A Week in the Life: December 12, 2021

This week has felt a little weird. I’ve had a hard time getting myself to focus on things. All I want to do is look at instagram and play scrabble go. Actually, scratch that. I don’t particularly want to do either of those things but I’m having a lot of inertia when it comes to getting away from my dumb phone. So I haven’t done much in the way of reading this week and I didn’t really think to take any food photos either (there are cat photos though, don’t fret). However, I’ve done a lot of dance and I even left the house for a cultural event, so I’m not fulling living on my phone.

One good thing from this week is I’m no longer the lone technical writer at work. One of my colleagues has returned from maternity leave, which has cut my workload in half. Amazing! When the other coworker comes back, this job is going to feel luxurious.

Consuming

Here are some things I’ve recently read, watched, or bought.

Books and Other Words

I didn’t do a lot of book reading this week, but I did read a lot of interesting stuff online (note that the Washington Post articles are “gift” links and you should be able to read them even without an account):

• Long covid is destroying careers, leaving economic distress in its wake via The Washington Post. Covid is terrible, but what really scares me about getting covid is being disabled forever because of it. Long covid sounds horrific.
• Amazon, can we have our name back? via The Washington Post. This piece is about women whose name was Alexa before Amazon started using it. The way people treat the Alexas of the world sounds horrendous.
• The new monarchy via Insider. This is an in-depth look into Mark Zuckerberg’s asshole behavior buying up land in Kauai. It provided a lot of history and interesting context to the issue.
• Abortion, hypocrisy and the will to power via The Sword and Sandwich. This is good and there’s honestly nothing I can say other than that you should read it.
• Friendly, foul-mouthed crow befriends entire Oregon elementary school before state police are called in via The Oregonian. The feel-good story about a crow (or raven?) that you didn’t know you needed.

Rampant Consumerism

I bought a delightful tote bag from Club Waaa, which is, unfortunately, going out of business. Get your weird art while you can.

Making Things and Doing stuff

Last night we went to the Sacramento Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker and it was fun! I’d actually never seen the Nutcracker before, but this year I decided to be bougie and get season tickets for the ballet. What’s cool about buying a season ticket is you get a really good seat in the theater—we were just five rows from the stage! The set design and costumes were both amazing. I was impressed by the “snow” that fell onto the stage during the snowflake number and by the hot air balloon that whisked away Clara and the Nutcracker at the end of act one. It was a lot more interesting to watch this after taking ballet classes for the last year and a half. I could see what some of techniques were and it made me want to keep learning more.

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Languages

I have officially decided to try the DELE exam for Spanish again in May. I submitted my registration form but haven’t heard back from the organizers yet (of course). At least that’s in motion. I sort of don’t want to do it but I also want to have my revenge on this exam.

I’ve been looking for some new ways to approach my Spanish studies and classes so I have started working on reading up on random topics then presenting that information to my teacher. I’m thinking I want to alternate weeks with giving short presentations and maybe tackling some writing prompts to get me thinking about different subjects and exploring new vocabulary. Last week, I talked about synesthesia after listening to a Radio Ambulante episode about it. It was neat to read up on and discuss something like that in Spanish.

Moving It

This week all three of my dance classes recorded performances for our virtual recital (showing on YouTube December 26, 2021 at 4 pm and January 8, 2022). It was a lot of fun. It’s funny to see how different people react to performing. Some people got more stressed about remembering steps and counts but I decided to take a “no count, only vibes” approach and I think that worked well. After our last recital, I thought that how I felt in my head didn’t translate to what I saw on camera so I think a vibes-based approach will help with that.

For my tap class, we performed to a song from the musical The Boyfriend. We had been working on it for the last two months and I hadn’t thought about it much, but this week I went to look for some clips online to get the feeling of it a little more. This tugged at my memory and I realized I knew this musical because we did it in high school, but I’d completely blocked it out (as I have with many high school memories, I would guess). I was cast in the chorus but dropped out for reasons I don’t exactly remember, but I do remember being mad that the director had intentionally cast it so all the shortest girls and tallest boys had the main roles for, apparently, comedic value. The height of comedy, I’m sure. In any case, watching some clips inspired me to try to be as extra as possible in the performance, so I’m interested to see how it will look.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz has been living a life of luxury (as is normal in this house). Huey has re-taken the bed, which I’m proud of. She was letting Fritz drive her away but, now that it’s cold, she’s holding firm to claiming her rightful place.

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