small cypress

a weeknote!

I love weeknotes. I have never written one before so this is my first. Fun! The new year is a big deal for me, a systems-person who loves resets and routines and gets excited for Sunday evenings and Monday mornings so that I can reflect and get my head in the game to teach the children.

my weekly tasts/to-dos/accomplishments

I have been using this weekly page in my journal as an alternative to Notion for a few weeks.

The habits I track are:

A completed week's spread looks something like this. Whatever doesn't get done from the list gets re-examined or moved to next week's list. The best part is the ACCOMPLISHMENTS!!! I am someone who is wired for capitalism. I like to work and be productive. I do not rest well. I zero in on What Needs Doing and my life slips by. Accomplishments gives me a place to put down things that prove a life well lived, even if they aren't to-dos. But because my brain is so poorly wired for the human experience, sometimes I manipulate the productivity impulse like this: if I'm bored, I think "what's something good I could do that I can at least write in the book later?" And then I bake something or work on my website or call a pal.

Anyways I only say this because if I keep up with weeknotes I may post my little spreads again.

the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

the elephant in the lobby

In my mind (and because of movies and media), I thought I had been here before. I had not. I love museums and how carefully museum experiences are curated and this was just so, so rich. And to be free! It's just a testament to the greatness that does exist in my country. It was hard not to look at the exhibits - climate change, evolution - without fear of their future, but it just does good justice to hard-to-explain concepts for people of all ages and levels of formal education.

The Hall of Mammals made me feel like I was in a real-world version of neal.fun's Size of Life - I kept thinking "wait how is this thing bigger than that guy?" and I always like having my assumptions broken.

Ok and the magic rock section was extremely cool.

tourmalines

Tourmaline Town (is what I would have named this display)

tourmalines

There were great displays on the mining process and how minerals form and are extracted from the earth. I learned a ton.

blacklight stones

I dyed my hair blue and built a work website

We spent the holidays in a very very very socially conservative part of a very conservative state and spent four days fitting a ton of norms I have long-since shed for the sake of Family Peace. I had a good time but it felt good to dye my hair when I got back. And scary! I have to face my kids and coworkers tomorrow. Nobody will care, it's Baltimore. I counted my fellow blue-hairs at the farmer's market and got bored of counting. But having blue hair is fitting into a very very specific narrative of who a person is, especially politically, and I am more than that. Then again, I don't spend time with people who flatten me outside my professional context anyways.

I built a work website for my letterpress business. I will forever keep it separate from my small cypress project, but it's not too different from my neocities site. I'm really proud of it and it's almost ready to launch.

I will apply for more residencies this year I think.

I purchased a board game

On our way out of DC we stopped by Georgetown so that I could spend a giftcard and buy this game - Fountains - that I discovered from a blog post about a board game convention called Lobster Trap. It hits a lot of my interests - I have a goldfish pond, I like to build things, and it's really tactile and fun. It's the first game I've bought in at least ten years. There's a solo play mode that's an allegory for AI coming for artists and designers that will play at some point.

Fountains game

I am coping without my e-reader (temporarily)

I left my Kobo in a hotel during the holidays. It's in the mail back to me (phew) but I am really trained to fall asleep with an e-reader and apparently only an e-reader at this point. My brain has not been turning off at night. Last night I started a book recommended by an artist I like called the Art of Frugal Hedonism. Convexer made a post that reminded me of my own current predicament, and I found it on the Internet Archive. I am trying to de-grind my life and enjoy it while I am alive, so it's helpful to read a book on the same theme.

I need to make a post on my love-hate relationship with self-help books and how much shame I feel for reading one or two a year. The writing is always bad and they always make me want to scream about how much harder younger generations have it, but they always end up helping me at least try a new way of being for a short time and that's usually worth it. Cringe.

I am going to try to add the provenance of links going forward, because I think that's fun and I am nosy and I want to know how People Find Things on the Internet.