And I’m exhausted.

Last spring, the school board voted to approve a 4-day school week from the usual 5-day week, and that meant adding an extra 50 minutes or so to each day, and boy did I feel those extra minutes today. My feet are throbbing, and the bags under my eyes feel that much heavier.

But one thing I didn’t realize (but that is super obvious in hindsight) is that I got to spend even more time with the kids, and I think that’s totally worth the longer days. I’m eager to return tomorrow, and I’m ready to do what I can to make this next year a great one.

Also, about two weeks ago, the exchange student from Germany flew into Missoula and met her host family, and today was her first day of school, too. I wrote about this back in April, and let me just say, she is simply awesome. Funny story: she had a nightmare the other night where she was at school but she kept entering the wrong classrooms. She somehow ended up in the elementary school and was with the little kids, and she was just worried that she would get lost on her first day because our little school is bigger than her school in Germany. But after today, it looked like her worries were just that, worries. I haven’t talked to her about her first day yet, but I’m hoping it was okay.

Sometimes my job can be stressful, and I’ve thought about quitting a few times in the past year, but it is moments like these that remind me how cool my job can be. Here’s to a great year for everyone!

Today, I completed my Move ring for the one thousandth time in the last one thousand days. The funny thing is that I feel like I’m just getting started. So let’s keep going.

To one thousand more.

This news breaks my heart:

Three members of Chromatics have announced the end of the electro-pop band. Ruth Radelet, Adam Miller, and Nat Walker signed a statement that was shared on Radalet and Miller’s Instagram accounts. “After a long period of reflection, the three of us have made the difficult decision to end Chromatics,” the statement reads. “We would like to thank all of our fans and the friends we have made along the way—we are eternally grateful for your love and support.”

I first heard of Chromatics when After Dark was released back in 2007. I was in college then, and I spent much of my free time downloading and listening to all the music I could get my hands on. Since then, I’ve purchased more of their albums, with Closer to Grey (embedded above) a particular favorite.

Kill for Love is another favorite:

I give all the members of Chromatics my best.

Tatsuki Fujimoto, the creator of Chainsaw Man, a manga I read earlier this year and really enjoyed, released a new one-shot called Look Back, a beautiful story about two middle schoolers who aspire to become manga artists.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed it. It has the same beautiful art style that I was fond of in Chainsaw Man, and the story was just beautifully told and tragic. It also has this little scene that I completely related to:

“Just draw, stupid!” is great advice, regardless of your artistic ability. It’s fun, it pulls you out of the world for a bit, and you have something to show once you’re all done. I highly recommend both.

That’s the current air quality index in my part of Montana. The air quality here has been unhealthy for weeks, but I’ve never seen the index so high. I can taste the air; it’s gross. There have been a few times in the last week where I felt lightheaded and where my throat hurt, almost like I had a sore throat but didn’t. A new fire flared up near me a few days ago, prompting evacuations. Some homes burned down. A week before, this same city started enforcing water restrictions on their residents. Our water reserves are at record low levels, and so many ponds I used to see around town have now dried up.

What is this world? Is this how’s it going to be from now on? And what gets me is how powerless I feel. I do not know what to do to stop this, or to at least mitigate it, even if just a little bit. I guess all I can do is just hope it gets better, if it will.

I didn’t really get into comics under after college. It was one of those things I always wanted to get into but for one reason or another (money, mostly), I didn’t get into as a kid. One of the first series I remember reading and loving was the first few volumes of Gotham Central by Ed Brubaker. It told the story of the police officers working in the Gotham Police Department in a world where Batman exists. It was amazing. I loved the noir aspects mixed with superheroes, and it kickstarted my love of Ed Brubaker.

I devoured his Captain America run, read through Incognito and Sleeper, and absolutely ravaged his Criminal series. Over the past year or two, Ed, along with his longtime collaborator Sean Phillips, has released original graphic novels outside of the monthly comic release cycle. These are full-length, 140 or so page stories that are simply incredible.

Over the last few days, I found myself with time to finally get through these stories. It started with Pulp, a magnificent and tragic story of a 1930s crime writer with not much life to live. I followed it with the first volume of his new Reckless series, Reckless, a noir novel set in the 80s that just reeks of 80s nostalgia and horror. And today I read through Friend of the Devil, the latest Reckless novel that takes the horror of cults and hippies to a new level.

Ed and Sean are two incredible artists that have created a world I absolutely love. These are stories I needed to read and experience. I’m continuously amazed at how art can pull me out of my own life and into a world I simply adore. It reminds me that I’m not alone, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

I finally made time to watch Demon Slayer: Mugen Train this evening, and I absolutely loved it. I’ve been without Demon Slayer for almost five months, and I remembered why I loved this series so much the moment I watched the first frame flash on my screen. This arc in the manga was one of my absolute favorites, and I felt like it translated wonderfully on the big screen. Everything was top notch, from the animation to the music to the acting. The studios added some 3D elements that I felt were a bit off, but thankfully, it wasn’t a distraction.

I had to renew my Funimation subscription to watch this, so I guess I’ll try to take advantage and see what new anime I can start. I hear both Fruits Basket and Kaguya-sama: Love Is War are pretty good…

Over the past several weeks, I’ve spent some of my free time going through Essential Craftsman’s series on how to build a house on YouTube, and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it. For a long time, I’ve had it in mind that someday I wanted to build my own house, and even though it feels like a crazy and far off idea now, I’m hoping that one day I will have a hand in building a home that will last generations. Granted, I don’t know how to use any construction tool outside of a hammer, so this might be something that will take a lifetime to pursue. But hey, nothing worth doing is easy. I am very grateful, though, to know more about drainage and surveying and plumbing and electrical and everything else that comes with building a home. That knowledge feels empowering in the best sense of the word.

I started to spend my time on this because I’ve been at something of a midlife crisis this summer. I’m afraid of tomorrow, of next week, of next year, because I feel like time is moving way too fast and I still don’t know how I want to spend it, and every minute lost scares the shit out of me. I’m slowly (very very slowly) building myself back up, and I’m hoping I come out of this stronger. I just don’t know what I want to do with my life anymore, so I’m pursuing every little interest I’ve ever had in my life, from these crazy ideas to the impossible ones. I want to find that thing or things that say, Yes, this is what Mario was born to do or whatever, because right now I feel lost.

I really resonated with Rachel Syme’s article in this week’s New Yorker magazine. She writes about our collective fetishization of setting and meeting deadlines, with the cult of productivity types who wake up at 5am and meditate and write in their bullet journal and drink spinach smoothies and do yoga for an hour before they’re ready to tackle their day. It’s all bullshit. “Everywhere you look,” she writes,

people are either hitting deadlines or avoiding them by reading about how other people hit deadlines. This may seem like a sly way of marrying procrastination with productivity (you’re biding your time learning how to better manage your time), but, no matter what, it’s an exhausting treadmill of guilt and ostentation, virtue signalling, and abject despair at falling behind.

I’ve been trying my hardest to slow down recently, to savor life, to battle my ghosts and fight for the life I want to live, so it was a breath of fresh air to read that I’m not the only one who sees it all as an “exhausting treadmill.”

I was also a bit giddy to read this section on Jenny Odell, the author of one of my favorite books of the past few years, How To Do Nothing:

Odell has her moonier moments, and she isn’t always stating revolutionary ideas. Her goal is to bring back patience, which she sees as our most neglected and underappreciated virtue. Still, she has a surprisingly fresh rationale: being patient isn’t just about changing how we do things, it’s also, more fundamentally, about changing how we see things. Breaking the “cycle of reactions” we’re usually beholden to, she explains, opens a “gap through which you can see other perspectives, temporalities, and value systems.” If the common fear is that a lack of productivity will narrow the possibilities of our life, Odell is here to tell us the opposite. With our eyes always fixed on a prize, we’re missing the bigger picture. What good is “the deadline effect” if it’s blinkering us, keeping us from a more expansively defined potential?

Bringing back patience is an honorable goal, and I’m better served practicing that than working my ass for a deadline that doesn’t matter. I don’t want to become the Red Queen.

Fortunately, Jenny Odell has a new book coming out called Inhabiting the Negative Space. It comes out in August. Can’t wait.

I’m in a particular frame of mind at the moment, one that finds this absolutely breathtaking:

To create the atlas, the research team took micro-CT images of ten heads of buff-tailed bumblebees. From these, they first extracted the image data showing the brains. In each of these data stacks, 30 brain regions of the bumblebee were manually reconstructed in three dimensions. On JMU’s high-performance computing cluster Julia, a standard brain was then calculated from the ten data sets, based on their mean values.

These scientists CT-scanned buff-tailed bumblebee brains and created a model of it, all in order to use “…it as a model organism to analyze learning and memory, the visual system, flight control and navigation abilities.” I don’t know why I find this so fascinating right now but I do. This is so cool!