In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood imagines her possible futures as branches on a fig tree. I feel that intensely right now (but I disagree with the flippant "oh, she was just hungry" interpretation). As we now work remotely and so many of our friends and former colleagues have scattered to the winds, are we here deliberately or by accident? Once we are unconstrained by childcare, do we stay here? Where is the "here" we're talking about? This neighborhood, this city, this Grand Division, this state?
Freddie wants us to stay. I don't know if that's enough, though.
I spent some time today trying to pull my reading lists off of Goodreads. It's been a whole thing for the last year, trying to slowly disentangle myself from being The Product. Goodreads also closed off their API a few years ago and have had known exporting bugs for more than four years, per their support forums. I ran into one today: books marked "read" from the Kindle iOS app don't have an ISBN logged.
The goal is to (eventually) move all of my reading logs to this site and set up a GitHub action on this blog's repository, patterned after this one by Katy DeCorah, to automate the posting process … but I have to backfill hundreds of ISBNs in a CSV first. So much for my wild hair to start that process today.
Speaking of wild hairs, I committed to 1000 Words of Summer again. The last time I made an earnest attempt was 2019, but halfway through I had a work retreat in the Smokies. (You would think a week with limited work responsibilities and no dog responsibilities would have been an excellent time to write, but alas.) Whether any of those words make it here remains to be seen.