When apparent stability disintegrates

When apparent stability disintegrates,

As it must—

God is Change—

People tend to give in

To fear and depression,

To need and greed.

When no influence is strong enough

To unify people

They divide.

They struggle,

One against one,

Group against group.

For surgical, position, power.

They remember old hates and generate new ones,

They create chaos and nurture it,

They kill and kill and kill, 

Until they are exhausted and destroyed,

Until they are conquered by outside forces,

Or until one of them becomes

A leader

Most will follow,

Or a tyrant

Most fear.

—Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Downtowning, once again

It’s been a while since we poked around downtown, so we headed out and hit the shops, stopped at our favorite burger joint, and had a seasonally good time all around.

New World Order

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.” –Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

One of the most chilling sentences I have ever read.

Growth in the Shadows

A tree

Cannot grow

In its parents' shadows.

—Earthseed: the Books of the Living 

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

A tree

A tree

Cannot grow

In its parents’ shadows.

—Earthseed: The Books of the Living

The Greyhound, the Inquisition, and the Witch

In 1233, a papal bull (sort of like a Tweet for the Middle Ages) by Gregory IX established a new branch of the inquisition in Toulouse, France, to be led by the Dominicans. It was intended to prosecute Christian groups considered heretical, such as the Cathars and the Waldensians. The Dominicans eventually evolved into the most zealous prosecutors of persons accused of witchcraft in the years leading up to the Reformation.

This led to the Church organizing bands to ferret out those who were practicing heretics, and within a century the Spanish Inquisition is roaming the hillsides, looking for people behaving badly. In the area near Lyon, for instance, the Spanish Inquisition visited a shrine to St. Guniefort, the holy greyhound who was known to cure sick children. The Inquisitors questioned the community who all spoke of the intercessionary powers of the spirit of the dog, who had been mistakenly slain by the lord after protecting the lord's infant son from a snake. The Inquisitors explained how this was heresy, and waved their fingers admonishingly, and said they would be back in a year's time and that they expected improvement, or there would be dire consequences. When they came back a year later, the townspeople all said "of course, no, there is no Saint Guniefort, what a silly idea," and the Inquisitors wrote their report, satisfied that the Holy Church was back in charge of canonization. The Inquisition succeeded when common people acknowledged and followed the Authority of the Church. While the Inquisition is notorious for torture, to the point of being synonymous in modern times, the point of the Inquisition was not to kill those who disagreed, but to induce them to agreement with Authority, to toe the line. 

In the fourteenth century, Pope John XXII issued a papal bull (sort of like a Tweet for the Middle Ages) declaring heresy an act and not just an intellectual crime, and in the late fifteenth century, the oft-heralded Malleus Mallificarum was published, delineating three degrees of criminality of witchcraft--slight, great, and very great--and witchcraft generally came to be seen not just as evil but as demonic. 

By the time Martin Luther nailed a bunch of posts to a Church door (sort of like a Tweet Thread) and ushered in the Protestant Reformation (1517), the idea of heresy in the was deeply interwoven with the idea of evil, specifically the demonic practice of witchcraft. It had transformed from a tool of conformity to Papal authority into a tool of neighborly popularity. In the seventeenth century, neighbors condemned each other, and the traveling Star Court would hear the charges. While charges flew widely, the countercharge of slander proved a powerful foil, not only to getting the charge of witchcraft thrown out, but in finding the accuser guilty of harm. Those who could afford an attorney to bring countersuit were summarily successful, while those against whom witchcraft charges proceeded were often tortuered for confession and put to death. The countercharge of slander positions one's identity and one's standing in the community as a material possession which can be damaged. For widows and those of little means, there was no possibility of securing representation, let alone being able to afford a countersuit. Therefore the poor, ederly, and widowed were most likely to face the charges and suffer punishments of the Star Court, up to and including being burned at the stake, a sentence that has come to be synonmous with the witch trials and with neighbors killing those who don't conform or are otherwise unpopular, troublesome, defiant of authority, or outspoken.

One hesitates to think that neighbors believed the accused were, in fact, powerful witches, warlocks, or sorcerers. They were treated in demeaning and physcially rough ways that would have induced a person to marshal whatever power they had to stop the abuse, supernatural or otherwise. It's a bold colonial who would lash a genuine witch to a post and then stand nearby lecturing her if they believed she could command the forces of hell. By contrast, in Ireland, there is no witch craze during the early modern period. No charges of witchcraft were leveled, and no countercharges of slander were filed. It's almost as though those in the area most known for both a genuine belief in magic and with a long history of defiance of authority (both papal and regal) had little use for making either into a crime, let alone making the latter a crime in the guise of the former. 

Enter pragmatism.

Pragmatism comes to us from William James, the father of American psychology, and James Dewey, follwing from Pierce's writings. Essentially, the Pragmatist holds that we know a concept by the way people treat it. The common example is that we know a flag is a flag if you run it up a pole and people salute it. Thus, if we were to lash a teatowel to a pole and people saluted it, it seems that the pragmatist would say "it's a flag" and that it became a flag when it was saluted. By extension, it seems to me, that, for a Pragmatist, a person becomes a witch when, once lashed to a pole, people set her on fire. Pragmatism seems to be the philosophy of identity through conformity, and I'm not sure I dig that.

This sort of walking-the-maze backward level of understanding conceptualization and identity unerpins a lot of cultural problems, including the Social Gospel (a person is righteous because they are well off, and the more wealthy they are the more righteousness they possess) and the Protestant Work Ethic (that labor is proof of personal goodness and that personal industriousness is the key to a prosperous life) both of which problematize poverty as evidence of personal moral failure. 

A life rich with Humanities is a rich life.

"Finally, and most important, these students exude confidence and pride in their lives. Their curiosity and newfound sense of self-mastery is likely to sustain them through life’s vicissitudes and give them a deep inner world into which to delve when the going is tough, the “inner citadel” of which the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics spoke as they confronted their own tough times. What I saw was joy, the sort of joy the philosopher Seneca described: not the flighty joy of the partygoer, but a solid inner joy that comes from discovering yourself." -- Martha Nussbaum, "The Humanities are Alive and Well in Utah," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2024

Brunch

 

Don't Move. Don't Even Breathe.

The air tastes like smoke and a few minutes outside left my tongue and throat thick with it. If this is the red zone, I can't imagine how awfult the purple and maroon zones are. 

Otherwise, it's a perfectly beautiful summer day, 83 with relatively low humidity, just perfect for picnics and parks and hikes in our beuatiful mountains. I was really looking forward to the walk to pick up the milk delivery for the week, happy that after a fortnight of drenching rain, we had some sunshine. I have yoga at the museum this evening. 

Of course I picked up the milk, but the decision to walk to the museum and do yoga on the roof is more tenuous. The walk might do more harm than the yoga class helps.

Stay safe, friends.

37

37

Over all

The Way never does anything,
and everything gets done.
If those in power could hold to the Way,
the ten thousand things
would look after themselves.
If even so they tried to act, 
I’d quiet them with the nameless,
the natural.

In the unnamed, in the unshapen,
is not wanting.
In not wanting is stillness.
In stillness all under heaven rests.

Information Ecology

An information ecology is “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment.” (Nardi & O’Day, 1999) I’d like to highlight two words from this, the first being system and the second being local. For the purposes of my research, the local-ness of the system is key, and I think it’s really important not to lose sight of how each library differs because of its governing locality. Even if two libraries were identical in all other ways, being on opposite sides of town would change their information ecology just by changing the populations they serve. In reality, no two libraries are identical, and existing “on the other side of town” can create differences in the ecology that have dramatic differences in the services that are provided. For instance, if all libraries in a city or consortium are funded equally from the budget, but one has three times the square footage of the other, the utility bills alone of the larger library could leave the programs, services, and staffing budget decimated. If the libraries are funded by square footage, smaller libraries who serve just as many patrons can find themselves spread thin when trying to address the community needs. If libraries are funded based on property tax contributions, libraries in poorer sections of town can have dramatically reduced budgets compared to wealthy neighborhoods, an inverse of the typical use patterns in libraries and one which re-presents wealth inequality as inequalities of service. The previous examples are all about budgets, but there are other municipal factors as well: A gorgeous new library with all the latest technology and programming services and an eye-popping collection of materials for all ages isn’t of much use if it’s stuck out on the edge of town without access from public transportation. This is exactly the situation of the crown jewel library in my town, a gorgeous building with a phenomenal collection -- it even has a coffee bar and a 3D printer. It’s amazing, and one of the most inviting spaces in the whole city. One of the reasons planners were able to spend all this money on the building and holdings was that the land that they found to build on was on the far edge of town, not even in the city limits; land in the city is expensive, when it can be found at all; the price goes down and availability goes up as you move away from the town center, so several acres over the county line seemed worth every penny. The County library is a 20 minute drive from the center of downtown; to take a Lyft or Uber would be upwards of $20 one way. 

And if you ask librarians to name the single greatest constraining factor for their particular branch library, school library, law library, or practically any other information services organization, they'll often say space. Information materials take space on shelves; computer labs and meeting rooms and coffee bars and viewing rooms take space for the patrons. And it’s all necessary for a library to work. So when the plans were rolled out for a large building with beautiful windows and expansive grounds and plenty of space, no one said “but it’s not on the bus line.” But, as a consequence, the availability of the best library for 50 miles in any direction is that it is unavailable for most of the library patrons in the city; it’s remote enough that it might as well be on the moon for those who would be most served. 

    One of the things I find interesting is how this simple difference has skewed the informational landscape in the city. The County library doesn’t only have a 3D printer and movie theater viewing room that the city libraries couldn’t dream of having; it also has passport services available, a notary, hosts a mobile DMV clinic every week, and serves as a voting location during elections. None of these essential civic functions that the County library provides are restricted by space, but somehow the City libraries don’t offer these services, making the libraries in the City far less civic and diminishing the overall opportunities for civic engagement for city-neighborhood patrons. This small thing -- being available on the bus line -- has an enormous impact on the information ecology for the City and its residents.

The State of Libraries

    Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff), Digital Colonialism (Kwet), Social Credit (Lee), Datafication (Lycett). My many thoughts on Irresistible Bargains (Pallitto). The titles alone are creepy and insidious, and the articles are enough to make us lose sleep for decades. All of this is a vast landscape straight out of a William Gibson novel; as Lee pointed out, it inspired episodes in the dystopian Black Mirror. My own reading notes along the way are practically a novella.

    But what of libraries? The ALA's core competencies and the library bill of rights both position patron privacy as a foundational tenet of librarianship. I remember when the Patriot Act was introduced in 2001. Under the Patriot Act, the FBI can secretly conduct a physical search or wiretap on American citizens to obtain evidence of crime without proving probable cause, as the Fourth Amendment explicitly requires. One of the (many, many) avenues for discovery under the Patriot Act is a patron’s library use history. Most libraries don’t keep patron checkout records, and after the Patriot Act the ones that did simply toggled the software settings to stop doing that. Designers of library software in the years since the Patriot Act became law started including default settings to not collect or store any circulation or other history, such as requests for items through interlibrary loan. What is most concerning to me about the Patriot Act provisions is the idea that libraries (and other information providers such as bookshops, and possibly even publishers) are dangerous to the state, up to and including suborning terrorists.

While the explicit provisions of Patriot Act itself reflect a deep ignorance of librarians’ structural protections of patron privacy, laws allowing for state surveillance of patron activity and the history of their library activities are in direct conflict with the professional core and patron protections with which we are charged. 

With so much data integration being desired (and, as Pallitto would describe it, as irresistible), how do we provide information services while also protecting patron privacy? Libraries, like every organization, need to make data-driven solutions, which can be done in anonymized ways: Number of books checked out, number of discrete patrons, number of attendees at a program or event, etc. But patrons themselves want more personalized and visible participation: book reading challenges that are integrated through GoodReads or other apps, for instance, are ways to encourage and support community engagement. 

It seems that the core tenets of librarianship are coming into conflict along privacy and big-data fault lines: how are we to engage the community in ways that inspire and support increased library use while also protecting patrons--individually and as a group--from parasitic capitalism or state control programs? 

And, as state surveillance expands, what role does the library have in making documents available to the public that are deemed “too dangerous” for public use?

Datafication by Choice

'Datafication': making sense of (big) data in a complex world, Lycett, Mark.  European Journal of Information Systems; Abingdon Vol. 22, Iss. 4,  (Jul 2013): 381-386.  Datafication is the  “capture, representation and delivery of data to inform decision making and action.” This seems so innocent when it’s written that way, and those skeptics amongst us frequently want to take on who is doing the capturing, while the technologists (both pro and con) are talking about how the information is captured. This week’s readings are not focused on the capture of the information so much as investigating whose decisions are being informed, and this is, to my mind, the right question.

Datafication, dataveillance, and the social credit system as China’s new normal Claire Seungeun Lee, 2019  “– China’s new social credit system, which turns both online and offline behaviors into a credit score through smartphone apps” sounds like something right out of a William Gibson novel. Terms like “the social credit system,” “data-driven authoritarianism,” and “datavellience” seem plucked out of science fiction nightmares. Yet here we are, all of us, downloading apps to track our steps, tapping to log in at our favorite cafe, or using our watches to pay for everything from bus passes to movies with friends. This is the structure of how a social credit system is even possible, never mind how it’s used. 

Irresistible bargains: Navigating the surveillance society by Robert M. Pallitto, 2018 “certain aspects of the surveillance society may be irresistible in a number of ways, so that refusal to engage with them is not a realistic option.” When you install a swimming pool in your yard, you are obligated to also secure the safety of others from being injured by your pool, usually by putting up a fence of specified height, because a swimming pool is considered in legal parlance as “an attractive nuisance.” That is, that the idea of swimming is itself attractive enough to inspire risky behavior. A young child in the neighborhood might see it and be so emotionally drawn to it that they enter the pool without being able to swim, for instance. This, in legal terms, is your responsibility to manage and mitigate. But in our rush to adopt the latest, most informative, and attractively helpful technology, are we entering into risky behavior? How would we even know? Pallitto talks about the attractive smart city disabling cars when payments are late and this seems like a very Western-capitalism model for the data-driven authoritarianism that Lee describes. But there are many other ways in which we could elect to have our data used to control our mundane lives: what if your insurance policy offered a quarterly rebate or credit for anyone who walked the recommended 70,000 steps in a week? Sounds like a real win, right? But is this seeming incentive-rewards program actually a fine for those who don’t achieve it? What if insurance rates were increased for subscribers who walked fewer than 50,000 tracked steps in a year? This sounds a little outlandish, but we already have steep financial disincentives in the insurance landscape for tobacco product use. How is that any different from the steps scenario presented above? I’m not sure that it is. It’s not a difference of type so much as Pallitto and Lee show a difference in scale. How big does data have to get before it is too big? How monolithic is too monolithic? I remember in 2000 when GE promised never to sell my information as I signed up to be able to pay my electric bill online, and I thought, “They don’t have to sell it; they already own everything.” And sure enough, GE Capital sent me any number of pre-approved offers regularly in my inbox, to my phone, and to my physical house. 

    This year, GE Health Care was birthed into existence. Amazon is in the healthcare universe as well, offering me better prices on my prescriptions without even entering my insurance information than I get at CVS when billed through my coverage. How is this even possible? And, more importantly, why would I not use the Amazon pharmacy option when it can save me money as well as be more convenient? Alexa even reminds me not only to refill my prescription and alerts me when it’s delivered, she (you see how I already think of her as a person) offered to remind me twice a day to take my blood pressure medicine and at night to take my statin (I’m old; this means I’m a member of the beta blockers and statins club and also means that I’m grateful for reminders). Every morning around 7:30 and every evening around 7:30, I touch the screen of my echo show to mark the task as done. In the dataveillance model presented by Lee, it’s completely plausible to conceive of a day when Alexa reports to my doctor that I haven’t marked my tasks as complete for a week, or calls the ambulance if my monitored pulse is too low or too high. And, here’s the real rub, would I feel grateful that I had the assistance? Possibly, yes, even to the point of signing up for the service and paying for it (all rolled into my Amazon Prime annual fee, most likely). When our Amazon Prime subscription fee doesn’t go up but “now includes more” we are not given options to opt out. I cannot, for instance, opt out of having the Amazon Pharmacy and other Amazon Health menu options available in the app itself.

Kwet argues that “Software is a central component of freedom in the twenty-first century.” (p. 18) In Kwet’s analysis, the Global North is enacting digital colonialism in the Global South through economic domination, imperial control, and tech hegemony and Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South Michael Kwet, 2019 Kewt’s answer is Free and Open Source Software, which he likens to “the development of socialism within Europe as a reaction to land enclosure and industrial exploitation, and its subsequent spread across liberation movements throughout the world.” (p.18) He introduces Moglen’s pillars of digital freedom. “Moglen adds that the trio of Free Software, Free Hardware and Free Spectrum (network connectivity) form the foundation for Free Culture, whereby anyone with a device and the Internet can freely access, produce and share published works. Taken together, the core pillars of the digital ecosystem are essential components which, by their very freedom and openness, empower the public – rather than states, corporations, or any other third parties – to exercise direct and collective control over the devices and ecosystem shaping their lives.” I’m not entirely convinced that free open source alone is enough to convince us to opt-out of the attractive nuisance of digital surveillance. We continually accept all cookies without coercion because we want the integrated, convenient, tailor-made solutions that datafication and integration offers.      Pallitto metions this as a matrix of irresistibility, offers that "consumers ... find ... irresistible. There are at least five components of this irresistibility. Specific bargains can be (or seem to be) irresistible:

• in terms of convenience
• in terms of efficiency
• in terms of ubiquity
• in terms of the networked life-world
• in terms of the source of sharing being hard to pinpoint."

The Internet Changed Everything

Lupač opens his 2018 article “BeyondThe Digital Divide: Contextualizing the Information Society” with “the internet has changed everything.” Lupač isn’t wrong. In five words, he has described the quake at the foundation of society, one that shook everything loose and positioned information -- and our access to it -- into the very center of how we live our daily lives. In the five years since Lupač wrote this understatement of the century, the everyday reliance on the internet has become more entrenched and entwined than ever. For Example: Before we catch the bus to work or school, we check the weather--on our phones, or increasingly on our watches-- to see if we need an umbrella or a jacket; we expect a digital assistant or text alert to let us know if the bus is running late or if there have been changes to routes or fares; on the bus, we can pay with tokens or cards or, increasingly, tap our phones or watches for the bus fare; once at work or school, we log in to various devices to participate, either by downloading information that we will work with for the tasks at hand, or by uploading content, and frequently our work is more collaborative that ever, collaborations that take place in the digital sphere, separate from the physical space we might occupy. 

The more important and central an item is, the more likely it is to be necessarily located in the digital landscape: banking, medical, groceries, transportation. These fundamental aspects of living are inherently digital, many of them not available offline or even by telephone. 

I have a friend who runs an intentional community in the mountains. Founded in 1974, there was no electricity or other civic infrastructure such as public water. In the last decade, the community set up a small battery of solar panels specifically to run a modem and router so that there could be a small but meaningful amount of internet available. When I asked why this mattered enough to be part of the community infrastructure, he told me it was no less important to human thriving in the community than the tools collected for the large community garden: it was a necessary tool to support daily survival. 

Bridging the digital divide is essential, and libraries have always held this to be a core for their vision as well as their mission: providing information itself, but also providing access to it is a fundamental tenet of libraries and librarianship. Why? “A better understanding of the mechanisms behind the societal proliferation of ICT can serve to provide clearer insight into deeper underlying issues, such as how human societies shape their material infrastructures and how these infrastructures are interconnected with such inherently sociological issues as social inequality, social change and social structures.” (Lupač 2018, p3). As all of society has transformed from a knowledge society to an information one, the library has likewise transformed from being an information provider to a social equalizer, such as it has the capacity to do so. 

Along the way, libraries, like all social institutions, are caught in the web of how we present the tools of this new society-- are we making choices that re-present the inequalities, or possibly even entrench the inequalities we hope to eradicate? What options exist for information providers such as the library to level the playing field? Budget constraints are conversations librarians and information architects are frequently not privy to and have no voice in, yet these are the very discussions that are essential in overcoming the digital divide and presenting information as a solution and not as a weapon of inequality and disenfranchisement, no matter how innocent or well-meaning the designs might be.

As my investigation of information society issues enters its third decade, I’m more aware than ever of how physical community remains important to the landscape of human thriving. I continue to see the real-time, real-life benefits and enrichment of in-person community events and sharing. Frequently during our deployment of informational, digital tools, the landscape of the in-person reality is getting deprioritized, sidelined, and at times lost. I think of the digital solutions that were employed during the pandemic, as schools and offices scrambled to replicate normalcy and enable the work of daily life to continue during a social shutdown. The digital divide was on full display especially in education, as students who had the economic resources for high-speed internet and quality laptops were able to participate nearly fully, while less advantaged students often fell out of the curriculum altogether. 

I think it’s essential that we as information professionals keep a balance between providing information tools and using community placement and partnership to enhance and enrich in-person programming. Being an information society means we have a responsibility to address the societal needs of our communities and patrons through information, not just to deliver data. It’s also important to discern how the delivery of data connectivity carries and creates its own inherent assumptions of access and digital privilege.

Mountain People

 We live in freedom by necessity,

A mountain people dwelling amoung mountains.

--W. H. Auden, from Sonnets From China, "XVIII"

Free raw material

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.

1. A new economic order that claims human edperience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales;
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history;
4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth;
6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty;
8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people's sovereignty.

In this beautiful definition, Shoshana Zuboff lays out everything that she is going to present about what surveillance capitalism is, how it operates in our world, and why it's a problem. 

You know I'm going to love this book.

Letters from Home: Friday June 16

The air cleared up from the smoke and that was nice, but now is heading towards trouble again, and will get a bit worse over the weekend. The midAtlantic region is getting a lot of the upcoming smoke, and even so, the mountains are as helpful as ever. I’m a little concerned about some periods Friday night and Saturday morning, but there’s nothing I can do about it except plan to be inside. Vivian and I are planning to go see a movie on Saturday evening, with possible dinner out afterwards.  I have an air quality app on my phone (it doesn’t give alerts or anything, which is a shame, but I feel certain something like that is being developed as we speak), and I check it before I go out. She of course wants to visit Mast again, and visit the barrels of candy. 

Acupuncture was great. My Uber driver on the way was the owner of War on Books, and we got to talking about bookshop owning and Industrial Society and how we have made our patchwork way in a capitalist world. He has an MFA in Poetry, and I started talking about how manifestos in general are some of the most overlooked specimens of persuasive writing — everyone wants to focus on the practicability of the ideas that are presented, and while that’s interesting, I really dig how any manifesto of any kind has to first and foremost be persuasive. I like looking at how the words and the whole work was crafted, like when did the reader find herself swept away by the ideas, and when did the writer lose us, and how and why was that — was it because the idea was too grandiose or too cruel or was it because the writer simply forgot to keep hold of our hand as we walked in this vision of a better world?

 

He was kind of blown away by the idea of deconstructing manifestos as persuasion, and asked if I wanted to do a workshop on that.
Of course I said yes.
We have no details beyond our enthusiasm, and that’s a lovely space to be in.

 

I told him I have a draft of a book proposal about Theodore Kaczynski, and how publishers for a long time wouldn’t touch it. He asked if we could talk more about it, since he thinks it would generate some serious interest now, not only because the man himself just died, but because the idea of the dangerousness of intelligent design is really hot, too, and this is of course the intersection of that.

 

And then we were at acupuncture.
Greg and I talked about things as we always do, and then also talked about how we are going to have a transition plan for my treatments while he’s out for a couple months in August and September. We’ll probably use Katie, not because she’s the best (she’s probably second best of the acupuncturists in Roanoke who are not Greg), but because she’s only three blocks away from the Loft. Greg said that he was thinking last year that perhaps we needed to add in a treatment acupuncturist supplement who can just “do the needles part” (this is called being a medical acupuncturist, while what he does is a full blown doctor of Chinese medicine) in between visits and on an emergency basis. We both think I would benefit from being able to be treated as soon as possible after those nights of hard sleep, or other episodes.

 

The treatment itself was really great, too.
And then I came back to the Loft.
I always find myself astonished that i am back in the workaday world after an acupuncture visit. Seems ridiculous, honestly.

 

I did the work thing, and nearly fell asleep at four, so I got up and walked to the roof and back and had a glass of milk, all of which helped. The release meeting went long since one of the operations engineers didn’t show and we ended up waiting an hour to make sure we weren’t starting an interdepartmental war by just doing it ourselves. In the waiting time, we ended up talking about the nothing things, including how amazing the 2004 Battlestar was and still is. 

 
I have read the remaining chapter and checked in with some of the responses for this half-week.
The video introduction is due tomorrow by midnight, which would have been true for my scheduled availability anyway.
I’ll probably do it tomorrow night, mostly because I hate them.
HatesThemWeDoes.gif

 

I have tea and knitting and I don’t know if I’ll watch something or just let the yarn be as fascinating as it is.
Life is good.

Letters from Home: Thursday, June 15

Last night's sleep was very good, and I woke up not able to do much, but not physically debilitated. I didn't go to the sauna or on the walk. My head was letting me know that I could end up in an episode at any time, so I didn't leave the apartment at all or push myself to be be NotHere. I spent my time making tea and neatening up for all the Friday Activities which were starting very soon, beyond just logging into my actual job: Dishwasher Repair Guy coming in, House Cleaning, virtual session with Corrine, and an in-apartment visit with Erica.

 

At work, I started crafting my weekly log, which is always a bit of a scrapbook project that gets done between other tasks. The Dishwasher Repair Guy showed up just as the house cleaning crew arrived, and of course there was ten minutes of a dance while we all tried not to step on each other. I logged in to the team meeting which started just then and was very glad I had already prepared the space. The dishwasher guy did a few things with a shop vac (thank goodness for the mute button!) and said he would need to come back in an hour. (I haven't seen him again yet. This is the way of maintenance dudes. They're here and then not, mysterious as cats, though not as silent.) Vacuuming and other activities happened as well, and then, just as the morning meeting ended, everyone was gone.

 

I did some more on the weekly log and other work tasks and wrapped them all up with whole minutes to spare before the virtual meeting with Corrine. We had another great talk. After that I spent half an hour sweeping up things and answering a bunch of questions that came in during lunch, then met with Erica. I like that she likes having tea in my apartment, and I'm very glad that my Apartment Therapy has resulted in a welcoming space that can host a conversation with grace. This is lovely, and the conversation was wonderful. I feel very centered and whole.

 

Afternoon meetings are happening, and they are running far too long with too much detail for a Firday afternoon. Issues are being found that need to be prioritized and addressed, and our lead solutions engineer for this work is on vacation for three weeks. 
This is the way of programming. 

 

After work I absolutely have to spend 15 minutes recording the "hi, i'm a dweeb" video and posting it to the discussion board. Please don't get me started on how wrong it is that my written reflections of the week's material are only worth 1 point (percent of total grade) but the video is worth 10. Seems wrong. (Rant over; thank you for listening.) The second half-week starts today with all the homework due Monday, so I'll be going over the lectures and readings to square that away before Vivian's visit tomorrow morning.

 

Then I I have some few housework items that remain -- changing the sheets on the bed and washing the set I take off, doing the dishes once the dishwasher repair guy finishes (not sure that he's acutally coming back at this point??), and putting the week's groceries away when they get here this evening. Dinner tonight is going to be roasted chicken, a baked sweet potato, and a salad. I love the way the fresh bread makes such flavorful croutons without needing extra seasoning. 

 

After housechores, I'm looking forward to knitting and watching an episode of City on Fire or Redemption (a BBC series from last year that I can stream via Britbox). Either way, it's clean sheet day and clean house day, and Vivian comes in the morning. 

 

I feel centered and whole and able to be in the world.

Apartment Therapy

Last night I fall asleep at a more reasonable time, 9:30, and slept until about 6, then stayed in bed doing a very long wake up period for about 30 minutes. This is practically ideal as a schedule, and I'm very glad that I was physically centered and present when I woke up. Somewhere along the line, probably during a dogsitting jaunt, I fell out of the habit of taking magnesium at night, which does a ton of good neurological things and also helps my sleep quality. I started taking it again last week, and I'm hopeful that this is the root of good sleep last night. 
 

While I was waking up, Kat texted that she was skipping the walk because of a headache. I went to the gym and had a nice long steam room and sauna session, then came back and changed into walking clothes. I had initially figured I would skip the walk too, but then after getting home I wanted to walk "just a little" which turned into the regular 1.5 mile cicrcuit we typically walk together. It was nice, and good, and I'm glad I went.

 

I stopped by the mail room on the way in from the walk and picked up a couple packages that arrived as well as the stack of "you've got mail" mail. Vivian's physical copy of Seraphia came, along with her credit card with her name on it, and there was also the delivery of a scad of yarn for a project I'm designing. This is the second shipment (different companies) that has been marked "yes, please wind this for me" that has not, in fact, been wound.  Okay, Universe. I dumped the yarn in a basket and set it aside. Nothing needs to be done for several weeks, so there's time to delve into the bedroom closet  and excavate my yarn swift.  It will likely trigger the whole Bedroom Closet Project, which is not something that needs to be this challenge or possibly even the next one. There is time, and all will be well.
 

I'm really pleased with how the Apartment Therapy has turned out so far. I feel like I have a great foundation for daily life, and for furture Apartment Therapy projects. My overall goal for 2023 is to have the Loft have everything I need, with a home for every thing, and nothing that I don't, along with out-of-the-way storage for less everyday items, which leaves me available to midfully consider what qualifies as an "everyday item." This has been a very spiritual process, and I'm liking it very much.
 

Speaking of Apartment Therapy, the second coffee table currently is sitting behind the sofa, in the dining / entrance area, where it landed while waiting for Vivian's Final Approval of getting rid of it (with suggestions for where it should live if we decide to keep it). It's becoming quite useful as a bench for putting on or taking off shoes and as a landing zone for whatever bag is in my hand at the moment. It might end up staying in the apartment after all. 
 

My morning phone call was particularly meaningful this morning after the walk, and when I logged in I felt centered and capable. This is good. 
 

Wednesday's list involves baking bread, taking the wagon of empty boxes to the dumpster area, and then going on to pick up the milk for the week. After that I need to read for 30 minutes or so if I haven't done that at lunchtime. I might walk over to the War on Books at lunchtime since it's just around the corner and they have a copy of Industrial Society and Its Future and I need to add it to my Endangered Books collection, probably right next to my copy of Maus. 
 

I've lost most of my Endangered Books Collection in the chaos that was 2020-2021, and I had thought I was okay with not having any of them on hand (because libraries, and electronic copies, and all that), but when Tennessee went full on Regime about Maus, I knew I needed to carve out a bit of shelf feet to recreate it. So far I have only Maus, but as the Book Wars ramp up, I am feeling the need to return to the original volumes that started the whole collection, especially The Anarchists Cookbook and 1984. Most of the books that I unboxed last week and put in the lower shelves of the coffee table seemed ridiculous for me to own -- the collected works of John Stuart Mill isn't really something I'm going to be skimming through the physical copy of, and several of the collections of short stories can be gladly shared into the hands of others now that they have graced my life, along with some of the other writing craft titles that I had to admit to myself that I was only keeping as demondstration of my writing chops. I'm not proving anything to anyone anymore. Titles that have a significant emotional component can stay, of course, like Firebreak and The Bone People. I'm not doing the whole "five books are all you ever need" plan, here, just some mindful weeding, which, now that I write it, is sort of a physical manifestation of the spiritual work I've been doing for the past couple years.

Possiblities

The new yarn stash arrived, and there are more colors than this, but this is the likely palette for a design that is making its way through my impagination. I'm pretty tickled with it overall. If needed there's plenty of accent color available, including some lovely blackberry tones, and a burnt orange that i think would be Just Right.