haiku 28

sixty point headline

missiles screaming through the air

why didn't you vote

haiku 27

second to last day

this has been interesting

what will i do now

haiku 26

look up suddenly

the branches are pink i swear

tuesday they were bare

haiku 25 - the wake

passing you left a

trail to follow I chose to

go another way

haiku 24 - accidental sondheim

look i made a skirt

where there never was a skirt

before i learned how

haiku 23

hard to concentrate

no matter where i'm sitting

cat attacks my feet

haiku 22

sorry for the rage

i'm exhausted and really

that's all i have left

haiku 21 - g***

i need another

word for grey or else i can't

describe anything

haiku 20 - it's haikus all the way down

taking a break from

editing a haiku film

to write this haiku

haiku 19 - writing mundane poems about the humdrum events of my daily life

the room stops when you 

walk in all oblivious

supermodel cat

haiku 18 - look around the room

new catalogue

dreaming all the colors of

future vegetables

haiku 17

blocks of muddy ground

fifty small purple flowers

spring out of nowhere

haiku 16

one tiny iron

forty tiny triangles

huge dopamine hit

haiku 15 - sunday

what was i doing

all day that i couldn't write

this very short poem

haiku 14 - spring

one robin does not

make a spring but ninety nine

crocuses just might

haiku 13

sewed the final stitch

submitted the final draft

open empty hands

Haiku 12

sewing store scouting

plus unexpected ice cream

eaten in my car

Haiku 11 - my first missed day

too angry to write

other than that two page rant

couldn't keep it short

Haiku 10 - get out

there is life outside

so obvious yet easy

to forget inside

Haiku 9 - (i wrote this yesterday)

Quiet banana

Unimaginable one

Year ago deep sigh

Haiku 8 - Park Spy

arms spring open in

greeting yards before the hug

friends meet in the park

Haiku, um 7?

grey water grey sky

curtains of rain parted by

a single white sail

Haiku 6

i ate and showered

built a dress form pet the cat

yesterday she died

Haiku 5

black and white counters

have endless patterns and ways

of making you late

Haiku 4 - Feb 4

february fourth

brought my long grey wool coat with

but didn't need it

Haiku 3 - Fun

bloody half footprints

slowly trace them back to find

too many red clots

Haiku 2 - Spring is Coming

same grey sidewalk same

grey sky same daily walk spots

new white crocus bud

apparently it's NaHaiWriMo

the month is short the

days are short this poem is short

the darkness lingers

Conversations With My Cat

 (Rachel enters room. Gizmo, a cat, is looking out the window, making quiet chittering noises)

Rachel: ooo, do you see something? is it a squirrel?!

(she goes to the window and looks out. looks at Gizmo. looks out the window again.)

Rachel: it's nice that we have similar interests.

One Hundred and Twenty One Jump Street

Finally saw Wicked (movie) last night. How does Jonathan Bailey look 20 years older than all the other students at the school?

(Didn't really enjoy the movie. It felt very slowly paced, especially any time we were about to start a song. Also, most of the events felt very under motivated, like a bunch of stuff Just Happened. Which is weird considering it covered only the first half of the stage show, but had the same running time as the entire stage show; you'd think they had plenty of time to explain things? Support things? I dunno.)

We Can All Talk TO the Animals, But Do They Talk Back?

i talk to crows. well, let’s be super real here, i talk to everything. but i make an effort to be polite to crows, because they’re smart.

the other day on the back deck:

crow: CAW!

me (playing duolingo): hey crow. want to learn spanish with me? (pause) why am i assuming you don’t already know spanish?

crow: CAW!

weird, but harmless. twenty minutes later:

crow: CAW!

CLEARLY A HUMAN: CAW!

crow: CAW!

CAH: caw caw CAW! i’m sorry, i don’t have any nuts with me. i’ll remember to bring some next time.

crow: CAW!

so i’m not the weirdest person out there. always comforting to rediscover that.

A Very Close Call

I got a text this morning that my meal kits had been delivered. this was a bit of a surprise, not because it was unexpected, but because i hadn’t heard it arrive. generally the box is heralded by a decisive THUD that can be heard through the entire house and gives one the notion the delivery person is testing just how far away they can stand and still manage to chuck the thing up onto the porch.

this week’s menu included a fish meal, so though I was in the middle of making my breakfast, I figured I should get it inside sooner rather than later. I had just gotten to the door when…

CREEEEEEAK!

…I heard the gate between the sidewalk and my yard open. 

people occasionally ask me when I’m going to fix my squeaky gate. The short answer is never. The long answer is I work from home and love the warning before someone actually knocks on the door, so never ever ever ever.

I walked away from the door, because I’m not at home to random visitors. there was a knock. I continued accessorizing my oatmeal. there was a much lighter knock? then the gate squeaked again. I gave it a few minutes, just in case it was a fake out situation, and then opened the door.

next to my food box was a pamphlet. a pamphlet about jesus. specifically inviting me to a memorial service for his death. friends, if my gate were not noisy, i would have run smack into a jehovah’s witness. to be fair, it _is_ very nice weather for going door to door and bugging people with your religion, but today I am most thankful for the benign intervention of my squeaky gate. amen.

Vampirism is Wasted on the Curmudgeonly

I don't know what possessed me to reread Twilight the other day, but fortunately I only own the first book, so the torment was short lived.

My main feeling at the end was low level outrage that such an absolute wet blanket of a person eventually gets all the perks of being a vampire. Lady Buzzkill Lives Forever. Goodie Gumdrops.

My second feeling at the end was gratitude for the sneak peek of the next novel, because _that's_ what stopped me from reading any further back in the day.

My knowledge of the rest of the series comes from the excellently snarky blog “Reasoning with Vampires.” It was a fun way to learn about what happened without having to suffer through more Bella the Bummer Queen and also a great grammar refresher. The blog author also introduced me to the books of E. Lockhart, who is a much better writer than Meyers all the way around. Among other positives, her young heroines/anti-heroines have lots more agency.

Because it wasn’t as much in the zeitgeist the last time I read it, I never really noticed how hard Bella as a character mashes the “I’m NoT LiKe oThEr GiRLs” button. “i don’t care about stupid things like make-up or prom! i care about important things like reading chaucer and jane austen!” ok, except you never do any reading or buy any of the books you allegedly so desperately crave? and you’re also completely, utterly obsessed with your boyfriend and are a drama queen to a level that becomes tedious, so… pretty stereotypical teenager there, actually.

What I am finding funny to consider is how a lot of women my age were afraid that this book was going to warp young girls, when we grew up reading Flowers in the Attic and lots of other fiction where the “hero” takes the heroine by force, but it’s ok and great and super sexy actually because she likes it? I mean, I guess we know what it is to have been warped, but I don’t feel like Twilight is worse in that particular.

Social Media Break 2024

 Does blogging count as social media? 

Does blogging count as my "at least 10 minutes of writing" today? 

Oh gosh who knows? I think it's supposedly my call either way. 

I frequently take a break from FB in January. The intent has never been to turn that into a full quit. It's always been more of a breathing room thing. Less noise giving my brain room to assess stuff. This year the urge to take a break had extra mustard on it. 

I've been aware that FB makes me less happy for a long time. My therapist pointed me to a study that demonstrated that even scrolling through positive posts lowers the scroller's level of happiness, and I've been hyper aware of that working on me ever since. I told myself I'd take the opportunity of finally stepping down as president of my local puppet guild as a chance to delete my FB account. 

The problem is the pandemic. And the problem also is the pandemic.

It's hard to want to leave social media behind when that's my only casual socializing available right now.

But it's also very hard to be on social media right now when it shoves the fact that 90% or more of my friends are absolutely la la la-ing their way through this part of the pandemic up in my face in living color every single day. I kind of hate almost everyone right now because of that. (I tried eating. It didn't help.) And it's an active choice every single day that I'm on there to not burn most of my friendships into the ground with a good solid angry rant or 12. Which steals a lot of energy, and I don't have much of that right now anyway. (The rant would also steal energy; there's no good answer here.) ((Except perhaps The Break.))

Anyway.

With one thing and another, I'm finding this break is much harder than any previous break. I keep catching myself loading the home page. (Just realized i could log out to make that harder. Helpful!) Yesterday I actually managed to realize I'm missing the dopamine hits. I found myself fantasizing about a post I could write and how many responses it would definitely get and I got a small rush - social media dopamine by proxy? - and then I realized what was up. Yay brain. Or yay wise mind or whatever. I've been allowing myself to continue twitter in this FB break, but am finding it less satisfying. Why? Because I get monumentally less engagement there, ie. less dopamine.

So I think the break is good for multiple reasons now, yay, but I'm not sure what to do with this information. But clearly I wanted to get it out somewhere. Good ol' blog! Thanks for being here. Have a biscuit.

Day 3

Social media

Time out day three unforeseen

FOMO freak out time

Buff and Buffier

This is Michael Landon. He was an actor and a television star. Here he is sometime between 1975-85.

This is Matt James. He is a broker and the star of the new season of The Bachelor (2021).

Entry level buff-ness to appear shirtless on television has gone way the heck up.