Everything Takes Forever, Now

An Intro

Sep 10, 2021

Dear everyone! Dear you! It’s good to have you here.

I’m starting a newsletter which I’m calling Everything Takes Forever. If you want to know why, read on, if not, you can skip to the other things further down, including some inspiration, some music, some visuals, something I wrote in the past, and something I made this week.

If you’re ready to subscribe, use the button below. If you need to read it first, there’s a button waiting for you at the bottom of the newsletter. Thanks.

Beforetimes

In February 2020, I was already used to spending most of my time in the house. I had been a stay-at-home parent for a solid ten years. My husband traveled on business fairly often. I was not afraid of a day, or even a week, without in-person social contact. You could say I was prepared for lockdown.

Without a job to commute to, I had to get social stimulation through the internet. When I felt lonely or had something to say, I visited Facebook. You know, just like most other moms. I shared photos of my kid when they lost a tooth, I opined about the latest political bullshit, I complained about my first-world problems, I told dumb jokes. I counted “likes” as positive interactions. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. That transactional space was comfortable and soothing.

Facebook was already a huge part of my life in February 2020. By late spring, it was everything. Absolutely everything.

That Facebook lyfe tho

Most of it wasn’t public. I had fallen into a long list of Facebook groups that kept my posts within a select community. Circles based on parenting, comedy, podcasts, other fandoms, and just plain nonsense were much more engaging for me than the usual generic personal posting. I counted my quips in humor-based groups as creative output. I prided myself on a well-timed callback, a deep-cut reference, and taking ten whole minutes to select an absolutely perfect gif response. No one outside those arenas would understand any of it, so no one else was allowed to see any of it. (Oh and that stuff is full of swears. BTW there will be swearing here so yeah, you’re officially warned.)

I was used to living on Facebook. When the world shut down, it was easy to curl up with my memes and my virtual friends in a pillow fort, like a kid in a power outage holding a flashlight, saying “when do you think they’ll get the world going again?”

But riding out the pandemic on social media wasn’t amusing - it was necessary. All the weaknesses and half-measures of existing purely in the digital world became crystal clear. If you feed yourself solely on the instant gratification snack machine you will not meet your fitness goals.

Besides the bare minimum of social nourishment it has provided, I don’t have much to show for all the creativity I’ve poured into social media. Surely that energy could have been funneled into something more tangible. I went digging through my old Facebook updates thinking there were definitely pieces worth saving and revisiting. I found maybe a tenth as many as I thought I would. Perhaps I’m thinking of good stuff buried in comments, but if so, they’re basically gone.

I’ve been hiding in social media for much longer than the pandemic, even longer than Facebook’s lifespan. I’ve been writing online for fun for over twenty years. Maybe I should do something with it?

With both hands

YOLO. Even I know that isn’t a cool thing to say anymore. Maybe I should just go with Carpe Diem, that’s the one that was cool when I was a teenager.

In my case, I want to get a job. I may not have been technically employed, but I’ve been working very hard since I quit the library in 2010. I gave birth to two kids, I parented full time, I kept house and home up and running. I volunteered locally and regionally beginning when my son was 3 months old, including serving as a President to our local chapter. I’m proud of every second of it.

My 2020 was going to be a year of change anyway. My youngest was going to enter full-time kindergarten in the fall, which would allow me to pursue part-time employment. By February I was thinking about the next stage of my life, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. Ten years is a long time to be away from anything. I had so many unresolved questions. What am I qualified for? How much can I make? Should I just go back to what I did before? It all felt very daunting and put me in the mood to settle for whatever fell in my path.

Then the world froze in place, any prospects cryogenically preserved for some future time. I would continue to stay home for an additional year. Phew, I thought. I hate decisions. I spent quarantine avoiding the concept of work entirely. In that moment I was what I had to be - the be-all and end-all for my kids, from the moment they woke up to the moment they went to sleep. There was no room to think about the world that might come after.

As we get closer and closer to normalcy, questions about employment re-emerge transformed. Lockdown shook all of us out of our one-foot-in-front-of-the-other existence, enabling us to re-evaluate everything. In a post-COVID, Carpe Diem world, those reborn questions look more like this:

What do I enjoy? What can I kick ass at? What is employment, anyway? Is it too late to do something meaningful?

(Awareness Moment: I am privileged, others cannot afford to consider such things, I feel gratitude every day for my situation.)

So I left Facebook. (Ok, I’m not completely gone, but I’m not spending my days scrolling there.) My writing itch had been soothed by the balm of posting, which meant I didn’t write anywhere else. I hadn’t worked on poetry or short stories or essays or histories or research anywhere else for a very long time.

In an attempt to revisit my earlier self, I dug up old writing. I visited pre-Facebook online haunts to remember what it was like when I wrote long-form. I…wrote some new things, too. I had forgotten how much I love writing.

Maybe I should call the newsletter “Dearest Log”.

So…maybe I can write, like, as a job? Maybe freelance? It won’t make the big bucks but it could be fun. Looking around, it’s pretty daunting. I have no experience to point to. Going to have to grind it out at low-paying work just to develop some skills and a portfolio. I’m learning a bit about SEO, too. (If anyone has advice or leads please let me know.)

I’m trying to not focus too hard on what could have been. Endless hours spent refining my Facebook posts counts as writing practice to some degree, but my expertise in reaching anyone other than my friends is near zero, and my fiction writing has stagnated. My grammar is probably shit, too.

This newsletter is an attempt by me to reach for the contact I need with those I love and the creative output that I need to thrive. I can’t be a writer without writing. Writing for you is both practice and perfection.

At the very end here I want to emphasize that I miss being on Facebook, not because of the bells and whistles, but because I miss you. I miss your awesome ideas, your awesome writing, your awesome lives. Facebook is only so great because you are there.

So here we are. Let’s see what happens next. Thanks for coming with me.

Please subscribe to my email list to make sure you don’t miss a thing.

Neil Gaiman:

“Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.”

Headphones

Send me your awesome music recs!

There’s Something Nice

There's something nice
about a hot afternoon
pumping gas across the street from
a car sales lot, flags
flapping crisply
window rolled down, head resting
smell of gasoline and the
heat
inside the greenhoused car
bus stop sign shudders to the sound
of trucks on their way
car door dings softly when you
open it to replace the nozzle
and it's hot, summer breathing
down your shirt
full
ready for the next errand
snap shut the gas cap
start up to blaring radio
drive into heat shimmer
and away.

-js 5/12/2005

(I promise, no more than one throwback piece in each issue. Thanks for indulging me.)

Your mind makes it real

Speaking of Everything Taking Forever, the new Matrix trailer is out.

I was 22 in 1999 when the original Matrix came out and it, you know, blew my mind, because that’s what that movie did that year, it blew everyone’s minds. I then took a friend to see it because she didn’t have the spare cash and I thought it was important. When I set up my very first website (coded by yours truly) my “Links” page included this:

The Matrix. See it. It is awesome. If I say anymore, I'll make a fool of myself. Keanu is well cast as "the confused guy." I'm serious, I love this movie.
I admit it, I think he’s cute. (This was the hovertext.)

No, this doesn’t count a second throwback piece, and no, I’m not going to let you see my 1999 website.

This was one of the background tiles. Seriously.

The Matrix was the last film I bought on VHS. Is that ironic, Alanis? I saw it a very large number of times. It’s one of those films that seeps into the consciousness and helps shape how you live your life. Hmm, is that bad?

And they never made any sequels so that’s that.

Ok, so the sequels were bad, and I hated them, and I was very bitter about it. But now I have no expectations. Since I’m not invested anymore, I think I can actually enjoy it. Why the fuck not? (I told you there would be swears.) It’s much easier to enjoy things when fandom doesn’t get in the way.

Speaking of which, the next thing on that links page was about how great The Phantom Menace was. I miss you, 1999.

Photoshoppin’

Audrey’s birthday is coming up and she is way into the video game Among Us. For those unfamiliar, it’s like the party game Mafia, where some players are secretly trying to kill all the others. Great stuff for a six-year-old. (We all played Clue, ok?)

I’ve got some great ideas for an Among Us birthday playdate, including COVID precautions, which I’ll talk about later. Today I’m focusing on the invitation.

First I needed a base image to spoof. Here’s the game screen I chose:

How to play as a Crewmate - Among Us | Shacknews

This fits a lot of great basic criteria for a spoof:

Iconic look. Anyone familiar with the game would recognize this screen.
Writing that can be switched to necessary text.
Colorful/eye catching.
Imagery that can be placed in the new context. In this case, characters attending a party.

I went hunting for some fonts, an Among Us avatar creator, a white version of the game logo, and even an already-clean background. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Not bad for one day’s worth of free time.

I swapped the cyan “Crewmate” color for the more striking “Imposter” red, added the game logo to the text for extra identification, and kept the text on the invitation-y side. I could have gone with the more exact “Audrey: There is 1 Birthday Among Us” but I just didn’t like it as much. Moved everything up so I’d have room for details on the bottom, and used the most legible themed font for that.

I made characters using the avatar generator which highly streamlined my process, but it only had a few customization options. So I ended up with only a few colors with a few pets (Audrey is obsessed with the pets, I’m glad there were enough to please her). It had only one style of party hat so I went with it (the game includes a cooler rainbow one). If I had created each element myself in order to make the image “perfect”, the whole project would have taken over twice as much time and it wouldn’t be twice as good.

I do apologize for the kerning. Yeah, you nerds know what I’m talking about. I didn’t realize how bad it was until looking at it later. Really should have hand-manipulated the red lettering. The annoying part is that I wasn’t actually using Photoshop for much of this. I’ve been playing with the Cricut Design software because it has some easy ways to deal with kerning text. Sadly, I completely forgot to use it to its full advantage. Sigh.

The only way I actually “finish” a visual project is to be able to tell how much work I want to put into it. If I worked on it for a week I could make it look exactly like the original with all the customization I can think of, but it won’t be worth it to me. The results are not perfect. They never are. Over the years of crafting image mashups, I came to understand what’s important to me at that moment and what’s not. I keep in mind who the client is. It’s not my first-grader who will look at it for 5 seconds, say “cool”, and walk away. As always with projects I make for the kids, I’m really doing it to please myself. I keep my ideas manageable so that I stay happy with the process. Too much exact detail and I exhaust myself.

Now that I’ve saved some time and energy, I’m on to more crafting for the party itself. Stay tuned.

Show me what you’ve made lately!

Everything Takes Forever