Sometimes breaks are a good thing

I didn’t mean to take so long away from the blog but it has been great to get a bit of a break. Two people have prompted to me return to some more regular writing: my blog posts came up when they did a google search looking for a plant and they told me about it! If that isn’t a sign that things like trip and plant reports are worth the while, then I don’t know what is! The addition of the AI search results on Google has really done a number to the rest of the search results there and even I find myself sometimes stopping short of scrolling further down and letting AI tell me, correctly or not, what the answer is to something I look up.

The slow down in writing has been going on for years now, really since 2020 and the pandemic but even slightly before that. But the pandemic broke my brain in many ways. I used to be able to keep up with emails and newsletters I received, returning to my own version of “inbox zero”, which is to say, I opened and read emails or deleted them and then I had zero unread emails each day. Now? I currently have 486 unread emails in my Gmail and that’s primarily newsletters and Google keyword alerts. Sometimes I set a timer for 30 minutes and read and delete as much as I can. I did this recently with my Yahoo email and still left quite a bit unread. But it doesn’t help that the social media scroll is a powerful thing and don’t get me started on if I wind up on Reels or Shorts or whatever. Honestly it is time for a massive break again and possibly figuring out how to break my use significantly.

Honestly, I just hate my phone. Do I also love it? Yes. Over the Thanksgiving break my Garmin watch broke for good. I’ve had it since 2018 and replaced the bands a few times but this time the attachments on the watch face for the bands broke, they were already wearing down, and so I have been watch free for days. I had notifications go to my watch, just for texts and one or two apps (not social media) but even in this last year I have muted notifications for some text chains I am on (I still love my friends, I just need my watch to not ding 15 times in a row!) and am contemplating what my friend Meghan does which is put it in Do Not Disturb and Silence all Notifications and only let like a few people through. This non-dinging to my watch has been great because I was able to focus on hiking or spacing out while we were camping this weekend and only hours later when I would I pick up my phone did I see a bunch of text messages. I really miss those days pre-smart phone and I didn’t carry phone everywhere because it had a tiny camera in it and so you know, you’d get back to people when you got back to them. I read something recently about people being upset someone wouldn’t reply back to a text instantly to them (they were dating) and I was like, man, people have really just gotten so used to constant contact they wouldn’t have survived landlines and busy signals. You forgot to tell someone to pick something up at the store on their way home, well, you are out of luck they don’t have cell phone in their car, you’ll get it later. I mean, how did we live when we wrote letters to each other…*the drama*.

Which brings me to so many other things about our current public life and being connected and ugh, the election. Before I get to that I’ll direct you to this episode of We Can Do Hard Things about breaking up with social media. The section about even making rules up about how to use social media so you can form boundaries around it was brain exploding because I’ve done that a lot. I regularly take Instagram off my phone and only use it on desktop. And the amount of work to promote on social media—I hated doing that when I was producing my two podcasts. It was so much work and effort and I already had a job and family and life, it was a huge reason I stopped posting onto multiple accounts. All the work, what was the real reward? More listeners? Ok, then what?

I don’t know if I even want to talk about the election. I’m so angry but also just like numb and resolved that it’s going to be utter shit for another four + years. I just cannot with people. I could post authoritarian scholars (and maybe I will) and talk about the collective delusion/mental health aspects that have led us to this situation, again, and bring up the loss of the Fairness Doctrine and how our phones and social media and Joe Rogan got us here. But there are a plethora of better writers out there who can address that and plenty of hot takes for everyone to read. I mean, the reality is we should have actually punished some folks after the Civil War and did Reconstruction right but can’t go back to that now. Alas, here we are.

Currently I’m counting down for the Spotify Wrapped and for me to maybe finish another book or two to post my yearly reading wrap-up. I set the bar to read 30 books this year, down from my usual 40 and lower than what I typically attain, 40-60. I’m currently at 33. I say this every year the last few years, but I need more fiction in my life. I still have been gravitating to non-fiction but I’m about burnt out of non-fiction, except maybe nature non-fiction. I abandoned books with glee this year. Didn’t like it? Gone. Slow? Gone. Got what I needed out of it halfway through? Gone. There were some gems in there. Will share that soon!

A few links to sign off today:

• The holiday anti-bucket list
• What went wrong is everyone can fuck off
  

  I wonder how people will stay safe. Will they blend in? I think about how women dyed their hair blonde during WWII. I see people shouting on social media to “get your passports!” For what? To take a vacation? Because you can’t just move to another country with a passport. You need money and visas and most people don’t have the means or qualifications. So many people have reached out to me and said how lucky I am to be “safe in Europe”. I want to scream. Europe is not safe. Europe stares war in the face because Trump is aligned with Putin and said Putin can do whatever the hell he wants, and Putin wants to crush Ukraine, and also maybe the Balkans and Poland. Mark Rutte, the former PM of the Netherlands is the head of NATO now. Good luck, buddy. Also, newsflash, the Netherlands elected a far right candidate. Fascism is growing globally and the world is destabilized with Trump’s election. No one is safe.

Brief intermission for links here, re: no one is safe—look at South Korea today staving off a coup today!

• The Outdoorsy Mama Movement that Helped Trump Win

And an obligatory photo: Galapagos sealions from this past July. I will be blogging Ecuador photos soon. I have a lot edited but need to finish Galapagos. I had to get my computer repaired and I just got it back so once I’m up and running again I’ll get on it!

Tell me what you are reading and how you are doing!