I started writing this during the last days of my vacation week. I take two a year, one in spring (around my birthday) and one in autumn (around Halloween). I never go anywhere more than a day trip and spend most of the time enjoying just existing outside of the clockwork of the daily work-life. At least, I am supposed to. It is literally written on the to-do list I make when I'm prepping for my time off.

It is, I have found, difficult to properly smother the parts of one's brain that demand Output and Productivity. People also tend to ask "what did you do on your vacation" and I've learned that answering anything in the vein of "I really just hung out" is often the catalyst for a whole conversation that nobody intended to ignite via small talk. So, the to-do list is a concession to the vagaries of my brain and the social demands of working in an office. Maybe "I finished playing a video game and got some errands done" isn't the "I travelled to a Destination and Did Things there" that is expected, but it allows everyone to move on if they want.

I have a very list-focused way of doing things, which I've mentioned before. In a chat with a friend recently, I realised that I've been refining this system—this process of outsourcing the short-circuiting parts of my brain—for about a decade. Early on in the process I learned that sometimes we can't cross it all off our list, that is fine and we are not going to hell for it. What can work to keep these still-to-be-dones on the brain is either "mobile" to-dos (moving the sticky note to the next week's planner spread) or re-writing them¹. I've talked about my planners before, that's not what this is about.

This is about how one thing that has been on my vacation to-do lists across multiple vacations is: "fix couch."

I need you to understand this is a hell of a couch. It's a purple velvet, high backed loveseat that apparently I've taken no pictures of. Despite all its glamour honestly I think it cheaper than the "turns into a futon" loveseat that eventually replaced it (we do not have space for a full couch in this apartment). Its inexpensive nature was proved when one of the squiggle-line springs came loose (through the bottom, thankfully), and that side began to sink.

I did continue sitting on this couch. On the broken part. Sure it sunk in a little and sure I needed to sit kind of thoughtfully so that my eternally tucked-up feet weren't jammed full weight against the unpadded frame of the seat, etc. etc. I actually continued to use the couch a lot, even after we got a better one². It wasn't wildly comfortable for long periods, so I just didn't use if for long periods—very often.

And besides, I was going to fix it. The broken spring could be easily replaced with something like bed roping, easy-peasy. And here I have this convenient week off where I can clean around the couch and tilt it back and spend an afternoon roping it. I just hadn't gotten to it yet.

I've been very on my to-dos lately, so when my break started I decided to fix the couch first thing. Get the big to-do out of the way, right? And it took maybe 40 minutes max, because that's the way of it—things you put off for ages end up not taking that long, actually. It's like a joke we all know the punchline to but it gets us anyway.

So, hooray, I've fixed the couch. It's not perfect and someday I'll rope all of the frame and not just the broken area, but it's jumps better than it was. Sitting on it, after, I realised: holy crap I've been torturing myself for years now, sitting on it broken. The thing was, when it first broke it wasn't that bad. Annoying but not terrible—we had a couch once where one side was so broken we had to jam old pillows and blankets inside it so you didn't fall into the couch, and a small dog of our friend's almost got lost in there once.

It wasn't as bad as it could be, but it hadn't been great. It had gotten worse over time, a slow erosion of comfort that I ignored because it could be worse, I'd had worse. I'd been holding my body tense all this time to avoid hurting myself on this broken couch, this thing you're supposed to enjoy and relax into.

An almost embarrassingly frank metaphor, a bludgeon of a thing. Sometimes you are living life a person and suddenly feel like a cartoon, for better or worse³.

Maybe these books are a strange pairing, maybe not so much. Both are classics I only got around to reading in the past couple of years (in my defence, there are so many classics). I can't quite articulate why I thought they'd make an interesting duo, but! Have fun. Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.

• The Chrysalids by John Wyndham builds a world with some very heavy building blocks—for post-apocalypse sci-fi readers the concept of "a bubble of normalcy for those who stay within bounds" (and all that may imply) may not be unfamiliar, but Wyndamn approaches things, as always, on his own path. Looking over contemporary reviews for it, it looks like nobody liked the ending, but I think there's something secretly rotten in the deus ex machina of it that feels quite Wyndham.
• Speaking of endings, I have known the one for Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck forever and a day, and even if I hadn't, I watch Looney Tunes. Anyway, this was written as a "playable novel"—meaning it could be performed as written. And there's something to that, not a sense of stage but a sense of clean lines that carry you through. It is enjoyable to encounter classics that you get the "why" of it.

Here's two ways to get a fun shot: luck and patience. The lizard was one of those from-the-hip snaps with a phone that I looked at later and was delighted by. The night shot was a tripod and a walk to a building I'd seen on my walking commute, and some long exposures. I ended up chatting with the folks who owned the building who came out to see what the heck I was doing there at night. Later they filled an entire floor with a miniature train set, from what I heard. A delight to walk by daily and think of what the plain grey walls were hiding.

Image description: A photograph of a lizard in the foreground,perfectly in the centre of the background of two concrete staircases. The lizard is dusty dark green with black stripey dots, seen from behind as they stand, legs splayed and kind of proud. End ID.

Image description: A photograph of an industrial-type building at night, under deep yellow streetlights. Steam is coming from a vent on the building and it blurs the night sky and the full moon behind it. End ID.

Some neat links I have encountered semi-recently!

• AO3dle is a very fun and simple game. Just choose which of the two character tags on Archive of Our Own has more works. Even if you're not a big ol' fandom geek, you will probably recognise enough characters to be like: wait there are how many fanworks of this character?! It's very fun.
• This was shared on the family discord with the description "Want to listen to music by clicking through a never-ending scroll of microgenre names?" And also a tip to turn your volume down a bit as they "come in hot." EveryNoise is basically a scatter-plot of musical microgenres that you can click around ("down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier") and explore. It's fun and a neat way to be like "what does 'skiffle' even mean?" -Subpixel text encoding is basically a "squint to see it" teeny tiny font. Hard to explain until yo usee it, but neat as heck.

Remember that giving money to your local food bank goes a longer way than donating cans, because they can do more with that dollar. If you don't know where to start, Feeding America makes it easy to find your local by clicking Find A Food Bank and entering your zip.

If you've thought of donating eSims, this guide was very helpful, and Crips for eSims for Gaza is a good option if you can't easily manage topping them up. There are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders. If you prefer giving directly to families, Gaza Funds is a nice resource that facilitates finding campaigns.