because this has been on my mind wrapping up the epilogue, here is a little story about how writing fanfiction for very silly sometimes awesome sometimes genuinely terrible SYFY show the magicians changed my life for real.

i started writing help, i’m alive in may 2020. as i have stated many times on this blog, the overarching goal from which this story sprung was my passionate desire to give quentin coldwater each and every last thing he deserved: i wanted to follow him all the way through a downward spiral, and then i wanted to figure out what it would take for him to climb out of the darkness and make it to somewhere he actually wanted to be. the first part of that, the part that became damage control, was some of the easiest writing i’ve ever done, even accounting for the hours spent google mapping the most depressing road trip of all time. the second part was harder, and not just because it wound up being more than four times as long (lmao). it was thornier; there were more threads to weave through; and, frankly, quentin was so fucked up that it took a lot of effort even to outline what it was he needed in order to change. i had written one story already in which the pivot happened entirely internally, an act of self-forgiveness that proved transformational, and i knew that this time i needed to give him more: actual wants, actual actions, an actual life, with actual ties not just to the people already in his circle but to the world beyond. once i had that outline, the first four chapters flowed pretty easily, anchored by the goal of hitting the story’s first big win, which is when quentin finds a way to fix something for the first time since his magic broke; chapter five was where i got stuck.

by that point, it was fall. i had quit my teaching job mid-pandemic with some modest savings, no back-up plan, and a growing realization that after five years in the classroom, teaching was no longer something i could see myself returning to; working obsessively on this story was, among other things, a great way to quiet the constant humming freak-out of what the fuck i was going to do with my life. in october doing some jump squats after sitting in bed all day i threw my back out so badly i couldn’t walk to the bathroom unassisted and paid a hundred dollars to talk to a telehealth doctor for fifteen minutes for some muscle relaxants. the pain sucked, but so did not knowing whether i was going to be better by election day — i’d signed up to be a poll worker, and i really could have used the money.

i’d started dipping my toe in some local volunteer stuff when i quit, but it was during this time that i signed up for the first time for a particular project i was really excited about joining. i did the zoom training with my camera off because my back still hurt too much to sit up; the follow-up involved scanning and emailing some personal documents and signed agreements. i didn’t do it the next day because, whatever, my back fucking hurt; i didn’t do it the day after that because…? and then, well — then i started feeling like i had missed my chance, and it was too late now.

now, here’s the thing: i say feeling like because by this point i had learned enough about the world that i knew — like, knew — that, objectively, taking a few days to send an email (during a pandemic, while i was having previously established health issues) is not considered by most people to be an unforgivable crime. i knew that i should still send the email. and i also had learned enough about myself that i could actually recognize the thing happening in my brain as an example of the kind of overly self-protective mechanisms in which i have many years of practice; i knew by then that i was an absolute expert at finding reasons to not do things that felt like they were based in truth but were really just cleverly disguised manifestations of fear, because if you do things then bad things might happen, but if you don’t do things then nothing bad happens, except that you ruin your own life. i knew all of this!! i could diagnose and analyze exactly how i was once again perpetuating the same anxiety-driven patterns that had governed so much of my life. i was conscious of the workings of my own unconscious. but i still couldn’t bring myself to send the fucking email. instead i was spending 16 hours a day alternately lying in bed and gingerly pacing in my apartment to regain mobility, feeling like shit about the fact that i wasn’t sending the email and also trying fruitlessly to unpack whatever was going on in chapter five.

the election came five days into this mess, and i did feel well enough to go work the polls. this was a great way to experience election 2020, by the way; i had to leave my apartment at like 3:30 in the morning and by the time the returns started coming in i was too delirious to have any emotions about them whatsoever. it was also, not to be a shill for electoral politics, genuinely kind of inspiring: all these people lining up to Do Democracy, the deployment of translators to assist across languages, the columbia undergrad from the neighborhood we were in i was paired with at the info desk who told me he wanted to go into politics and said very seriously, upon hearing i had a friend in the grad school there, “you should tell them to join the union.” plus, you know, the high of doing something, surrounded by other human beings, at a time when that sort of thing had been in short order for the work-from-home crowd for months, and i personally had recently been confined to my bed for several days.

leaving the site that night, entering my twentieth consecutive hour awake, i felt this weird mix of spiritually rejuvenated and psychologically worse. i had just lived through this physical proof of how doing things is both not that scary and kind of awesome, i had spent a day living in alignment with the kind of person i wanted to be, i felt a fresh rush of love for my city and its people — and i still couldn’t imagine sending the fucking email! it was like i was looking at the thing i wanted most through a pane of glass, and the glass was actually really easy to break, so the only thing stopping me was that i was too much of a baby to do it.

and the thought that i had then, i fucking swear, was: i would be such a fucking hypocrite if i wrote quentin coldwater into a happy ending i’m too cowardly to give myself.

which is, first of all: SOOOOOOOO corny, like omg. unbelievably cringe. embarrassing as hell. but it was also my truth at that moment in time. i had no faith in my own ability to change, but i had spent five months and counting thinking about almost nothing else except the story i was writing in which quentin also has no faith in his ability to change but is brave enough to do it anyway, and i really felt like — i could not live with myself putting these ideas out into the world and refusing to integrate them into my own life. i could not write this promise that something better was possible for quentin if i wasn’t even going to try to make it possible for me. i could, apparently, live forever with my constant self-sabotage, but i couldn’t live with myself making this story a lie (this story being, again, fanfiction for a TV show that was, at its best, so great, and also, at its worst, so, SO stupid).

and like… that worked. i emailed the documents the next day; i attended my first monthly zoom meeting that weekend, during which the election was officially called, which felt like a good omen. i summoned the idea that had presented itself to me that night — don’t be a hypocrite! do what you would want quentin to do! — again a while later when my email got lost in the shuffle and i had to send a check-in following up, and again every other time something came up where my fear had to war it out with my desire. (or, well, most other times — it's a work in progress, and yes, i do still find myself calling upon this logic to this day.)

my life now looks more like the happy ending i wrote quentin into than it did almost four years ago, when i started this story, or even three years ago, when i finished it. it looks more like that future than i ever imagined my life could look when i was writing it, and not just because, as i have mentioned before, a few weeks after my election night revelation, i did do as quentin did and befriend a community-minded extrovert who invited me to join a book club. even the fact that the final part of the epilogue has taken me so much longer than expected is a funny case of life imitating art, because while i have had work and illness and travel and general life stress, i have also had many days in the past few months where i was not very productive because i was simply too busy doing something fun — the kind of never-quite-solved balancing act quentin was set to deal with in the epilogue back when i first started kicking it around, well over two years ago at this point, but which was not really applicable to my own life until basically now. and it sounds even to my own ears so, so, so insane to say this, but it’s true: i can trace every aspect of that shift to the fact that i wrote this story, and that writing it fundamentally changed something inside me for the better. (shout-out to the people in the comments who noted that the story was, in a meta sense, my own version of quentin’s coffee maker; i knew you were right, but i don’t think i knew how right until this recent bout of reflection.)

i don't really know that there's a take-away here, because "quit your job and write four hundred thousand words about a weird TV show with a niche audience" is not exactly universally applicable advice. but if i were to try to find one, i think it would be something like: i felt really crazy and kind of embarrassed the entire time i was writing this story, not because i was writing fanfiction, or because it was incredibly horny and wildly self-indulgent, but because it mattered to me so, so deeply. it was one thing to have a fun goofy hobby, even a fun goofy hobby i took semi-seriously and poured a lot of time and effort into, but it was another to actually, like, care, and to care a lot, which i did. but if i hadn't accepted that this story mattered to me, i don't think it could have been as personally transformational as it wound up becoming. the heart wants what it wants, and you're only going to find out what that is if you're willing to listen to whatever rhythm it beats.

i solved chapter five on the way home from the poll site, by the way. i knew there needed to be some problem with quentin’s first semi-successful attempt to mend the coffee maker, but i couldn’t figure out how it tied in thematically with where he was in his life. on the bus it hit me: quentin and the coffee maker were both trying to remain unbreakable. an appealing idea if you’ve been broken, but one more conducive to stagnancy than to growth; you can stay there for a while, but eventually you need to let yourself want more.

rly didn’t wanna go to the mutual aid meeting bc it’s cold and im busy, had already committed and felt guilty not going, had a nice time and left in a much better mood than when i arrived. how nice! too bad there is no lesson here i can ever transfer to any other kind of decision-making 😔

medialog february 2k24

is it almost april. yes. am i letting that stop me. no. the perfect is the enemy of the good!

watched

she must be seeing things - a 1987 indie about a woman who gets obsessively jealous about her girlfriend's past after discovering her collection of photographs of ex-boyfriends; this movie contained one of the most human-feeling love scenes taking place between two characters in an established relationship i have ever seen, and captured the feel of new york city apartments inhabited by the un-rich in a visceral way. it is also a funny movie about how annoying artists are. i am like sincerely curious as to whether jonathan larson, during the years before or while he was developing rent, caught a screening of this (it had its premiere at film forum, where i saw it), because a story of sexual jealousy between a very professional black lesbian lawyer and her irritating yet captivating white bisexual artist girlfriend... did feel a little familiar to me as a person who could still belt out every line of take me or leave me in my sleep, ngl!

poor things - we've discussed this but: Yes. Me. Absolutely. i wanted to live in the world of this movie forever, it could have been four hours long and i NEVER say that shit. one of those where sometimes i see critiques or queries i think are valid and i nod peacefully and think: ah, but it wasn't for that; it was for me, to have a treat. also one of those where people are saying some bonkers ass shit about it all over the place, as we have also discussed; i do genuinely believe that reading it as in any way interested in or convinced it is describing a story of female empowerment is deeply misguided, and that much of the pleasure of the movie comes from the fact that bella doesn't need to be empowered, because she has been lucky enough to be raised as an experiment rather than as a woman, which is a fun sexy provocation that is of course nonsensical if taken literally but incredibly fun for me (the person this movie was for) to sit with for two hours.

office space - i watched this in high school and HAAAATED it, was bored out of my mind, and then every time it came up in conversation, which it did a lot because this is how things were in high school in 2005, i would say i didn't get it and the person i was talking to would say, "you have to watch it twice." i don't think i've ever had an experience with a piece of media where the response to my response was so reliably uniform. anyway yeah this is funnier the second time. stephen root might be our greatest living actor idk

drive-away dolls - YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHH BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITCHHHHHHHH

the heartbreak kid - elaine may's mikey and nicky is one of the most emotionally brutal films i've ever watched, but i think i found this harder to sit through. it's brilliant - i talked about it with a friend who'd seen it sometime earlier who said it was the first movie she could remember seeing that confronted men's fantasies so directly, which is apt - but absolutely excruciating. i never really understood what the film people were talking about when they talked about the use of cuts to build/release tension until the scene at a restaurant where a guy keeps winding himself up to break up with his wife on their honeymoon, and not doing it, and the camera just makes you stay with him until you are begging for relief.

sex, lies & videotape - rewatch with director's commentary. steven soderbergh is definitely on the list of famous people i delusionally believe i could be friends with if the circumstances of life had caused our paths to overlap.

zone of interest - another one that has really Brought Out The Takes, about which i'll just say: no one in this movie is turning a blind eye to what they're doing with the possible exception of the mother, who's happy to join in with some chattily murderous antisemitism but finds the material reality of it too distasteful to stay (in at least one potential reading of a plot point left interestingly ambiguous). personally i thought the film was (1) almost completely disinterested in the question of the banality of evil (2) quite good.

mission: impossible - i talked my friend into going through the series with me and we started off with a double-header; the colors in this movie are sooooooo good. tom cruise at this point has obviously had work done by xenu's finest specialists but revisiting this did remind me that he actually also genuinely always has looked quite young for his age - he's 34 in this but he looks like a baby.

mission: impossible - 2 - i literally can't believe there are people who don't like this movie. grow up

read

monster midway: an uninhibited look at the glittering world of the carny, william lindsay gresham - i guess i don't know what i expected from a nonfiction book about the carnival by the author of nightmare alley, the great american novel, but it definitely wasn't 300 pages about how the carnival is the most special and wonderful place on earth and the people who've given their lives to it are the noblest, boldest, most magical folks you can find. i particularly enjoyed the section on palmistry as cold-reading, which included a long quote from fake psychic about how really most people just need to be told some basic emotional truths and to believe in themselves, so if she can give them that, that's a dollar well spent, which is tbh hard to argue with.

listened

rosie tucker - tiny songs vol. 1 - rosie tucker came onto my radar through one of dave's mixes, which i'm still listening to - her song "all my exes live in vortexes," which opens "i hope no one had to piss in a bottle at work to get me the thing i ordered on the internet," caught my ear - and while i haven't delved further into her discography, i did love this 12-track, 10 minute album (not a typo!), which gives you the sense of someone spitballing an idea for a song just long enough to start it, then losing interest and moving on to the next one, but in a good way? idk it's fun and weird and only 10 minutes!

today i woke up, i did some work for money, i cleaned my room and made a gynecologist appointment, i did the vulture puzzle with nick, i worked out (abs and quads 😩), i did some admin stuff for tutoring, i got my hair cut, i bought a parfait in a coffee shop so i had somewhere to sit and read sofia samatar while it rained, i got a free doughnut because i left as they were closing, i met nick at a piano bar for a show. after the show there was piano karaoke and i was going back and forth about requesting a song but between requests the pianist played “dear catastrophe waitress” and i laughed out loud and put in “samson” to continue the theme of songs i haven’t listened to since like 2009. i ate my parfait on the train. i came home. a lot of my days go something like this these days: some work and some responsibilities and some moving around and some art and some fun. not every single one of them every single time but enough that none of them feel very far away at any point. sometimes other friends and making things are in there too. little delights are everywhere like a free doughnut or corrections with seth meyers or a cute baby in a store. it’s nice :)

been toying around with various ways to concretize Get Some Stuff Done as a resolution and i think maybe it might just come down to "20 minutes a day getting my shit together" where some days that's calling the place where i fucked up opening a retirement account the other day + scheduling a haircut + cancelling a haircut when i realized thanks to my new easy to use calendar app that i managed to schedule it for the exact time of the wisdom tooth consult i've had on the books for like six months + rescheduling a haircut, and some days that's making a dent in dishes i have allowed to pile up or the mess i have permitted to blossom in my room, and perhaps if i keep this up with some degree of regularity one day it's like, "dusting some shelves" or "going through the pile of unopened mail some of which is at least five years old" or whatever. as i have been mentally drafting and trying on various forms i have been inclined towards loftier goals and wondering if this is really Enough but the reality is..... if i can manage 20 minutes a day 184 days this year that will be percentage wise a huge increase over 2023. so. maybe we just Know Ourselves and start there hm?

my mom has also updated her funeral mix. for years she drilled it into me that she wanted “i shall be released” (the rolling thunder version with joan baez on it) played and now she says she wants “to make you feel my love” (original and also both the billy joel and adele covers). i asked her what happened to i shall be released and she said “well, i’ll already be released”

my mom is fine. we finally left the medical center at 4:45 a.m. our time, just shy of 12 hours after we arrived, most of which was spent waiting first for a CT scan and then for a reading of the CT scan, which was done remotely by some third party company that i guess had a backlog. the doctor said he couldn’t let her leave with the kind of injury she had, and the doctor who took over on the night shift and eventually went over her results with her explained to her that usually the kind of bruising she had (a mottled purple not only around the locus of impact on her forehead, which at the time of the fall was legit swollen like a golf ball to the extent that i realized those cartoon characters getting hit by mallets were much less exaggerated than i had realized, but also in streaks under her eyes, which for the first few hours seemed fine) usually indicated a fracture at the base of the skull and was in her telling shocked that her scans revealed no such thing. my mom is, in fact, fine, and by the time we left seemed more or less back to her usual self and way more energetic than i was; i wandered off to a separate hallway to escape the waiting room air conditioning and lie down on some plastic chairs. some recent mom takes: barbie movie lame and she thinks ryan gosling, who she loved in la la land, probably thinks it’s ridiculous he got nominated because in her view you could tell he thought what he was doing was stupid [not sure i agree with this but do think she was reacting to the same thing that caused me to go “it’s giving SNL,” and also this is word for word how i felt about timmy in the talkier sections of dune lmao]; maestro good and she now feels a profound kinship with bradley cooper because she too used to watch the leonard bernstein PBS concerts enraptured and dream of conducting despite having no musical talent; i tonya good and i think she’s a little more hyped about the trump cohn movie when i told her that’s sebastian stan; adam driver insanely hot but not the best part of house of gucci (that goes to jared leto who she referred to as “the one we like” because of how i made her watch my so-called life with me as a teen in the hopes that the show would articulate my own adolescence to her in a way i couldn’t)

year in review

one thing i did this past year was set my "win condition" for daily habit resolutions at 183 days in the year, because if you do something on 183 days in a year, that means you technically did it most of the time. i found this really motivational because it meant everything counted but there was also a lot of room for slack, and i feel like even for the resolutions i did not do so hot on that style of tracking gave me information and helped me think about what i really want out of that habit. so i am definitely planning to repeat it this year! as for the actual daily resolutions, they kind of fell into four categories.

nailed it

spend some time with some art: 232 days

work out: 216 days 💪🏼

drink at least 64 ounces of water: 277 days

pretty good

log my little habits & other trackables: 189 days

don't go on the internet before noon: 189 days (but see earlier posting about how i don't really feel like that addressed what i wanted it to address)

nice try

write out a plan for my day: 164 days

make something with words or with my hands: 153 days

get my room back into its baseline acceptable condition: 135 days

abject failures

meditate (147 days), journal (116 days), yoga (69 days) - yoga i just never found a place in my routine for this year but the other two i'm putting into this category even their numbers are not that high because i actually started off pretty strong and then just fully stopped around the beginning of september because life was hard. then like a month later i started having a mental breakdown where i couldn't stop crying and/or thinking about death. coincidence? you decide! (it's almost definitely not.)

i also had some goals to accomplish for the end of the, areas i wanted to make progress in without a specific endpoint, & vibes to cultivate, with mixed results:

memorize at least one (1) keyword/phrase for each tarot card - lol no

listen to sondheim's full body of work in chronological order - lol no

finish all unread books in my room - lol no

get my apartment into a state that would be okay for guests - lol no

post all WIPs - partial credit! i had a very ambitious count of 12 in mind when i made this resolution; i wound up posting 5 and a half, one of which was for & event and not on the list. idk i feel good about this tbh, especially since i did post everything that already had a substantial amount of writing in gdocs when i started the year (so, like, really all True WIPs rather than WIPs + various half-baked notions) and i like pretty much every fic i posted a lot.

up my walking till i'm regularly hitting 70k a week - i didn't put this one in my app for some reason and i am definitely too lazy to go through 12 months of notebooks but a glance at my apple health app suggests... sure? kinda? definitely for a while and then i got sick and then it got cold and dark and less so since then?

make progress towards figuring out routines that serve me: i... think so, yes? i spent a lot of this year, especially the spring and summer, just feeling sooooo dysregulated physically and fatigue-embattled and so on and so forth, and although my sleep cycle at the moment is not ideal, i am not, like, beset every day by the challenge of having a physical body anymore. i don't have one single daily routine i swear by, which is what i always fantasize about even though i know i would inevitably get bored of it and reject it (cap sun / sag stellium problems........), but i have some mini-routines i feel like i can call on, and i also have a set of meals that are boring but easy and reliable to eat basically every day so that i am not spending all of my disposable income on take-out anymore, and i also definitely now think of myself as A Person Who Works Out, so.... yes. i'm gonna say yes.

figure out a way to tackle my gigantic and ever-increasing Backlog Of Tasks: lmao no. not even a little bit.

make progress towards feeling more connected: i think so on this one, too. my most socially proactive friend moved out of the country for six months this spring and as the date of her departure was approaching i realized that i could either watch my social calendar virtually disappear for half a year or i could Try Harder, and then i did try a little bit harder and it went pretty okay. as much as part of me really wanted to, i did not drop my efforts during my extremely busy september/october, either. so.... yeah!

make progress towards fiscal responsibility: yeah. not, like, in leaps and bounds or anything, but i am definitely 3000% less stressed about money than i was a year ago.

stop treating everything like an emergency: hmmmm. i think i did well on this one for things that i can or should or need to take action on, but not so well for things i actually can't - like, i've gotten better at reminding myself that it, whatever it is, isn't fucking brain surgery, and in the worst case scenario life goes on, but i am still prone to the occasional despairing google spiral where i "research" some issue lying to myself that i am gathering important information but knowing deep inside i'm not planning to act on any of it at the moment and therefore really i am just feeding my own anxiety about it. partial credit.

don't push unless i have to: you know what? i think yeah. i mean, work in progress, but - yeah.

be proactive about looking for the stuff that makes me be alive: partial credit.

make more stuff, see more people, experience more art, have more fun: in order, maybe not strictly speaking "more" but between the amount i wrote and getting back into knitting i feel pretty happy about it; yes; probably?; definitely

fuck temperance: not as much as i maybe wanted to, but often enough to be glad when i did

i'm gonna come back on a full resolutions post later i think, maybe tonight maybe not (don't push unless i have to), but some current thoughts on this review:

keeping unedited; the 183 day goal (although i guess since we're in a leap year technically it should be 84, lol) in general; the daily habits of art, working out, drinking water, logging my little habits

i'm debating whether to keep planning my day as a habit or not. i feel like i've sort of internalized enough of a daily structure that some days it's helpful but other days i can just kind of jump into things and not feel like i missed something (today, for example, i've been toggling between work stuff and other goals, including sitting down to write this post, and it's felt pretty seamless)

internet: still thinking of a good way to phrase this. might just go with "make good internet choices" with the option to redefine or be more formal about "good internet choices" if i feel the need

making stuff: debating whether to keep unedited or now that i have gotten into knitting and definitely WILL be doing it pretty much anytime i'm watching something, do a teeny tiny daily writing resolution, like 100 words a day (or "100 words OR time spent doing actual research for something e.g. rewatching [redacted] for the sake of this newsletter i'm drafting")

room: i think i'm gonna keep this one, which lives in my app as "room maintenance," but mentally redefine it to EITHER re-setting my room to its zero position OR spending 20 minutes making progress towards that to disincentivize my current practice of leaving any messes i can't take care of in 20 minutes until i feel like i have a whole day to work on them

meditating, journaling, yoga, aka the self-care shit: i think i'm gonna swap meditating & yoga for mindfulness & mobility. so, like, one (1) yoga video, done while nothing else is playing and containing some degree of stretchiness, would get me a checkmark for both of those things, but i could also achieve both of them by doing, like, three minutes of silent deep breathing + stretching or foam rolling or one of those pilates butt workouts that always helps my back while watching TV or listening to a podcast or whatever. journaling... debating about this one but almost definitely planning to switch to digital journaling of some kind. the therapeutic value of handwritten journaling is real but it's clearly not something i'm up for at this period of my life lol. beyond that might keep it as journaling but just switch the mode, might split it up into reflection & recording, which are the two things i want out of journaling (the latter of which traditional journaling is actually terrible for for me because my handwriting is so bad i never reread my old entries) but could theoretically be accomplished by, like, a tarot pull + a social media post relating to the book or movie or whatever i'm reading. (i said i was gonna bring back blogging this year with my yearly personal tag and then i used it all of twice lol. BUT THIS YEAR I MEAN IT!!!)

walking: definitely gonna put this one in the app lol and also might switch to a monthly goal? i saw someone say that and it seemed crazy but then i was like, well it's true that if i get my period on a saturday and i haven't been going crazy with steps that week i'm basically done..... lol

it's been funny seeing posts all over the place encouraging "fun" new year's resolutions because those were the ones i failed the hardest at! lmao. clearly setting "do this by the end of the year" is not a productive framework for me personally. i will probably take some of my failed year-long resolutions from 2023 and make, like, a funsies list & a serious list, and then set a daily habit goal like "chip away a little at one fun project & one serious project"

the elephant in the room of my brain is, do i want to set some kind of numerical goal regarding Getting Out Of The House And/Or Spending Time With Human Persons? it feels intimating and scary and hard but also less so than it would have had i considered it before my friend moved out of the country. so....... maybe? idk.

similarly, debating if i do want to set some kind of goal regarding how much writing i accomplish, or if doing 100 words a day is enough since the hardest part of writing is absolutely just sitting down and fucking doing it. lol.

also considering a reading goal? that can but doesn't necessarily always count towards the art goal? hmmmm.

today's workout is 30 minutes of burpee variations..... pray for me

i feel like caroline (my chosen fitness mommy) is stockholm syndroming me into hating core work less because in this program she keeps tossing in a little core set after like a half hour of Some Other Fucking Nonsense so that by the time we get there i’m like “oh thank god some fucking sit-ups”

top comment on today’s HIIT workout (20 on 20 off for FORTY MINUTES STRAIGHT???)……. pray for me 🙏🏼

been trying to get into one-card pulls to get a handle on at least a keyword or two for each card, mostly at bedtime trying to read them as, what do i need to hear right now? saturday i pulled the five of swords - conflict that is a huge bummer for everyone involved, maybe one you shouldn’t have engaged in - and i was like, okay, yes, i can connect to this, this is about me engaging in debate on the internet (elsewhere not tumblr) about a topic i usually know better than to Go There with and then deleting. the cards are telling me to Stay Offline. sunday, did i Stay Offline? not so much. i pulled…. the five of swords again. ok. very funny. i get it. but, i am doing this partly as an educational exercise, i want another card to ponder. i pulled again: the seven of swords - deceit, hiding, including from yourself. OK!!!! VERY FUNNY!!!! I GET IT!!!!!

MEDIALOG ADDENDUM: thank you @onihcinimkcin for reminding me that i forgot to mention that fear of flying is also HUGELY about how fucking terrible and annoying analysts are and it's sooooooo funny

a friend of mine and i laughed at ourselves tonight for getting the white wine at a beer bar - did a little one card bedtime pull for the first time in forever and got the two of cups 🥂

i’m not really interested in maestro at all like whatsoever but a part of me does feel like i need to watch it now so that i can stay up to date on my mom’s evolving understanding of bisexuality

i do think i'm gonna keep a separate 20 minutes a day on the various digital tidying up tasks that don't actually matter but i fantasize about completing like clearing out my inbox/trimming my gmail archive/going through and clearing out various apps/clearing my liked songs on spotify in an effort to start using liked songs better and spotify only lets you do this manually one by one???????? for some reason????? but this is fine and really (perversely, i am disgusting) a Fun Resolution :) for me personally because it's quite brainless and can usually be done while i am walking on the treadmill listening to music or watching some low stakes TV. so it's actually a nice little treat for me that lets me take a break from my real life and also contribute to my step count.