notes on putting one foot in front of another
Dispatches from several days in on a new relationship with the news, added over the course of several evenings:
I saw this update from Kathleen Winter about a community archive she's making of a building in which she used to live.
13 Garrett Street (also called 'Morrisons' Building') is a converted warehouse building in Te Aro, Wellington, Aotearoa / NZ. Built in 1937 to house a printing press, it has been a residential āflatā for decades - famous amongst many in the city for housing artists, activists, musicians and the occassional massive party. These are the final years of 13 Garrettās life as an un-gentrified space for political and creative communities in the city. We are using this time, the final breaths of Garrett, to gather the histories of the buildingās uses and of the many communities who have come through.
Man I wish there were archives from even the group houses I lived in. Sometimes I wish the internet was safer for photos than it is.
Later, I got a weird feeling in my chest while working on my website and almost went to YouTube to "accidentally" scroll to the garbage news section but then I didn't and I got my body out of my doom-bed and walked down the stairs away from my computer with my own stupid agency and ate ice cream. The parallels to early sobriety are pretty eerie - watching for triggers, looking for the next right action, the ice cream consumption.
Later I watched Dan da Dan and bopped around on Are.na and discovered the Lace Safety Vest company that makes lace safety vests. I kind of love it.
I have found that it's easier for me to be present, as neurotic as this is, when there is other, less existential stuff to worry about. I teach and some days my students just crash out. On those nights, I cross stitch and recover and feel happy just to decompress.
And on good days, I leave my school with nothing to worry about there and I freeze in panic. I text my partner to tell me if anything unexpectedly awful happened in the news today. They usually say no - "unexpectedly" does a lot of heavy lifting here. I distract myself but feel uneasy. Luckily I am in a new city, so we can always go see a new thing, go on a car ride, see a cool building, visit a new park. So we got library cards!
The Enoch Pratt Free Library is the Baltimore public library. The headquarters is gorgeous and has a pretty great graphic novel section. There was a photo book meetup going on with about 15 people passing books around a long table, talking about art and building community. Hope, hope, hope. Brought some books at I can read when my regular non-fiction is just too wordy and dry for my attentional capacity.
And now I log off to go to a hot dog social (!!!) that my neighborhood is putting on. It's not an HOA or historic district or neighborhood watch, it's a few neighbors who email eachother and walk the whole block putting a flyer of neighborhood events on every door to keep is connected and I like that. It will be awkward but that's okay.
I still read the news every morning, when I have the most emotional capacity, but I am finally accepting that choosing to spend the rest of my day without it doesn't make me a shitty human being.