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I've been bouncing around with this for the last few weeks, ever since I read a couple of quotes from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals  by Oliver Burkeman. The book overall had some interesting ideas about reframing the idea of trying to get everything done. Even though there were a couple of things that made it clear the author was not approaching things with an eye toward neurodivergence (his discussion of distraction, for example, only talks about the "choice" to be distracted, and not how some people's brains simply don't focus the same way others' do), I was feeling generally positively toward the book until I got to the last chapter, and read this: "Hope is supposed to be 'our beacon in the dark,' [environmentalist Derrick] Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope  for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or ...

I committed an act of poetry over the weekend, and looking at it again this morning, I still feel pretty good about it (after a bit of a clean up). Here you go : The world’s on fire, Hatred, despair, an atmosphere of ignorance abounds. I’m only one person -   There’s nothing I can do. Well -   There’s breath in my lungs, Life in my body and mind. Existence is resistance When someone hates who you are. I can exist with all my might. There’s ink in my pen, words at the ready, Able to call forth new worlds on a whim. Words can create, destroy, distract, console -   Put cats in pants in space for science! I can write with sorrow and delight. There’s outrage and sorrow in my body and soul, Fuel I can turn into action. There’s space to listen, to learn, to grow, To remember to rest and recharge and regroup. I can use my grief and my fury to fight. I’m only one person, but so’s everyone else. By our powers combined, we can work the problems. The world’s on fire, but we all have ...

 Remember when 2025 seemed like a year out of a science fiction novel? It didn't seem like a real year, it was so far into the future. Would we have flying cars? Robot maids? Computer chips embedded into our brains? The future was full of opportunity and excitement! Well, now the future is here. I don't know about you all, but this isn't what I imagined for "the future." I'm not one to talk about politics - I freely admit to being ill-informed about the nuance about a lot of things - but high-level, I believe people have the right to live their lives as their whole, true selves, regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability status, or anything else. People are people, and they all deserve to live lives that don't harm other people. Apparently, this is a difficult concept for some of the people in power in the US these days. Things are getting hard, and it's really difficult to see what a single person can do to ma...