/now
Fall Equinox, 2024
Things have been going well on this site since its complete overhaul back in June. I like what I’ve done and will probably keep this site design for a year or two (unless I get completely possessed with the desire to change it, which, in truth, could happen at any moment.) After doing a re-watch of Steven Universe Future, I decided to add another “site” about it as well. Building that out will take a number of months, assuming that I don’t lose momentum. It’s nice to have a proper web revival shrine, though.
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In early August, we lost my elderly cat Fanny, who had been sick since the previous October. We’d kept her going with a regimen of antibiotics and painkillers and she didn’t seem to care that much about being sick, still preferring to treat everyone around her like the inferior life forms that we are. Her personality could be summed up in two words: ”food motivated.” I always knew that when she stopped eating, that would be the end, especially since we could only medicate her via food. Our vet came out to put her down, so Fanny was able to pass away peacefully in her favorite place: our screened in back porch. Losing her was hard, but I feel that we timed it right, letting her live life to the full when she wanted to, and being able to take away her misery when her body could no longer cope with her illness. Our younger cat MacGuffin is an only cat now and does need a playmate to help him burn off energy and boredom. We’ll wait for a few months before we start looking for a new cat, though. It’s expensive and exhausting to take care of a sick pet and we need a break.
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Over the course of this summer I’ve had a lot of stress, mostly related to work. For the first time in my life, I got hives from stress. I’d often been in the habit of saying, “Such-and-such gives me hives” as a joke, but now I actually understand what it feels like. Fortunately they weren’t that bad and after the initial treatment they have not come back. I am now focusing on reducing the over-reaction of my stress response to situations that aren’t even remotely livelihood-threatening, let alone life-threatening.
I’ve long noticed my nervous system’s miscalibration when it comes to responding to stressors, that sometimes it will react to a relatively small thing as if it were a mortal threat. This depends a lot on context, and on the fact (so I’ve been told by many self-help books) that our amygdala, the “lizard” part of the brain that handles reactions to threats, cannot distinguish between a real threat and an imagined one, or between a physical threat and a psychological or emotional one. My body has been responding as if it’s seeing tigers and vipers, whereas reality is much more mundane. However, the wear and tear from stress hormones, lost sleep, and digestive upset is very real. This spring I listened to Gabor Mate’s When the Body Says No, which explores the connection between chronic stress and life-threatening diseases such as MS, ALS, and cancer. It has motivated me take more seriously the consequences of not addressing my stress over the long term.
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When I made a new year’s resolution to consume less media and start writing more, I didn’t realize what effect that was going to have on my physical environment and writing tools. In my essay “Hitting Return” from earlier this year, I meditated on the writing tools available to me in the present day. At the time I was toying with the idea of getting a digital typewriter, which I ultimately decided not to do after observing my writing habits for a few months. But I am still unsatisfied with modern word processing software and how it is geared towards people writing reports and essays, not long-term creative work. (As a side note, I actually do most of my digital drafting nowadays in Notion, which is kind of terrible for it. But I prefer it to Microsoft Word and its relatives like Libre Office or Google Docs. Notion has its own issues, but it’s less obtrusive to me than dedicated word processing software. I suppose if I really wanted to go all the way, I could start writing in Notepad.)
I leaned hard into drafting and editing by hand, but the laboriousness of that process has slowed me down. So, despite what I said in “Hitting Return,” I recently ended up doing the very thing I said I wouldn’t: buy a real typewriter. I paid a lot of money for it because I wanted a refurbished vintage machine that was comfortable to use and could stand up to a lot of writing. I went with a manual over an electric typewriter because I know from my childhood experience how godawfully loud they are. And I didn’t get one based on looks, preferring to skip over those cool glass-keyed ones from the ‘40s or the streamlined European mid-century beauties. Instead, I got a typewriter that I think would have looked very at-home on an episode of the Brady Bunch: a c. 1970 Smith Corona Galaxie Deluxe.
It's still a gorgeous, if musty, machine. Learning how to type on a manual is a very different experience than even electric typewriter keyboards. While the quiet, obedient keyboard of my little lapop has reduced the labor of writing to almost nothing, the typewriter makes it impossible to ignore. I do not yet have the finger strength to produce consistent drafts, although I have to remind myself, by looking at historical examples of typewritten documents, that this tool has never produced drafts that could rival printing in neatness. And not only does the typewriter require physical stamina, it requires mental stamina as well; since mistakes are much more difficult to correct, it requires more attention to the page. I have to give myself encouragement to remind myself that millions of people used these tools every day, sometimes for hours on end, and that people became so comfortable with them that they were instruments not only of transcription but composition. I have a long way to go.
As a consequence, I have been thinking a lot about the material conditions of writing over the past few weeks. I recently read Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of computing or the recent-ish (past 50 years) history of Anglophone literary composition. I know the title is extremely dry, but despite everything it continued to keep my interest up for 250 pages.
I’ve got another essay rattling around in my brain as a result of all of this. I remain resolutely un-sentimental about typewriters and early word processors even as I understand how they changed everything for writers who first encountered them. They were in fact primarily office machines used to regulate female bodies and exploit female labor, even if they were also used for creative ends. (Kirschenbaum has a chapter on the intersection of gender, labor, and word processing, and I’m currently looking into getting some resources about women and typewriting. I’ve also found some cringey historical videos that show the extent to which “proper typing technique” included implications about female dress and behavior.) I may also do a much shorter web page with pictures of the little Room of My Own that I’ve created this year.
I got the idea of the /now page from Derek Sivers, which I found through 32-Bit Cafe.