My last real update to the pandemic diaries was right around my 13th Twitterversary, right around when Elon Musk announced his intentions to buy Twitter, which he has now, 7 months later, finally done (then and now got me thinking about the song Reunion by The Indigo Girls (..."I have no need for anger with intimate strangers and I got nothing to hide"). I started putting together this post several days ago with the intention of combing through my tweets since that mid-April update and then deactivating or even deleting my account, not out of any kind of Twitter takeover protest but because I lack the willpower and self-discipline (and self-respect?) to stop wasting my time there. And then I'd lose @danceswithkids forever. Either way, here are some random things I thought worth tweeting over the past 7 months:
Debbie Millman in conversation with Amy Sherald on Design Matters about the long-term benefits of, well, hanging in there (been thinking about this a lot lately so I'll try to write more about this later).
We made vegan fondue for Easter.
The newsletter is mostly dead. Add it to the long list of things I've started and stopped.
Finally saw Bandaloop perform. It was incredible.
It's been very chilly here the last couple of weeks (although it's supposed to get to 67 today). Here's a haiku I wrote in February 2007 while living in Boston:
so cold, the little
bit of heat from your eyeballs
fogs up your glasses
As I settle into my 46th year, I really feel this quote from an LA Times article about the final season of Better Things: "My friends and I could rob a bank and nobody would notice. It’s that invisibility."
Is there a better social media app for artists and writers? No links to share; I'd genuinely like to know.
I haven't run in several months (still working out...switched from Freeletics to The Fitness App because, what can I say, I do love me some Jillian Michaels) but I signed up for the Oakland Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving next week. Above is a picture of the lake at dawn in late June. Below is, I think, why I run. I need to get back to it!
Still haven't had time to watch the TV show remake of A League of Their Own, but did you know Abbi Jacobson's podcast Piece of Work back in the day was part of the inspiration to start my own podcast?
Finished this project, submitted it to a couple of alt gallery spaces here in Oakland. Nada. Rejection still a real bitch after 15 years of not showing my work. Considering clearing out my 120 square foot backyard studio to show the work there (I just want to show the work—beyond online—that I spent three years working on, y'know?) which wouldn't be all that different than participating in Open Studios, which will next happen in June 2023. So maybe then? Sigh.
Earlier in 2022 I started slowly going through this here blog, organizing posts into thematic Google documents. I ended up with 7 docs, the longest of which (about attending grad/art school in Boston) is 113 pages, 60,093 words. Who wants to publish my art school memoir?
I became a people manager again in August. Hopefully I won't have to fire anyone anytime soon.
From the New Yorker essay about Angela Garbes' book Essential Labor: "At one point, Garbes compares the pandemic to early parenthood, a period of time 'when whole lifetimes are held in a single day when 'the smallest details matter, they become the universe'—when we 'restructure and rearrange the way we live, how we define our lives, and what we value.'" Even though my kids were 7 and 11 when the pandemic started, I felt that so many times during the first couple of years of the pandemic, chronicled right here on this blog (those posts make up a 50-page Google doc...and counting!).
I recently finished reading Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and now I feel like, actually, this will never come true. On a positive note, however, I also learned that if you highlight text while reading a book on your Kindle, you can then export those quotes to a Google sheet that your Kindle will email to you. Amazing!
Stayed in Oakland for the 4th of July. Had a good tweet.
Spent the last week of summer break solo parenting during a working vacation with the kids in Chico, followed by a truly solo weekend in San Rafael to attend Mindful Eating Film & Food Festival (which I wrote about here).
Traveled to San Diego for my birthday weekend last month.
Rewatched Wayne's World a couple of months ago and thought it was much funnier than I remembered. Decided to dress up as Wayne & Garth for Halloween.
Party on!
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