January 7, 2021

When I finally managed to turn off the news and get into bed last night, I wondered what would be different in the morning.

I'd hoped to wake to find that decisive action had been taken; that the people who could and should have been putting a stop to all this since January 2017 had finally done so at last. That everyone involved - including Dorito Mussolini himself - had been rounded up and arrested.

LOL. My bad.

The weighted parcel I bought online last week was delivered this afternoon in a huge box:

I took the only sensible course of action in view of current events: get in the box, put the weighted blanket over my head and stay there for the rest of the day.

Got no uni work done as my brain appears to have shut down. I now function at survival level only. I don't feel depressed but something is definitely not right - I'm just... not functioning. Sort of floating above everything in a floppy, disinterested way. No doubt this is really bad from a mental health point of view but I can't seem to make myself care.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In today's bookmarking news, I very much liked this:

Shared by the wonderful Rabih Alameddine, who tweets amazing art daily, it's Kathryn Clark's 2015 "Foreclosure Quilt, Washington D.C."

I really like the idea of recording and presenting data through art, and I especially love representations of maps. Look at this amazing 'aerial' embroidery that somebody alerted me to last year:

It's an idea I would like to play around with if I ever get my brain back.

I enjoyed this New York Times article, How Poets Use Punctuation as a Superpower and a Secret Weapon. 

"Perhaps the most insistent example of foregrounded punctuation is the quotation marks in Alice Notley’s “The Descent of Alette” (1990), which appear around every phrase and some single words, such that no word in the book is not encased in quotations. It begins:

“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”

“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

As such we perceive all the language as a series of discrete utterances, communicated haltingly, with difficulty, which has a mesmerizing effect, as if the poem were not the message itself but the medium, the channeling. In all of these instances, I do start to hear the punctuation, much more than I usually hear it. Punctuation often serves to force a pause, but the pause isn’t silence."

My favourite thing to do is cut up magazines to make picture or word collages, and the above reminded me of the weird bitty paragraphs I've spent many happy hours putting together:

Weird and disjointed, but containing their own meaning somehow. I was intrigued by the idea you could do that with your own words too.

I came across the Twitter account of Alex Norris, who makes brilliant comics with a recurring punchline: "Oh no."

This resonated so much I went straight to the online shop and bought an "Oh no" pin.

My photo of the day was taken from inside the box. From my vantage point on the floor I looked up and noticed the sky was being weird; long regular claw-marks scratched across the darkening sky:

I'm no meteorologist but I guess, based on scientific observations of the BBC Weather page and the temperature in my flat, that clouds like that mean it's going to be cold.

What a day. I've learnt during lockdown that you just need to ride days like this out - stay in the box, hide under the blanket, don't beat yourself up, just do whatever you need to do to get through and out the other side. 

There'll be another day tomorrow, all going well (one must never assume), and you can pick up the reins again then if you want/need/are able to.

As wiser ones than me have observed: This too shall pass.