46

I meant to take some time to write my yearly birthday post, but I slept really late and then embarked on random organizing projects and suddenly the day was almost over.  But it was filled with key lime pie and coffee and later, tequila and dispensary weed the boyfriend procured. Most of my presents to myself arrived, including some new leopard sunglasses, a cute crochet bag for summer (if we get a summer) and a lighter blanket for the bed. I meant to make it a productive writing day, but am having a hard time getting into that headspace.  Ditto on today, so we'll see how the week shakes out. There are some more intensive writing/planning things for the library and some more digging in on the new system launching there this summer (which seems like a ridiculous changeover to happen mid- pandemic, but whatever).

As for the last year, it's been a weird one, probably most weird the past month or two, but on the whole a jumble of near misses, hysteria, things that seemed bad luck, but turned out to be good luck. I've felt precarious this year more than anything, not just recently, but since fall's financial unrest.  But my 45th year was also filled with absolute good things--demon twin siamese cats, some decent writing,  pretty clothes, and some fun library stuff.  I was ruminating on this post from a decade ago, and yet, that girl feels very far away as well. I feel like my statement of never feeling like a grown up still holds, but I am much more comfortable with it ten years later (and will no doubt feel the same in another 10.)

adaptatability & improvisation

I've been working on getting up a digital version of the FUTURE TENSE exhibit on display in the Library as well as plotting the Manifest week exhibit devoted to our Artist-in Residence's work coming up.  I've never prepared a full-on digital exhibit, and while it seems like it would be less work-intensive than hanging a physical show, there is a lot of coding and clicking and image saving, as well as million different moving pieces to wrangle into the finished product.  I did however, discover some techniques embedding flickr slideshows into blogger that bodes well for a little bit of reconstruction on my own website down the road that will be much more streamlined than it is currently, where it simply directs you to flickr to look at the work. I've gotten very adept at using free platforms to get pretty decent results that are user-friendly to beginners on no budget whatsoever (which is pretty much how A of R operates on the regular outside of a small amount of occasional supply funds.)

A few weeks back, I wrote an article about what I had planned to adapt to virtual learning in this weird time and what I was still trying to figure out when it comes to online programming for libraries.  So far, the virtual version of our zine nights has been slow to get rolling, but we have good hopes for our Art and Propaganda workshop debuting next week. Either way, the resources and materials will be available into the future, so even if they get less use now with everyone distracted, they are still online indefinitely.   I'm excited about these new things and how they might augment what we do in the future as well, even once we are back in physical spaces and to regular programming. There are always the limits of temporality in terms of audience, promotion, and reach. Some of the virtual things we're doing now can definitely be used to augment the more in-person programming.

Someone at work recently complimented me as "fearlessly creative or creatively fearless" and I laughed, mostly since so much of it feels like making it up as I go along, but then I suppose it's kind of always been that way outside the library--building websites and online journals building the press.  Even making and designing books was something I had to just figure out from scratch given limited budget and technology. Writing poems (or anything else for that matter). Creative techniques I am still figuring out--painting, printmaking, etc. Simple graphic design without fancy design technology.  Some people hate the phrase "fake it til you make it" but I appreciate that sometimes you have to fake like you know what you're doing in order to figure out exactly what it is you're doing.  Maybe it's more like improvising until you've got it down rather than "faking."  So much is a matter of just stating "Here is what I'm doing." and just figuring out how to do it.

we open our mouths and the murder falls out

In my efforts to digitize some older projects, up next is my collaborative zine with my sister, Becky Webster,  devoted to the 2014 Slenderman stabbing in Wisconsin. It's a strange little project about the strangeness of midwestern girlhood and creepy internet legends.  Enjoy!

http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/necessaryviolencezine.pdf

disaster dreams

As I've mentioned, I've been watching a hell of a lot of apocalypse movies.  While the pandemic ones are a little too much right now, I do take some weird sort of comfort from other threats--zombies, aliens, global warming, weather disasters, volcanos, earthquakes, meteors, giant reptiles.   While I wouldn't say I've been bingeing things as I might on weekends previously, I still have more late-night movie watching time than when I'm working late and usually go to sleep as soon as I hit the blankets. Some of them are bad.  Some of them decent . Some of them not at all what I expected.

People have been talking about how crazy and vivid their dreams are during this time, and admittedly, my dreams are pretty crazy and vivid anyway.  Last night's though was a doozie, and long, and very cinematic in it's structure, so I'm pretty sure it's influenced by my recent entertainment preferences  It began with waking up to water pouring down into my apartment, pooling in the ceiling, running down the walls. There was a bit of time in which I kept trying to dial the super, moving things out of danger, and kept wandering what could possibly be happening above me--an overflowing tub, a burst pipe?  It didn't seem to be raining outside, but as soon as I looked out the window, I knew what was up. There was literally water in the courtyard up to about the second story.  The little elderly polish couple who lives in the townhouses across were standing on their roof and trying to launch a boat.  Maybe a sort of  inland tsunami was my first thought.  A building over on the next block exploded and busted every window for blocks.

Water was shooting out of the electrical sockets and this seemed dangerous so I fled, but not before looking outside again to notice that the water was gone, like someone had pulled a plug in the lake a couple blocks away, and it had drained away leaving only carnage in it's aftermath.   But suddenly, instead of an apartment building, I lived in a massive casino hotel and me and other people were running in the lobby as the floor tiles cracked and fell away.  Then we were in the stairwell, which was now also filling with water and fire both at the same time, and the building lurching and crumbling around us. There were other people with me, and somehow, we were on a higher floor in the hotel, but all the entrances were blocked. There was a lot of discussing how to escape, when I discovered a door that led out onto a high balcony, where on another building outcropping below us, there was a pastel colored parade happening with floats and people cheering and no one seemingly away of the building falling down or what was happening in the streets.  Slowly I watched as police entered and  began pushing that crowd off the side of the outcropping and shooting those who would not jump. Right around then I woke up. It took me a bit to get out bed and calm down.  I blame the movies for the plotline, though earlier I had woken up and fed the cats, noticing that somehow it had snowed overnight, enough to coat the roof of the town houses outside the windows without me noticing (so the apocalypse could easily have occurred while I was sleeping.)

pandemic productivity

Yesterday, I went to drop some packages in the mail at the corner and then walked around the block.  It was chilly, had been lightly flurrying on and off through the morning, but was sunny and bright and for a second it felt like spring. I passed a few workmen in front of the new Loyola building, a couple joggers, a man with two kids no doubt easing cabin-fever.  On a normal day in a normal year, I'd likely be the sort of day that looked pretty from inside, but was actually really too cold to stay out long.

I came back home for a couple of zoom meetings--one our regular whole library staff meeting.  The other, a virtual job interview for one of our open positions. I can't even imagine, stressful as interviews are, doing it place-unseen via video conference. I'm stressed out by the zoom meetings themselves, which employ all the things I hate about phone calls, but also make me feel weird about video. I was speaking today and realized how much I throw my hands around when I talk and it made me super self-conscious. I also can't really gage the feel of a virtual room and it's disorienting.

I'm also still finding that though I have nothing but time for things, I have only little reserves of energy.  What I might be pressed to complete at work, spawned by my own deadlines, those of others, and plowing through tasks takes much longer.  So I might start my workweek with a set of 5 tasks, but really only be able to hit about one of them day, when I normally could have polished them off in 2 days (and sometimes 1 if I was really enthusiastic about something.)  On the whole, I have less to do daily since so much depends on access to the books, bit even still, those things that do not move maddeningly slowly. So while my ambitious side thinks of the things I COULD be doing, I don't feel like I can actually do them before I'm just exhausted mentally.  I thought it was just the weirdness of working at home instead of in the library, but even other things I've always been doing at home seem to be moving in similar patterns.  Contrast the first few months of my at-home press doings since moving out of the studio and they are drastically different than now. And there are other things that I don't even have the energy to do at all like daily writing and art-making, all of which, this would ironically be the perfect time for.

I've calmed down enough to be able to work a little more in depth now, but it's touch and go and catch as catch can. I've managed to have bursts of work in all departments but the last, and have a marathon assembly session planned for several new releases happening this weekend and filling orders. I find the best time to work uninterrupted is after I've gotten up, but before I check news or social media and comnmence my low grade freak out portion of the day.  When I can almost convince myself it's normal morning like any other.

fortune favors the brave

A couple of days ago, I cracked an egg into pan with two yolks, which depending on where you look and who you talk to, can be a good omen of impending luck, or conversely, imminent death or pregnancy in your immediate family. (While I'd prefer the former in the absence of an alternative, neither is a good thing.)  If it's good luck, then let'd hope it means things will get better, or at least that things will stay stable.  I'm suspicious of omens in general.  I did find the king cake baby on Mardi Gras before the quarantine after all, and while I thought it might signal good news for the NEA application I'd submitted earlier that day, what followed in the immediate weeks after was a little troubling (the jury is still out on the NEA.) I've had a weird mix of good luck and bad luck this past year (and sometimes really good luck disguised as bad luck) so I never quite know what is happening in the fortune cards.

So, another Monday where I mostly want to nap, but worked yesterday on rewriting a segment of the dark country manuscript that needs work, and will maybe give it a another run-through before the week is out. I am trying to be patient with my supreme lack of enthusiasm when it comes to certain areas--poetry in general and all things po-bizness is chief at the top.  Probably visual art too.  I have these moments where I am just horribly hopeless and apathetic, which is not like me at all.  I feel like I want to abandon the only thing that might save me I won't and know this is only temporary, but still, it's an unfamiliar feeling.  Instead, I clean and organize a lot.  I painted my bedroom vanity with what was labeled gold, but came out more of a pewter color, which I am not hating.  I wash dishes and make food.  I watch more disaster movies while at the same time trying not to spend so much time scrolling facebook waiting for the latest grim prospect. I feel lucky that I actually like this time at home, but that I should be doing more productive things with it instead of squandering.

one month in

My daily updates on the coronatine have dwindled, dear reader, mostly because one day bleeds into the next.  I find myself washing the dishes or emptying the cat boxes and thing "Didn't I just do this?" and yes, dear reader, I just did.  Perhaps the strangest thing about nothing to break up the days is how nothing is delineated by place or event.  Normally, the things that happen in 24 hours are split up. I get up.  I ride the bus.  I go to work.  I come home.  The day is split into defined times.  These are all one thing, now, where I roll out of bed at some point, eat breakfast, do some work, eat lunch, do some more different work.  Then dinner, then streaming movies, then sleep. Maybe some cleaning in between or a trip to the lobby for packages, taking the trash to the dumpster. I try to vary it by showering when I first get up or right before I go to bed, but it hardly matters much, since I don't really get ready to go anywhere.  I am not one to complain, mostly since I really like being home and not having to go out, but it takes some getting used to, this new way of experiencing time.

My sleep schedule, while it sometimes resembles the usual, also gets out of whack, either because I wind up napping at some point in the afternoon, or I go to bed to early, then wake up too early, and need to go back midday. Thus the cycle repeats itself.  Today was bright and sunny for once, and I'd been asleep my midnight, so 7:30 I was wide awake.  I got up, made an omelette, made coffee, and sat down to draft the poem I had not been able to get to yesterday. I'm already dragging and it's not even 11, so I may crawl back under the blankets for a couple hours. But I'm guessing I should enjoy this freedom because eventually we'll be back to something like normal.

The past few days, the death rate continues to spike, though a downturn is expected. I can't help but think of that first anxious, distressed,  weekend where I was already home for good, but others were St Patty's partying and going about business as usual, even though city events had been canceled and schools were closing one after another.  Everyone running around like little virus machines.  But I can only hope that the curve levels off.  It makes me uneasy when I read headlines about the city procuring freezer warehouses to harbor corpses, but things seem less dire than places like NYC where it was all happening too fast.  We are nearing up on one month. (at least for me,  3 weeks for the rest of the city.)
Things have to be getting better.

I am still having a bit of trouble caring about things I used to quite as fiercely in this world, but I suppose this is to be expected.  I promised myself I would keep producing, even if some things sparkle less than they did before. I'm somewhat motivated to work on library things, mostly  because justifying my paycheck depends on it, so I've been busy working on programming, lib guides, grant applications and such that can be done away from the physical collection. Poetry and art are a trickier matter.  I've been hammering away on the NAPOWRIMO pieces, but they feel a little bit like doing sit ups or laps around the block. I do it, and it's done, but it doesn't spark the way it used to. I'm digging into new layouts and cover designs for the press nevertheless, so hopefully I can fake it til I make it.  It occurs to me I would normally be opening for submissions in May, but since this year is out of whack, I might wait til June and hope by then I've regained some of my passion for poetry things and will be a much kinder reader.

notes on men during the apocalypse

Somehow, of course, I find myself drawn to apocalypse movies. This was probably always the case (I did write a whole book devoted to it) but also because, like horror, they make me feel a little bit more in control of things from a worst-case-scenario stance. Granted, it occasionally backfires. I should have not watched Contagion a week into lockdown (it would have been better to watch a few weeks in if at all).  Outbreak has long been a favorite, and I did enjoy the one season series Containment around this time. After plague movies made me a bit  uncomfortable, I moved onto other disaster movies, both good and bad, rewatching Deep Impact, 2012, and Cloverfeild (which is always a favorite).  Also some newer, but highly improbable flicks like The Core.   In most of these, the great terrifying thing is the government being shady as fuck. I've also watched some really good dystopian films, more indie oriented, Girl With All the Gifts and What Happened to Monday (where the government is also shady as fuck.)

So last night, I settled in with two films that looked promising in this vein.  The first was How it Ends, promising in that it looked like post-apocalyptic road trip film.  What it was, was absolutely dripping grossly with toxic masculinity. From the father way too critical of his son& law, that dude's posturing, through miles and miles of gun-toting rednecks one after another (mind you a mere 2 days into power grid shutdown), down to the end fight between the dude and the neighbor who rescued his fiance from the rubble of Seattle then got all weird when he showed up.  It was so fucking ridiculous, I was actually offended by it.  The second, Into the Forest, which I only made it half way into before falling asleep, was two sisters left to fend for themselves in a cabin after a shutdown and unspecified event (Hollywood loves an undetermined apocalypse apparently) but then was playing out the rape/pillaging angle too hard.  Because of course two attractive ladies in the woods would not be in danger of starving, being eaten by a bear,  or getting tetanus (or like their father, an unfortunate chainsaw incident) but of being RAPED because apparently the only thing keeping men in control and NOT raping is the internet and electricity. Since I knew exactly where that was heading, I don't really feel a desire to pick it back up.

I would hope that in the midst of pandemics and power outage, that civilization is not the only thing keeping men from attacking women, stealing shit, and running around with guns. A friend knows someone who works in a bar, and once they knew they were closing, some regular who never seemed the least bit creepy offered her money for sexual favors.  I'm not sure I can live in a world with the sort of men who immediately see any sort of breakdown in structures as opportunities to take more, to pillage and rape, to behave ridiculous about protecting "what they own."  I've often had discussions with friends about whether these people really exist, or is it some weird masturbatory Hollywood fantasy thing.  Because even the hero, if not a redneck gun-toting millitia is always trying to "protect" his woman, or his family.  He might be less of a troglodyte, but it's the same impulse. A friend of mine would argue that she knows men like this.  Is related to one.  One who seems to think that at some point he will be called on to protect what is his.. from other men, from the government, what have you.

(incidently, the evening after I first drafted this post, I re-watched I Am Legend, and despite it making me cry about the dog again, I was relieved there was no rape-as-plot-device. )

you've always been the caretaker

When I was a kid, we went to the drive-in a lot.  It was the one entertainment platform my dad was willing to pay for, being much cheaper per family than a standard theater.  We would load into the car with snacks--a giant paper bag my mom had popped on the stove, sodas, maybe some candy--and head off to the double feature. I've oft talked about my dad and his hereditary love of horror, which my mother endured, sometimes laying down in the seat to avoid the screen while he watched or leaving the room when something scary was on TV.  It would be a few years until we had a VCR, but the first movies we rented were Flashdance (for my mom) and Friday the 13th (for my dad).

I don't remember what the first movie in the double feature was the night we saw The Shining.  Looking at the release schedule that summer of 1980, it may have well been Urban Cowboy, which would have satisfied my mother's tastes. It also could have been Airplane! or Blue Lagoon, both of which I remember seeing at the drive-in that summer.  Either way, I rarely made it through the second movie and was usually, along with my sister, who would have been two, long asleep by the middle of it.  But The Shining somehow etched itself in my young mind, and even though I'm pretty sure I missed middle parts I would not see til years later.  I must have been awake for the snowy maze at the end.   When you're a kid, you always look for kids in movies to relate to, so Danny Torrance would have, of course,  captured my attention. I think when you're young, the true horror of things woudn't be apparent--the blood flowing from the elevators, the twins, the woman in 237.  I don't remember being scared at what I saw, not exactly, and yet something imprinted itself on me.  This was true of many horror movies I watched at that age.  Maybe you are too young at that point, and yet somehow the movie began to form my conception of horror. My conception of the world, even though I don't think I understood even what ghosts or hauntings were at that point..the difference between the living and ghost worlds wouldn't have existed in my six year old mind.  They would have been one in the same.

At the time, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what scared me. And yet sometimes I was still scared. There was that Ghost Story movie that spooked the crap out of me when I sat down to watch it with my dad, not knowing I should brace myself for horror and corpse ladies (as an adult, that movie is scary for entirely different reasons).  There were bits that I was creeped out about that I picked up from the movies we watched--the tree & clown attack from Poltergeist.  The scene at the end of Friday the 13th where Jason lunges out of the water.  There was a planter on the dresser when my sister was a baby that was a little boot, but when the light from the hallway hit it just right, it looked like the creepy buddha statue in my aunts house, and one night, I dreamed it spoke to me and for years was convinced I ran into the bathroom and awoke sleepwalking. But looking back, I remembered it wrong.  For awhile I would sleep with my head under the covers and a small breathing hole, that is until my grandmother died and it made me feel safer that she was somehow watching over me when I was 8. My fears of nuclear bombs after watching The Day After. The worse was the dream I often talked about of my other abandoning us in the backyard.  Going over the wooden fence behind the garage and into a field of daisies. A dream I prayed every night for months to not have again.

But while I wouldn't have been able to tell you exactly what scared me about The Shining at that age, it left enough of an impression that when I watched it years later, felt like I knew what behind every corner.  In each new scene.  I rewatch it often as an adult, and over time, I have learned to appreciate so much about it's sets and structure.  Add a little weed, and I start to notice things I would have breezed past before--angles and set design elements. About the ways humans are horrifying even without the supernatural.  The domestic abuse angle wouldn't have resonated as a child, but it's the loudest thing about the movie when I watch it now.   I am no longer scared of spooky twins and elevators full of blood. Stephen King sometimes fails, but one place he excels is human's and their propensity for violence. Also, as an adult, I've gained an endless appreciation of the building tension and cinematography  of the film, it's narrative tightness and tone.

The place of it has fascinated me, and I have done a lot of reading over time on Kubrick's impossible hotel--the palimpsest of King's original Stanley hotel, with the Timberline Lodge and another California hotel to create what we know as The Overlook. The sets make me uncomfortable, and I've often found spaces that remind me of the Overlook when it comes to carpet or furniture or layout.  It's also interesting to watch as people have tried to map the hotel and found Kubrick's spaces impossible to map.  This month, as I trod through NAPOWRIMO and the seclusion of our own isolation, I thought it would be wholly appropriate to visit my impulses to turn my love of the film into some poems, which so far, are progressing well. They are very much inspired by the film, maybe a little by King's novel, but also my own imaginative wanderings in those spaces. Also the temporality, or non-temporality of hauntings.

kinds of lonely

One night in January,  I came home and wrote the bulk of something--short prose fragments?  A braided essay?  Something else that remains to be seen in its final form?  I did it fast and had it mostly written within a couple days, with some pieces here and there interspersed on days I was stuck on the dog-girl poems. It's definitely more non-fiction, but a little poetic, and therefore probably a lyric essay creature. I called it  & NBSP ;*  (or "non-breaking space" for non-design folks).  The command you enter in html code to create space in a line, but not a jump to the next one or a new paragraph   I've long wanted to write something in html code format, and this isn't that exactly, but what it is is a meditation on loneliness.

Today, as I was idly scrolling through facebook before I got up to make breakfast and start the day, I came across a statistic that 11% of the population lives alone and how hard it must be during this time.  I laughed since I've been routinely thinking how hard it must be to be cooped up with other people.  Or how many relationships are on the rocks because of a little too much together with no reprieve.  I am a pathological introvert, so that might have something to do with it--my enjoyment--I'd say the necessity --of being alone much of the time.  Which is not to say, you can't be subject to loneliness, but it seems to have really nothing to do with who or who isn't around you at any given moment. I occasionally ask people randomly would you rather be stuck in an elevator alone or with other people.  I've been briefly in both situations and would rather not be either, but definitely preferred the solo one.  It's sort of like that with quarantine, only more comfortable and with cats. Solitude is not loneliness, and they don't really have a cause and effect relationship, at least for me...

I've been lonely in groups of people I don't quite feel a part of.  In relationships that were at the same time passionate, but lonely-making. I've been in decent relationships with good people that have also spawned a feeling of aloneness at points where we weren't connecting. I've gone through times where I felt like I wasn't able to communicate my loneliness or my disastifaction.  As a poly person, I have been in up to three different relationships and still felt like something was missing and was a little lonely because of it. These weren't all the time, or even much of the time.  I had a spat of time about 5 years ago where I was pretty much completely single and was not really lonely at all during that time- or at least not romantically lonely (I was bedridden for a few weeks that winter  after a pinched nerve, and I had some feelings about that, but was supported by family and friends that more than made me feel less lonely.)  Part of that period was spent at my parent's house, which was no more or less lonely than the time I spent in my apartment where I limped around and made do on my own. Still relationship lonely was a separate thing from other kinds of loneliness.  You can also be family lonely or friendship-lonely.  While I keep loose tabs on and relationships with  many of the folks I've considered friends over the years, I quite often threw myself into new environments where I started from zero--North Carolina, Chicago.   I'm reasonably adapatable, and if you can break my introvert hard shell, I make friends pretty easily (a few toxic misjudgments, some might say TOO easily.)

So these past few weeks have actually not really been a problem when it comes to lonely. My feelings of unease have less to do with anything going on in my immediate sphere of me and the cats in my apartment and more to do with what may be happening in the outside world, or what this all will look like when we go back--people missing family members, friends lost to the virus, the way the world will be changed. How our lives may be different for awhile as we adjust.  As someone who likes to feel like I have control over my world, it's a hard adjust to realize I very much do not.  Though I also feel the low-key stress of because I am solo, dangling out there without a lot of financial support and back up if things go awry. Or if I myself get sick and hospitalized, who will take care of my cats (I actually have a plan for this, now, but was something I had to worry over for a hot minute. )  A little anxious about being a single household in an uncertain time? Sure,   but I wouldn't trade it, not really. Mostly, I relish this alone time, and while after a another month I might be a little stir-crazy to get on with things, I'm okay with it.

But what I am still processing, and have been long before this, is how my mother's death suddenly punched a hole in my loneliness.  Even though I only visited a half dozen or so times a year, I did talk to her twice a week on the regular.  Despite all the things I left out of our conversations (mostly romantic or things I felt she'd worry unduly over), she probably had the fullest picture of my life.  Her mere presence in the world made me less lonely somehow.  Even still, perhaps that relationship was a spine that collapsed on so many things and I've spent the past two years grappling with that.  I have good relationships With my dad, with my sister.  With my best friend and my boyfriend.  But there is still this giant hole into which my mental health falls into every once in a while and needs to climb back out of.

While not entirely about that loss,   & NBSP ;* builds on that with other types of loneliness and re-reading it for the first time earlier this week, I think it's pretty solid and just needs a few tweaks and I'll start sending it out, either in parts or as a whole.  Large stretches of alone-time are excellent for writers , I just need to buckle down into it and see it through.


______

* note:  I had to breakup the command because blogger kept making it a space not a word..lol..

lost days

Some days are more functional than others.  Others just feel like lost slips of time where nothing of note is accomplished.  Today, I was up early to do a meeting with some of our student workers,  then talked work stuff with my boss (well, also my best friend, so we talked a bit of non-work stuff as we usually do) .  I finished a slide for a presentation one of our reference staff is doing via LIBRAS, then I just needed a nap, that lasted well into the evening until I got up for my usual Weds. call to my dad.  Then I made dinner and watched Youtube vlogs and will probably go to bed or watch some Netflix.   I ordered another small grocery order via Amazon for the weekend (I was unhappy with my chosen coffee creamer from Whole Foods after years of using the same variety (Italian Sweet Creme) and could always use some more chicken and better pizza crusts than the ones I bought a few weeks ago. )  I did make a stab (literally) after dinner  at some NAPOWRIMO activity, because of course, what is more appropriate to writers in isolation than The Shining, so we'll see how that goes and if I have the energy to keep up with it.

I'll do another post in the next few days on the things I am researching and playing around with, but you can follow along with the drafts here on the blog and on instagram for highlights.