entmoot

hey everyone, i got a 2 hands full of arthritis and one head full of stupid and you bet your buttons im playing sniper

[erikacpataki]

sadly this does mean that I won’t be able to liveblog the experience of having two part-time interns coming to do my busywork for me at the spare desk in my office starting next week

[erikacpataki]

tldr - social media fast

about a month ago two things coincided: I started watching hannah louise poston’s youtube channel and I read that nyt article about screen time and I really started thinking about & processing something I already knew, which is that a huge amount of my social media/screen time is compulsive and that compulsion is stealing a tremendous amount of my time, energy, and headspace.

I was talking to austin about it, and discussing with him how I keep thinking about what I used to do In The Beforetimes. and even though especially later in my teen years I did spend a lot of time holed up in my bedroom on my desktop, what I was doing looked a lot different than what my screen time looks like now - more like reading, independent fun research, scouring for creative ideas and then shoddily implementing those ideas. 

and eventually, with the computer and also with cable, I’d get bored and move on to something else. I read constantly and journalled constantly (sometimes 15 or more pages in an afternoon). I wrote the beginning chapter to dozens of bad self-insert fanfics. I sketched a lot and created mixed-media collages that covered half my bedroom walls. I did a daily self-portrait challenge and got creative with it. I spent weeks designing a huge and intimately detailed fantasy world map that covered half my bedroom floor which I did absolutely nothing with - I just felt excited about making it.

I have a lot less free time than I did back then. I get home at 5:30 and have about three hours before I really need to start showering and getting ready for bed. and, despite having spent my entire work day clicking back and forth on all my feeds in between tasks, I spend like two hours of that time (or all of that time, or even more as I lay awake in bed) refreshing my feeds.

my mom’s prone to gambling addiction. if she’s at a social function in a casino restaurant (is that common in other regions?), someone has to walk with her to the bathroom because otherwise she will sit down at a slot machine and lose an assload of money and come back and do it again. and screen time for me? is that.

but instead of losing money every time I swipe down to refresh, I just lose time, and the attention I could have been paying to literally anything else. and I swipe swipe swipe waiting for that little dopamine hit of “oh! 0.5 seconds worth of mildly interesting content! ... moving on” swipe swipe

and I find myself sitting there DESPERATELY wanting to be doing anything else, and just... I can’t.

so at that time I deleted/blocked my main “scrolling problem” apps from my phone and haven’t been using them at all after work or on weekends. which has been good, except that to some extent my brain just transferred that addiction onto other sites/apps. (it’s weird, the desperation that sometimes hits me when I open my phone and can’t find anything to click on except my japanese journey frog game. I open it, journey frog is still on his journey, I close it, my thumb hovers around restlessly, I open it up again.)

and it’s almost advent, which is a good time for thinking about what we’re investing ourselves, our time, our money, our energy into. I honestly want to know what I will get up to if I let myself get bored. so I’m gonna do a total social media fast, starting sunday and going until christmas, and see if I can’t find some stuff out and achieve a kind of hard mental reset on these habits that I’m just not into anymore!

I’m not deleting, and I’ll be back! hopefully you will all have a good december and don’t come up with any really good memes without me.

[erikacpataki]

The Office 2x01, “The Dundies”

[erikacpataki]

marriage: highly recommend

people really like to ask if it’s “different” and then they’re surprised when I say it definitely is. partially I think that’s because he only moved in about a month before the wedding, and since things were so chaotic during that month the living-together only really settled into “normal” after the honeymoon.

the part that’s embarrassing to tell people who are just making small talk is that, you know, our ceremony was an effective means of god’s grace. our relationship is a sacrament now, all the time, every day. that’s, you know, different than what it was before. but since people are regularly surprised that my answer to “why did you become catholic” is “because I believe it’s actually real”, I tend to keep that to myself. in more in-depth conversations with nones I’ll talk a bit about the effectiveness of “liminal spaces” and ritual in changing a person, which is also true and people find interesting.

the thing I usually say is that, if we have a disagreement or a conflict, there’s this sense of ease now because I know that we have the whole rest of our lives to work on this issue a little bit at a time. there’s less anxiety and urgency to it. we don’t have to perfect our relationship all at once.

but something else I’ve noticed which is psychologically sort of hard to make sense of is that… like a lot of people, I fell in love with my spouse partly because we don’t censor ourselves when we’re together. aside from trying to be a nicer and better person than what comes naturally to me, I don’t have to hold anything back. and it’s been like that for ages.

but now that we’re married, I feel more like that with other people, too. I’m a lot less self-conscious or worried about being judged. a lot of the moments where I would have been like “will people think I’m lame if I admit that I love XYZ, are people going to laugh at me if I wear this outfit, does my face look stupid when I’m being expressive, oh no, my hair is doing something weird today,” whatever, my mind just goes, “who cares, I’m married.”

[erikacpataki]

khealywu replied to your post: watched the pie episode of the new-old gbbo last...

That episode is so bad and genuinely infuriating start to finish. The one woman who made a peanut butter / squash pie bc ‘americans love peanut butter’ omgggg no no no no

it’s so bad! austin is furious that they gave ryan star baker even though he was last in the technical (we both love brendon and austin feels he was robbed) but I get the sense that his showstopper was basically the only one that tasted good. 

also by far the funniest moment of the episode was when james was talking about how he found his sweet potato pie recipe and said “I was watching these videos of these very... grassroots..... [LONG pause where you can see the wheels frantically turning as he tries to figure out the polite way to say “black people”].....Southern-Americans.”

[erikacpataki]

khealywu replied to your post: I changed up my hair routine and now my hair is...

Mousse is GREAT for lightweight curly hair, putting it in when it’s super wet really helps

I’ve always been scared to mousse up super wet hair - I have horror memories from high school when old mousse formulas would turn wet hair really crunchy, and my hair is soooo fine and flat that I was convinced putting anything in it would just weigh it down and make things worse. so glad I finally worked up the courage to just go for it while my hair’s still wet and clumpy! 

it’s definitely not curly-curly, but I’m surprised at just how much wave it’s retaining and there’s even some loose curl at the end. abby always used to remark on how curly my wet hair is and tell me to stop brushing it but I was too much of a coward. should’ve listened

[erikacpataki]

I changed up my hair routine and now my hair is like, fluffy and slightly wavy with a few baby curls around my forehead, aka my dream hair, so this is nice

[erikacpataki]

austin loves butterscotch hard candies and is constantly offering them to people like an old man and his favorite thing to say about them is “they’re so mild! not super sweet!” and he keeps a big cut glass bowl of them next to his desk so ever since that episode of bob’s came out I’ve been calling them “doctor austin’s butterdrops” which he hates

[erikacpataki]

watched the pie episode of the new-old gbbo last night and there were three separate “american pies” baked which were labeled “pumpkin pie” and made with butternut squash :|

[erikacpataki]

philtippett replied to your post: my list of stupidest injuries, ongoing cut my...

the jalapeño oil and perfume ones…………erica………….i’m so sad lol

i’ve told all of those stories numerous times as examples of what a cursed dumbass I am, except the perfume one. it’s too humiliating. probably the most slapstickily dumbass thing i’ve done in my life.

[nightlock]

y'all act so woke but where were y'all for the michael scott’s dunder-mifflin scranton meredith palmer memorial celebrity rabies awareness fun run race for the cure ☕️

[erikacpataki]

my list of stupidest injuries, ongoing

cut my finger on a milk jug and it bled

cut my knuckle on a counter and it bled

forgot I had put the kettle on while wine drunk, got in the shower, ran out of the shower when I heard the kettle screaming, slipped and fell hard on the linoleum, didn’t notice I had subluxed my shoulder and kept using it and putting weight on it until two days later when my arm didn’t work anymore

rubbed jalapeno oil into my left eye

sprayed perfume directly up my nose and into my eyes at point blank range

forcefully sniffed 1/4tsp of coarsely ground cloves directly into my nasal passages, smelled nothing else for 6 hours, got a migraine, clove crumbs came out every time I blew my nose for a week

[thefriendlyneighborhoodcryptid]

Local family somehow fails every perception check.

[the-soul-doctor]

“Do not set foot on the path of the wicked or walk in the way of evildoers. Avoid it, do not travel on it; turn from it and go on your way.”

‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭4:14-15‬ ‭

[mothric]

me, about to click ‘see more replies’ on that youtube comment thread: *remembers this verse* shoot, u right

[snulbug]

Hochschild: We’re trying to have an important conversation but having it in a very hazy way, working with [a] blunt concept. I think the answer is to be more precise and careful in our ideas and to bring this conversation into families and to the office in a helpful way.

If you have an important conversation using muddy ideas, you cannot accomplish your purpose. You won’t be understood by others. And you won’t be clear to yourself. That’s what’s going on. It’d be like going to a bad therapist—“Well, just try to have a better day tomorrow.” You’re doing the right thing, you’re seeking help, but you’re not getting clarification and communicating clearly. It can defeat the purpose; it can backfire.

Beck: It seems like this is mostly becoming a popular term in feminist conversations. But if we talk about all the unpaid labor women do in the home as “emotional labor,” we’re insinuating that any kind of labor that falls most often to a woman is “emotional.” It almost seems like we’re saying that women do the work and women are emotional, so that must be emotional work. Like chores are just labor. Writing Christmas cards is just labor. If we’re talking about the division of labor in the household, and we start calling chores “emotional labor”—

Hochschild: It’s inherently, then, a female thing. It’s feminizing, in a way, these things that should be described in a more gender-neutral way.

Beck: Do you have any advice or thoughts on a better way to have this conversation?

Hochschild: Added to a feminist concern for equity—not taking that away, adding to it—we need to add clarity about our social-class position and explore the idea of alienation. When things stop being meaningful and fun. Let’s not just sweep that aside, because I don’t think it’s a solution if both husband and wife are now 50-50 with alienated labor. There’s a fantasy that equity will be a solution. I’m adding a concern about why things don’t feel fun for both of them. I think we need the clarity of an important conversation about what are the circumstances that make family life so hard.

Arlie Hochschild: The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor’

[erikacpataki]

mnkhsss replied to your post: mnkhsss replied to your photo: ...

I assume that people who grew up on the KJV (which I also did!) are just well-night unable to let it go as the epitome of what the Bible is supposed to sound like. And some conflate engaging with the historical and translation issues of the text with doubt/lack of faith. Really blew my mind in college when I found out that theologians who were also people of great faith were asking the same questions that I got yelled at for asking in my everyday Catholic community.

it’s so especially strange to meet catholics who are Like That because the catechism explicitly encourages careful exegesis and research w/r/t scripture.

I can understand people who are used to it or can’t get past the like “old timey language = important, beautiful, and authoritative” thing. but it’s just. not that good of a translation

also it’s slightly hilarious to me to imagine a kjv-only catholic

[pintoras]

“Imagine a woman in the long skirts and high collar of the early 20th century standing in front of the painting she created. It is a massive piece—about 10 feet tall by 8 feet wide—and it is not a landscape, a portrait, a still life, nor a scene from myth or history. Dominating the composition is a bold yellow form reminiscent of a plant or sea creature, glowing amid colorful, biomorphic shapes and vigorous lines. This is just one of 10 such works that she has created almost entirely alone—sometimes walking on her work as she lays down the paint—and one of 193 radically abstract paintings that she has made in a few short years, between 1906 and 1915. None of these details fit with the story told in museums and art history courses. We know the first abstract painters so well that we often refer to them by last names alone: Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. We know who is celebrated for doing “action painting” on giant canvases laid on the floor—Pollock. Each of these men has been lauded for opening a way into new territory. As it turns out, that territory had already been explored by another artist. Her name was Hilma af Klint.”

— Who Was Hilma af Klint?: At the Guggenheim, Paintings by an Artist Ahead of Her Time by Caitlin Dover

[unpretty]

[erikacpataki]