/20221130

in

52ºF, rain: Approaching cyborg installation (set for Thursday, 08 December, at 1400) and training now with far less apprehension / trepidation: plusses are outweighing the minuses and the minuses don't seem so intimidating. Sense of failure dissipating / damned if you do damned if you don't omnipresent but such is the T1D way.

Irony of ironies: my blood sugar is now fully back under control, as per its standard modus operandi, one which seems to operate in opposition to vehicles at the mechanics: Mechanic: "cant find anything wrong with it" / "But there's a burning smell and smoke coming from the engine" / "Didn't see anything" :: Endo: "it's time to start from scratch" / "I was fine last week and have been for a couple of weeks" / "ohmygod it's time to move to a pump and start from scratch and... "

This is the day, the life.

Workwise, realized what was wrong with the main WIP – probably – and adjusted accordingly. Not sure it will solve all the problems but it was one small one semi-resolved. Little victories in this, my daily offering to our lady of thankless callings.

“monster, draw near”

in

Another Tuesday (seems to be the stuck day) of stuckness in one of the WIPs, another Tuesday with an exercise from Lynda Barry's MAKING COMICS, "Monster Draw Near," which asked that I "1.) Pick a monster (from the Monster Jam page) and copy it into the first frame (of four quadrants)... 2.) Draw its parents in frame two... 3.) ...draw it as a toddler with an older sibling ... 4. ... as an elderly monster dancing with its true love…”

Can kind of make out an elderly couple dancing in the fourth frame but they kind of look like potatoes with a hat so IDK. Particularly fond of screaming toddler monster in the third. Enjoyed this one – loved that I got to use an earlier character.

this is the last thing i’m letting myself write about twitter

in

Every tweet is deleted, DMs in the process of, switches turned to off, one by one: every success and failure and hope and disappointment and opportunity and clusterfuck and useless ephemeralilty from 14 years of my life, from 27 through 41.

Were those 14 worth it? Not really, no.

While I've made some wonderful connections with now-lifelong friends and creative collaborators and had a few good opportunities, it wasn't worth what I let it do with my brain: I got sucked into its promise - which was very real - when I was at my most vulnerable, having lost my job, then my house – and I bought into the fantasy that it could give me a road forward.

The only road it gave me was a roundabout back into the feeding trough, dangling the hope that maybe I could be mentioned in the same breath as those writers with the 200k followers (a need for validation for which I’ve nothing but shame), that maybe I could have some impact on the world, that my hopes and creations were more than poker chips for a rigged game.

In the slot machine of Twitter, at least, they weren’t.

Anyhow, I'm not letting myself repeat those mistakes in this new social era (if I make the same mistakes at 41 as I did at 27, I won't be angry, just disappointed): I've happily moved on to Mastodon and here and the newsletter, doing whatever I feel like doing creatively and sharing it with whoever finds their way to it because at this point, honestly, fuck it.

“Fuck it”: was a more apposite summation of Twitter ever written? Probably. But fuck it: I'm free. And so are you.

/20221128

in

38ºF, clouds: Despite what the Attendance Card below would have you believe, I am not a bear: it was meant to be representative of me figuring out how to work the Dexcom 6 CGM and my vision of the future with the insulin pump... the left side of my head was supposed to be a snake but I guess it does look like a chewed bear's ear so what the hell, call me a bear... wrote the same thing twice in my journaling practice this morning so I already have a feeling that it's going to be one of those days... but I am not a bear.