patron saint of weasels

evilly tending to my nefarious concoction (giving my overnight oats one more shake before i stick them in the fridge)

did a very good job on my list today 🤩 go me. 2 loads of laundry, cleaned the bathroom, cleaned the stovetop, vacuumed the whole apartment, put clean sheets back on the bed, decluttered the top of the bureau + the two cardboard boxes of toiletries that live in the kitchen cabinet, talked to a friend to make sure i was ok to crash on her floor for a night and then booked ALL my road trip hotels, cooked the last of the cheap freezer chicken for j, took her for an extra walk and had a lie-down on the sunny couch for an hour, had a smoothie, and now i am abt to scoot to double hot yoga my absolute beloved.

this is my nth time pacing out and planning a multi-day cross-country road trip with my dog and i gotta say. it has not gotten any less annoying.

good MORNING happy SUNDAY it is soooo sunny and green and fresh outside today 😌 and my back feels completely normal and i have so much good food in the house (salmon and pear sushi leftovers from last night, ingredients for an afternoon smoothie, maple and cinnamon overnight oats, one (1) cranberry orange muffin, the iced matcha latte i am drinking as i write this--) and an extremely long to-do list that's mostly cleaning and decluttering but also includes my (hopefully triumphant) return to double hot yoga tn and planning the drive out to ca in a few weeks 😩 i think I'm gonna stop home in oklahoma on the way so juno and i can both see our friends hehehe

i hope you're all having really lovely days!! i fed j at 6 and then let myself curl back up in bed for a few hours before finally going on our morning walk and i gotta tell you. a long walk outside seriously is THE activity.

it's been a good week for voice note gang

if you've ever wondered what juno does when i'm doing my physio exercises, the answer is that she stares down at me judgementally.

CLEARED BY MY TRAINER TO WORK OUT* AGAIN!!!!!!

*with half or less than half of my usual weight, heavily modified, non-lumbar-torquing exercises only

whoo i hope you have such a good class! both classes i've taken there have been pretty distinct from each other, so this may or may not be helpful :) but i feel like half the experience is feeling very overwhelmed with the sheer deluge of information you are receiving (for like.... 8 hours a day, 5 days in a row) and then the other half is making new friends. as silly as that may sound!! even as someone whose social meter fills up fast, there's something about RBS friendships that makes it 100% worth pushing past my people-fatigue to hang out and do things after class wraps for the day. part of it is, i think, that often the folks you're taking a class with are in your extended professional circle but not your immediate one--at least in my experience, it's generally an ego-free zone bc you're all there to look at cool books and learn things you don't already know, so there's no real edge of competitiveness the way there might in a more field-specific environment.

i will say that if you (like me) need some solo time, do lunch by yourself somewhere quiet. during my 2019 course (philly) i generally found a coffee shop and in 2022 (charlottesville) i would get a breakfast sandwich and find a very out-of-the-way garden to hide in for the hour break. the exception to this is the last day of the course, when you'll generally take your instructor(s) out somewhere and eat together as a group! but having Quiet Lunch generally made me feel refreshed and ready to handle the second half of the day + whatever social thing was happening that night. RBS can feel like being intellectually and professionally "on" for 5 days straight (though that tends to loosen up as the week passes!), so taking whatever time you need to drop your socialsona in private is a good idea.

my one very specific piece of advice is to schedule your travel so you can stay for the ending reception :)

ran so many errands this morning, came home, bused to campus, did some database work and then had a zoom thing i've been fraught about for like, 6 months now, and it went fine !! and then made it home right before the clouds opened up. i'm cozy with an iced matcha latte and a lavender candle lit while the rain beats against the windows behind my desk and thunder rolls somewhere to the east of us. the vibes are unmatched!! they will immediately be harshed when i have to walk juno in the middle of this later tonight lol but for NOW! we are so good. i'm gonna try to do a little pm work session, which i haven't done in a while because i've been very committed to a focused 8-4, but today's been so off-schedule anyway that i feel like making the attempt.

belated photo dump from the past few days 😌 not pictured: chinese food w a friend, lots of time in the office, monday seminar, physio exercises my beloathed, me almost crying while i filed my taxes, me actually crying because the weather was so nice, 2 yoga classes, seven million errands.

right! they're so good! close reading is a literary studies methodology (that definitely is used by other disciplines as well!) that involves paying very close attention to very small details in an object, and then seeing what story those details tell when you put them in conversation. you can close read anything--an image, a passage of text, a song, a video--as long as you hang out with it for a while and act like a detective, gathering evidence and then seeing what story that evidence suggests. depending on what details you decide are important, you can make different kinds of arguments!

one argument you could make about that first illustration is that it figures the relationship between the anatomist and his object as erotic. your evidence from close reading might include observing that:

good close reading is always backed up with historical research! so it's helpful to know that this is an image of mondino de luzzi, a late 13th/early 14th century italian surgeon who's credited with legitimizing anatomy as a medical science in europe by being the first to hold public dissections of cadavers after a very long time of that being extremely illegal.

this is not actually the reading i'm interested in, lol--i'm squirreling away bits and pieces to use in a chapter on surface, hapticity, surgery, and surgical tools, so i care less about the pocket-wound as vagina and more about the twin gashes suggesting that human skin functions like fabric, and about the fact that the surgeon is watching the cadaver's face rather than his own hand, which is (presumably) operating by feel. so you can bring different interests and investments to your reading >:) which is what makes it FUN.

y'all ever straight-up gasp when you open a facsimile

okay i also just wanna say. it's been about a month? since i essentially child-locked my phone and computer. and it is genuinely one of the best decisions i've made all year lol. the current default situation is that i can't use anything but utility apps, my weight training app, and spotify on my phone until 8am, and i can't text or access any social media from my laptop until 8 or 10, depending on the day.

and you guys, it is so, so good. if you've ever considered doing something like this i would 100% recommend it. do you know how much saner i feel in the mornings. how much easier it is to just get out of bed and start the day. there's only so long i can spend checking the weather report. i'm so much less likely to get derailed by a youtube video or by catching up on the 100+ messages in the group chat if i can't actually see them until i've already gotten the momentum going for my day. when i'm walking the dog in the mornings i am fully engaged with walking the dog. and bc these are all just prescheduled i don't even have to think about it and muster up the energy to commit to being focused or whatever--i committed, like, once, when i set the schedules, and now i just wake up and am cruelly subjected to past-me's wholesome decisions.