changes

It is currently 4 AM and I am awake for some reason, and I just heard a noise downstairs of unclear origin.

Maybe I shouldn’t have watched this with my 4 month old puppy around. Was that a mistake? Will she live deliciously now? Will she grow up and randomly kill us all one morning like that damn goat?

She started paying attention at points where there were kids on the screen. She got noticeably agitated at a couple of moments when characters were yelling at each other or screaming. I don’t think she paid attention to the blood. I hope she didn’t pay attention to the blood. I turned the movie off and made her go outside while I finished watching this. Then I felt bad so we played fetch in the darkness for like 30 minutes.

It’s been over three months since I last watched a movie, and because this dog’s crate is in the same room as our television, it may be another three months before I watch another one.

Standalone post link: THE VVITCH

I’m retconning my website. I might as well be transparent about it. I feel like my lack of consistently sharing anything out from this site to the wider Internet*, along with the fact that it is my little corner of the Internet and I can do whatever I want with it (and that’s kind of the whole point) gives me the freedom to add, change, shuffle, and randomly publish new posts as though they were several months backdated, as well resurrect content from my old zombie websites, &c.

This site, https://jdwhiting.com, shall become the center of a new and expanded JdwhitingDotCom/Froz-T-Freez Drive-In Internetical** Multiverse. Will this center be a singularity? A black hole? I don’t know yet, it remains to be seen. It’s a bizarre exercise done in darkness, but nevertheless it is going to be an ongoing aspect of this project since I plan to use this site as my personal all-inclusive internet archive.

STAR-except that one time I discovered that some old IFTTT recipe I had set up and forgotten about had suddenly started working properly and shared out some of my new website posts to Twitter without me realizing it and before I was ready to share. Maybe I should retcon my Twitter account, too.

STAR-STAR-I needed a word that means “of or relating to the Internet” and I came up with “internetical.”" I’m not convinced it is the best option, but I am convinced we need such an adjective for the Internet. Now I’m thinking about Magic and Loss, Virginia Heffernan’s brilliant book about the Internet as art, and I’m pretty sure that I wrote a review of it somewhere one time that I need to port onto this site so that I can link to it. It is for reasons such as this that I’m attempting this work. She likely has a perfect word for “of or relating to the internet” within that book and I’ve just forgotten it.

STAR-STAR-STAR-I haven’t taken the time to figure out how to do footnotes in markdown yet.

Standalone post link: The New Taxonomy of the JdwhitingDotCom/Froz-T-Freez Internetical Multiverse Drive-In

The other day at work I was going through some new MARC records for a school and came across this book they had purchased, and it covers the precise topics that I’ve been meaning to learn more about since a dog came into my life.

So now I’m learning about the co-evolution of humans and dogs. I love the serendipity of good library cataloging.

Standalone post link: Dogs--Evolution. Human-Animal Relationship--History.

I Read In the Dream House: A Memoir

Started Reading: January 10, 2020 Finished Reading: January 11, 2020

After reading Her Body and Other Parties a year or two ago I determined that I would read pretty much anything and everything that Machado chose to write and publish, and so here we are. A memoir about domestic abuse is not something I would generally seek out to read, but after sampling just a couple of sections I wanted to quickly read the entire book. Though the topic is serious and the underlying narrative is harrowing, the artful, fractured method she uses to explore this experience through all manner of genres, forms, and tones just excites me about writing more than anything else. I feel a little guilty having enjoyed this book as much as I did, but I think for all the trauma the author went through, she didn’t mean for this to be a traumatic read.

Try it:

Standalone post link: Reading: In the Dream House

I’m reading Charlotte’s Web with my kids at bedtime

Started Reading: January 4ish, 2020

Last Updated: January 14, 2020 This reading is restoring my faith in children’s fiction, after I got kind of burned out on it.

I’m still not entirely sure if I ever read this book all the way through as a child, or even paid attention to the movie all the way through as a child. I’m definitely paying attention now, though.

Standalone post link: Reading: Charlotte's Web

I read The Undefeated by Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson

Read: February 12, 2020

I want to give this all the awards. It probably should have gotten even more awards than it did.

(A little ashamed to admit that I’m just finally getting around to this, but I’m repenting of my unreading ways and doing what I can do now. And despite my claims to keep track of all my reading here in 2020, I’m back on Goodreads as well, I guess…)

Nice official book trailer:

Standalone post link: Read: The Undefeated

Exceeded my expectations, and I can’t remember the last time a new album from an artist I already liked has done that. There is a warmth here that I haven’t heard in any of his work up until now. This is the electro psychedelic yacht rock I’ve been prepared for my entire life without realizing, every single track an absolute adult contemporary jam.

If I didn’t have so many other listening projects already queued up I’d probably just listen to this on repeat for the next couple of weeks.

Created a “Favorite Music of 2020” collection mainly so that I could add this to it as the first entry.

Standalone post link: Listening: The Slow Rush

In the past month I’ve found myself paralyzed in regards to social media, both personally and professionally. Whenever I peak into my feeds I’ve been easily overwhelmed by the content I see: deluges of RESOURCES FOR “ONLINE LEARNING¹,” endless interludes of stay-at-home inanities and banalities, and then literal death and suffering, since underneath all of this inconvenience, opportunism, and political posturing it turns out there is an actual tragic pandemic that is taking lives.

I haven’t known how to contribute to this world, and ultimately decided the best way to contribute would be to just stay quiet. Or maybe I just choked and failed by dropping out of this resource-sharing, curating, connecting game at the very moment when it was suddenly THE THING TO DO.

–

A couple of Sundays ago the weather was wonderful and I tried to get my kids to go outside with me on a walk or a hike or even just a drive, and they didn’t want to do it (this was the third day in a row I had invited them on such an excursion), so ultimately I went on a drive by myself. I headed east of Salt Lake for a particular side canyon dirt road I know that isn’t too high in elevation and that I had always found pretty much deserted when I visited in the past. I wanted to be able to socially isolate, and ever hopeful, scope it out to see if the snow had melted enough for a hike there with my kids on another day. When I arrived, the parking on the side of the road was full. There were far more people there at that moment than the collective number of all the people I had ever seen in all my previous visits to this place over the past 15+ years. Families and groups of people were out walking up and down this dirt road, with unleashed dogs running everywhere. One walking person, whose dog had just run in front of the car in front of me, almost getting hit and causing all traffic on the road to just stop for an awkwardly long period of time, loudly complained into my open window, “I don’t know why everyone wants to drive down this road TODAY!” just as a cyclist zoomed in between us and all the cars, dogs, and walkers as well. It was jarring and I felt exposed, and although technically I guess everyone was maybe keeping the 6 feet rule beyond their own families and groups it felt like the exact opposite of social distancing. I realized I had made a mistake and should have just stayed home, sat in my backyard or at my desk with the window open. I’m privileged to have these things, especially right now.

–

Turns out my 7yo daughter, the one we generally think of as the big extrovert in a mostly introvert family, hates video calls. She doesn’t want to be seen on them, whether it is with her grandparents, her cousins, or her teacher and classmates. She doesn’t want to converse with people. She finally got a little used to them by doing one with her brother from different rooms of our house. She spent the entire time just making goofy faces and noises at him until he laughed. (Didn’t take long because she is really funny, to be honest.) The next week after that she did join in a chat with her cousins, but never showed herself on screen. At one point in the chat she went outside on our old trampoline and put down the tablet with her microphone muted and the camera facing the sky, lay down next to it, and just listened to the chat. At another point she employed a small bunny rabbit puppet as a bonkers surrogate that would jump sideways into view and hop around in front of her brother’s face making ridiculous noises.

–

A curious thing I’ve noticed about myself is that the social networks I’m most consistently active on are those where I don’t actually know anyone or interact with them in any kind of way beyond following, reading, or maybe “liking” their posts. During this time of my social media confusion and my silence on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and other places where I actually know some people, I’ve still been faithfully logging and reviewing the movies I watch on Letterboxd, where I know no one (except one old co-worker who doesn’t post excessively) and get very little response from my posts. I continue to faithfully scrobble all my music listening on last.fm, where I likewise know no one and interact with virtually no one.

A few months ago I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what I might post on this very website and started adding things here semi-consistently, but I was barely sharing it out at all anywhere else. It was kind of my secret spot. Then I shared a couple of things on twitter and facebook and soon after that I heard from a some people face-to-face that they had looked at the site. I got weirded out and my enthusiasm strangely waned. I mean, theoretically a primary reason to have a website and share things on it is at the very least with the intention or hope that other people might look at it, right?

–

Two weeks after it was expected, my 9yo son still hasn’t finished the first main lesson page² he was supposed to do at home. These pages are a combination of art and writing created by students on lusciously thick 11x17 paper, collected throughout the year, then sewnbound by the teacher and presented back to the student in a collection at the end of the school year. For the time being, we were to take a picture of the finished page and email it to his teacher. I believe this is the only assignment of this distance learning period for which she has requested such evidence of it being completed.

He colored the borders and drew the art on the top half of the page. He drafted the 5-sentence paragraph on the process of turning wool into cloth in his writing notebook, with only a single spelling error—sheer for shear—which he quickly corrected and added to his personal dictionary as per teacher instructions. He carefully wrote the first sentence of that paragraph in cursive on the lesson page. It was pretty much lunchtime, and he took a break for a minute “to imagine.” A week later he was still imagining.

–

I thought that sharing lots of digital resources was kind of my thing. I thought that communicating and connecting with people mainly online was kind of my thing. Turns out, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m not actually that good at it. Maybe I don’t actually like it or want it. Yet I keep thinking about it. I don’t quite know my path forward, but I’m going to start by posting this, finally, and then just maybe start sharing things again without overthinking? Yeah, right.

–

TL;DR- I was into social distancing and digital learning before they were cool, but now you all have come and ruined my scene.

Or maybe I’m losing my edge.³

⁴

Standalone post link: A Break for a Minute to Imagine

I had a dream that I listened to this song on a different streaming platform and the guitar solos were missing from the track. I feverishly scoured the internet trying to find the original version with the guitar solos and figure out what was happening. Tabs kept closing on me and websites glitched into oblivion. I wasn’t sure if the streaming platform or record label had demanded their removal, or if she had somehow become ashamed of them and self-censored, or if it was the Mandela effect, or some other kind of weird conspiracy, but I was going to somehow get to the bottom of this cosmic scandal against musicianship and bring the lost guitar solos back to light.

The next day I had to listen to the song several times on different platforms just to be reassured that the guitar solos had not actually disappeared, but still remained on the track in their fulness.

Standalone post link: It's a Moot Point

My kids and I have been casually talking about turning our yard into an orchard, and re-reading this book in my backyard today inspires me to get completely serious about it. Impossible to read these poems and not want to start growing stuff.

Read the title poem from the collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay.

Check out Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude from a Salt Lake County Library like I did once or twice before I finally bought it.

Standalone post link: Reading: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude