"But that was all done away with centuries ago. No one demolishes planets anymore."

Week 2 of ADD meds, and I have a mild head cold (we're still isolating, how does this happen??) but grauwulf has commented that I seem way more like my pre-kid self and where can he get some? The vast chasm is still there to dig myself out of, but I'm doing stuff. I don't *feel* different, tho. It's just that I need a little less time sitting on the couch staring at stuff, and when I get sucked into hyperfocusing on the wrong thing it's possible to get back out again, instead of continuing to do whatever it is while also fretting about not doing what I really need to be doing instead.

Anyway, regrets are useless, but an eyeroll and a kick in the shins to past me who tried one med once in college, didn't *feel* any different, and gave up on the idea. There is perhaps an alternate world in which I began publishing a decade earlier, but here we are.

Elsenet people are apparently talking about the six-month wall; now is the time for collectively lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling as we find ourselves cringing at memories of interaction from pre-mask days and wondering whether it will ever be safe for our children to go to school again. The promise of this particular undertow spitting us back out on the other side is definitely appealing.

Storytelling in the digital age

The year that I was in fourth grade my parents took me to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee. (This happened many years; it involved missing a couple days of school and a long drive there and back, but storytelling was their thing, and moderately educational. The year previous I had stayed up late to go to Diane Wolkstein's telling of Inanna, even at age 8 fascinated by ancient myths translated from forgotten languages.) Anyway, that year I was the year that Robin Williamson was one of the feature tellers, and he was one of the people we followed from stage to stage trying to make sure we heard as many of the stories he had to tell as possible.

According to the internet, Robin Williamson more known for being a folk musician, but in my idiosyncratic orbit he was a harper and teller of myths and legends from the British Isles. We bought his story tapes and a couple years later when I had a tape player in my room, those were some of the things I listened to most. Not quite to the extent of my child's audiobook fixation, but enough that phrases and cadences are part of my background context.

So far as I've been able to determine, none of his story tapes were ever digitized. Some of them are in his book, alternately called The Wise and Foolish Tongue or The Craneskin Bag depending on which side of the ocean it was printed on, but I quoted Michael Scott's demon to my child the other day ("Give me work, or I will rend thee") and then couldn't remember the wording of the anecdote beyond "Michael Scott summoned a demon once..." When I went to look it up, I discovered that the story as included in the book is missing a whole bunch of middle bits, the demon included. Possibly some day in the post-pandemic world I'll be able to use my mother's stereo set-up to bootleg digitize any of the tapes that haven't died yet and share them with my kid.

But. Well. She got her autoplayer (Alexa) confiscated for the rest of the week for problematic behavior, and so had to resort to a CD for bedtime, and she's picked her favorite of my father's storytelling CDs to listen to. So that's probably ok, too.