I didn't write anything yesterday.
National holiday here in France, so I took the day off for a long walk in the country. In the rain. Because apparently it has to rain once a day, now.
Blurbs from my brain.
National holiday here in France, so I took the day off for a long walk in the country. In the rain. Because apparently it has to rain once a day, now.
My birthday is coming up and, since I've been living with my boyfriend – who had stopped celebrating his birthday long ago – I feel kind of silly trying to support this idea that it's a special day.
But I don't care.
So I made some requests. Chocolatine (pain au chocolat for the rest of the world, I guess) for breakfast and tiramisù as dessert/birthday cake. I want to reinstate this tradition. My grandma used to make us tiramisù for every birthday. Even when she moved to a village in the mountains, she would come to the “city” for our birthdays with a big tray of tiramisù. Two years ago, for the first time, I had a piece of tiramisù as a birthday cake since my grandma died (in Florence, in a fancy restaurant). Last year, during Italy's lockdown, my dad me an amazing tiramisù with a surprise. Well, he had actually finished the savoiardi biscuits, so he used one random biscuit to complete his work. We decided that, whoever found the biscuit, they would be the lucky one (very “galette des rois”). I found it!
This year, I really wanted to be back by my family for my birthday, but it won't be the case. My dad will not be making me a tiramisù (maybe when I'll come to visit, as a belated birthday present, I hope). We'll be going around the city to look for the best tiramisù in Toulouse!
My boyfriend and I got obsessed with playing Pokémon on the Gameboy and it's sucking my life away.
Let's start this blog experience. I've got to admit that today is not the best day for me to start anything new. It's been a pretty draining weekend and monday morning and it's all because my parents are now eligible to get the COVID19 vaccine in Italy.
I won't get into the details, but it's been rough and, while I'm happy they'll both get their first injection this week (hopefully), I have a lingering feeling of sadness from all of the back and forth.
This has made me once again think about my troubles with anxiety, one of the main reasons I give so much power to these situations. The anxiety of losing a parent, the anxiety of having a tough confrontation with a parent, the anxiety of feeling not respected, the anxiety of not being able to express myself when I'm upset. It's a lot to grasp.
Should I grasp it all? Now?
Give yourself some credit, they say. Don't be too hard on yourself, they say.
Yesterday I wrote a blogpost about the fact that I haven't been writing in a long time. The fact that I haven't been writing as much as I thought I would have, once I opened a blog.
Was it a depressing, self-deprecating and illogical post? Yes.
Did I delete it? I just did.
One thing I want to retain from that medley of sad musings, tho, is the acknowledgement that one of the things I had been procrastinating was, ironically, the reading of an article on procrastination I had found out when looking for advices for procrastinators on reddit (so while actively procrastinating).
As it turns out, on this website, Wait But Why of which I knew nothing about (sorry), there's a small series on procrastination.*
In the first episode, Why procrastinators procrastinate, we get to know the characters who inhabit our brains. Well, our as in the procrastinators'. What is preventing us from doing what we have (or want to) do is the Instant Gratification Monkey which, when the time comes to get down to business, pulls us to the Dark Playground. This guy really did come out with the most appropriate names, didn't he?
The second episode, How to beat procrastination, gives some interesting tips on how to tackle the problem (and maybe, the monkey?), notably the summoning of the Panic Monster. How? By finding ways to keep yourself accountable, for exemple.
The third episode... well, I havent' read it, yet. (I'll still leave the link here)
Am I procrastinating this reading?
Maybe.
Mainly, I was feeling overwhelmed by all of the informations and by the realisation that I will have to face this.
Well, I'm giving this a try. To make myself accountable I have announced that, from now on (and to an undetermined date) I'll write a post everyday at 4pm. Even if it's just one line.
Help me out! 🙃
*Apparently my boyfriend already knew about this, so maybe I'm the only one who had been oblivious to it until now.
I've always liked the idea of book communities. Even when I was younger, going to the library, I would some times peek at the bulletin board hoping to find, like you see in the movies, a flyer advertising a book club looking for new members. To no avail. Being super shy, the idea of creating one of my own was unfeasible, so I resigned to the idea of relegating one of the most important part of my life, one of my most driving passions (reading, obviously), to the pile of activities I'd do alone.
Sad music.
Then came the internet and my first experiences with online book communities. I made my first attempt with Anobii. I remember the pleasure of seeing all those beautiful book covers put one next to the other, forming kind of an ever growing virtual gallery what I was reading at the time. It is definitely difficult for me to dissociate my experience with these kind of sites from their design as it is to dissociate my choice of the books I'll buy from their book cover. I am a book cover snob. I will judge a book by its cover. So to me, Anobii was an aesthetic experience, more than a social experience. I didn't find book clubs, didn't really interact with other users... was it because the site made it difficult? Was it because I am shy even on the internet?
Shrugs.
Then came Goodreads. Well, I'm pretty sure it was well established when I signed up, but I had been oblivious about its existence up until my crush at the time told me about it. Of course I immediately signed up. A simpler design than Anobii, but the idea was the same. I liked it. Up until I stopped reading. This happens to me from time to time. It's not as easy as “life gets in the way”, it's not always as difficult as “depression gets in the way”. It just happens. I stopped reading, I stopped using Goodreads.
Last year my partner gave me one of the best presents I have ever received. A Kobo reader. Never in my life, or at least in my life after the release of the first eReader, I would have thought something like this would happen. I started to love reading eBooks. Me, the bookworm, the girl who would stay at the library up until midnight, the girl who never felt shame for sniffing any type of book in any circumstance. It came at the right time, while libraries and bookstores were closed due to covid restrictions, while I was reluctant to get out of my house due to a resurgence of panic and anxiety attacks. Books being readily available through the internet, I started reading again. I even started reading books written after the end of the nineteenth century! Oh my!
And with that came the wish to share my reading, to organise it, to keep track of it. As opposed as I am to Amazon, I decided to look for alternatives, especially open source ones.
The first one I tried was Inventaire.io. As its name suggests, this website helps you keep an inventory of your books and gives you the possibility to lend your books to the people around you. This website didn't really work for me because I didn't know anyone there and, being in Italy at the time (and in a not so populated zone), there was literally no one around me using it.
I then tried The StoryGraph. To be honest, I am still there (you can find me here ) and that's because it is still the best option I have found in the open source realm. Am I satisfied with its design? Not really. It still has some cool features, like a page where you can see your stats (how many pages you've read, what kind of books...) and the possibility to go through a list of Content Warnings related to each book.
Today I started a new experience (wow, I make it sound very serious and ominous) and that is with Bookwyrm. Take all of the above and make it federated, they said! The jury is out for now, but I am liking it so far. It really does integrate all of my online book communities experiences (I can see the book covers, yay!) with my Mastodon experience. Which is what is making me hopeful to maybe start a real book community. My profile
I need to write as much as I can.