8/19
miso had a bath and it's always cute to see a wet dog, how transformed they are by the simplest of elements, and that we penned her out on the back deck because we didn't want her to play in the loose dirt at the edge of the yard and d said "if she was brave enough, she could escape" and we both agreed that she wasn't brave enough but then she actually did, which was kind of a nice surprise even though her feet got dirty
the newest single by taylor swift, "lover", which i love basically and wholeheartedly after being so unhappy with the first two singles, which i found garish and artificially flavored, magic marker flavored capri suns, and thinking the third one ("the archer") was produced in an interesting spacey way that made me think of beach house but also not entirely my thing whereas now it fits in with the aesthetic of this one in the same kind of universe and this one is the rick rubin version of jack antonoff, which is the version i want most ("writer in the dark" is probably the melodrama song that has aged best with me, though it's hard to top "liability") i texted a friend who i sang a duet of that song from a star was born at karaoke once about whether she'd heard it and she listened to it for the first time and noticed that the run in the bridge is like "the weight," that quarter note on the beat descending bass line and am radio piano and yes, thank you for that
for melodrama, which is the album that d and i have listened the most to together as a couple, since, while we like many of the same songs, there aren't many albums that we both love to the degree that we both love that one, i associate it with the hour drive that we would take back from the indianapolis airport late at night down a dark country road and needed to listen to something that we could sing along to and keep each other awake and it was so good for that drive
that we now live somewhere where we can get dim sum on a whim
that we now live somewhere where we can get dim sum on a whim
the last two times we have been to fred meyer there have been these enormous tasty shrimp for 5.99 a pound, tonight we had them with boiled corn and slices of on-sale sourdough and cherries and i was supposed to slice a tomato but i forgot so we'll have to eat it tomorrow
d's sourdough starter is ready and she's making her first bread with it soon
the butter bell that e gave me, which means that every time we enjoy the magic of soft butter on bread i think of her fondly, it is a really good gift idea if you want to get something for a person and you know they like bread
i drank some gross-tasting cherry lemonade in my quest to explore all the new ways i can legally get high
though we had hoped the tamale/taco place that's close to our house was going to be good and was going to be come "that good place that's close to our house where we can go a lot" (which doesn't need to be a fancy restaurant, it was a wendy's at our last house in bloomington) we learned that it was not and we don't need to go again and i at least had a nice tamarind aguas frescas and it was nice to sit outside
learning the word "aureola" while trying to figure out how to spell the word "areola"
the new new me by halle butler, which i also read in one sitting and is a more roughly constructed novel than jilian (not necessarily in a bad way) and which really spoke to me, i know that i'm going to reread both of these even though they're so painful.
friday i spent time rewriting some old code that i had been putting off by doing easier bits all week and realized i had a lot of psychic baggage tied up in and was worried about revisiting and finding a way in and feeling how much better and clearer and simpler i'm doing it right now is so satisfying, one thing i eventually want to write an essay about is how the lede of learning 2 code for writers is always about it as a means to escape precarity, be more "practical" (read: valued by the neoliberal technocrats) and yes i get that but also the good feeling i get from writing code i'm proud of is this other version of the feeling of being proud of a piece of writing, except with writing i never could do revision, i would look back at my old work after 6 months or a year and see the ways in which it was inadequate but going back and trying to make it better was so impossible to me, so unpleasant, whereas with code going back to rewrite it to make it better is not only not impossible and unpleasant but feels almost as good as the good feeling of writing it for the first time and sometimes actually better and i am really grateful to have that in my life, to feel at times unalienated from my labor, and grateful that work has been better the past few weeks
this newsletter, which is the healthiest relationship i have ever had with writing anything, the aimless endlessness of it
leaving all the windows open so the breeze can flow through
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