okay full disclosure: i started this as another "omg i hate my job" post (because i do) but! then! i decided that doesn't really sound like fun. so instead of bitching about my job, i want to talk about, idk, stuff that doesn't suck butts and/or ass.
yesterday was my birthday. sort-of? i've always had kind-of a rough time around my birthday, for a lot of reasons, and when i got together with my husband, he was the first person i'd met who felt the same way about his birthday that i did about mine. not just "oh i don't like it," lots of people have that, but the specific flavor of sad that our respective birthdays made us was very similar. but also, we both quite like excuses to celebrate one another. so we kept trying to find ways to make our birthdays work: we tried celebrating the day before, we toyed with the idea of celebrating our birthdays on a different calendar, etc. finally, a couple of years ago, we found the solution: we just switched birthdays. so now mine is in june and his is in september. and it works great!
anyway, yesterday was my birthday. josh (the aforementioned husband) got me a friggin' TYPEWRITER which is something i've wanted for literally my entire life and i'm so SO stoked about it, omg. i'm waiting very impatiently for the ink ribbon i ordered to get here, but in the meantime i'm gonna get it all cleaned up and learn what all the little switches and levers and shit do, aaaa. anticipate pics of my typewriter very, very, so very soon.
we also went to a nifty book store and another nifty store and another 'nother nifty store, and we got good coffee and learned to play gin rummy, and we got thai food for lunch but it was Not Very Good BUT! we got to sit in this cute little alley to eat it, which was nice. perhaps most importantly, we got to spend several hours together without a toddler interrupting us every five seconds.
and let the record show: i love the hell out of that kid, and i love how rambunctious they are and i even abstractly love how much they interrupt us because that's what living with a tiny adorable child is like BUT ALSO it's nice to just... sit at a coffee shop and play cards and go to a book store and actually get to look at the books, etc. etc.
ANYWAY. my point is it was nice! i also got several (read: six(6)) books from the library! because recently i realized that i am tired of reading books on screens? idk, about a month ago we went out for our anniversary and wound up at a different super cool bookstore, and we spent way too much money on books (because i have learned that i will apparently throw all budgetary mindfulness out the window as long as i can justify it with "i'm SUPPORTING A LOCAL BUSINESS, OK??"), but like. i read them, and it was nice having physical pages. and like, i'm not going to be all pretentious about it and be like THE PHYSICAL FORM OF BOOKS IS INATELY BETTER THAN SCREENS BLAH BLAH BLA no that's not the thing. i love e-books and libby and overdrive and all that junk. i just also am finding that, for me, the more i have to do through screens, the less i feel like... well, like me. and the less i retain, in general. i'm not sure why that is. it's something i've also been noticing at work. like, and i'm going to carefully sidestep all of the "i hate my job bleugh" stuff here, but like, one of the biggest challenges i face at my job is that my supervisor insists on us using this project management software to track all of our tasks, but my brain doesn't work like that. i'm a paper/pen planner guy. ocassionally an online kanban board guy, if i must, but outside of online calendars for sharability, i just don't keep track of things screen-wise.
so yeah, anyway, i remembered that i really like reading a physical book. just like i like writing in a phyiscal notebook, keeping a physical planner, etc. i like paper, a lot. i think it is nifty. which then led to me picking up 6 books i'd had on hold at the library yesterday :)
i've been reading a lot lately and watching a number of movies lately and also playing a bunch of video games lately and i have decidedly not at all been updating my media journal here, oops. i'll get around to it. i wonder if i should make a shrine for promise mascot agency... of course, by the time i think "should i make a shrine about X," i have already started planning it in my head. so, stay tuned for that, i suppose.
okay the dance studio next door is playing some music that sounds like if whales did electronica and it's vibrating my brain so i'm gonna put on headphones and go sleepwalk my way through a couple more hours of work. ily bye.
- - -fuck do i hate generative ai. i hate that it's everywhere, i hate that it's making things actively worse all over the g-ddamn place, i hate that it's shoved into every product, i hate how much time i have to spend undoing the shit it fucks up, and i hate (hate) hate how comfortable everyone seems to be about just straight-up lying all the time. i work for a nonprofit. our ed runs pretty much every public-facing bit of text through chatgpt. and i fucking hate it. it's gross. it's lying. people are opening this newsletter thinking that this person they respect wrote the words they're reading, and she didn't! and i don't understand why we're all supposed to be fine with that! i'm in a couple groups for nonprofit professionals and just read a thread about one org's development director clearly using ai to put together internal communications and grant proposals, and how the ai keeps fucking stuff up and she keeps not catching it, and eeeeeverybody has to come out of the woodwork like "well the ai isn't the problem it's that she's not checking--" actually, they're both the problem! if i was a funder and found out that a grant application had been put together by ai, i would blacklist that org. if i find out that an org i like is using ai to put together its mailings, that's when i stop supporting that org, full-stop. i don't want computers talking to computers, i want to read things written by people. i want a person to have a thought and put that thought into words and then i want to read those words with my eyeballs.
and i'll admit that part of my annoyance is that i spent years getting really, really good at the kind of work that i do (and doing it fast, and now i'm constantly coming across as being behind deadlines, but those deadlines (from my boss) are 100% made with ai in mind. and i can't compete with that. i don't want to stop using my brain, i don't want to put efficiency above humanity, i don't want to fucking lie to everybody about what i'm doing. aaaaagh.
okay i'm gonna go get breakfast now bye.
- - -procrastinating making some updates to my about page, and generally brainstorming edits to my site. so i'm over here making a blog entry instead of doing that stuff. i just, ugh, i don't like the layout on my about page anymore, but i spent so much time on it back when i put it together... but also that was like a year ago and i'm recognizing that this is just sunk cost fallacy in action sooo nevermind, i'm gonna go work on it.
- - -okay first, can i confess something to you? i use the long-form date because i hate having to mentally process what month "3" is, or whatever. i'm not a fan of abbreviating the date. i mean, making the month shorter is fine, whatever, but beyond that? nah.
anyway, my idea. so okay, for a little context, i've been having a difficult time with one of my jobs and how it has kiiiind-of sucked the joy out of things i usually love, including but not limited to my appreciation for stationery. because i like stationery. to the extent that i have been known to scroll the pen website (affectionately nicknamed such by yours truly) when i'm having a rough day. i love planners and pens and highlighters and i am gradually starting to love stickers and washi tape, though those still don't come quite so naturally to me. but recently, because my job has maybe a little bit drained a lot of the joy of planning out of my life (a thing i will almost certainly be unable to not talk about at length in the future), i've been having a harder time giving a shit about any of it. what's the point of having my nifty planner and these nice markers and pens and shit if i can't even use them because my boss insists that we use this fucking project management software (even though i'm the only person who updates it and also she doesn't actually check it for updates she just asks me the shit anyway but if i don't update it she gets upset oh my g-d)
anyway. you get it. i'm a lifelong paper and pen planner and i haven't really gotten to do that lately because maintaining this "planning" software is a sysiphean task that takes up WAY more time than it should. the end result being that i don't get to just break out my planner and center myself. and my non-work time is generally full of the chaos that comes with parenting a small child, and/or being, just, so exhausted, it's not like there's time outside of my work day to do any of it anyway.
alright, that was more than you needed to know, but whatever, it's my website, and statistically the person reading this is someone who knows me personally so you already know that i have to steam-vent my work angst to survive. (oop i just had ANOTHER idea).
anyway! my idea! i miss my pens. i am also trying to do things with my website, but have trouble thinking of what exactly to put on here. BUT! I'M GOING TO MAKE A SHRINE FOR MY STATIONERY! so i guess i'm gonna go take a bunch of pictures of my pens and what-not and get going on the assets for that. i'll come back here and link to the page when it's done, so if you're not seeing a link here, just wait longer. (edit: here it is!
okay thanks ily bye
- - -Welp. It's been a heck of a year, but I finally remembered that this website exists and that I want a blog and stuff, soooo here I am.
Do you ever wonder what happened to your ability to comment on whatever and then put those thoughts out into the world? And obviously by "you" I mean "me," because yeah, I think about that a lot lately. What the hell did I even talk about, back then? What do I want to talk about now? Does it need to be important or pertinent? Probably not, right? Like, who is even going to see this? And isn't the personal element kind-of the point? Well. Whatever. I have some things to do, but I'll be back soon. For real this time.
Hello! This is where my blog will go. I'm admittedly not sure what my blog is going to be for just yet, but it feels important to have one for reasons I'll get into eehhhhhhh later. Ok bye.