/now
Summer Solstice, 2024
Back in April, I began working on a completely new version of this site. I knew that I wanted it to be 100% hand-coded in HTML and CSS and incorporate, to the best of my abilities and tastes. The layout of the main page is a little strange, the product of my brain, and doesn’t quite look like anything else I’ve seen on the web. As a bonus, I think it actually looks better on mobile than desktop! I set it aside for a few weeks to work on other projects, but I’m excited to be rolling out a completely new version of this site.
/I had four new year’s resolutions: waste less produce, build cardio capacity, write more, and consume less media. I have fallen the furthest behind on building cardio capacity because of the unpredictable nature of my health so far this year. I’ve had a lot of ups and downs since October and am trying to push myself to move an exercise, but not so much that I get thrown back into fatigue. I have done the best on writing more and consuming less media. I feel better about coming home and working on projects instead of zoning out and watching videos.
/I bought a phone stand, which has been both completely useless and totally wonderful. I’ve thought about getting one for years but finally decided to go for it. What is the point of a phone stand? So that my phone has somewhere to live. I put the stand in a corner of my office that is out of arm’s reach of anywhere I usually sit. When I come home the phone goes on its stand. If it dings or I need it for something, I can use it and then put it back on its stand. When I am in other rooms, the phone does not come with me unless I have a particular reason to use it. I believe this has helped with my concentration and reducing the amount of time I spend looking at a screen. I am considering getting a similar stand for my laptop for the same reason. It seems like a really stupid thing to spend money on, but for some reason having a stand to put the phone on was the crucial component in changing my behavior with it. I suppose a box or something else of that sort would have also worked.
In general, I have been using aids like this to help me stay focused. I fall into unproductive, if not miserable, ruts on my computer and phone. If I go on YouTube I will always end up watching certain kinds of videos over and over again. If I go on Wikipedia long enough, I always end up clicking through until I come upon an article about genocide. (There have been so, so many genocides. I have not remotely run out of genocides to read about.) I use a browser extension on my laptop to limit browsing sites that I tend to waste a lot of time on. Same with app timers on my phone. My phone goes black and white when it’s my bedtime which drastically reduces my desire to use it.
I think people have this notion that they just need to exercise willpower to reduce screen time on their own. But that’s a false notion, as we’re up against deliberately addictive technologies. There are so many resources out there to help redirect your attention away from unproductive tech habits, many of which are free or even built into devices nowadays. I’ve benefited a lot from leaning in to them recently.
/I am getting back into reading and writing more poetry. Two poets I recently took up, having known about their work for years, are Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Rich. I realized that Stevens just isn’t worth messing with. When I was younger I might have been cowed by him, but his self-obsessed grandiosity and his contempt for those he deems lower than himself (namely women and Black people) come through in so much of his work. I’m not questioning his skill or talent because he has much of both, but at the end of the day, is it worth it to spend my time reading an asshole? Rich, on the other hand, is someone I wish I would have taken up much sooner. I got her Collected Poems out of the library and have been burrowing through it at random angles. I see her as the precursor to so much poetry being written now, to so many ways of thought. Her poetry may not always be beautiful, but it is always worthwhile. When I was in grad school, nobody—*nobody*—studied her. There was an unspoken list of people who nobody read or talked about ever, seemingly for no good reason. Aldous Huxley was another. My husband asked if we ever studied him in our classes and I laughed, even though there was no actual reason for his exclusion. I imagine Rich got pigeonholed as a lesbian poet and so might have been studied in the women’s studies department, but not English. A shame.
/I’ve also been working on some prose pieces. One is that I’ve been passing back and forth in my brain for about 3 or 4 months now. It’s partly an essay about why I don’t watch TV, movies, read novels, or play video games (seriously) due to the effects that narrative has on my mind. It’s also about why we’re drawn to certain narratives to fill holes in our lives. I’m also working on a much quicker piece about why—unpopular opinion alert—neither federated social media nor blogging are unqualified goods and we cannot expect them to save the internet because they both kind of sucked even before they were corporatized.
I got the idea of the /now page from Derek Sivers, which I found through 32-Bit Cafe.