7/3/19
i didn't start the workday yesterday by crying
i can now squash and rebase my git commits without having to look up a tutorial every time and i did two pull requests that i'm proud of and left some good code review notes with my current collaborator
writing down funny ephemeral quotes people say during meetings as a way of trying to keep them as joyful as possible
thinking about things to write here occupied my subconscious last night and pushed out some of the usual grinding rumination about work for a while, which was such a balm
my dad took his phone into a sensory deprivation tank lol
cold water after a long run, which i have been thankful for again and will be thankful for every day of summer
enjoying the luxury of central air while we still have it
last night when i took miso out for last call the breeze smelled like fireworks
keeping miso in our bedroom all night prevented the nocturnal living room poop she's done recently
how when i go to pick up the nocturnal living room poop and feel, through the poop bag, its solidity and temperature i always feel briefly like a poop detective, like i am wearing a sherlock holmes hat and holding a magnifying glass, and that makes me laugh to myself
something i thought about again when rewatching us, which was how i think it's a more interesting piece of art than get out because get out, while well-made and entertaining and powerful, is built to be legible, to be art that explains itself, whereas us is murkier and more tenuous, kafkaesque and in my mind more powerful for it
this politics podcast i was listening to yesterday (
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-the-verdict-on-the-debates/) read reader metaphors for the primary/election and the best one i thought was comparing it to the bachelorette (the bachelorette is america, the contestants have some strengths but also are a lot of generic dudes who have no chance of winning but are in it to boost their public profile)
how watching the bachelorette makes me want to return to a perfect summer book, heidi julavits' the folded clocks, which was one of the inspirations for this project and which had such good writing about the bachelor, a show i hadn't watched at the time
how the bachelorette reminds me of my experience teaching creative writing to undergraduates when i was in my MFA, in that hannah is always asking the contestants to speak to her in specific concrete details about themselves and their lives and their experiences so she can, you know, learn about them, and they constantly give back meaningless repetitive generic abstract platitudes about being "all in" and "opening up"
hannah's habit, when she's making out with a dude, of "mounting" him, which one of the (multiple now lol) bachelorette podcasts i listen to argued is perhaps not only her sexual proclivity but also a strategy to shield her suitors' erections from the cameras
another tidbit someone noticed, which is that the hannah and one of the other contestants have the kind of smiles that are so big that they kind of close their eyes as they're smiling, a phenomenon i had never noticed before but keep seeing now
this essay (https://www.affidavit.art/articles/secret-canon)
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