Booklog!

I have been reading fairly voraciously the last few weeks, which is always a good feeling --too often, I wind up stumbling into a period of time in which I just...don't consume books, not even re-consuming familiar stuff. Trying to have a Power Hour every day has been good for this: I'm not allowed to do anything electronic, and my books so rarely are. Here's some things of note that I have read in the past bit:

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Squire and Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce. Squire is my single all-time favourite Pierce book, and somehow the only one I own (what?!) I've probably read it a dozen times or more, it's definitely on the list of books I read every year or two. The last few times I've read it, I've wanted to go ahead and finish out the quartet. Sometime I should try reading all four again --I can't remember when the last time I read Page, and I know that's still more recent than when I last read First Test.

Keladry is a stupid-important character to me, being one of the Big Two¹ in terms of shaping how I view leadership and Getting Things Done. I can't always live up to her example but dang do I want to. Her friends are wonderful, and Pierce's attitude about sex is a breath of fresh air in a YA novel. (Speaking of which, I should really reread the Alanna quartet!). Kel isn't perfect, but she tries hard, and I love seeing it.

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Fables is a comic about fictional characters, written by Bill Willingham. Which, I mean, lots of things are about fictional characters, but in Fables, the vast majority of characters can originally be found in some sort of fairy tale, nursery rhyme, or tall tale. It's folklore and metafiction and just enough fourth-wall breaking to really make me giggle.

I've gotten through the first major story arc once or twice before, but that ends around issue 60, and this is the first time I've gotten well past it. I think the whole series only has 150 or so comics, I'm past 100 (plus about 30/50 Jack of Fables) and going strong, so I think I'm actually going to finish it out. I just need the library to keep delivering them as quickly as I can get through them!

I'm a big sucker for folklore, so it's not surprising that I'm digging this mess. I do find the comics vaguely sexist and they have some painfully racist bits (there was a Native American caricature drawn into one of the recent Jack of Fables bits that _hurt_ to look at, it was so horrifically out-of-date. I know Jack is meant to be a scumbag, but you don't need to illustrate it so frankly.) but mostly I am enjoying the stories as they go.

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Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson is maybe my top choice for silver age(?) sci-fi. Speaking of occasionally a bit sexist or racist...although in Spider's defense, he is _really_ trying to be open and care for people. His failings feel more like out-of-date ignorance than actively gross, and I feel like he does a lot of good around mental health to make up for it. I've got an omnibus with all the short stories from the first three books, and _man_ does it make for a nice narrative arc (starting with "The Guy with the Eyes" and the arrival of Mick Finn, and ending with his departure)

I am incredibly bone-weary background radiation sad to remember that Callahan's as one of the first fictions I visited when the pandemic started, knowing that I needed a place where shared joy is doubled and shared pain is halved². Callahan's isn't quite in the category of "books I reread constantly" but even books that are usually don't get less'n about eight months between reads. That the pandemic has gone long enough for these to be read twice is a painful thing.

(On the plus side, for the first time since high school I feel like I might go through the rest of the series again, and maybe try some other stories to boot. We'll see what I can order from the library.)

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Murder Book by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell. On Friday I went in to the library to check the shelves for a specific book (this is rare of late, I've just been doing a lot of requests) and while I didn't find it, I did see this just hanging out on display. It's a memoir of a true crime fan, and being as I am a true crime fan who likes graphic novels, I had to pick it up and try it out.

I found it interesting --one comedian gets introspective about "but why do I follow murders so closely?" interspersed with more detailed views of three or four cases-- but also uncomfortably flippant. Part of being interested in gruesome shit like this is a required recognition that you are reading about people's tragedies for your own amusement, and figuring out how to balance that appropriately. I...didn't feel like she hit the mark. It wasn't quite as bad as bacholorette parties on a Dahmer tour³, but it all felt unbearably twee and excited, with only lip service paid to the victims.

(Also as a non-woman consumer of true crime⁴, it was a little offputting how much she kept emphasizing that this is something _only_ women find fascinating. Majority? Sure, and I recognize this was part of her narrative arc, but it felt extremely unwelcoming to me, in the way Women's Spaces frequently do.)

On the flip side, I see a lot of reviews online disliked her writing style, and I found it pretty enjoyable. She's disjointed and bounces rapidly from thought to thought, circling back and forth throughout years and stories. Her art is crude enough that it's hard to recognize reoccurring characters, but she makes up for it by relabeling them and giving them context each time. Maybe it's just that I'm (also?) ADHD, but it felt like a very readable style, and fitting with the disjointed mystery-seeking side of True Crime.

(And I really appreciated her willingness to lay herself bare and try and figure out "why am I into this dark shit anyways?". That's something I haven't done a lot of myself, and props to her for trying to work it out.)

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Coming up soon is finishing Fables (I expect) along with as many of the spinoffs as I can get my hands on, and rereading Howl's Moving Castle (the book I failed to grab on Friday, but is on my holds list).

I hope you've been reading nice things as well sometimes.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: The other is Kerowyn, from Mercedes Lackey's "By the Sword".

2: In fact, I was (re)reading it right about the time I founded Free Space Dinosaur, and each half of that aphorism is the title of the appropriate channel there.

3: The tv series "Dark Tourist" did a bit on these and yeeeep.

4: Or as Hilary would say "Murderino" and _ugh_, let's please not have cutesy nicknames about how much we enjoy gruesome shit.

Life, organizing, mostly money

Therapy today was good! It was a little narrative-life-focused instead of organizing-life-focused, but actually in a way that helped make clear some of my todo list items for the near future. Specifically, having run a Pretty Good gender presentation, I should maybe re-use those slides and run it again in the future? So I'm going to do a thing that I claim to hate above many others, and attempt to sell myself to some people.

(Luckily those people are gonna be 1) someone who explicitly asked about the presentation for their professional group and 2) the director of professional development in my school district, who is constantly asking folks to suggest new PDs anyways).

On the organizing-life side of things, I feel like I have set up a Pretty Okay Process for dailies right now. I've been using it for four of the last six weeks (and all of the last three weeks), and I'm really pleased with the Dice Innovation, which _critically_ rewards me for hitting 75% and therefore helps me recognize that 100% every day is actually too much and will cause burnout. So that's all really good!

But then I want to start working on my Next Process, and that's harder, in that I'm not...totally sure what to work on next?

One option is that I probably should start thinking in a more sophisticated and adult fashion about money. Which is to say, I've long since mastered the art of "if you don't have any, stop spending it; if you do have some, buy dice or other frivols" but the thing about having a real job and few major expenses (I eat out a lot less than I did two years ago) is that, uh, I'm getting a bunch of savings? Which is the opposite of a bad thing, and I'm happy to keep socking away dollarbucks into my savings account, but presumably I should eventually do...something...with them.

In a shorter timeframe, I'd also like to have a better budgetary sense than yes/no. Step one is figuring out a way to actually track how much I spend, and on what, so I know whether it's reasonable to set my dice budget at $500 per month or merely $300. I had a great idea for a little google form, that I could just bookmark directly onto my phone screen and throw in the item/category/cost and it was a great start...when I began it on March 9th, 2020. I maintained it for all of like two days, then suddenly stopped going anywhere or buying anything and quickly got out of the habit.

So maybe I just try that again?

There are other options, like "useful todo list" and "get good at calendars", but I'm wary of trying to do too many things at once. The key word here is "incremental". Incremental progress is good. Even if it's exhausting and depressing not being perfect all at once, that's still probably better than being perfect for exactly 42 hours before burning out and dropping everything at once.

(okay, but I am going to try an experiment and put calendar into my fingers for reading my comics in the morning and see if that does anything interesting. That's how I got back into the swing of reading here, after all.)

So let's stop there for now. Keep doing dailies, keep earning dice (oo, aa!), and now maybe add in a tracker for when I Purchase Things on the Internet. Or off the internet. Really just...purchase things.

("Couldn't you just use your bank statments" not as visceral, not in easy categories. I should probably compare the information occasionally though, shouldn't I?)

Anyways. I hope you are well. If you have money advice for an early-thirties-something, I'd love to hear it (I already know the one about "go put more into retirement than you are already doing" and I should work on that)

~Sor
MOOP!