progress_report epitome of incomprehensibility (My contributions will be neither be 100% sincere or 100% ironic, because they're from me, but anyone is free to report progress of any sort with any degree of sincerity here.) -What I'm happiest about: I finished the outline of a story I was struggling with last night AND the draft of another this afternoon. The sort-of complete story, The_Palm_Reader, is one I began in Germany back in 2023, which shows how glacially slow I am (at first I wrote "slows how"), but...progress! -I slept about 9 hours last night. Upon calculating that, I was impressed and a little perplexed. Sure, I didn't have to wake up early, so no alarms, and the night was cool, but was I all that tired? Oh well. Impressive sleep. It felt like an accomplishment. -No paid work today, but I refrained from stopping for bubble_tea on my walk from Atwater Library to the train station. Packed my own lunch. Spent nothing. Collected 4 cans and water bottles: 40¢ worth. That's my get-rich-slow scheme. ...Ah, fuck it, I said I'd transfer money to Hanin and Maysaa tonight (the young people in Gaza who have families that I started helping by accident). I'll do that. Generous_but_stingy. 250704 ... e_o_i -I can now do exactly *one* chin-up from a slack position (that is, me lowering myself as much as possible while hanging onto the chin-up bar and then pulling my chin up over it). See "rearming." -I recycled drink containers for pocket change and strange conversations. See "merci_beaucoup." 250705 ... e_o_i -I finished organizing the books on the bookshelf in the old office of the tutoring centre. Boss B. only paid me in books, not money, so why the hell did I bother to sort all the fiction alphabetically by author? Am I genetically a librarian?? (My dad used to be one.) The other books I just put into categories like poetry, plays, business, self-help, psychology, travel, food, ecology, etc. There was a lot of ecology for some reason, so it got its own section. 250707 ... e_o_i I was doing that because there's going to be a moving sale. Here are the books I got - I've decided that getting books is a kind of progress - 5 Language Visual Dictionary: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian (There's some kind of Volkswagen on the cover - cutesy headlights like those on my parents' MiEV. The blinker light Britishly calls itself an "indicator." Then le clignotant, der Blinker, el intermitente, and la freccia.) Wie Geht's? An Introductory German Course (2 volumes, a textbook and workpack. Inexplicably, the front cover image shows four stone animals stacked on top of each other from biggest to smallest: donkey, dog, cat, and chicken.) The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (B. says it's also a play. Comical misunderstandings between an ESL teacher and his student, who likes to write his name with asterisks in between the letters and thinks the plural of "library" is "public library.") 250707 ... e_o_i -I started a number of batiks today. I'm not satisfied with my colour-mixing skills right now; it seems I haven't learned from last year. Some colours are too intense, others too bland. But the batiks themselves are a material progress. Material, hah. -I wrote about writing a story - Judgment_of_the_Aunts. I didn't write it, but I wrote about writing it. (I *did* do a bit on the train yesterday.) -I woke up several times last night, which led to odd disconnected dreams. Nevertheless, and despite shifting my sleep schedule an hour and a half earlier than usual, I slept 7 hours. 250710 ... e_o_i edit: odd and somewhat connected dreams. Kinetic, connected. 250710 ... e_o_i edit: the "train" I wrote on yesterday was a bus. 250710 ... raze what began as a random mess of a storage room and became a cozy little sitting room as a way of processing trauma needs a fresh coat of paint (proverbially speaking) after the self-imposed destruction of a shelf that held the bulk of my records. a new shelf has taken its place, but it's a little wobbly. so it'll need to be anchored to the wall. and it doesn't stand as tall as the last shelf did, revealing the steel tracks of what was a makeshift wall shelf before we moved in. that eyesore will need to be covered with something more pleasant to look at. the most time_consuming task might just be re-alphabetizing all those records. maybe i'll even be able to track down the rickie lee jones ep that mysteriously disappeared on me. here's hoping. 250712 ... raze the fallen records have been rearranged, and *almost* all of them fit on the new shelf. i'll need to get something to place on top that will hold everything from the allman brothers band to john_cale. i have to say — the new kid on the block (which is really a hand_me_down) looks so much better than that old shelf did, it's kind of ridiculous. 250713 ... raze i made the mistake of not measuring the depth of my new-old shelf before getting a small record holder made of metal and wood to accommodate the stragglers. instead of sitting atop its larger sibling the way i'd planned, it had to settle for straddling, legs dangling off the sides. as luck would have it, the weight of the records stabilizes what holds them and keeps it locked in place. two massive pictures that hung on my bedroom wall in the house before this one have spent almost two decades relegated to the basement here. they're now doing lorde's work, covering those ugly steel tracks. a bit of tidying up, a once-over with the vacuum_cleaner, and i'll be done. it's funny how much nicer this room looks than it ever did in the before times — water damage, window air_conditioner and all. 250716 ... raze (as for rickie lee, there's been no sign of her. it's as if she fell into that volcano of hers, never to be seen again.) 250717 ... e_o_i Two things: 1) I wrote a pantoum about the Berlin Wall, but the first draft took me about three hours. Or maybe two and a half? At first, I looked up other pantoums for inspiration (it's a type of poem that repeats certain lines - like a villanelle, but I find it allows for more movement and change). About three hours, about the Berlin_Wall. 2) And about hours, I'm trying to wake up earlier because I've drifted into a too-late sleep schedule. So today, I set my alarm for 9:30; tomorrow it will be 9. I'll keep going until I reach 7:30. Then a planned plateau, unless it happens I'm accepted for the job where I have to get up early to tutor folks in a different time zone. I don't know. I haven't even applied yet. ... These are small things, the 2nd one dull, but I want to report successes because I've been in such a rut lately. Slower than molasses going uphill in January, in January. 260117 ... e_o_i I tried to get up at 8:30 today, but I felt too tired, so I just rolled the alarm back to 9:30. (That's what you do with an alarm, you roll it.) Amended wake-up schedule: Tuesday, 9:00 AM Wednesday, 8:30 AM Thursday, 8:00 AM Friday, 7:30 AM ...but that brings me to the weekend, when it's tempting to sleep in. Pah. At least, I wasted time profitably while my phone was charging by updating blather with things I'd meant to write (a) month(s) ago: news_from_the_ex news_from_the_boss (I was kidding about the reason for my worry about B. being the money he owes me. Kind of. But I do hope he stays safe.) 260119 what's it to you? who go blather from