i would have recited shakespeare with you, let you read all the good lines (WN40)

Doing

This week was absolutely overwhelming. I don’t want to get into the details here to protect myself professionally, but I’m no longer switching to teaching high school in the January. It is still my long-term desire to teach older kids, but circumstances changed around the opening that I was going to fill. I spent most of the week ping-ponging between emails and phone calls, and I think I averaged something like three hours of sleep each night. I am still sorting through my (mixed) feelings, but mostly, I’m just tired.

I channeled that exhaustion into spending my weekend fucking around on the computer: I worked on transitioning from Plex to Navidrome for music streaming, transitioned some of my expiring domains off Squarespace¹ and to Porkbun, and moved this site off of GitHub and Cloudflare Pages. I also set up Maloja as a self-hosted last.fm / Listenbrainz alternative (and imported all my legacy data in). Navidrome has built-in support for both Listenbrainz and last.fm, so I’m going to continue mirroring my data to both, but I like that I can hit the eject button any time I want and move purely to a self-hosted solution.

Reading

I’ve made some more progress on Villette this week. I’ve started reading during my lunch, which, it turns out, leaves me feeling a lot better than my typical practice of working through lunch. I’m just shy of 200 pages in, which is about halfway through my copy. The book has started to lean into some of the gothic tropes that are more pronounced in Jane Eyre — Lucy suffered from a mysterious fit of nerves, swooned and passed out alone on the streets at night only to be rescued by the emotionally unavailable male love interest, whose true identity was then revealed. It’s a bit of a strange turn considering that the last hundred pages or so have mostly concerned the banalities of Lucy’s time teaching at Rue Fossette, and the text makes Dr. John being Graham Bretton out to be more scandalous than it is. It’s bizarre — in so many ways Villette has been quite similar to the simplicity of Agnes Grey with touches of Jane Eyre, especially in Lucy’s depressive episodes. I’m curious to read how it continues to unfold, but it’s very much torn between those two worlds.

Watching

I’m (emotionally) done with Orange is the New Black now, and Joe agreed to re-watch Breaking Bad with me. Unfortunately I first watched it in 2012 or 2013 and it became a part of my personality that I love Breaking Bad. I subjected him to rewatching it several times in only a few years; eventually he got sick of it, but that hasn’t stopped me from asking him constantly if he wants to rewatch it (or I just find consistent opportunities to bring the show up in conversation with any captive audience). In a remarkable show of patience, I laid off for a few years and he finally caved. We haven’t started it yet but please expect that to be all I talk about for the foreseeable future.

Playing

I played a little more Final Fantasy Tactics. I am growing concerned about Delita; I don’t know where I am in the narrative (I think still Chapter 3?). I’m still loving it and wish I made more time for it (rather than spending all my time fucking around on the computer).

Listening

I bought three albums on Bandcamp Friday and listened through to them. The first was Best Friends Forever by Best Friends forever, which is a collection of some of their rarities from the early 2000s. I thought “Abe Lincoln” was cute and enjoyed it, but I found the rest either unremarkable or cacophonic (“Mountain Song”). I think it is very cool that Best Friends Forever writes love songs about the US presidents. I also stumbled on this fun review of Romance Conflict Adventure while googling for info on the band:

There’s only three people I’ve ever wanted to trade bodies with. One is Bruce Willis’ French girlfriend from Pulp Fiction, the other two are Jessica Lee Seaman and Briana Jennifer Smith from Best Friends Forever. The first time I heard their music was two years ago when a guy I was crushing on told me he was sure that he could never love anyone else besides them. I totally understood why, then felt like crying.

I also grabbed Always Happy to Explode by Sunset Rubdown since I’ve lately been so into Apologies to the Queen Mary. I think I’m just a fan of Spencer Krug’s voice, both in performance and his songwriting, and the experimentation with weird synthesizers (“Candles”). Always Happy to Explode also has a second vocalist, which I think adds a cool dimension to a lot of their songs. I did have to listen to this album in two sittings, however, because I was nodding off at my computer for the first time around.²

My last Bandcamp Friday purchase was When Horses Would Run by Being Dead. I’m already a big fan of their newest album, EELS, but I hadn’t listened to their other work. I really dig When Horses; it’s the same cool sound as EELS (though EELS was more experimentative in genre in places), just more of it. Being Dead is probably going to be one of my top artists for the year.

Here’s my playlist for the week, this time with a notebook picture!

1. “Misery Lane” by Being Dead
2. “Abe Lincoln” by Best Friends Forever
3. “Canopies and Drapes” by Emmy the Great
4. “Candles” by Sunset Rubdown
5. “cassadaga fairy garden” by kitty
6. “Still Ill” by The Smiths
7. “Crab” by Alex G
8. “You Good? (In Media Res)” by Proper.
9. “In Twos” by Horsegirl
10. “Bozo bozo bozo” by underscores

I’m going to continue writing these in the notebook (a JetPens Kanso Noto) to play with fountain pens (this one was a Platinum Preppy EF with Kaweco Pearl Black ink) and practice my handwriting with them. You can see it’s imperfect! Honestly, I’m not handwriting much lately since I switched to Obsidian for my work notes. I’m happy with that change because it’s really useful to have them searchable and easily shareable, but I miss handwriting. I figure this is a nice habit to be in (and I’ll eventually have a notebook filled with my favorite songs). I want to start journaling again, too. I love you, dear reader, but I filter some of my more personal and private thoughts here. That’s the nature of having a public blog and I don’t plan to quit that, but I think there’s value in maintaining both.