Notes
📚💬 “How many of us have already met our doom and then had to get out of bed and go on?” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
📚💬 “Disability describes a condition that is both more othered from and profoundly closer to one’s body than any other political condition that I can think of.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
📚💬 " All the ways we cannot do something, all the ways we won’t be able to do something—what sort of political dreams can come from this as a starting place?" Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
📚💬 " What about stories that are enlivened, vivified, not despite illness and disability but because of them?" Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
Finished reading: Like No Other Lover by Julie Anne Long 📚
So great. Julie Anne Long is excellent both at the plot level and at the prose level.
🎭 I’m at Beetlejuice The Musical and it’s like the musical theater version of Bats Day at the Fun Park. Everyone is here in their goth finery and it makes me so happy.
Finished reading: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman 📚
As great as everyone says. It’s striking how much chronic illness and grad school prepped me for accepting rather than struggling with the ideas here. This is a perfect book to read when you’re in your 40s.
Please read today’s Book Riot Literary Activism Newsletter and EveryLibrary’s statement on the appointment of Keith E. Sonderling as Acting Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It’s always a hard time for libraries in the US but it’s been an especially rough couple of weeks.
📚💬 “…having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant…” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman writes about professor Robert Boice’s attempt to get PhD students to work a little bit daily and take weekends off. The students wouldn’t do it and their desire to rush the work actually got in the way of their progress. I found something similar when I did a dissertation boot camp where for the whole day I was working on my dissertation instead of the small increments that I normally did. I was so exhausted after that week of pushing really hard that I had to take a 2-week break which obviously did not advance me as far as you might hope a boot camp would.
📚💬 “…the presence of problems in your life… isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence, but the very substance of one.” Oliver Burkeman, Forty Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 “…reading Is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Finished reading: The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long 📚
A book with an awesome heroine and a delightful hero. Julie Anne Long is new to me and seems bound to become one of my favorite historic romance authors.
📚💬 “Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they better not be, because results always come later—and later is always too late.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 " …a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome." Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 " In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth." Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Sometimes, I’ll think of someone I connected with online and wonder how they’re doing. I’ll miss them and if I don’t have their email address or they don’t have a newsletter or RSS feed, I just won’t know how they are, because social timelines are bad for my mental health right now.
“…what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 “…if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
EveryLibrary has created a tool you can use to send an email to your legislators and governors urging them to support federal funding for Libraries. Libraries could see downstream impacts from Trump’s Executive Order as soon as this Friday.
📚💬 " The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things." Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
🔖 Book Riot’s Literary Activism Newsletter explains: Library Funding Targeted in New Trump Executive Order: What It Means & What To Do Now.
I was looking at my On This Day page, reading an old post I wrote that’s especially thoughtful and in-depth about improv, and it struck me that I don’t think that deeply anymore. I miss it.
But I do think that deeply at work, I’m just not blogging about it. May be time to start blogging that stuff.
🔖 Read The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? by Oliver Burkeman (The Guardian).
I’m trying to find a space where determinism and existentialism co-exist. I just keep coming back to the line from the TV show Angel: “if nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.”