after spending a lot of today on trains and out of town, i almost completely zonked out for the night as soon as i got home. fortunately for you, i caught a second wind. fortunately for me, it happened before 10pm.
after finishing my latest one several days ago, i wrote about my last few pixel art paintings. i've started my fourth, and i am hoping to not take nearly as long as i did with my last one. i hate to say it, but the more you do a thing the better you're going to get at it - and this applies to me too unfortunately!
this is even true of pottery. while there's a good chance my first teapot may not survive two firings, the fact that i made a teapot that actually looks like a teapot is a huge win for me. next week i start round three of my favorite wheel throwing course and then i'm taking time off from regular instruction to work on my first real collection. maybe including teapots!
besides spending less time online and more time on my offline art, i've also been trying to go out and socialize more. this includes engaging in more tech meetups - like brooklyn web workers - and even visiting my family more frequently. i think the key to powering through low energy and low ambition is to remember that i'm no longer a full time face of a product, that i don't have to be on or on my best behavior all the time. that reminder helps take the pressure off and gets me out the door more.
i think some of that pressure is also literal in the sense of the extremely high humidity we've had over the past week. when the air is this thick, i feel so anxious and me not want to leave the house at all. i hate the fact that we'll likely have to spend the rest of our lives constantly adjusting and adapting to climate change. and, unpopular opinion, i hate that we have a whole entire month left of summer lol.
here's to a happy, less humid august. a month for fun in the sun (with plenty of spf) and getting ready for the fall/back-to-school reset that's ahead for all of us.
after a week of smoke in the air and severe thunderstorms and heat, we got to see a week of blue skies and an atmosphere that doesn't burn one's nose more than it usually does around this car-dominated hellscape. this week we were all outside and it ruled.
this week was one of those weeks where i felt like i was just going through the motions, living in the moment but feeling a bit out of body. i think it was a mix of the heat, the wildfire smoke, my period, and the windup and down of the world cup.
technically i had scheduled myself to spend this hour in the ceramics studio, but i didn't want to go all the way there and find that my bisqueware isn't ready, so i've decided to push that time to tomorrow and instead publish the latest in the *what i made in my ceramics class* series.
this week began in recovery from the heat wave and being outside so much in the direct sunlight the few days before. i said i didn't want to see the sun for at least 48 hours and it obliged, although we could have done without the massive amounts of rain.
it is presently a cool 84 degrees (F) out according to my laptop as i type this in a well air-conditioned room. don't be mistaken, though, your beloved princess of hating the heat (me) spent a lot of time outdoors despite, and in spite of, a three-day "heat dome" bringing over 100 temperatures to the metropolitan area throughout the 4th of july weekend.
this past week was a test for how bad i really want to be off my phone, and the answer is *very bad*. it's a tough habit to kick though, requiring intentional moves like deleting apps and logging off of web pages, keeping the phone further from me than other things i could fidget with my hands and eyes, and simply going outside. in an algorithmic world, making intentional moves is really hard.
when i was in college learning software engineering, my professor told us that there's no way to say with 100% certainty that your software is bug-free. even if everything is working perfectly now, there's always a chance that some kind of race condition or memory leak will rear its ugly head down the line. that doesn't mean you should never celebrate a release, just that there's a level of humility needed to align with reality. i bring that up to show that i know that there are caveats when i say that pumagreg is cancer-free. as far as the sarcoma in his leg is concerned, he's all clear, and that's a huge win!
i wrote last week's retro from the floor of my bathroom next to pumagreg as he lay lethargic after pissing blood, and with advice from the animal hospital to see if it clears in the morning otherwise bringing to an emergency room. today, i type this from my couch as pumagreg lays nearby after zooming around looking for food. it's incredible how a good nights rest can heal even the sickest little guys.
