “I don’t know, get out of my comfort zone, try new things?” And that’s part of it. Saying it aloud feels sacrilegious; there’s nothing weird about sticking a toe out of the open cage.

I turn 25 in less than two weeks. What the hell?!

What???

God damn. That’s like a quarter of a good lifetime, and I feel like I’ve been fairly conventional and agreeable for most if not all of it, and like, what the fuck honestly. (More sacrilege: swearing in a previously-calm, even melancholy, little post about going outside and the like. Need these tones be separate?) There’s another post I saw recently, or maybe it was a TED talk, I don’t remember—something about having seven “lifetimes” in an overall life, possibly related to how many years it’d take to master something. And that hit me in the same sort of way Burkemann’s Five-, no, Four-Thousand Weeks did: you sure are mortal! What are you doing?

It’s easy for this to turn into a scrupulosity Not Doing Enough spiral. I’d be lying if I said I could be fully content to “just live,” more often than not. So that’s part of it.

The cage is open. You can walk out anytime you want. Why are you still in there?

I don’t know, advice-column-writer whose primary audience seems to be middle-aged women but who I’ve read enough of anyway to the point where I will occasionally journal to myself by consulting an “Inner Polly.” See, this feels cringy and ridiculous to write out loud, devote to “paper,” hit publish on.

There is absolutely no godforesaken reason I should be so allergic to being cringy and ridiculous.

I’m tired of hearing the word “weird” used like a slur. In meme-speak: You say “weird (derogatory).” I say “weird (odd, wonderful, unconventional and complimentary.” We are not the same.

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Have some song lyrics that punched me in the face. But they sounded off without context, but I didn’t want to quote the whole thing, so I rearranged some snippets, and then that looked incomplete, and, well—

Well, that was a whim. I’m not a poet by a long shot. It’s kind of lame and silly. Trying too hard, even. The main parts got highlighted anyway, and aren’t even shuffled.

But it’s made, y’know?

That’s what I’m talking about.