changes

Currently Reading: Moonwalking [29%]

by Zetta Elliot and Lyn Miller-Lachmann

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.19]

[Granite Sora ebook copy]

Currently Reading: Nightcrawling [28%]

by Leila Mottley

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.18]

[SLCO Library physical copy]

1. Not sure why but I deliberately chose to cover up the part of the Nightcrawling cover with the “Oprah Book Club 2022” sticker.

2. The desire to take this picture with the book displaying from the app on my phone screen forced me to finally get out our old Nikon DSLR camera. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, as I’m increasingly frustrated with the supposedly great camera on my iPhone 13 mini and its well-intentioned attempts to optimize and fix everything to how a photo is supposed to look for me - I like the mistakes and the limitations, though. Now I just need to learn how to use the old camera again, probably get it cleaned up, so that the mistakes are on purpose.

Standalone post link: Nightreading Nightcrawling Moonwalking

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out [66%]

by Susan Kuklin

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.15]

Another day, another challenged book.

Standalone post link: Currently Reading - Beyond Magenta

Link: “Summer Wind” | William Cullen Bryant

Type: Poem

Source: Poem-a-Day (poets.org)

It is a sultry day; the sun has drunk
The dew that lay upon the morning grass;
There is no rustling in the lofty elm
That canopies my dwelling, and its shade
Scarce cools me. All is silent, save the faint
And interrupted murmur of the bee,
Settling on the sick flowers, and then again
Instantly on the wing. The plants around
Feel the too potent fervors: the tall maize
Rolls up its long green leaves; the clover droops
Its tender foliage, and declines its blooms.
But far in the fierce sunshine tower the hills,
With all their growth of woods, silent and stern,
As if the scorching heat and dazzling light
Were but an element they loved
…

I just like this. Matches my summer-sitting-in-my-backyard vibes but from like 190 years ago.

And then I started thinking about this AM Gold…

Standalone post link: Poem Link - Summer Wind

2022.08.11 (committed)

• Added a [more of ‘Title’] link at the bottom of the main microblogish rss index
• Added [more/less] buttons to recent updates on homepage and ‘new/now’ list pages
• Improvements to the functionality of the ‘recent images’ section of the home page
• Moved ‘links’ into their own main section

2022.07.22 (committed)

• Added Breadcrumbs to default single and list pages (https://gohugo.io/content-management/sections/#example-breadcrumb-navigation)
• Started organizing reading updates and other content into non chronological sections

Related still to-do

• Standardize [more/less] functionality across all list pages
• Create a standard ‘gallery’ partial
• Re-create the jdw-gallery page (page showing just the images I consider to be my own creations not stealing/screenshotting/remixing
• Standardize breadcrumbs across all templates
• Update templates
• Much more post/static page reorganization
• Fix and standardize image tags in all old posts

Standalone post link: Changelog - 2022.08.11

Been thinking a lot about curation, both professionally and personally. Where, when, how, whether to do it.

I’ve been in a holding pattern about sharing things for a long time now - I have digital and physical notebooks full of things to potentially share (good and helpful things, I believe), but it seems too big a deal to share them. There are too many options, each with benefits and drawbacks, each with different audiences, or in some cases no audience at all.

Started playing hard with Pinterest at work last week as a potential way out of this, then promptly took vacation time and went camping out of cell range for several days. Now I’m having second thoughts about what I was starting to build there. Then third thoughts, that I should do more, and do it in more places.

Pinterest? Wakelet? Tweet threads? Some Google Doc? Destiny Discover Collections? My own website? My district library website? My district edtech website? Just leave it alone since my district has another new main webpage that kind of curates a little bit of what I was thinking but that I’m not involved in? Yes to all?

Do I go to where the most people are, even if it doesn’t always make the most organizational sense, or I don’t like the way it looks or works? Do I just use whatever platform is easy or makes the most sense to me? Do I belligerently insist on my own platform and expect people to come to me if they come at all? Do I let it go? Most other people don’t have this pressure to curate and share; maybe I shouldn’t either, and maybe it’s not even helpful or a good idea. Maybe it’s not actually my job. Guess I’m still kind of a mess, mentally uncurated.

Hey, take my little survey and let me know your dream curatorial format/platform, if there were no rules for any of us. I’ll share the results. (I first made this to get input from my co-workers.)

Standalone post link: The Opposite of Curation Isn't A Mess But Silence

I’ve been here before. It’s a cycle for me. The compulsion to exist on social media, followed soon after by silence. I’ve posted variations on this dilemma before. I’ve almost posted on it many times more.

I want and need to just live my life, do my things, think my thoughts, and not be performative about any of it. I despise so much in life that is performative, and I want not to contribute to it. I don’t want to be that person, although I probably still am.

But then, I do want to share and bring to light cool things. People have good ideas, they’ve made interesting or useful things, they need to be supported.

And I want to sort-of connect with people in my weird, limited ways. I usually fail or fear doing this in person. The asynchronicity of some social media platforms is everything to me. I’m not that interested in chat or video calls. I don’t want to get together with you. I just want to share stuff, see other people share stuff, maybe have some sort of time-delayed conversations. I should start writing letters. Or a blog. That’s it.

And yes, wanting to be performative after all. Wanting to make art, or at least something kind of interesting, out of the details of my life, to share my thoughts and perspective.

Is that a performance? A curation? Something always has to be left out.

--

I recently re-read Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and right now I’m listening to the audio of his Book of Delights. I’m fairly inspired by how he is working his way through this. I love how he pays attention / gives attention to so many regular, mundane things. I want to do more of that in my writing, and photography/video, whatever I choose to mess around with and share.

Standalone post link: On Whether To Share Things

The school district received a herd of ponies. I was supposed to catalog them, barcode them, and figure out a good protocol for checking them out to students.

They were all in an old corral out in the desert, and seemed wild and restless, as if perhaps they had just been captured and swept in from that desert and we hadn’t exactly been told the truth about their (lack of) training. Also, it didn’t seem like anyone was taking care of them out there so it was maybe going to fall to me to feed them, scrape out their hooves, and do whatever else needs to be done for horses. I don’t know anything about horses.

I felt I needed to learn all the proper descriptive terms for horse coloration so I could create accurate descriptions in the MARC records, but I was afraid to admit my lack of knowledge of horse culture to anyone. I’d never even ridden a horse.

I remember thinking I would probably put the barcodes on their saddles, until I realized that horses only wear saddles when a human is riding or about to ride on them. I was reluctant to brand the barcodes on them, and it would be tedious work to get the symbology and coding correct each time.

Years ago I was driving around out in some rural area and I turned a corner on a lane and in front of me were two pickup trucks, engines running but stopped in the middle of the road while going opposite directions. The drivers were chatting with each other through their windows, and had been for who knows how long. I want to say one truck was brown and the other tan or grey with some white or turquoise trim, but I can’t truly remember. Their colorings definitely weren’t entirely un-horseish, though.

In the pastures parallel to where the trucks were idling, two horses stood on either side of a fence. They were doing that thing horses sometimes do where they stand next to each other but face opposite directions, their tails occasionally flipping a little bit in each others' faces. Like idling engines.

Two trucks and two horses, opposite but parallel. Perfect composition if I could pull it off. It might have even been the golden hour; let’s go ahead and say the lighting was good. I was too afraid of what the drivers might say or do about a random city kid in a tiny Japanese car taking their picture. They just as likely might not have even noticed if I had stopped and taken the picture, though.

Encountering horses in the human world often just makes me feel sad, guilty, a little bit afraid, and like maybe what I should do is sneak back at night and set them all free. I’m occasionally concerned that if I get too close they might bite me, kick me, or trample me, and I’d deserve it for standing there gawking at them or otherwise being complicit in the nonsense. A horse certainly doesn’t owe me anything. But in actuality I understand they are mostly too broken to ever attempt such things against a strange human.

I said “herd” above because it sounded better to me, but in the dream it was definitely first described to me as a “set” of ponies. Catalog our new set of 40 ponies and prepare them for checkout.

I’d settled on a 1 week check out period per student. They could walk or ride the ponies home from the school, but I wasn’t sure how they were going to be able to take enough hay home to feed the pony for a week. We’d need horse carts, or a delivery truck.

At one point a vice-superintendent and a district PR person videocalled me at the corral to check in on “where we were at” in getting the ponies ready and out to students. It was a district priority.

My wife’s cousin’s horses were being ridden around in circles by my nieces, my kids, and some other cousin kids. Everyone needed multiple turns. I was informed that one of the horses was called Dreamer. Right as I was told this I noticed an insect crawling around the edge of Dreamer’s deep, brown eye, accentuating the misty, faraway look I saw there. However faraway and inscrutable that look, I intuited that the dreams that Dreamer dreamed behind those eyes were reasonable and close, centered in the here and now: I think that Dreamer longed to stop walking around in circles in the heat. I think this dreamful creature, itself fulfilling the dreams of so many cabin children with its steady legs and unfathomable eyes, actually just wanted to eat some fucking grass. It was growing all around the edges of the riding ring, and Dreamer kept breaking the circle to go snag some bites of green stuff, before being pulled back into semi-compliance by the child at the reigns.

I could be wrong about all of this, though; I don’t know anything about horses.

Standalone post link: A Horse Called Dreamer

Making some little moves again on my website in prep to possibly come out of social media retirement.

Been like a year - remains to be seen whether I can finally dissuade myself from getting distracted, disheartened, disinterested, dispirited, or otherwise discouraged.

Maybe I need to disco for it.

Yeah, I did that.

Standalone post link: ''makingmoves-disco''

Coming out of social media retirement to tell you about the Tandoori Chicken Tin I had for lunch today from O’Falafel Etc. Wish I had taken a photo of this dish, because the picture on their website doesn’t do justice to the masterpiece of fresh take-out I received.

If I had taken a picture, what you would see is this yummy grilled chicken (just a little bit spicy) mixed with grilled onions and zucchini in a pink, creamy sauce (I think pink from paprika and maybe tomato), served over the most beautiful yellow long grain basmati-ish rice, with a fresh green salad, a cucumber-yogurt-salsa-type thing, a creamy green cilantro salad dressing, and an optional spicy salsa. I think it might be something like harissa but they just call it “the spicy sauce.” I like to just mix it all up together in the tin. One of the best lunches I’ve had in a long time, sitting alone in my car in the parking lot of Fairmont Park chowing it down.

Some meme I saw a local business share on Instagram one time said that one of the best things you can do for businesses (besides buying their stuff, of course) is post good things about them, so this is me trying to start doing that. I’ve liked O’Falafel for quite a while, but I’ve only ever tried three or four things from their extensive menu; those three things have been so good that I generally just want to get one of them again. My other favorites besides the tandoori tin are the falafel sandwich and the smothered chicken shawarma tin.

Standalone post link: ''ofalafeltandooritin''

So I have digital and physical notebooks and a phone and computer filled with photos and random things from the last year that I haven’t shared or done anything with, and I’m seriously considering just starting to go through and post backdated stuff on this website, and on the various social media channels. We will see if I have the guts to be that consistent and that obnoxious.

Standalone post link: ''backdated''