Fuck multitasking and fuck metrics, too
I got up this morning, did some morning chores (filling humidifiers, emptying cat boxes) and checked the mail not because I forgot Monday was a holiday but because I was convinced Monday had already happened and it was Tuesday the 3rd.
Stuff is going well here, we’re operating at least a 10 or 11 on the Glasgow coma scale. But five things make a post, so here in no particular order they are:
Thing one: I have a new poem out in the special 50th issue of Uncanny Magazine. It’s called “Hel on a Headland,’ and it was inspired by a conversation I had in my favorite bar in Boston with Amal El-Mohtar, DongWon Song, Max Gladstone, and Scott Lynch… a year or so before the apocalypse.
It then took me a while to write, because poetry is hard, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out.
The issue will be out tomorrow for Uncanny subscribers and Patreon patrons, and my poem will be available after February 7th on the Uncanny website for everybody else.
Thing two: I’m making the executive decision to move book club posts to a regular Monday thread, available at the subscriber level, because I am just not reading enough books currently to do a monthly post (my article consumption is way up lately; I figured out where the time went through the magic I will discuss below) and I’m also trying to decide if I’m move away from using Goodreads to track my reading as part of my quest to de-gamify my life and also because yikes, Goodreads, on so many levels. (Many of which are also “Yikes, Amazon,” but you know what I mean.)
Anyway, unless I write down what I read somewhere fairly soon after I finish reading it, I will never actually remember what I read, so… we’re trying something new!
Thing three: I’ve been remiss on horse content, I know. It’s because we’re doing PT for the dude’s ankle again and PT is boring. And, Ormr says, very uncomfortable. Thanks. Please don’t. (I’m also doing PT for my foot, because bodies are the worst. Amusingly, same limb is hurt on me as on the horse. Possibly even the same damn ligament, who knows.)
Thing four: I have given up on so many things this past year, and it’s all been good for me. I’ve stopped wearing a fitbit (some of that was frustration with the fucking thing’s planned obsolescence cycle, because “I’m going to stop reliably tracking your sleep and heart rate and then I’m going to yell at you about it to make you ‘upgrade’ ” isn’t the selling point silicon valley tech bros think it must be, I guess.
I just want to know how late in the day I can drink coffee before it starts to mess up my rest! Making that stop working is annoying, especially when you’re also trying to sell me a subscription service.
Anyway, every so often I start thinking “Maybe I should put it back on.” Usually when I am digging my phone out of an inside pocket on a cold day to check the time.
But maybe I should just get a watch.
Another thing I’ve been trying to do is focus more on single things, and toward that goal I am writing down what I do in like one-hour chunks throughout the day to try to fight the distractions of the information economy. This is actually going pretty well, and in particular I’m finding that it helps me not just mindlessly flip to twitter or mastodon when I pause because I’m not sure what the next sentence is.
I’ve been fighting a lot of distraction, brain fog, fatigue, and general difficulty concentrating for several years now. Some of that was burnout, some of it was stress, some of it was menopause and psoriatic inflammation and chronic pain and other health nonsense, some of it was cancer treatment, some of it was *waves at everything*.
It seems like it’s finally lifting, and my brain works again, which is really helpful given that my job is all, you know, getting my brain to work! I’ve had a productive and focused couple of weeks despite the holidays and I’m hoping that 2023 might be a little bit of a return to form and focus. That would be good because I have a lot of work to do!
So that’s the goal—one thing at a time, and as little getting sucked in to pointless faffing about as possible.
Thing five: Intentional faffing is fine: people need rest.
Toward an intentionality of faffing, I’m very much enjoying this youtube channel called “Country Life Vlog” that is an Azerbaijani couple doing farm chores and cooking, beautifully filmed in beautiful country by what I presume is another family member we never see, and their various family and pets doing normal family and pet things. If you want to hang out with kittens and puppies and a Very Lorge tom turkey while somebody cooks delicious looking food and somebody else chops wood and makes tea, I recommend this as soothing background noise.
Happy new year, folks. Those of you who are paying customers, look forward to that book post in just a few minutes here.
Best,
Bear