![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateAnother new year of me has come around again, and I keep remembering how my best friend from middle & high school used to call me up on my birthday & refer to me as "O Ancient One" because I was about 8 months older than she was. Probably partly because of the comparisons brought up by having a nearly-teen around living her own chaotic life.
I feel like my introspections are still stuck in the projects queue; my brain tends to jump from deadline to deadline in terms of what I'm focusing on, with other things stuffed in helter-skelter sideways, and that works just fine when everything important can be assigned enough time to take care of it, and fails me in the face of any number of things I would really like to be doing but that could happen whenever. And anytime the various disruptions of life cut in line, of course. I have started complaining that we have too many "Arkansas traveler problems" after the song where the old man can't fix his roof when it rains, but as it never leaks when it doesn't, why would he bother? The whole quadrant of "important but not urgent" is sadly neglected around here.
But what more would one expect given the state of everything else, I suppose. One of the things I have still not gotten to is sorting out a website that includes a gallery where I might post the very temporally-particular artwork I had in last spring's Mental Health Awareness show at the Chesapeake Art Center featuring a cardboard cut-out me hiding under a quilt made of old security envelopes from everything I was worrying about at the time. ("How can I tell what is a problem and what is a reasonable reaction to my environment?" / "We are the katamari ball of human knowledge and someone is knocking bits off with a hammer...") And aside from the various household mental health concerns, which even when we are failed by the appalling systemic healthcare problems, we are *so much better* at dealing with, we have multiple buffer zones of privilege (& choices) between us and Doom. (which is not to say any of it is ok, or that we won't at some point run into problems at a moment's notice, but quiet suburban neighborhood, private sector tech job, & a fully-vaxxed middle-schooler who actually masks in public are a long way from the kidnappings & measles epidemic grounds zero.)
Things I have been considering, & may yet do something with include:
*The Baltimore Gamer Symphony Orchestra meets... just across from where the Key Bridge *was* (but I have driven farther to get to weekly meetings before; I've just gotten lazy) and they require no auditions and even have a choir that theoretically one can manage to be part of *at the same time.* And I do miss having scheduled & group music...
*I need to *actually talk to* people about writing community, which of course I have been saying for years, & I think what I need is a general progress-sharing & brainstorming cheering section space or even just an update window on other people who are writing regularly, because it's the momentum that is hard, but I don't really know how to create that or with whom because none of the standard "writing group" models is going to recreate 2000s NaNo lj or pausing every couple hard-won paragraphs in a college paper to exchange random e-mails with a friend who's working on their own. (and both papers & NaNo ultimately got written because of deadlines, sigh.)
*I keep meaning to say to my family that I'm good for 2-3 nights of dinner plan a week, & if each of them take a day then we can declare one "seagull night" (seagull says "get yer own!") & a take-out day per week and stop having to make last-minute food decisions when we're already hungry and/or done braining until after food.
*Still working on plan: make the basement suitable for habitation &/or sudden arrivals of kids who live within walking distance. (at least the pre-Christmas clean-up has led to a slightly less problematic living room space, temporarily...)
*likewise, attempts to join/create/promote local community continue to be an unchecked ticky box.
*[complicated mutterings/rant about having a useful website] [slightly further shadowed by watching a nature writer/artist's website get devoured & replaced by the internet asbestos machine]
*wholesale deleting my phone games in the hopes of redirecting my flow-state downtime towards... something else??
The list will always be longer than I have world & time to devote to it, but we knew that already.
I feel like my introspections are still stuck in the projects queue; my brain tends to jump from deadline to deadline in terms of what I'm focusing on, with other things stuffed in helter-skelter sideways, and that works just fine when everything important can be assigned enough time to take care of it, and fails me in the face of any number of things I would really like to be doing but that could happen whenever. And anytime the various disruptions of life cut in line, of course. I have started complaining that we have too many "Arkansas traveler problems" after the song where the old man can't fix his roof when it rains, but as it never leaks when it doesn't, why would he bother? The whole quadrant of "important but not urgent" is sadly neglected around here.
But what more would one expect given the state of everything else, I suppose. One of the things I have still not gotten to is sorting out a website that includes a gallery where I might post the very temporally-particular artwork I had in last spring's Mental Health Awareness show at the Chesapeake Art Center featuring a cardboard cut-out me hiding under a quilt made of old security envelopes from everything I was worrying about at the time. ("How can I tell what is a problem and what is a reasonable reaction to my environment?" / "We are the katamari ball of human knowledge and someone is knocking bits off with a hammer...") And aside from the various household mental health concerns, which even when we are failed by the appalling systemic healthcare problems, we are *so much better* at dealing with, we have multiple buffer zones of privilege (& choices) between us and Doom. (which is not to say any of it is ok, or that we won't at some point run into problems at a moment's notice, but quiet suburban neighborhood, private sector tech job, & a fully-vaxxed middle-schooler who actually masks in public are a long way from the kidnappings & measles epidemic grounds zero.)
Things I have been considering, & may yet do something with include:
*The Baltimore Gamer Symphony Orchestra meets... just across from where the Key Bridge *was* (but I have driven farther to get to weekly meetings before; I've just gotten lazy) and they require no auditions and even have a choir that theoretically one can manage to be part of *at the same time.* And I do miss having scheduled & group music...
*I need to *actually talk to* people about writing community, which of course I have been saying for years, & I think what I need is a general progress-sharing & brainstorming cheering section space or even just an update window on other people who are writing regularly, because it's the momentum that is hard, but I don't really know how to create that or with whom because none of the standard "writing group" models is going to recreate 2000s NaNo lj or pausing every couple hard-won paragraphs in a college paper to exchange random e-mails with a friend who's working on their own. (and both papers & NaNo ultimately got written because of deadlines, sigh.)
*I keep meaning to say to my family that I'm good for 2-3 nights of dinner plan a week, & if each of them take a day then we can declare one "seagull night" (seagull says "get yer own!") & a take-out day per week and stop having to make last-minute food decisions when we're already hungry and/or done braining until after food.
*Still working on plan: make the basement suitable for habitation &/or sudden arrivals of kids who live within walking distance. (at least the pre-Christmas clean-up has led to a slightly less problematic living room space, temporarily...)
*likewise, attempts to join/create/promote local community continue to be an unchecked ticky box.
*[complicated mutterings/rant about having a useful website] [slightly further shadowed by watching a nature writer/artist's website get devoured & replaced by the internet asbestos machine]
*wholesale deleting my phone games in the hopes of redirecting my flow-state downtime towards... something else??
The list will always be longer than I have world & time to devote to it, but we knew that already.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-27 12:13 am (UTC)