sunday seven

For Christmas I got a cool little lens kit that clips onto a phone. There’s a telephoto, fisheye, wide angle, and a macro which appears to have a depth of field of a couple millimeters. It’s a bit of a production to attach it right, so it’s not the sort of thing to bust out in real-time to capture a moment, but still. Kinda cool.

And that’s the latest batch of lemon seeds, ready for germination, and then potting, selection, and raising. Which of them will someday grow to live in the yard of my hacienda? There are a lot of assumptions packed into that question, some which tiptoe right up to the line of challenging karma. Best not to spell them out, for that would seem a direct provocation to a universe that has schooled me well on such matters. God laughs, and all that.

Can I make another terrible confession? I’m going to be relieved when our national Marie Kondo obsession passes. Not because she isn’t kind and lovely, not because her methods are unsound, and not because a tidy home isn’t appealing. No, all of that is so. It’s the shame of the monumental, overwhelming clutter surrounding me, and my powerlessness in doing anything about it. The sort of lifestyle she coaches requires the commitment of the entire household, and I’ll never get that. So I’ll be happier when the timeline slides past this era, and I no longer have to be confronted with the idea that there are other ways to live, ways I can’t know.

I’m going to pause my job search for a little while. I mean, if something incredible falls from the sky and into my lap, sure, I’ll listen. Absent that, though, it’s time to focus on the work I have in front of me. I’ve mailed it in there for too long, figuring I’d be gone soon, and I am starting to feel bad about it. It’s a terrible job in a lot of ways, but it (mostly) pays the bills, and there are some not-terrible things about it, too, mostly in the area of work-life balance, which is so vitally important. Besides, the job market has spoken loudly to me over the last year, and to borrow a term from the financial market, it’s zero bid.

Further to my post yesterday about my tracking follows/unfollows, I disabled that script. I don’t need to know. But I want to promise something to everyone: if I do determine you unfollowed me, I will never be the person to bother you about it. Go if you have to. Life’s too short to be stuck with a bad follow. And in return, I’d hope for the same from you. Twice I’ve been confronted by people who figured out I unfollowed them. It was brutally uncomfortable, as kind as I tried to be about it. I’m told one of them still rants obliquely about it. Please don’t be that person—to me, to anyone.

It figures that the Bears would get good again after I swore off the NFL. I’ve watched some this year, though it’s still at arm’s length. That league is so fucking horrific on so many levels. So is the sport as a whole. I’m thankful every day Danny never wanted to play. (We’d have told him no.) But in a metropolis like this one, it’s impossible to participate in any of the local discourse without the topic coming up, so I feel the need to be informed. That said, though, I see that they’ve resurrected the atrocity of the thirty-year-old Da Bears bit from SNL, and that some people here appear to take pride in that portrayal, and that cures my ambivalence. Burn all of this and salt the earth after the fire.

I have the rarest thing today: a fully unscheduled weekend day. The calendar square is blank. I have twenty things to do, of course, but nowhere to be. Get to know the feeling of liberation and relief, he said. The morning’s past, now, and I should start getting after the stuff. May today bring you restoration, babies.