#135 - Rabbit Rabbit! Let's Recap my January Reset

or: i renovate my living room & lift weights now

Well hey hi hello there, it's been a minute, I kind of took a break in January (theeeee longest month of all time??) but we're back babes!!

Rabbit, rabbit! Welcome to February!

(&& welcome to the new home of Smoke Show, a newsletter I've been thinking about in lots of new ways recently because it turns out changing platforms was a bigger deal than I was willing to admit to myself but I just feel so powerless against so many terrible people and tethered to so many bad organizations that it feels good to be in control and get to leave a platform I don't support. This platform has a lot to learn in terms of coding but hey, everything is a work in progress and there's no such thing as perfection and we're here!! We made it!)

January was a big month for me. Work wise, we landed our largest contract ever, so we've kind of taken on completely new roles and that's been interesting and challenging and stimulating but also just like mentally exhausting in ways that feel good. It's nice to really feel like I put my all into something, that I pushed myself to give it my best, that because we intentionally focused on a narrow question, we were able to build our answers from good to great.

But also holy shit I am so tired and I keep finding myself saying things like, "I'm going to try and squeeze in a workout before I come over." and what's next I develop pinterest boards of generic quotes (some of which are misattributed to Margaret Thatcher when they're actually quotes from death threats the IRA sent her) (it's not the Irish's fault we're so fucking poetic that even threats sound lyrical!) and start doing affirmations?

Life wise, I've been doing a lot of arm workouts and feel significantly stronger, I'm redoing my living room, my ongoing attempts to lean into undoing my tight control grip on life are not helped by the structures of society rapidly disintegrating, and I feel atrophied by the horrors of the world that I continue to live in.

Oh! And uh, I do do affirmations now.

Not only do I say them out loud in the morning and write my intentions for the day in my work planner, I also listen to ASMR affirmations at night in some of my ongoing attempts to rewire the loud inner critic voice that often takes over my brain. Did I think this shit was cringe for 99% of my life? Yeah, but this year I've decided that "cringe" is a bad metric to live my life by and that my obsession with it was probably more of an extension of my desire to keep my mask "cool" at all times (lol nothings less cool than trying to be cool and I'm never ever going to be convincingly dispassionate about anything, ever) than a genuine expression of self.

The pinterest quotes thing hasn't happened though. Individual quotes don't do much for me tbh, but I have been trying to get back into reading and oh baby does long form written word do everything for me. Talked about Oscar Wilde's poetics the other day and got all excited about treating writing like the art form it is again rather than a perfunctory medium.

I have also been seeking to engage with more work and art done by professionals. (I say this unflinchingly aware of my status as an unedited amateur writer who's words you're currently reading btw.) It's relatively new that the majority of what most people are reading everyday was not touched by an editor. We're living in a first thought, best thought kind of world and I don't love it! So I'm trying to seek out thoughtful compositions that others have inspected for clarity.

The churn & burn rate of culture is because the algorithms demand it, because the sites have nothing to offer if the users aren't generating the content, so they negatively impact anyone who isn't wholly dedicated to "growth" on their platforms. (For evidence of why this approach is stunningly bad when it comes to modern news, look no further than the atrociously handled shutdown of The Messenger where some journalists were made to write over 900 articles in the course of 6 months before being unceremoniously laid off via an announcement in the New York Times.)

Demand for newness is built into the medium, so no one has a chance to reflect on the consequences of their actions because they're already too busy filming the next daily vlog, or putting their next thought on TikTok while they're walking down the street, or finding the perfect witticism to caption their story with. And culturally, we're encouraging it because this is one of the few jobs where people seem to be Making Money and that's all that matters.

Don't look too closely at all of the first generation YouTubers who have burned out in spectacular fashion!! Avert your eyes from the grown child stars of the internet who are shouting the truths about the horrors of their childhood! Keep posting pictures online there's no chance they're going to be used to generate horrific images against your will because we've failed to regulate tech...ever so now AI deepfake porn is just part of our reality!!! OOPS!

Like there are the more obvious soulless instances of Logan Paul, but then there are influencers who wake up and panic about once again hiding their hair extensions that they've sworn up and down to their followers don't exist and have never ever been on their head and I get that the latter feels like a real "oh boo hoo poor me" situation, but like, what does lying every day do to a persons soul? And what compounds when they feel like they should quintuple down on the lie after reddit gets its hands on the drama?

Are these problems of their own making! Yes. I'm not saying they're not. I'm saying these influencers exist in a world where that has become the norm, and we dismiss analyzing it because most influencers are women and therefore the conversation is deemed frivolous. But influencers are driving the economy right now, because everything is advertising, and they're still far and away the most affective advertisers. So I think paying attention to the way they're making compromises and what lies they're telling their audience and themselves is important!

But that probably deserves its own essay rather than an even longer side-rant in this one.

In January, as part of my new years resolutions, I started keeping a list of "Little acts of self-kindness" because I've tried gratitude journaling and it never stuck but I'm trying to reframe a bunch of things I don't like doing that much into acts of self-kindness. Plus, I journal in the morning and try not to do ~daily recaps so this has been a nice way of noting things that brought me genuine joy throughout the day.

Eating three meals a day? Self-kindness.

Working out/movement/mobility exercises? Self-kindness.

Jerking off, watching Traitors, trying a new edible? Self-kindness!

Turns out, when you have spent most of your life hating yourself it feels really wild to care enough about your future self's joint health that you stretch everyday now.

Cooking, journaling, listening to records again now that I have a good record player and am not in constant fear of scratching my vinyls – they all make it on the list!

It's short, it's helpful, and I've enjoyed making it part of my routine. Gratitude lines didn't work for me, but this has. And it's been a good way to motivate myself to take care of myself better because I know I'm going to write it down and personal accountability works for me in this case! (Sometimes I use personal accountability to punish myself but I'm trying to commit to not being my own biggest bully anymore so I'm ~tracking the pattern and stopping if it becomes a problem.)

Other acts of self-kindness this month included: making over my apartment living room. It's so cool in here now! I got rid of my broken couch (that I deeply loved and still kind of miss) and a dining room table I never used and filled the room with furniture I'm absolutely obsessed with from AptDeco.

I love thrifting! I love buying things second-hand because not only does it feel like I've won a treasure hunt, it's good for the planet! And I try and thrift whenever possible, all of my designer bags are secondhand, my favorite winter coats all came from Monk and Crossroads, and now my furniture.

And one day after coworking, my best friend sent me the listing for a velvet orange couch and we were off to the races. I have been on the hunt for a reasonably priced Eames chair (a chair my grandfather always sat in when I was growing up that I didn't know was a ~famous chair and exclusively called it "Daddo's chair" in describing my desire for a swivelly chair + ottoman that I had loved sitting in so much as a kid) for years and when an Eames knockoff popped up on AptDeco I hit buy immediately.

And then the next morning she sent me renderings of what my apartment could look like because she's the coolest and most creative person in the world and I'm so fucking lucky???

We trekked to get emerald paint (stopping at L'imprimerie, a french bakery that used to be located right by our first ever apartment we lived in together that now serves the best regular and vegan almond croissants I've had in the city) and painted and oh my god painting is so hard I was sore for weeks what fresh hell awaits when doing activities at 31?

It's still in progress, but it's incredible how different it feels and how happy it makes me to be in there. It feels like mine and it feels reflective of the spaces I love the most and there's color and textures and I've been putting on records in the morning and journaling away while they spin (my record player has an automatic on/off for the needle which does in fact mean I listen to one side of the same record three times in a row) and I got a full length mirror so my form while lifting my wee 8lb dumbbells has vastly improved, and I needed something to invest in that I would get a lot out of and this was it!

Is it haunting me that Daddo, who was by no measure considered a wealthy person, had an actual Eames chair and owned his home, two things that I, his much more "financially successful" granddaughter do not have a sliver of hope in doing? Oh you bet! Uh oh uh oh whole nations crumbling to bolster false profits for venture capitalists!! We don't make high quality goods accessible to the masses because we've stymied innovation in order to more fully corrupt the system and create more landlords of labor OH NO!

(Venture Capitalists have quietly bought out the retirement, childcare, and veterinary industries because those are non-negotiable & emotional industries we have to pay for and therefore will go into debt in order to afford! Afford how? By taking out loans from the banks those same VC's own!)

I would apologize for the wild swings in mood, except I think trying to make my thoughts more palatable is just dishonest. It's been a really weird time to be alive, and commenting on that too quickly feels trite, but also not talking about it and pretending this is normal or something any of us are equipped for isn't true. And I refuse to not live in reality, so I have to try and make reality better. Or at least be honest about what I'm seeing because I'm terrified of how few people seem to be at all in touch with their emotions and I get it because it's hard to continue to feel in these circumstances!

It's hard. I get why people go numb and cold in response to injustice. It's hard to get your heart broken thousands of times over every single day. But not feeling isn't an option for me, because that's when I know things are bad. I will go down saying what I'm seeing at the top of my lungs.

I don't think Biden wants to win, and I don't know why. I don't understand why the NYPD gets $155 million in overtime (up from $4 million in 2022) while school children in New York have $60 million taken out of their school lunch budget. Capitalism makes me feel stupid, because surely the motivation can't be callously hoarding money, right? There must be something more, something deeper, something more meaningful at the heart of corruption.

One of my final coping mechanisms seems to be my ability to deny that all the suffering is worse than useless. That there is nothing more, it's just a stupid game they've trapped all of us into playing.

So I write my journals, and I make my desk cute for work that day, and I turn on fun lights and meditate in the morning. Because I'm still alive, and I'm still creating, and sometimes staying alive is an act of defiance too.

Shifts are happening. Big shifts. I think a lot of folks are coming around to the idea that we've got Real Work to do in order to right the wrongs that we've inherited. The narratives aren't keeping us safe, we have to come up with new ones. We have to go back to community > individualism, and for that to be true we have to work on welcoming the full spectrum of human existence to show up as they are.

We'll all get better at being together, by being together. Sitting in discomfort, working through solutions, coming out the other side. If we throw people overboard, it just makes the rest of us that remained onboard nervous we'll be next.

Individualism is about control. (I mean, everything is about control, so. Ipso facto on that one.)

Communities are about cooperation.

Our instinct is to help each other. It's the corruption that rots things from the inside. We've stopped fascism before, we can do it again. (Been thoroughly enjoying working through Rachel Maddow's Prequel this month!) We already know how to pull ourselves out of economic depression! Public work government jobs babeeeey, it's time to rebuild those bridges and, say it with me now, build high speed railroads across the country if anyone shows me that northest loop train again with no plans to actually make it happen I will go fully feral!

I have hope for the future because we've fixed stuff before in our wildly fucked up past. And accepting what I can control, staying steady in my awareness and growing dread at the loss of public influence over the booming voices of corporate interests. I believe in humans and our abilities.

My job is focused on helping people work better with an within groups. It turns out, facilitation is a lot of specific communication choices all lined up in a row. So now everything is meta, because I'm communicating about communication.

This essay has been really hard to end, but I know it's because I haven't been writing so it's all piled up and I want to go twice as long but in doing that, everything will get muddled. So, expect more soon!

I hope you had a good January, and, in the case you didn't, great job making it through! Welcome to February! May it be kind – and if not, at least it'll be over sooner we can get through this y'all!!