annie's microblog

There’s a writing project I’ve been very slowly working on for a while, and stuck on how to approach some of it, and last night the solution kinda ✨came to me✨ out of nowhere (but not really nowhere as the brain or subconscious is always working on things and then if you give it enough time and relax a little usually you get some idea or direction and isn’t that lovely) and anyway. This is a frustratingly vague description of an internal event but I’m just saying I’m grateful for it. I like how creativity flows and is not dependent on hustle but on rest.

Just turned on the debate and I already regret it.

The air is soup. Not a light broth but heavy thick soup. Almost a stew really. I didn’t feel like I was running this morning, more like swimming through some sort of warm porridge.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

What could be a grim reality has instead pumped his life full of vigor. Has made him live big and good. I have strived my whole life to follow in his nihilistic, clown-shoed footsteps. To stare our pointlessness in the face, and waddle along toward happiness because of it.

I liked the depiction of nihilism as a useful philosophical path to a kind of simple, in the moment happiness. Didn’t like it enough to read the whole book.

DNF: Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller 📚

How do single parents without a flexible job do it?
This week is chock-full of (mostly) mandatory back-to-school stuff.
I either have to be present for it, or the drop-off and pick-up times are so close as to make it kind of pointless to do anything but wait nearby. Sometimes I can get a little work done then… sometimes not. Yesterday I had a 45-minute period of waiting but there was zero cell signal so I couldn’t use my phone’s hot spot.
Every time I’m handling one of these things I think about the many single parents I know who don’t have the same kind of work flexibility. It’s still a challenge for me, because the work still needs to be done, but at least I have flex on when that happens. I don’t have to schedule PTO to go get my kids updated on their vaccines. But some parents – many parents – do.

Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear — against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connection — to find ourselves in the other.

Currently reading: All About Love by bell hooks 📚

yes, exactly, what he said:

so I want to turn the new me into the old me once removed and knock the old me out of joint to slide ahead into the new me so that the old me will be the new me twice removed and the new me the old me to the new me.

@moondeer on versions of self

What we don’t know anniemueller.com

Wrote the first half of this months ago. Unburied the draft and wrote the latter half yesterday.

Just dropped my youngest off for middle school orientation.
Youngest. Middle school.
My oldest is a senior this year.

The days are long but the years are short.