it's so hard to stay when all you wanna do is ride (WN38)

This week was nuts. Oh, and I’m sick again (still?).

My birthday was Monday; I went right from teaching middle school to teaching my college course in the evening. I got home around 7:00pm, showered, ate dinner, and felt down — not because I had a particularly bad day, but it just felt like a bunch of stress came crashing upon me and like there was no way out. I guess I hoped something completely arbitrary like a birthday would wash away the weeks of discontent, but alas.

I won’t get into the play-by-play, to protect the privacy of the people involved and because it really isn’t that interesting to you, reader, but on Tuesday, I caught wind that there was a sudden opening in the English department at the high school in my district. By Friday, I was (tearfully) letting my middle schoolers know that I had made the decision to take the job and would be moving on around the end of January. It’s been a real rollercoaster — a plain example of how one’s life can change in moments. I wrote out an email to my current coworkers explaining the decision, which I’ll reproduce in part here:

I became a teacher for three reasons: I love literature, I love writing, and I love children. I have the best job in the world because I get to fulfill those passions every day. But increasingly in the last few years, I’ve longed for the literature that you find at the high school level, the writing that you can push older kids to do, and most of all, seeing kids grow as readers and thinkers over several years… Ordinarily, I’d never dream of leaving a job midyear like this, but opportunity came knocking, and I’m not one to turn it down. I’ve had a heavy heart the last few days as I weighed the decision, the foremost of which is that I hate to leave my students in the middle of the year like this. But I also know that this isn’t goodbye — it’s see you later.

I’ve been giddy — and anxious and hysterical and paranoid and about a dozen other emotions — ever since I made the decision. I know it’s going to be a ton of work, a huge challenge to adjust to a new building and culture. But there’s so much that I’m looking forward to, and I feel newly invigorated by the prospect of a fresh start and a new adventure. There’s a lot of logistics to figure out, but I’m thrilled. More to come on this in the weeks ahead!

On the weekend, I played around with Jellyfin a bit. I’m currently pretty deep into Plex but would prefer to use open source software. I found Jellyfin to be a bit slow and clunky (which could well be a limitation of my server) on both the web app and the Roku app, but it’s mostly useable for movies and TV. I hit a lot more walls for my music. I have a library approaching 20k songs¹ that I’ve spent a lot of time combing through on Plex (Plexamp, specifically) to star tracks, build playlists, etc. I probably could transfer that with a not insignificant amount of effort, but the bigger hurdle is where to listen. I’ve played around with Symfonium on my phone (which already supports Plex) and like it well enough, but there’s no desktop parallel. I could go back to foobar2000, but I like having one app that’s synchronized across desktop and mobile. So it seems I’m sticking with Plex/Plexamp for the time being.²

I’m also really excited that omg.lol recently started a Forgejo instance. I’ve been a happy customer with them for over a year, and while I recently migrated my git repos to 32bitcafe’s Gitea, they don’t have a working Actions workflow, so I’m right now mirroring the repo to Github and then deploying to Cloudflare Pages. Once omg.lol launches an Actions Runner on Forgejo, I’m planning to set up a build script that deploys to (probably) Nearly Free Speech so I can start ending my reliance on Microsoft and Cloudflare. I am shocked I just wrote all of those sentences because a year or two ago, I really didn’t understand how git worked at all. I’m still really new to it, and I know it will be a headache for me to figure out how to get that all working, but I’m excited to do it! Once I figure things out, I’ll do a proper write up.

As I mentioned last week, I re-read (listened to the audiobook) of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow in preparation for discussing it in my college course. That discussion centered a lot around screen time and the role we give technology in our lives and our students’ lives. That’s distant from Doctorow’s themes — the book is largely about technology as a tool for opposing fascism — and that’s maybe on me for poorly framing the conversation, but it was interesting conversation and that’s what matters. I started the class off by having everyone (including me) look at their screen time for the day. I sheepishly admitted that mine was nearly three hours, the most significant of which was Forkyz because I do the New York Times Crossword most mornings.³ I did direct the conversation toward considering the apps we’re using and whether we trust them with our data, but I was shocked to find most of my students reporting 10 to 13 hours in a single day. A single day!

I could have walked away from that conversation patting myself on the back for my comparatively minimal screen time, but instead I felt even more pressed to do something before mine spins out of control.⁴ Many of the students tried to pose screen time as self-care, a break from the stressors of being a college student, and they suggested that they’re watching YouTube videos as an alternative to doomscrolling. They suggested the same for me: that education is such a tremendously stressful career that I have to come home and just passively scroll to recover. I’ve often felt the same way, but — perhaps returning to some of the themes of Little Brother — I also think that’s a form of social control.⁵ We are so dispirited and drained by capitalist society and the phones keep us distracted from initiating real social change and participation in alternative culture. So consider this a reaffirmation of my previously oblique goals to reduce my screen time and focus more on shit that actually matters. I mean, I’m constantly writing here about how I’m making glacial progress through Villette, yet here I am spending 20 minutes a day on fucking Facebook doing god knows what.

Here are the steps I’ve taken:

• Removed shortcuts to most social media apps on my homescreen. All that’s left is Discord (which I barely use these days), Mastodon, Snapchat (low usage), and tumblr (a few days a week — it makes me laugh).
• Put a big screen time tracking widget on the now empty space on my homescreen in hopes that, when I unlock my phone, I see where I am for the day and make informed decisions.
• Added app timer limits for Facebook and Reddit (10 mins/day). I’m hoping to eventually get those to zero, but I used this strategy when I wanted to quit Instagram a while back and it worked.
• Added a Read You widget to my homescreen to replace my mindless scrolling with RSS feeds of blogs written by actual people.

The honest truth is that I love technology and being on the computer. I’m not necessarily looking to eliminate that from my life, but I do want to be more conscious of where I am spending that time (i.e. independent, decentralized spaces online that aren’t stealing my data) and the loss of idle time. When I actually sit down at my desk and use my computer, I’m productive (grading, planning lessons, etc.), working on projects (this blog and my home server, which is increasingly a pathway to get away from giant corporate apps), or interacting with meaningful culture (listening to music). That’s all worth keeping, I think, but I need to reclaim the time I’m losing to mindless scrolling and replace it with things that are more worthwhile. It wasn’t always like this! I want to go back to a world before all the apps and the social media. Some of it can still be digital, but it has to be a digital that adds to my life. I used to read books! I used to play games! Now I just lament every week that I haven’t had time for those things while spending hours on Poshmark because it’s easier to open an app than crack a book. But I want to start using my brain again.

Reading

I’m still making extremely slow progress through Villette; I was worse this week than last because of everything I had going on, work-wise, but now that I’m going to be teaching high school, I feel I must re-establish my literary authority and start burning through some classics.⁶

Watching

I finished season two of Orange is the New Black. It’s probably still my favorite season of the show, but I recall thinking it was astonishingly good when it first came out. It does not quite reach the same crescendos for me this time around, but I’m still watching.

Joe and I are now I guess going through the commentaries for The Lord of the Rings. I’ve listened to some of them over the years, both with and without him, but we did Fellowship and Two Towers this week. He’s only really interested in the cast commentaries for now, so I might do the others on my own at some point.

Listening

I woke up on Saturday and thought of “Windmills of Your Mind” by Parenthetical Girls for the first time in a long time, so I bought their discography off Bandcamp⁷ and skipped around through some old favorites.

Talulah’s Tape by good flying birds was featured on Bandcamp, so I listened through that. It’s good — “wallace,” “pulling hair,” and “last straw” were my standouts, but the whole thing is nice sleepy indie rock. The band has a a really cool site, too.

I listened to Slothrust’s The Pact. It’s OK, but I like Of Course You Do a lot more.

I gave Mass Romantic by The New Pornographers a proper listen. A coworker recommended them a while back. I really like “Breakin’ the Law,” but the rest didn’t hold much of a shine for me.

Los Campesinos! are re-pressing their Christmas album; I was able to snag the limited edition vinyl before it sold out. I’ve never been much of a fan of their Christmas songs — truthfully I don’t think I’ve ever properly sat down to listen through to the album — but they’ve discussed wanting to reissue all of their albums on vinyl and it seems as good a time as any to try to collect them all. I already have all their Heart Swells 7"s,⁸ so the hard part is through.

Here’s my song list for the week:

1. “pulling hair” by good flying birds
2. “bones” by Rainbow Kitten Surprise
3. “Windmills of Your Mind” by Parenthetical Girls
4. “Nowhere Fast” by The Smiths
5. “Travel Bug” by Slothrust
6. “Racing Gloves” by Plumtree
7. “Wolfman” by The Front Bottoms
8. “Lemonade Grrrl” by Joanna Newsom
9. “It Shits!!!” by Bomb the Music Industry!
10. “We Are All Accelerated Readers” by Los Campesinos! (three weeks strong)

véronique posts photos of her zines in her blog posts which often contain lists of things she’s into at the moment. I think I’d like to try the same thing for these song lists! I’ve bought a notebook on JetPens to use for this.⁹ I don’t think I’m cool or creative enough to get into making zines (yet?), but perhaps this is a toe in the water.