A slice of life update.
Life. Have you ever seemed to injure yourself in clusters? As if clumsiness begets more clumsiness? That was me this week. I kicked off the week by acquiring a tiny cut where every freaking vein seemed to converge, causing me to bleed profusely, not just after the incident but 16 HOURS LATER when I tried to re-dress the mini wound. I started my Monday converting the guest bathroom into a crime scene, scaring my husband, and having a rare vasovagal syncope incident that delayed my workweek by 30 minutes, as I laid on the couch, eating a salty snack and willing my blood pressure to go back up >.< Then I burned my finger on my other hand on Tuesday because life likes symmetry. All is well now though! My thumb won’t bend quite yet but it’s healing super quickly.
Work. Life post-hackathon has remained busy at work, with 3 new features to be designed! I love the intricate work of planning an entirely new feature. The information architecture, research, ideation, and meetings to discuss the logistics of everything make for some of my favorite work! The days are going by quickly–in a flurry of empty states, validations, edge cases, what-ifs, and UI breakdown writeups ^_^
Gratitude. I’m grateful for the beauty of two colors that when side by side, are hard to imagine apart. I’m also grateful for a friend of mine sending me a lovely poem as we were discussing the little things in life. Every time someone sends me a poem, my heart sings with joy. Here’s the poem I got this week: Fire by Judy Brown
Creativity. I finished my mother-in-law’s socks! They are blocked and ready to gift at the end of the month. I started a new pair for myself from a book I got last week. I coincidentally had two of the 3 colors in the original and they are stunning together! Thus my gratitude above. I’ll add photos when I finish the first one! The pattern that I'm using as a template.
Books. It took a while to finish The Kraken Wakes, but I finally did!
- The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham: It reminded me of The War of the Worlds in that the narrator was chronicling in a semi-detached style. I think what stood out to me here was how the slow pacing gave the story an air of realism, as the focus of the narrative was how society was responding to the event at every stage. As this was the 50s, the Cold War was a huge factor, and a lot of the theme was individualism vs tribalism at a micro AND macro level. It is eerie how little changes when you look at other eras in history. I always felt older speculative fiction is powerful in that regard. I feel that combining history books with older fiction gives a richer picture of the state of the world than any one genre on its own. I plan to read more John Wyndham novels after this one.
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka: I’m about two-thirds into this one so I’ll wait next week to talk about it but… wow! I’m enthralled by this story and can’t wait to process it as a whole.
- I think I’ll start Middle of the Night by Riley Sager next. I think a fun binge-read will be a nice weekend activity after all the more dense pieces I’ve read lately ^_^
Music. A friend sent me a song called 15 Minutes by Julian Lamadrid which made me dance so much that it reminded me that I no longer had a dedicated cleaning playlist! So of course I made one. I probably will switch the list up every once in a while but each song has some requirements:
- I must feel joy when I hear the song start
- I should feel compelled to shamelessly belt out the song
- I should be inspired to dance ^_^
Movies. I finally hunkered down last night to watch Grave of the Fireflies. I apologize if this sounds maudlin, but the movie was very traumatic for me. I was fine, but just typing the title made me cry again. I see my daughter now and I tear up at her vulnerability, her small, delicate form. I get so entrenched in my tiny life that I don’t think of the horrors of war beyond the abstract. This movie is hard. No, it is torture, and no amount of foreshadowing was able to prepare me for the end. I wish I had the words to articulate the pain of knowing that innocent suffer for nothing, where we rewrite history to create heroes when there are countless nameless victims. There are no heroes in war. Any war in which one drop of civilian blood is shed is a crime. It might be a simplistic view, but if you watch this movie and are not moved by these poor children, then I don’t know what to say. I think everyone should watch it and cry for those we forget so easily.
Don’t you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason?
John Wyndham (The Kraken Wakes)