this winter break

I was going to
write a bunch
revamp my website
establish good
reading
writing
learning
sharing
habits
for the coming year

but I didn’t really do those things

and though I didn’t
do them I can’t seem to
let the idea of
still doing
those
things
just
go
away

so it may still happen
just not necessarily
in concert with
an arbitrary
Gregorian year change
or an extended time
off work

so what did I do?

passed Wandersong

read some YA fiction

and read some Franz Kafka, which feels a little bit like YA fiction to me but only because the last time I read Kafka was when I was myself in the “teen/young adult” demographic

took the kids sledding

made masaman curry

made french toast

made sweet pork barbacoa for in-laws’ Christmas taco party (recipe pending here in these URLs because I’ve made it too much my own to link to where I started from)

engaged in various obligatory Christmas preparations and celebrations

shoveled actual snow (I don’t remember if that ever even had to happen even once last winter)

read from an ever increasing number of newsletters (reading links forthcoming)

doomscrolled
(even though I’ve deleted my Facebook account and logged out of my personal Instagram and Twitter accounts on my phone I still somehow managed this – my persistent traps / points of weakness are the Apple News app and the notifications I still get for work social media accounts)

and then there’s bandcamp exploration, which I don’t quite consider doom scrolling, though at times there I do scroll through actual doom

So I guess I actually did
do a few things that might be
worth sharing and linking
or potentially expounding upon

but I’ve limited
myself to this
platform
with no audience
and haven’t
sorted that
out yet

instead of waiting

or deleting

or further retreating

or plotting out
some clear future
for this website
and my writing
and my social
media participation

I will just try
by improvising
as I go
with whatever form
feels right
or useful
or interesting
in the moment

Saturday, January 1, 2022
Millcreek, Utah

Standalone post link: this winter break

Trying something new today - a weekly post where I round up quick notes and links to things I read, watched, played, listened to, or otherwise engaged with in the past week.

Some links or ideas might also get their own posts, if I find I have more to write or share about them. Or if I decide I feel like spreading stuff out over days and giving things their own spaces.

Reading

• I read Me (Moth) by Amber McBride, a young adult novel in verse about a teen named Moth who has lost her family in an accident. Features root magic, song lyrics, dancing and not dancing, angst, first love, a road trip, and a plot twist.

• I read Beyond the Mapped Stars by Rosalyn Eves, a young adult historical fiction novel about a Mormon girl who wants to be an astronomer, but growing up in a polygamist family in 1870s Monroe, Utah, she doesn’t see a path to follow to that future. Features a realistic and diverse portrayal of Utah and Western U.S. life in the late 1800s, a train robbery, emergency midwifery, a near altercation between Thomas Edison and Texas Jack, a ball in a luxury hotel, a solar eclipse viewed from Pike’s Peak, faith, science, and again, first love.

• I’m still working my way through Investigations of a Dog and other creatures, short fiction by Franz Kafka in new translations by Michael Hofmann. Grabbed this impulsively from a Jewish Fiction display at the Holladay Library, but it has led me to plans to really dig into Kafka and read as much as I can of his work. I haven’t read Kafka since I was a teenager but what I did read then was extremely influential on my thoughts and tastes in literature and art, and its weird that I have forgotten that. So, library displays can be important.

• I’ve been subscribing to more and more newsletters lately, and since getting on top of my email inbox I’ve been able to keep up with them. Sharing links just to the things that I most liked that I read in the past week.

  • “The Year in Vibes” and its prequel “TikTok and the Vibes Revival”, both by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker.

  • “Love in a Time of Climate Change”, poem by Craig Santos Perez shared in the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day newsletter.

  • “A Father’s Work is Never Done”, poem by Nathan Hoks also shared in the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day newsletter. (My exact initial response was “WITAF did I just read?")

Listening

Been clicking around Bandcamp a lot lately and these are albums I found there this past week that I liked - none of them are particularly new except for the Deerhoof, but oh well.

Giver Taker by Anjimile

Intuition by Kendra Amalie

Devil Kids by Deerhoof

Playing

• Finished Wandersong on the Nintendo Switch this week.

• Also watched an interesting talk from the creator of the game, Greg Lobanov - “Wandersong: A Game About Feelings”

• Played A Short Hike today, again on the Nintendo Switch. Fun little game.

Watching

Didn’t really watch anything, other than occasionally getting sucked into whatever my kids were watching, shows I don’t want to enumerate here this week.

I guess there was this TikTok user I got sucked into after my friend sent me one of the “cozy nintendo” videos:

Fritz and Donnybrook (@oldtimehawkey)

(Holy shit look at all that tracking junk on the original URL I followed:

 httpx://www.tiktok.com/@oldtimehawkey?_d=secCgYIASAHKAESPgo8tRvCShfQTSFOXpWMVc2%2F  
 CGmW%2BQZyHW62eLaXG85iVDpdvrAWKLp8R4K%2F%2B%2Bf2nW3hBJSZ6T2  
 c1g46JCPwGgA%3D&checksum=daabe076b9bef9aef0b47d138cc0cc154a  
 1d2466edad06d107f2351c7d1ecfaf&language=en&preview_pb=0&sec _user_id=MS4wLjABAAAAC  
 -Nor83oLDUTwTcpnj8QNBCO03Tvyzt89oSOMKbri-   
 aJUkR0d8qfphh3zWf923A5&share_app_id=1233&share_item_id=7008 004354242301189&share_link_id=20C2FD9B-4755-45B1-96A8-   
 FF181077CAF9&source=h5_m&timestamp=1640668684&tt_from=copy&   
 u_code=daabba7b8fm9ce&user_id=6781623360004031493  
 &utm_campaign=client_share&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=copy&_r=1

)

Clicking

Wado Sanzo’s Dictionary of Color Combinations, web edition: https://sanzo-wada.dmbk.io

Standalone post link: Links from Last Week (Dec 26, 2021 - Jan 2, 2022)

Here are some of the things I’m working on and thinking about now…

• Prepping the soil and planting seeds for a ‘digital garden’ on this website. +

  Also actively updating form, function, and “content” on the website in several other areas.

• Learning to love my backyard. +

  Last month I mulched a big section of it that had gone to dirt/weeds/mounds from our dog digging everywhere. Didn’t get it mulched in time to start a physical garden this season, but I hope to plant some fruit trees and other things in the fall and/or next spring. Also bought a fun little table for writing/reading/interneting that can be moved around to wherever it is shady at the moment, so I am out in my backyard a lot more - for example, right now.

• Entering full summer project mode at work. +

  I’ve finished out the 2022 Sora collection development budget. Next up I need to: revamp forms and web pages, draft a bunch of tutorials and documentation, push out a bunch of patron rights management updates, and catch up on some standardization in the library catalog and in the technology resource database. Maybe make some curations and graphics for next year?And write all the book reviews I’ve put off. And take some vacation time.

• Healing up my knee after a strangely catastrophic fall over my daughter’s bike in the garage last week. +

  As I am laid up, this digital home and garden has begun to flourish, all to the detriment of my physical home and garden.

• Still playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus now and again - I’m more balanced about it now, though. +

  It’s not the best game but I’m still obsessed with finishing the Pokédex and the true final mission. I’m an intermittent gamer but it’s clear now I have a thing about only playing one game at a time until I have thoroughly exhausted it.

• I’ve been listening to a lot of Joy Division and New Order - thinking about doing a deep dive into a whole bunch of other Manchester bands. +

  One of my favorite bands from Manchester is/are Doves, and I’m inordinately grumpy that they aren’t on this random diagram. (Resources and notes associated with these listening excursions would be good things to track in my digital garden, but they’re not there yet.)

• I’ve fully indulged my rwtfiw¹ tendency lately. +

  For me, that means reading Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and a bunch of newsletters/magazines/blogs, when I could/should be reading more kidlit and YA books for work. I’m thinking my ‘ought tos’ are more like most other people’s ‘guilty pleasures’ and vice versa…

This page was last updated on June 23, 2022. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers. +

Standalone post link: Now (June 23, 2022)

I went to Little Dell a month ago, and this is what it was like.

I should go back and see what it is like now.

Standalone post link: Little Dell February

These are:

• two of my favorite albums
• two of my favorite albums to listen to on vinyl, that I own on vinyl¹
• two of my favorite albums that sound like spring to me, though I can’t say why²
• two of my favorite albums that I am listening to on vinyl right now, and noting on my website on this day, for these reasons

Standalone post link: Spring Listening 2022: Turn Into and Everybody Works by Jay Som

Upgraded the primary domain for this site to its final form here at the end of the internet:

Welcome to joshuaw.xyz

(Also updated the introductory text of my home page a bit to reflect this change.)

Standalone post link: welcome to joshua w dot xyz

I read A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger 📚

Standalone post link: Reading A Snake Falls to Earth

‘February Break’ Ideas and To-Dos

a longlist, unfiltered and unedited other than select hyperlinks added:

Write book reviews finally

Get my website going again

Set up new bed in bedroom

Hate everyone

Ignore the haters

Therefore, ignore myself

Keep a diary

Do laundry

Figure out something for the hellscape that is our backyard

Go outside in the early mornings and stay there rather than driving to work and sitting in my cubicle

Read some books

Play some video games

Play some records

Get some lamps

Low-key get some good work done, just the work that I want to do and never let myself do when I’m at work

Cook some food

Go in the wilderness

Go to the record store and the bookstore

Go to a museum or two, art gallery

Destroy someone’s scene - make snooty people in a gallery or hipster store deal with my kids and/or just my fat awkward self

Give some attention to my dog our dog their dog the dog named Luna that lives in our house with us

Trim beard and haircut

Heal the world, make it a better place

We are the world

/ IATA - WATA (I AM THE ASSHOLE / WE ARE THE ASSHOLES)

/ “Lord, is it I?”

/ god damn you god damn me god damn us god damn we god damn us all

Buy a car

Watch some movies

Get out my CDs and cassettes

I have wasted my life

Standalone post link: February Break Ideas and To-Dos

I started reading Moon Witch Spider King by Marlon James the other night. I’m currently at 21% completion.

Pre-ordered copy that came in at King’s English, and ended up being signed.

Standalone post link: Reading Moon Witch Spider King

Also started reading today A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib.

I’ve had this, and, actually, all of Abdurraqib’s other books on my to-read list for a while now – I took the occasion of Black History Month to move this one to the top of my list and start reading.

Copy from the Holladay Branch of the Salt Lake County Library. And the blurb writers on the back are all on my have-read and/or to-read lists, too: Marlon James, Jacqueline Woodson, Clint Smith, Brit Bennett

Standalone post link: Reading A Little Devil in America