A bizarrely good month. So good I started a website. First and second trimester were unchallenging but low-energy – I wasn’t unhappy but my behavior was indistinguishable from a depressed person’s. Then in third trimester I suddenly felt much more alive, which I attribute 35% to unusual sunniness in Seattle, 25% to judiciously chosen new habits, and 40% hormones-or-whatever.
Promising resolutions
I started off the year with a number of resolutions, with the intention of seeing which ones would naturally stick around. There were two obvious winners:
1. Social media only on my ancient laptop
(I’ve tried the inverse of this before, where I used the old laptop for focused work, and it didn’t work nearly as well.)
2. Brief paper journaling before opening devices
In practice this means I start the day with 3-10m of writing in a notebook.
Sometimes I fail at this because I see an urgent-seeming watch notification when I wake up, but so far doesn’t seem like major slippage.
I had a number of potential prompts going in but I converged pretty quickly onto writing down
- observations, questions, or preoccupations that naturally crowd messily into my head in the morning
- todos (the ones I’m actually interested in and the ones that feel urgent, some of which would get lost if I jumped straight to checking email)
Sometimes I dequeue 12 things immediately and other times I force myself to write 4 items, mostly out of a plodding sense of duty. I suspect this is a pretty good early signal for how much energy/agency I’m going to have for the rest of the day but haven’t done much with this suspicion.
I got gestational diabetes
I found out I have GDM this month. This is not surprising – type 2 diabetes runs in my family, I probably should have been cutting carbs earlier, but was unable to do so due to a poor model of what foods are actually bad for prediabetics. I found that simply measuring glucose improved my eating to a larger extent than I’d have predicted.
Resting on purpose better
I spent 3-6 hours this month consciously strategizing through how to rest effectively. I noticed long ago I seemed bad at this / seem to not be able to get out of rest the things people tell you to rest in order to acquire. So, what are those? And how do you get them? I’m 70% satisfied with the conclusions I came to after
- talking to friends about their experiences purposefully resting
- listing activities that require rest
- and mapping them to their ‘best’ rest activity.
Visualizing Chopsticks
A full transition diagram of the children’s game.
Media
Book of All Skies (Egan) - 3/10
Decomposed rating: plot 2, characterization 1, setting 8.
The main character is the fucked up physical world that has interesting properties (portals are involved). You find out at the end why it looks the way it does. I found it distinctly (although not intensely) satisfying to find out. But god, the dialogue you have to read on the way.
The story literally ends mid-conversation, rhetorically resolving a cultural conflict (that wasn’t very fleshed out) in favor of one party (whose side I didn’t feel invested in). This was very annoying.
Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dinniman) - 6/10
My rating for the first book was 9, and my rating for the seventh was 3.
Has its own review page at dungeon-crawler-carl-dinniman. As I say there, reading the following, unrelated book by Pachirat immediately after DCC helped me articulate a philosophical? (ethical? conceptual?) objection I felt to DCC.
Every 12 Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Pachirat) - 4/10
Stopped reading at the halfway point.
My first foray in a long time into the slaughterhouse exposé genre. I’d guess it’s solidly middling qua slaughterhouse exposé. It’s relatively dry, which is good – it is not a directly anti-factory-farming book*, and therefore you learn more about factory farming.
* although he says in the introduction he hopes you will naturally become more sympathetic to vegetarianism as a result of reading facts about it
Cursed by the thing where academics have to stretch out and repeat a very simple point in different ways, landing them poorly in the realm of poetry.
Alien Clay (Tchaikovsky) - 3/10
I loved some of the author’s previous work so I was very disappointed by this one. (Plot spoilers in the last, faint-colored paragraph.)
The narrator and many of the major characters are political and have been put away to a prison planet for subversion. A different author would have done more with this. Tchaikovsky tries (there’s Cultural Revolution style drama) but it all falls flat.
It also hit me with the good old “the solution to the initially-presented-as-hard-scifi alien mystery is that the gray goo is psychic”. Man. I need a does the dog die website for this specifically. He did it in a previous book, which suffered for it also.
Procrastination and Blocking (Boice) - 3/10
Has its own review page at Procrastination and Blocking (Boice).
3/10 seems a little unfair because I’ve gotten moderate value out of it in the weeks since reading it – but the value was extracted from maybe 10 pages out of ~200, which I resent a little. The 3 is a compromise.
Links
’Read like a bookstore clerk’
A big reader on her recommended approach to reading: https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/read-more-with-minimal-discipline
My reading life became incredibly haphazard. I abandoned more books than I ever had before. Sometimes a customer would ask me about the book I was halfway through reading & I’d sell it to them, trusting another copy would show up in a week, & that I would have found another book in the meantime. I could take books home, but you don’t end up with a big homeworky pile when you can just bring them back to work if they don’t hit. And I finished more books than I ever had before.
Guide to death paperwork
Tumblr user @ms-demeanor wrote a guide on dealing with the paperwork of a loved one dying (and a guide to easing your loved ones’ paperwork burden should you die): https://drive.google.com/file/d/12LuGzCeU2PKPTjXjrXG63CGHK-bUB6XV/view
Questions
how do it know (to wake up)?
In early 2025, when I was sick, I went to bed with the intention of hydrating and peeing as often as I needed (because I was worried about underhydration), and I woke up ~25 times. The previous night, I went to bed with no such intention, and I woke up twice (the normal number). The main thing different between the two nights was simply setting the intention.
I’ve also heard of people who decide to get up at an unusually early, specific X:00am and their body wakes up at that time for them.
…how do it know?
what’s going on with resistant starch?
https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-resistant-starches
I don’t have a mental model on a chemistry level for why you can reduce the calorie content of potatoes or rice by cooling it, and why there’s a variance in how many of the calories ‘come back’ when you reheat it.