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Man, three weeks into this and I already missed my 1x/week goal. I realize that this is my project and I can do whatever I want, including but not limited to bending the rules whenever, but I had intended to stick to it — it was just an interminable week last week. I tend to lie to myself about how much time I have to get something done — I HAVE LOTS OF TIME, my brain says — and then it turns out that I am often wrong about that.

It is a thing I’ve learned isn’t really a personality quirk so much as the ol’ ADHD which shows up in pretty much every corner of my existence, and maybe sometimes I wonder if I would have a personality at all if it weren’t for executive dysfunction.

Okay, I wonder that a lot.

Anyway, I don’t know, as January rounded the corner into yet more January, I thought I had a lot more time to write last week than it turned out I had. And then all weekend I thought I was going to sit down and write something but instead other things came up, like peeling potatoes or steam cleaning my dog’s bed.

It is a party a minute over here, because that is what adulthood is.

So, I don’t have the time (or, currently, inclination) to write a long-form essay about anything, though I will probably jump into a series on my path out of evangelicalism in the coming weeks, because what a fun topic. For now, here are some quick hits, on my own current state of affairs.

Currently Reading

Nothing. I finished Yellowface by R.F. Kuang earlier this month and liked it, and then I started Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson and read a few chapters and haven’t picked it up since. I think I feel about it the same way I feel about Anna Karenina, which is to say that I feel nothing except for disinterest. I might try it again later to see if it was my mood or if I just… didn’t care about anything that happened to anyone in the book, but I suspect it’s the latter. I am sometimes listening to Meryl Streep narrate Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, and really, it’s hard to do better than Meryl Streep reading you an audiobook, as it happens. I used to drive for hours and hours every week — 103 miles a day, if all I did was go to and from work — and I listened to a lot of books in the car. Since I started working from home I don’t drive so much and I don’t listen to nearly as many books. It also takes me basically forever to get through an audiobook these days. Apparently I have 9 hours and 35 minutes left of this one, even though I’ve been listening to it for at least a month now. Maybe I’ll finish it by April.

Currently Listening

I am bouncing all over the place lately with listening habits but I took a memory lane meander not too long ago into 90s New Jack Swing, which has confused Spotify:

…none of these are from the 80s.

Currently Working

I decided to get into sourdough a few years after everyone else got into sourdough. My starter is finally pretty healthy, and I have made 3 loaves, each one progressively better, but I am still working on getting a little more height. I will not turn this into a sourdough nerdery post, though it is really easy to do — it’s like being a mad scientist, except with bread.

Also I have made crackers and cookies and some of the best damn pancakes I have ever had in my entire life out of the discard so it is a decent hobby as far as hobbies go.

The funny part is that my husband is trying to name my sourdough starter. So he will walk into the kitchen and say things like “How is… Arantxa Sánchez Vicario doing today?” or “Have you fed… Mary Lou Retton yet?” or “Are you making pancakes out of… Isabella Rossellini?”

I may never name it just so this ridiculousness never stops.

Currently Viewing

We are watching the latest season of True Detective, and also Death and Other Details. Waiting to see where both of them go. I am enjoying True Detective, as I generally do, and Death and Other Details has some Knives Out vibes.

Currently Thinking About

This poem, which is in Gary Snyder’s collection Danger on Peaks, published in 2004. I wrote a review of it, so I have a copy of it (with the publicist’s business card still tucked inside, and also an appointment reminder card with my name spelled incorrectly on it, because of course), and anyway, I think about this poem often.

For Carole

I first saw her in the zendo

at a meal time  unwrapping bowls

head forward folding back the cloth

  as server I was kneeling

to fill three sets of bowls each time

up the line

     Her lithe leg

     proud, skeptical,

     passionate, trained

     by the

     heights  by the

     danger on peaks

It is obviously a compliment, obviously describing a thing of beauty, and I have wondered for I guess 20 years now if I want to have a skeptical leg.