odds and sods

I’m in such a blog mood right now, half 4 on a Sunday afternoon. I just started three different blogs on Notes while I was in the bath, pausing the podcast I was listening to because I didn’t want to listen to other people, I wanted to listen to myself. Phone wet. Phone is always wet. I don’t know how I haven’t broken it yet. I dropped it clean underwater in my last bathccident while I was watching my friend Susie stream The Last of Us. This time, I was just pausing the ICYMI podcast over and over again, didn’t even have to lift my phone off the side to pause it because there was a growing water droplet forming over the ||. The blogs all started and didn’t finish, so I am stitching them together here to get the thoughts out of my system so I can move on with my day.

First: I am feeling a lot of confusing guilt around The White Pube at the moment. Temporary, confusing guilt. For the past seven years, we’ve been in a rhythm of posting one text every Sunday with the two of us taking turns. We are currently writing a book and we’ll be doing that until September, but in order to get the book written, we’ve had to change our schedule: now, it’s two Sundays of texts, one Sunday of Creative Grant recipient, and a final Sunday of a new podcast or video. I know it’s basically the same but it has thrown me for a loop. I feel like I am shortchanging our Patreon supporters. (The numbers are dropping, and it might be in part due to the cost of living crisis but it also might be because people want more bang for their buck, and fair enough!). Something about it feels more deeply unsettling though, like because we locked ourselves into the Sunday routine, we are breaking our own law now. On the run. Coming back but out of sight for some of the month. I still worry the invisible face of the Internet is annoyed at me for writing less even though I have never typed more words in my life, and that’s the confusion. What I can and can’t publish. So used to writing a text and putting it online the same week. This book has a September deadline and then it won’t be out for many moons after that. Guilt! Weird guilt! Tell me you haven’t noticed any change at all so I can sleep at night, and if you have noticed a change, tell me how little you care.

Second: I have my first cold since the big one. Honestly, a miracle I lasted this long. Jan 2021-Feb 2023. I came back from London, went ham writing the book for 24 hours, and then I have barely stood up for the past four days. I haven’t been able to write anything until this indulgence. I haven’t looked at emails. Scared of emails. I don’t know if I have felt so bad because my immune system is a shambles now or if it’s because I haven’t been outside to have normal colds on the regular but either way it’s been shit. Something PTSD-ish about being sick now. My boyfriend put earplugs in to sleep because I was breathing so loud, and then I was worried my bad breathing was back, but it was just this whole ENT standstill. And then when I originally had COVID, I was like this for a few days and it wasn’t until day 5 things got out of control. I am fine now. Just a cold. But annoying to experience these new feelings as a result of chronic illness and its continuousness.

Third: I filmed my trip to London but there were 7 days of clips and I thought, yeah, just gonna have to swerve this one. Can’t be having such an involved hobby when there’s a book to do, and then because I got sick and couldn’t think about writing, I did in fact have time to make the video. I’ll publish it in a few days just need to sort the subtitles. So many bad things about being sick but when it carves out space for you to do the things you want to do, because you can’t physically manage the things you have to do, it’s suspiciously okay.

Fourth: I don’t want to have to think about Instagram but I need to keep up some level of engagement so that when it comes to telling people we have a book, they listen. It’s convenient that I have gotten into video-making this year when that’s what the algorithm has wanted of me all along. I would like to sit down, chop up some videos into reels, and then just have an album of them on my phone so I don’t have to think about what to post for a while. What a job. But it is annoying me trying to squeeze landscapes into portraits! Annoying me trying to make an advert for the thing I made! But yes, with this slight getting-better energy, I’m going to sit down and do that now while I listen to the end of NME’s top 50 album list for last year. And THEN I’ll write a blog post about the albums I liked the best, because this blog mood just continues.

Here’s a video for your dues. Really liked the format and also seeing into someone else’s world (never understood pinterest so it’s nice to know what people get from it):