writeformyself

[writeformyself]

For my English class, I wrote a continuation of The Scarlet Letter where it turns out that Hester used secret herbs to help Dimmesdale fake his death so they could have a happy ending. They ended up having several children after Pearl, all with gem themed names.

"I know your school didn't teach you how to write fanfic-" I know this is something said in response to Americans whining about their education system in response to racism, but my school English class actually did have us write an epilogue to a book we were reading as an assignment, so in a way my school did teach me how to write fanfic. I have no point to make with this point and I don't care to i just wanted to share a tidbit about my life

[writeformyself]

I love how the queue feature hides just how much time I spend scrolling through this site at 3am after putting the four year old back to bed.

[writeformyself]

Every semester, I have a giant list of stuff to do to set up my courses and every semester I somehow underestimate how long it'll take me. Each task is fairly small, but there are just so many of them and so many little details that I get bogged down and stuck.

Yesterday I ended up half watching two episodes of Columbo while trying to trick myself into being productive. It wasn't terribly effective, but I missed enough of the plot of the episode with some guy on a sailboat that I must have been paying attention to my email for a while there.

[writeformyself]

The semester is about to start again, so this is the time to procrastinate by queueing up a few posts here while stressing out.

The university has been undergoing "emergency network maintenance" for over two weeks now, resulting in one of the servers I use for a class to be unavailable with no end in site, so guess who gets to frantically come up with an alternative before next week?

[writeformyself]

In class today, I mentioned a specialized data structure that the students might want to look into for their next project. If you put the name into Google, the second result is the paper from the early 1990s where the structure was introduced, so that seemed enough to let them find more information. (The first result was the Wikipedia page, which also linked to the paper.)

Later on in the computer lab, I watched a student trying to search for the structure without any success. When I got closer, I realized he was only searching for videos. Did he seriously expect someone to make a tutorial video for a specialized structure introduced in a paper 30 years ago?

[writeformyself]

Maybe I've watched too much Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood with my kid, but I'm reminded of how Prince Tuesday has all the teenager jobs in the Land of Make Believe (store clerk, lifeguard, camp counselor, babysitter, trolley washer, etc.)

I've had a lot of tradies through this place recently and they all have an apprentice and the apprentices all look exactly the same. I'm convinced there's this one teenager in town with like 5 apprenticeships.

[writeformyself]

My work email inbox is down to a dozen messages, none of them unread. Considering that I had hundreds of unread messages in there earlier in the week, I'm feeling pretty satisfied with myself. It has been months since the inbox message list could fit on the screen without scrolling.

I'm sure it'll all fill up again as soon as the students start freaking out about their final projects, but I might get a few days of peace before that happens.

[writeformyself]

I love it when a task I hadn't gotten to yet gets cancelled entirely. I was feeling guilty about not getting around to setting up some bookkeeping files for this administrative thing we have to do every semester, but I got an email from the committee chair that we're not going to do it this term because we need to reevaluate the process.

This does, of course, mean that we'll have all sorts of meetings to update the process next term, but that's a problem for future me. Present me is just happy to have something taken off my todo list.

[writeformyself]

My mother has always had strange food restrictions justified with "it's healthy!" and it's made me want to pull my hair out just trying to figure out what food we can actually serve her. It's always something different: no rice or grains, no dairy, semi-vegan (whatever she meant by that), paleo, etc. It doesn't help that my dad tended towards the "pile of meat, no veggies" end of things so there was virtually no overlap in what they ate sometimes.

Now my dad is diabetic and had been changing his diet to help with that, but now both of them claim that they "aren't hungry" when it comes time for an evening meal. I wish they'd just admit that they're intermittent fasting and stop acting like we're the odd ones for eating multiple meals. It's like she doesn't want to make her diet restrictions clear because then she wouldn't be able to martyr herself no matter what we offer. "Oh, it's fine if we go to the BBQ restaurant! I don't eat red meet, but I can eat this side of green beans. I don't want to be any trouble!" So frustrating!

thinking a lot lately about the normalization of orthorexia in our society, and it's just bleak.

on the surface i think that orthorexia isn't the immediate threat that anorexia or bulimia poses, but i would almost call it a gateway disorder. you are putting food in your body, yes, and that food is staying there... however, in our current diet obsessed cultural landscape with profit driven social media algorithms, it motivates people to do some truly dangerous shit beyond just an obsession with the healthiest and cleanest foods

for example, i started by cutting out carbs, but eventually when that stopped getting the weight loss results i had been promised, i stopped eating for days at a time. more than half the week i would go all day long without eating, and then i would regularly go three days without eating with aspirations to do more. i dreamed about going a month without food. i rationalized all of it "for my health"

(also side note i admitted to several healthcare professionals that i was doing this, and while i got a pretty flimsy "we don't recommend that", what i also got was regular recommendations to lose weight and also praise when i did lose weight - despite my admission that i was losing said weight by going days without eating. never once was it suggested i had a problem. when i say eating disorders are actively encouraged in fat people, i 100% mean that.)

i also had a friend suffering from orthorexia who almost died because of supplements she was taking that she read about in these "wellness" spaces. she was in the hospital, her doctors were completely stumped as to what was happening and told her she was likely going to die, before she thought to bring up the supplements she had been taking. they were basically like "what the fuck that's the problem right there stop fucking taking those."

she learned nothing from this experience. she told me this story as we were catching up one day and not an hour later she recommended i take some other supplement she read about on the internet

[writeformyself]

I spent a big chunk of the morning grading midterm exams so that I can honestly tell the students that I've made progress when I see them in lecture this afternoon.

[writeformyself]

How did I go so long using emacs without ever even trying Tramp? I'm sure it was because I though it would be a big hassle and maybe it was in the past, but it really did work transparently for me. I opened a file on my work computer from my laptop at home and it just worked!

Now, will I use this regularly? Probably not, since nearly everything I do is under version control and I can just use git to push and pull copies around, but occasionally it'll be handy. I finally tried it out when I just wanted to copy a couple lines from a configuration file on my work machine so I could replicate the setup on my laptop at home.

[writeformyself]

I'm really getting into messing around with org-mode (it looks useful for outlining assignments at work, so it's not a total waste of my time) and spent a good part of an afternoon poking around in the prep resources on the NaNoWriMo site.

I might try writing fanfiction for this. (I've read enough of it, might as well see if I can create some.) I like the thought that the characters and world would already exist, and there's certainly no shortage of "what happened next?" and "what if?" ideas floating around.

Part of me is just prone to overcomplicating things. My first big work doesn't need to be an epic time travel mystery or something. I could just try putting some characters into a situation and playing around with what would happen next. (Yes, I know that's sort of obvious, but I get in my own way a lot.)

Despite never succeeding at writing a novel and not actually having an idea for one yet, I am once again considering attempting NaNoWriMo this year. I'm sure it's partially just an urge to avoid all the other things I need to be doing right now (writing midterm exams, creating new lab assignments, wrangling a preschooler, general adulting crud) and not really a strong desire to write.

The best I've done at NaNoWriMo was a couple years ago when I just tried to write something every day, essentially just journaling, usually at night on my phone while lying in bed. I don't think I got much more than 5000 words for the whole month, but at least it was something.

This year, I'm starting to get distracted by tools already (looking into emacs org-mode) but as usual don't have a story idea that could become a large work. Maybe I should just try to churn out a collection of short stories and essays? I could slap a framing device around it and claim it's a novel afterwards.

[writeformyself]

Ooh, I am seriously tempted to make programming this an assignment for my students next semester. (I've assigned both Tetris and Minesweeper in past semesters, so why not both at once?)

Tetrisweeper is a very addictive fusion of Tetris and Minesweeper!

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Windows & Browser)

[writeformyself]

Despite never succeeding at writing a novel and not actually having an idea for one yet, I am once again considering attempting NaNoWriMo this year. I'm sure it's partially just an urge to avoid all the other things I need to be doing right now (writing midterm exams, creating new lab assignments, wrangling a preschooler, general adulting crud) and not really a strong desire to write.

The best I've done at NaNoWriMo was a couple years ago when I just tried to write something every day, essentially just journaling, usually at night on my phone while lying in bed. I don't think I got much more than 5000 words for the whole month, but at least it was something.

This year, I'm starting to get distracted by tools already (looking into emacs org-mode) but as usual don't have a story idea that could become a large work. Maybe I should just try to churn out a collection of short stories and essays? I could slap a framing device around it and claim it's a novel afterwards.

[writeformyself]

A problem with being able to work from home when I don't need to be on campus to teach is that I convince myself that I'll actually get work done there. At least I did get a load of laundry run and hung out to dry this morning before needing to leave, but I probably would have been more productive if I had packed a lunch and spent the morning in my office with the fancy dual monitor setup instead of sitting on my couch with just my laptop and the temptation of streaming video on the TV in front of me.

[writeformyself]

Okay, I'm trying to queue up a few posts again and get back into writing. I'm not really up for much today, though. I've caught some sort of bug from my preschooler and have been congested for most of the past week. I lost my voice and every time I try to rest it, I end up straining it trying to get my kid's attention, usually to prevent/stop some mischief. I still ended up in a situation this weekend where I learned that rubbing alcohol can remove ballpoint pen ink from skin fairly well. (Kid ran out of paper and decided legs were the next obvious canvas. At least it wasn't permanent destruction.)

[writeformyself]

I haven't been very good about posting here. When I first created this account, it was with the intent that I'd use it to actually write more often. It did result in some thoughts about work and infertility (the main topics for me to rant about), but once I had a kid during an ongoing global pandemic, I didn't really find the time to post anymore.

I did make a rule for myself that anything I posted here would involve me writing something, even just a sentence, so while my main account has a queue full of untagged reblogs, this one has fallen silent.

Maybe I'll try again and see if I can get in the habit again.