Warning: all my photos this week are food photos. I promise that the fall colors around here are gorgeous, and that the sunsets have been incredible, but in these moments of noticing, I have been blissfully without my phone to take photos, or have made a conscious choice to leave these moments undocumented.
Not unrelatedly, I am experiencing a strong distaste for social media right now, which is usually the case, but it's stronger than ever. This morning while trying to relax in the bath with a book, my mind kept wandering back to a comment someone wrote on Facebook that bothered me, and to another post on Instagram that distressed me. In both cases I found the restraint not to comment, but my mind kept coming up with zingers I would have loved to reply with. I kept having to take deep breaths, return to the present and re-read the paragraph I was on. It's a sign I need to return to my better disciplines of only signing on for work purposes and signing off on my personal accounts.
Coincidentally, this article just arrived in my Pocket from the Harvard Business Review: To Control Your Life, Control What You Pay Attention To
One of my goals this week was to make exercise fun. I found new playlists for my regular workouts which made a surprisingly huge difference, and on Friday, I decided to go old-school and found a Jane Fonda video on Youtube - I called it my "Fonda Friday." Because of this, I exercised each morning and didn't mind getting up for it.
I've also been working on a different method of goal setting that seems to work for me because it's not so much about goals - it's more of a curiosity-driven approach to see how long I can keep up a streak. For instance, if I work out today, I make a plan for how to keep it up tomorrow. It's no longer a goal, like "Work out 5 days this week," it's a question: "I wonder how many days I can work out this week." If I do it right, I have more on days than off days. And I don't feel bad if I break the streak, because I can just decide to start up a new one. I'm still figuring it out, and what areas of my life I can apply it to (like house cleaning???), but so far so good.
This was also the week that my niece and I continued our annual tradition of Halloween cookie decorating. In this pandemic world, we decorated them outside. It was so nice to spend time with her and feel some sense of normalcy and celebration, and see her parents and brother while I was there, too.
Reading
I'm skimming Anne Helen Petersen's Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. I read her viral essay last year that prompted the book, so I know the basic premise: Precarity causes burnout, our systems are built to perpetuate that precarity and therefore burnout, and it doesn't need to be that way. Otherwise, I'm onto the final short stories of Mavis Gallant's Across the Bridge collection. These ones haven't hit me in the same way as her others that were written earlier, but I'm still enjoying it for the ways I'm absorbing subtle history lessons of post-war Montreal and Paris that shape the background of her characters.
Listening
Podcasts have reentered my life. I have especially been enjoying Fresh Air, as well as Death, Sex & Money and On Being, all of which I used to listen to faithfully - they are like old friends.
Watching
On Friday night we watched Gremlins (1984), which I had never seen and Joel could hardly remember. It's an interesting watch for 2020 with its strong themes of xenophobia and American consumerism. But it also had all the slime and Spielbergian homages that made for an obviously 80s-era movie.
Making
Nothing! I took a break from it this week. I've lost my crafting mojo again. Waiting for it to come back - I know it will.
Recipes
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