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You are your environment

SF has felt like a tech monoculture for the past 10 years. It’s one of the big reasons we were originally planning to be in / around NYC instead.

I’m sure there’s more to it, but it’s kinda hard to find in the current situation, especially in our neighborhood. The worst thing is the possibility of slipping in to it personally, becoming one-dimensional.

Been on my mind since a lot of the indoor things I usually love doing (reading and cooking are two of the biggies) aren’t ticking the boxes at the moment. It might not be the city, it’s probably more related to the move or the pandemic. Maybe I need to check out Oakland? I guess time will tell, I’ll try harder in the meantime. You are your environment.

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Feet on the ground, head in the sky

A stone stile covered in moss in Addingham, West Yorkshire

I’ve been going on a few walks from the front door, no more than one a day as prescribed to maintain sanity. It’s confusing though…

The guidance says, “You can also go for a walk or exercise outdoors if you stay more than 2 metres from others”, so a walk on a quiet public footpath should be OK. Problem is that you can’t predict how many people might be on a path before you get out there, and there are a lot of stiles and latches you have to touch to get over or through fences.

But it’s not like Main Street is any better. You have to step in to the middle of the road in order to maintain distance since the pavements are so narrow, and there are 4–5 times as many people walking there at any one time than out on the countryside paths.

It’s tough to know what to do, particularly with the police doing things like shaming people via drone cameras. I get it, we absolutely have to avoid throngs of people descending on beaches and beauty spots. But, ugh. Staying 100% inside feels actively unhealthy. Just never feel like I’m doing the right thing.

A bridge over a stream in Addingham, West Yorkshire

I’m carrying hand sanitiser and use it after each time I have to touch some apparatus. I’m planning to carry antimicrobial wipes from now on to open / close gates and get through stiles. Maybe it’ll help others too? Who knows. I’ll also spend some time coming up with more bodyweight exercise routines that I can do from “home” or a random park. Definitely one of those times you long for a garden.

The photos above are from a walk along Marchup Beck (see walk 8, the shorter version) with Sam and the photos below are from walk towards Addingham Moorside (see walk 6, the shortest version) with Gemma in London. It was a walk-and-talk over the phone, 10/10 would recommend. I got *hopelessly* lost once or twice, but it’s pretty straightforward to get back as long as you know where the middle of town is and keep the moor at your back. The walk included some stretches of the Dales Highway and the Millenium Way, I probably just needed to pay better attention to the signs.

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packing, selling, dissolving

Drawing of a dracaena

We’ve been slowly packing up for the past month, preparing to move thousands of miles away. It was exciting up until about two weeks ago. We knew it would be sad to leave the people we love, pack away our books, sell so many of our things. But we were looking forward to a big change.

Now it feels untethering. Reality feels very thin at the moment, and the process of moving amplifies that feeling. Home should be a grounding place, but it’s shifting under our feet. We’ve disassembled our workspaces, we’ve given away the chairs and sold the monitors. The umbrella plant that I got at the flower market when I first moved here, the dracaena I brought back from the dead, the lovely coffee table we’ve had since we first started living together. They’ll all be gone by tomorrow.

Drawing of a mid-century coffee table

I really don’t mind the downscaling. They’re just objects, and all of them are going to great homes. And we’re still going to move even if it gets delayed by current events, so it doesn’t make sense to hoard things for the sake of a few more weeks. But the *timing*. Things are dissolving and will be fluid for quite some time. I could really do with some solidity.

The worst part is that we may not get to say goodbye. We were planning to celebrate with the people we love. There’s an outside chance we’ll still be able to, but we don’t want to put friends in an uncomfortable or dangerous position.

What will happen will happen. And we’re pretty fortunate. It’s just sad, that’s all.

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“it is possible to imagine [a critical sensibility] in which social paranoia is not foundational”

The sore winner is a product of the hyper-surveilled and personalized world in which we all now live, one in which people feel both nebulously responsible for everything wrong while also feeling responsible for nothing at all.

From the Outline article “A decade of sore winners” by B.D. McClay. A lot of stuff in this article is spot-on. It also relates directly to the response I received from my Republican representative regarding the impeachment of President Trump.

One of my rep’s many dubious points was that Ukranian leaders publicly attacked candidate Trump in the press, and that this was evidence of Ukranian meddling in 2016 elections. Specifically, he linked to an article in The Hill by Ambassador Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States from 2015 to 2019. I read the article by Amb. Chaly, and all I can see is an opinion piece that fairly criticises statements made by a candidate for one of the most powerful positions in the world.

How do you make the mental leap necessary to conflate principled criticism with personal attack? Furthermore, how could anything in that article be considered meddling in an election? The vast majority of Chaly’s article is a recent history of events in Ukraine.

This is sore winner territory. Here’s how McClay illustrates it in their article:

Worse still than the idea that things are for you is the extension into identification: that these things literally are you. If someone writes books for teen girls, to criticize her books is to criticize teen girls. Expressing something other than support for Taylor Swift guarantees you a place in that special hell for women who don’t support other women. If you like superhero movies and video games, and somebody outlines the reasons they think superhero movies and video games are a waste of time, that’s an attack on you, personally, not a disagreement over aesthetics.

How do we get past this? More critical thinking taught in schools and beyond? More restrictions on social media? Surely it has to be a personal exercise but it seems like such a fundamental and widespread problem, almost a public mental health emergency (one of many).

It is impossible to imagine a critical sensibility that does not exist socially. But it is possible to imagine one in which social paranoia is not foundational, and in which social reception — of work, of ourselves — does not have to determine our reaction to each other.

It’s possible to imagine it, but it’s pretty difficult to picture without some sort of major overhaul in day-to-day life.

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Low-stakes escapism

Everything feels so high-stakes. Doesn’t help that the general election is a little over 24 hours away. 😐

Escapism helps lower the bar a bit, knocks you off the daily life tightrope, but sometimes even books and movies can feel like too much. If I’m already wound tight, then I’m not sure that filling 100% of my free time with James Bridle or Adam Curtis is going to do wonders for my mental health. I know, I *promise* I’ll get round to them eventually!

These are some options for low-stakes, low-cost escapism that have worked, or could work, for me:

I’ll try to add to this over time.

Important note: Consider turning off all pop-up notifications on your devices and removing the count badge from your email if you have a Mac or an iPhone. You don’t need any of that gunk, I promise.

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If a tree falls in a forest

❤️👍😍⭐️🙌

The quick-kudos tools that have evolved online definitely have their usefulness, but most of the time it feels like sugar. Satisfying and fostering a hunger. It cultivates a bottomless pit of competition, arbitrary measurements of self worth, and requires a level of intrapersonal gymnastics that I’m not personally capable of sustaining.

Is the problem just the public-ness of it all? What about deliberately quiet kudos?

I want to give those sorts of kudos almost every day. It’s hard to describe the use cases, though there are many… Maybe someone famous does work you admire. That’s the I-want-to-tell-you-that-this-is-fantastic-but-I’m-genuinely-not-latching-on-for-likes use case. Or a rather private friend finishes a project they should be damn proud of. That’s the you-need-to-know-this-is-great-but-we-both-know-you’d-prefer-if-I-didn’t-turn-this-in-to-a-conversation use case.

And I sure as hell would be happy to receive that sort of thing. Little pick-me-ups are critical, especially when you are mostly/fully your own employer.

It’s the digital equivalent of a great compliment from a stranger. The sort of compliment that leaves you feeling a tiny bit lighter. The sort of compliment that isn’t motivated by a mob of people giving you the same compliment. And it usually has little to do with the identity of the complimenter. (In fact, when a complete stranger follows up an IRL compliment by introducing themselves, that’s often when the moment sours a bit, or gets a smidge creepy.)

So how to give quiet kudos? It should be as simple and familiar feeling as similar features – as in, just select an emoji – but definitely not public. It shouldn’t associate an identity with the kudos either, IMO. Hopefully that would avoid spamminess. It’d probably also need a daily/weekly/monthly summary setting but good lord, it definitely shouldn’t ever send a “you received 0 kudos this week!” sort of email. And it should include other reactions, the bad with the good.

I would be surprised if this doesn’t exist already in some form or another… need to dig a little harder. I suppose one preexisting version of this is the e-newsletter since it’s an opt-in system. Particularly TinyLetter. But that just feels a little too business-y for what the sort of thing I’m imagining. Might look in to making the tool I’m imagining. Add it to the someday list.

In summary:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I say yes.

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Britney Spears on her shaved head

bloodblistersisters:

britneyjustin:

britsanity:

Witnesses say they asked Britney why she shaved her head and her response was, “I’m tired of plugging things into it. I’m tired of people touching me.”

T-Pain: “That was the most beautiful thing in the world. Do you know why she was shaving her head? Because it was so important to other people. She is like, “Listen. Don’t touch my hair anymore. Stop touching my hair.” People were like, “We’ve got to make your hair before you go outside. You can’t leave.” She went … “Now I don’t have hair. What you going to do?”

Our Diva Britney Jean Spears

BODILY AUTONOMY

Edit 2 July 2021:

I was revisiting this recently in light of Britney Spears’ infuriating and terrifically sad conservatorship hearing.

The post above was originally a Tumblr reblog, from back when this site was on Tumblr. I was curious about the origins of these quotes so did a little digging.

The witness response quote source is unclear. According to some sources, something along these lines was said by Emily Wynne-Hughes who was present (As a tattoo artist? As a customer? Uncertain) when Britney got tattooed after shaving her head. All of these sources point to one another though and some are… questionable. Hence why I’m not linking to them. Go ahead and search “Emily Wynne-Hughes Britney Spears” if you’re curious.

The origins of the T-Pain quote are clearer, it’s from a 2007 Associated Press interview. He supposedly recorded three songs with her right after she shaved her head (source).

When I was looking for the quote sources, I came across the 2008 TV documentary “Britney Spears: For The Record”. This is the exchange around 16min 25sec in during an interview at The Mondrian Hotel in LA:

Interviewer When you look back at the whole shaving of the head thing, and all the rest of it. What provoked you to do that?

Britney Spears I was going through so much artificial stuff with my kids and with Kevin and all that stuff at the time, and he’d just left me. And I was devastated, you know? People thought it was me going crazy and stuff like that, but people shave their heads all the time. I was going through a lot, but it was just kind of me just feeling a form of a little bit of rebellion or feeling free, or shedding stuff that had happened.

Interviewer Why did you not tell anyone that’s what you were doing?

Britney Spears I didn’t think it was anyone’s business, really.

She’s right.