Ship's Librarian

It's still a work in progress, but my tea shelf is finally beginning to look as cozy as I originally envisioned:

I'm unsure whether any sort of preface about my failure to write more often is necessary. Probably not. I've encountered plenty of bloggers that write sporadically, but I always veer into self-consciousness about my own habits. My mind tells me that my posting ought to be regular and coherent, and anything else is messy and must be rebuilt from scratch. This is, of course, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in action—and my problems with motivation pure executive dysfunction.

I can't help but stop here and say for the record that it's hard for me not to see these as excuses, me using the symptoms of my diagnoses as crutches to absolve myself of my personal failings. It's not true, but that hardly matters in my brain. Attending church as a child, the passage in the Gospel of Matthew came up frequently, thrown around to admonish “worriers”: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Clearly, I told myself, I was a Worrier; I tried not to be, I prayed not to be, and yet it didn't seem to make any difference. I didn't know that anxiety disorders were a thing, that some people have fight-or-flight reflexes that just won't shut down.

It's only been in the past few years that I've realized that things I thought were character flaws were legitimate mental health challenges and taken steps to work on them as such. Admittedly, I'm still finding my way—I take identifying the moments of restlessness and dysfunction and internal freaking out as what they are, of telling myself It's okay, you're tired, everything's fine, as wins at the moment. But that still doesn't mean I don't feel frustrated with myself, or that Depression isn't constantly hovering over my shoulder.

This article came up in The Guardian a few months back and I meant to write something about it at the time (Content Warning: suicidal ideation). The author shares the story of her daughter's autism diagnosis and the mental health struggles her daughter has faced since that time. Even before the diagnosis, she clearly sensed something “wrong” with herself, and has continued to struggle since. Her mother writes, “It’s not the autism that we’re trying to change, but the cluster of secondary mental health issues that in her case seem to be a consequence of it.” That resonates: it's not just autism or OCD or anxiety or ADHD or any other neurodivergent condition in isolation. It's the complex, interconnected web of how our brains function and how they tell us things.

One of my wife's favorite movies is The Day After Tomorrow. In true Roland Emmerich form, it's a complete mess of crappy science and over-the-top CGI destruction that somehow makes a watchable film (I'm not sure how Moonfall botched this formula, though). Whenever we periodically throw the DVD in, I can never get past how the middle of the United States is essentially ignored (a common-enough trait of disaster films); I presume that Emmerich intends for us to presume that Midwesterners simply freeze to death, given that Dennis Quaid doesn't come to save them. This can probably be chalked up to the director being unfamiliar with any place that doesn't have iconic landmarks that can be blown up, which is unfortunate because I think the same film set in Minnesota would've been more entertaining and had a far more compelling cast to follow.

Even in the movie's wildly implausible scenario, I'm convinced those of us up in the north were all right. The weather forecasters prepared us for what was coming, the schools closed, and everyone rushed out ahead of the flash-freeze for bread, milk, and gas for the snow blowers. While New Yorkers were doing...whatever it was they were doing, we were sitting inside, getting up to look out the window every now and then, and inevitably comparing the current conditions to previous storms, up to and including the Halloween Blizzard of '91 (a registered trademark of the State of Minnesota). Eventually, the worst passed and we dug ourselves out and carried on. With plenty of grumbling about the cold and the snow, as is tradition.

Long, cold winters are a shared experience of all Midwesterners, but my years in Minnesota have given me an appreciation for how relative the length and the chill can be. The winters just seem to linger up here in a way I don't remember them doing when I was growing up in Illinois and Iowa. Nearly seven years in, I have come to basically write off everything between Halloween and Memorial Day.

At least until this year. We had a couple of weeks of brutal subzero temperatures and a handful of small dustings of snow, but nothing like we should have gotten. What's more, the weather's been unseasonably warm enough overall that the snow we have gotten hasn't stuck around for long, leaving the landscape brown, ugly, and dead. To top it all off, as I write this we're currently in the opening stages of what is forecast to be our most substantial storm of the season...in March, just days into what is technically spring.

So it's been a weird winter. It's not really overly relevant to anything in particular, but after finally resolving to start writing more after the new year, I've been finding it intensely difficult to follow through ever since. This isn't much, and it doesn't touch on any of the things I've thought about writing on, but it's basically my way of saying to myself (and anyone happening to be reading) that I'm still here and haven't given up yet.

Which, now that I think of it, is the message winter is sending to us right now....

Here we are, four days into 2024, and my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is kicking into overdrive. Because of it, I like pristine, blank notebooks, am terrified of using every device I own, and view new books, CDs, and DVDs with abject dread. I am loathe to mar anything I touch, and so it should come as absolutely no surprise that the idea of a new year freaks me out a bit. Every January 1st represents this blank canvas, this unruined thing, and then it's gone. By the second, third, or fourth, my brain sees the potential as diminished and asks, “Now what?”

This is rather melodramatic, and I readily admit it; my brain is so often not exactly a rational space. I had such high hopes for New Year's Day: finally kick off this blog, spend time reading and writing, and make a renewed effort at breaking my internet addiction. In actuality, I was sucked into the Twilight Zone marathon on the Heroes & Icons network, during which I spent far too much time idly browsing on my Macbook. Not an auspicious start on the surface.

Still, my wife and I stowed the Christmas decorations, reopening the corner of the living room where the tree goes each November. We moved her grandmother's writing desk into that spot from the bedroom, creating an actual surface for the old Alienware laptop that serves as our media PC. There's also a spot there for my Macbook, a place where it can go to get it out of arm's reach when I'm sitting in my living room chair. As a result of that move, the bedroom now has a cozy reading corner, for those frequent times I don't want to read in the living room.

None of this felt like much of an accomplishment on Monday, because I knew how far short it fell of what I wanted for myself. Tuesday was my first day back at the library for the year, followed by another day off on Wednesday, which wound up occupied by a morning vet visit. In the afternoon, I had little energy to do much more than spend time online—a bout of executive dysfunction that didn't do much to dissuade me that I'd already made a mess of my hopes for myself in the new year. Never mind that mental health and the regulation of my neural pathways don't observe a calendar, or that I might possibly have been demanding far too much of myself on a holiday.

Which brings us to today. It turned out that that little bit of rearranging on Monday made it possible for me to have a clearer path forward when it came to tidying and organizing our space, and facilitating the sort of streamlined, minimalist, and less online life I keep trying to build to. Things were picked up, stowed away, and arranged more sensibly. I now have a stack of paper on the top shelf of my desk, ready for my typewriter. Instead of lying on the floor by the router in a heap, an ethernet cable now winds from the living room to the bedroom, along the wall and behind furniture, out of the way and permanently hooked up to my Power Macintosh (yes, I know I was just saying I want to be online less, but we're talking about a computer with Netscape Navigator 2.2 for a browser). This afternoon, I finally felt good enough about my desk space to sit down and type this out, my first blog entry after my About post. And what's more, I'm drafting it on my Remarkable Tablet, which I regrettably haven't used enough in the few months I've had it, out of the OCD-fueled fear I'll damage it or kill the battery far too soon.

All of this has been light on context (just why are these things important, again?), and if you know me, you know that's probably triggering an impulse to abandon this post right here and never publish it. I want nothing more than to write about the Power Mac, discuss my ongoing thought exercises surrounding digital minimalism, and explain why it's so important for me to read and write more...and yet there's not really a place to insert any of that in any sensible manner. My objective in sitting down to write was simply to get something out, with some vague intent of touching on those things, and this is the result. Context will come in time if I can just get started, but I hate starting in medias res.

Maybe this is where I needed to start, thought, going back through these first few days of the year and demonstrating to myself that January 1st itself was and is only part of a process. My strange, strange brain needed that reminder.