Beloved

Teaching:

NA, though I did send off a proposal/description of a new writing workshop series at the artsy personal development NGO. It's "urban wildlife themed." I'm ambivalent about it, and about my continued participation in the NGO in general, but ehh, I think I'll go for it. 

Learning:

Kinda slacked off on my geography and Romanian practice this week, but got in a little bit of each. Also missed another somatic movement workshop, but watched the recording the next day. Actually got a little emotional doing it, but then I've been a little emotional all week I guess. Can't say I "learned" much in particular, but I feel like doing things like these workshops has helped me cultivate some skills I found very useful during this visit to my parents.' Or maybe not, I don't know!

Listening:

Not much really until this weekend, when I've been coming back to that Wicca Phase self-titled. Comfort music, I have to admit, and also pretty transportative, which is nice when I'm sitting in an airport feeling grossed out and overtired/overstimulated/etc.

Reading:

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson. Part of me kinda felt like this book should've been twice as long. It felt like there were plot threads that just never really came together. I mean, they don't have to come together, and honestly plot isn't really what I like best about KSR's books--it's his unsentimental focus on mostly principled but slightly flawed people doing grinding, frustrating, fraught work, often within super fraught bureaucracies, to make Things slightly less shitty. Contrast with:

Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler. Read this on the plane. I kind of thought it was gonna be a 2016-era dive into "alt-right rabbitholes" and whatnot, with lots of predictable things to say about alienation and algorithms etc. There was a bit of that, but mostly it was about familiar Millennial novel preoccupations with authenticity, identity, purpose, etc...what I kinda refer to in my head as the Perennial Theme of the Realist Novel: the Impossibility of Knowing Oneself or Others. The usual cynicism/grudging sense of obligation to engage with politics/activism/etc. despite feeling like it's all pretty pointless and gross to do so, especially if you're privileged in all the ways that narrators in these novels always are. (That's the part I had in mind when I thought of contrasting it with the KSR book). But also some stuff about "expat life" (ugh I hate that term) that I found sadly/amusingly relatable despite the fact that my circumstances are much different from the narrator's. There was one passage in particular, about enduring conversations about U.S. politics/healthcare by smug and gleeful interlocutors, that rang especially true.

Oh, and something else I noticed: so I've been trying to de-Google my life, not using social media etc., and I feel like people--well, men--who have similar relationships to the internet/social media, are often, as in this novel, presented as creeps and weirdos with Something to Hide or I guess at best (here I'm thinking of the boyfriend in Dave Eggers' The Circle) as sort of two-dimensional, eccentric curmudgeons. Not sure what to make of this, though I noted an impulse as I read to like, create/resurrect Facebook and Instagram accounts and thus prove (to...?) my normalcy, or at least to establish some greater sense of imagined belonging to/solidarity with the vast majority of the human race.

(Also ugh I feel like I'm writing this post in the voice of the narrator from this book and I don't like it...)

Anyway, since I was in the land of my childhood these past two weeks, I felt a compulsion to revisit some old X-Men comics. I read (re-read? Can't remember) some of the classic Chris Claremont stuff: God Loves, Man Kills and Days of Future Past. I kinda forgot how political these comics were, in their ham-fisted way. I also liked how soft Nightcrawler and Colossus were. Fun to read.

Watching:

Nothing really.

Writing:

A couple RP posts. I know last week I said I was feeling kinda burnt out on them, but I think I was just in a mood. They're fun.

Other:

This was week two back home with my parents. Not gonna get into it here but despite some challenges, it was really pleasant and peaceful and I'm really grateful for this time with them.