entmoot

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!

The Office 2x01, “The Dundies”

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.

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. 

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! 

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

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

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