December 13, 2024

...and somewhere, a monkey's paw twitched...

Last time, in the footnotes, I mused that my upper body strength isn't what it used to be and that maybe I should think about getting back into aerials shape. The universe apparently chose to interpret this as "my arms should be pulling more weight around here", and shortly thereafter, I fractured a bone in my foot and had to spend a week on crutches.¹ Sincerest apologies to my pectoral muscles. It's not a bad break, as these things go, but it was enough to scramble my plans for the rest of the year.

This is relevant to you, dear reader, in part because it means I suddenly and unexpectedly had to hit the snooze button on my works-in-progress. For one thing, most of what I'd planned for the next couple of updates involves many trips to the 3D printer, which lives in a spot that was now a lot less accessible to me... not inaccessible in the sense that I couldn't, in theory, get there at all on crutches, but because it was so distant from everywhere else I needed to be to meet my more immediate daily needs. The kitchen and bath were already a vast, exhausting flight of stairs apart, often requiring assistance from my wonderful, patient partner; the (much scarier) flight of stairs to the printer just wasn't in the spoons budget.

Well, I thought, maybe I can still get some writing and planning done. Maybe I'll work on that essay. Maybe I'll finally read these overdue library books. But it turns out that executive function is a finite resource, and one in which I'm not especially wealthy at the best of times. Suddenly moving across the room required a strategy and collaboration; deciding whether to complete one task before another meant pitting hunger pangs and fatigue against the Traveling Salesman Problem. When I got where I was going, those parts of my brain were just... burnt out.

That's not to say that I didn't read², or learn³, or think about anything. I was plagued by concepts! Some of them seemed worth pursuing and it was frustrating that I couldn't think them all the way through, write them down, and explicitly connect them to each other! (Many of those thoughts were, for obvious reasons, about disability and accessibility and marginalization and time and technology, big and spiderweb-shaped. This is something that had already been on my mind in the context of the knitting machine project, and I started trying to get some of those ideas out on the page here, but I think this is a topic that deserves more from me than a few haphazard paragraphs at the end of what is essentially a long-winded out-of-office announcement.⁴) I could work in short bursts on bite-size, low-stakes tasks–what shoemaker Amara Hark-Weber refers to as 4 o'clock projects–but as soon as I tried to engage with any of my long-term or strategic work... static.

Anyway, now that I'm off the crutches, I no longer feel like I'm using my entire brain to solve the world's most mundane escape room, though I'm still much slower at everything than usual. I've been getting back into a routine and making progress again, but let's be real: Darkest December hardly feels like the season for grinding to catch up, even if I were normally the type of person to keep a rigid production schedule. I hope to have at least one more video ready before the end of the year, but as usual, Stuff will be ready when it's ready to be ready, you know? Thanks for your patience, and thanks for being here.

Until then,

xoxo Sparks