I’ve been on Twitter for 13 years now.
Social media anniversaries always depress me a little. I’ve heard this from others as well. Somebody should write about social media and the anniversary effect. I always think about the lyrics of the Indigo Girls’ song Reunion during a particularly nasty patch like this week.
Otherwise, we emerged late last week from the COVID fog that affected 75% of us. It’s been nice. I even worked out this morning for only the third time since running the Oakland half-marathon, my race recovery interrupted as it was by going to D.C. with a bunch of middle schoolers and then probably getting COVID.
On Saturday, we dragged the kids to the 5 p.m. performance of LOOM:FIELD by Bandaloop. I’ve wanted to see them perform for awhile now but always seem to hear about their Oakland shows after the fact. It was, in a word, majestic.
It was an egg-free Easter this year (kids “hunted” for plastic eggs filled with candy, I’m not a total monster), but we still had (vegan) fondue, as is tradition.
I’m (still) reading Jane Eyre while listening to the On Eyre podcast and I love the experience so much. I think I enjoy the podcast episodes way more than the book, to be honest. The last episode I listened to, about chapters 28-30, was particularly good. What Lauren Sandler says about housing insecurity and homelessness, then and now, is so poignant, and the conversation at the end with Sarah Marshall is so great (she and host Vanessa Zoltan get to the heart of why I think I loved this book as a young teenager: it wasn’t the romance with Rochester, it was Jane, this heroine who is “a big weirdo…difficult and prickly and complicated”). I seriously want to read every book from now on with these super smart, insightful people in my head every few chapters.
I’ve embarked on a project to comb through my 17+ years of blogging to organize posts thematically into separate Google docs. The biggest one so far, having started the blog right after moving to Boston, is grad school. It’s time-consuming so I’m chipping away at it little by little but so far it’s so fun to read back through those art school reflections. I think it’s helping me to see, 14 years and way too much money later, that, actually, it was a rich and valuable experience. It’s turned up some fun, random little tidbits, too, about life in Boston, like this haiku I’ll leave you with this week, which aims to answer this California girl’s question (its title): “just how cold is it?”
P.S. Speaking of podcasts, I finally got around to updating the Artists in Offices newsletter. Check it out and subscribe so you’ll get not one, but TWO newsletters from me in your inbox every week!