I'm Not Gonna Lie, After I Walked Around The Corner And Saw The Stork, I Was Only Able To Express My

[IDs: (1) Nine brands of butter substitute with increasingly desperate names:

is it butter?

isn't it butter

Could it be Butter?

I Think It Tastes Like Butter

You'd Think It's Butter!

What, not butter!

Unbelieveable… This is not butter

who needs butter!

Memories of Butter

and (2) a tag by Tumblr user @‍stripedtabbycat that reads:

#the emotional journey evoked by reading these in order is beautiful

/end IDs]

This is one of my favorites hand down

i'm a big fan of the concept of using monogramming services for non-monogram purposes, as per the example (from alex mill) on the left:

and in a similar vein, i recently saw the pair of pants on the right (from urban outfitters house brand iets frans), and thought immediately to myself, wow, i really hope the butt pocket says THEN…

ordered a cheap wearable timer¹ that has a 'buzz every [multiple of 5 you select] minutes and repeat by default until deactivated' function and have been experimenting with it as a source of gentle non-judgmental 'do i still want to be doing what i'm doing at this time' queries that i can choose whether to ignore or respond to

anyway it's only been like a day and a half but so far it seems like a helpful tool to have in my toolkit—like it hasn't magically turned me into a go-getter or anything but it has meant i did a bit of crafting² today and went for a tiny little run which is like. usually i'm pleased with myself if i scrape together enough executive function to initiate one enrichment thing superfluous to subsistence, so

we'll see how repeatable the results are but in any event: some little wins today :)

⸻ ¹ yes i could probably also have just used my phone but (1) while you can of course get the built-in timer to repeat it doesn't default to that, which was an important part of the concept (2) i was also working from a vague notion that, while i'm not as fussed about my phone dependence as i know some people have gotten, maybe it would be good not to actively reinforce it, lol ² and yes i do mean my tiny little mends from earlier but like. sewing's a craft (zie says defiantly)

Some pen sketches/bird studies from a couple weeks ago (except that little griffin critter on the first)

These were just meant to be loose and fast, so some might look a little wonky

[h/t @‍elodieunderglass]

The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, from Up One Pair of Stairs of My Bookhouse by Willy Pogany (1920)

little baby man comes to interrupt my spinning

Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries, 1970-1986

the Guardian

Trump signs executive order on water pressure to ‘restore shower freedom’

White House says order will ‘make America’s showers great again’ and ‘end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure’

somehow this is not an onion article.

Oops!... I Did It Again

genuinely wild how often i realize i’ve taken an interpersonal situation where the information i actually have is ‘i’m not having a good time’ and turned it into ‘i’m worried they’re not having a good time with me’

probably ultimately very straightforwardly traceable back to a childhood in which i wasn’t having a good time with my mother and the only variable in the situation that i actually had the power to alter was myself, so that now when as an adult i’m having a bad time with someone my instinct is still to fix myself instead of, you know, removing myself? or alternatively checking in with them about how things are feeling to them and attempting to arrive at a meeting of the minds, or at least a mutually semi-satisfactory compromise?

anyway like. this failure mode probably implies a particular menu of followup actions that i ought to be identifying and instituting, but i’d frankly settle for just ‘recognizing this particular self-abnegating reframing when i’m in the process of committing it’!