I’ve become aware that I can easily lock myself into inaction simply because I can’t easily plan the best way to do something. Oh, I have so much to do – well, I’ll do that first, but wait, something else needs to happen and this really should happen today too… and then I’ve come to a complete stop.

Any time I start worrying about therbligs and it starts slowing me down, I have to deliberately stop thinking about the most efficient way to do something and just start doing something, dammit.

Also, if a task seems enormous and like it will never get done, I’ve learned to mutter to myself, “it’s finite”. Why, yes, the box of color photos I got from my Dad back when my Mom died, over a year ago, is going to take me forever to scan. But, you know what? It’s finite. There’s no real deadline. I will scan four at a time any time I vaguely feel like going over to the scanner, and eventually the box will be empty. Using the same mental method for cleaning up my Itunes metadata, which is an obsessively fun thing I do. Oh, this particular opera recording doesn’t actually name the arias in the tracks? Well, let’s set up a smart playlist and rename five of them at a time once a day or whatever… and then it will eventually be done.

A couple of years ago, I was spending a lot of time on Tumblr for reasons and found myself admiring the artwork of a lot of really young, really talented people, including a woman who bills herself as “The Shitpost Calligrapher”. She’ll do any goofy phrase you tell her to calligraph, if she has time, but if you pay her to do so, she’ll do that definitely, and it’s cheap and doesn’t take too long. So…

(don’t get me started on why there’s a pinprick in the card. I didn’t put it there. Our co-op office lady decided that, for some reason, since it came from Canada, she should pin it to the corkboard by the mailboxes rather than just putting it on the mailboxes. OK, she had no idea there was artwork inside, but still.)

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Life keeps apace. C’s vaccine appointment is within a couple of weeks, assuming it doesn’t get postponed by the pharmacy again. I still don’t have one, but am checking every day. I suspect I’ll be able to get one soon if I’m willing to go late night or early morning to Citi Field or Javits Center.

I’ve been reading a ton, but mostly M/M romance, so maybe I’ll save those for a separate post so only those who care about such can peruse. I did, however, read an actual print book called Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. I do love an alternate timeline story. Jason is married to Daniella. They’re fine in their jobs and such, but each could have maybe been super-successful if they hadn’t married each other and had a child and compromised. Then one evening Jason gets kidnapped by “Jason 2”, an alternate-timeline version of himself that never married Daniela (and regrets it), but powered through to invent the ‘hop between alternate universes’ thing. Jason2 wants to pop himself into Jason’s life with Daniela, which he does, as Jason figures out what the hell is going on.

This one seemed somewhat foursquare in an uninteresting way, and I basically just slogged through it, but then in the last act, it had a really interesting twist which I wasn’t expecting at all, and that really livened up stuff. So… glad I read it, wouldn’t necessarily push it on anyone though.

Currently reading another Real Print Book, the third in the YA dragon series by Jasper Fforde. It’s fun and cute, and filled with throwaway guffaw lines, as we expect from Mr. Fforde.

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This post is part of a larger project, #MOC19. Read more about the Mass Observation COVID-19 project here.