#205 - Rabbit Rabbit! Welcome to August
or: there's been sunscreen in my eye throughout july
My desk hasn't been clean in like a month. I keep trying to get things back together but then getting distracted by things like Doing Work in order to make money and live and survive so the desk keeps getting put off in lieu of my desire to spend like one day in the future Not Panicking.
Everything has been in panic-mode recently though.
And sure, part of that is the summer and the heat that comes with it.
I escaped the city for my annual "you should leave New York City at least once a year in order to be normal about the city and how much you actually love it" trip. My dad has finally freed himself from living in Florida so I went to visit him on Cape Cod in their very sleepy but very cute little town.
But today TODAY I woke up and it was cold like actually cold and I walked around for forty minutes in the rain (every time I say "in the rain" I say it like Carrie from the episode of SATC where Miranda & Steve get together) (which leads me to the perfect opportunity to share my favorite batshit gif of that series)
(the framerate?? the zoom???) and I just immediately felt better in this weather.
Even though my thighs like really are sore from a workout I did yesterday. Still toodled! Sometimes I forget how rough summer really is on my mental health and the abject resentment of having to be outdoors just isn't good long-term, y'know?
Speaking of working out, I have been diligently updating my 2025 Workout Videos blog that I started in January. Yes I did fall off for a few months but I'm back babeeeey and idk after a full seven months of logging things and writing my thoughts down about working out/movement/getting stronger I think I'm finally making some real breakthrough changes when it comes to healthy coping mechanisms.
Claire B
Now when I find myself abjectly outraged about the world around me, I don't scroll twitter, I lift weights!
There has been relentless weight-loss propaganda ramping up for the last two years and while I really try to just Not Care about the mounjaro and hers ads that litter the subway, it's like ignoring someone walking directly behind you with a bullhorn shouting about how much better your life would be if you just accept that everyone everywhere is fatphobic and therefore you should lose weight so they'll treat you better and then your life will be amazing, right?
Except well, I don't really uh, like spending time with outwardly fatphobic people?
It's kind of a great litmus test for "who sees me as human" to just be interacted with when you're fat like me. Lots of people do see me as a human worthy of being treated with kindness btw! But the ones that don't, like, I am also not interested in trying to be their friend.
Like when it comes to dating, "see how they treat the waiter" isn't necessary for me. My body is the waiter, in this case. (The...weighter. AYOOOOO! High five.) It's just not a group of people I have any interest in because I think hatred/self-hatred is a terribly boring and nonintellectual way to approach the world but also I had to work really really hard to stop hating myself so like yeah I don't spend time with people who value thinness above all else.
I know that it's conditioned into us since birth but I also know plenty of wonderful people who have done the work to get over that conditioning and those are the people I connect with on a soul-level. It's cool that way!
But anyway, I have been working out and I have been making an effort to keep myself both limber and strong because I gotta say, feeling strong is a hell of a drug. I can lift that, I can carry this wildly heavy bag of vegetables back to my apartment, I will be able to help you move and am actually kind of excited about it!
Also, I love dancing, I love to dance, I love to learn new moves, I love to watch a snippet of America's Sweethearts over and over to copy their combinations which is actually a grand tradition going back to watching DCC: Making The Team on the CMT network in my moms basement in high school and rewinding the TiVo over and over so I could memorize the tryout dance set to Glamorous by Fergie in s3. (They use generic music over it in all the reruns, but the real ones remember.) I sometimes forget how much I love to dance (and tbh, how good I am at dancing) and letting it be a thing of pure joy has been really wonderful. I can do a split again! We love that!!
In other news: I'm hosting my first public workshop! It's about meetings! It will only be 45 minutes long and will happen on August 20 @ 12:00 - 12:45pm ET and it's totally free and you should absolutely come! We're going to make meetings better if it's the last thing I do!!!!
(Don't worry, at least 10 other people have already signed up at this time (and I announced it...yesterday so there hopefully will be even more people soon) so you're not going to be in a Zoom alone with just me and my awesome agenda.)
I would worry that this blog is totally scattered but uh, I'm trying to just let things be what they are and to stop apologizing so much. I spent an hour this morning listening to an infuriating series of takes about the movie Dazed & Confused (they complained that the teacher in the beginning of the movie dissappears for the rest of the film – like yeah guys, it's the last day of school and she's not a main character!!!!) and then remembered that this was an entirely voluntary experience I was indulging in and hey maybe their audience is a bunch of fucking squares who want to nitpick if smoking weed is bad, actually.
(IT'S DAZED & CONFUSED WHAT DID YOU THINK THE "DAZED" PART WAS REFERRING TO????
I get them being disappointed that the girls in the movie aren't really given plots but also it's....a hangout movie? The only real "driving" plot is whether Pink is going to play football?? And the fact they agreed with the coaches is making me feel like I'm living in an alternate reality like–this is maybe the only movie in the history of America to say plainly that playing high school football maybe ISN'T the end-all-be-all of a person's life? (They also misquoted the "All I'm saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life - remind me to kill myself." line which AGAIN is kind of THE POINT OF THE MOVIE because we've just indulged in this ~ oh wow things were so great back then ~ tale only to be reminded that like, high school is perhaps NOT the best years of our lives and it's just nostalgia filters that make it feel that way. But also some shit was dope and that's fun to reminisce about. It's almost like it was a choice Linklater made to set the movie in the 70s because he was making a direct comment to all the Boomers in the audience watching it in 1993!) (I used to have a movie podcast to express all these thoughts in because wowza do I just have a lot of thoughts about movies!))
I've been forced to spend time on LinkedIn lately so I keep taking psychic damage from all the posts where people espouse their love of using ChatGPT as a therapist. There are some case uses for AI that I can abide (but like overall the damage to the environment/the corrupt way these models were trained makes me completely intolerant to the idea of using it for myself) but treating it like a person??? WHY! Also anytime a celebrity mentions using it on a podcast I have to turn it off. Allison Williams why are you not just googling the ideal humidity for a baby's room???? Meg Stalter I don't think asking ChatGPT about what you can expect from your WTF with Marc Maron interview to be cool/interesting/funny and I really don't want to think less of people but they keep telling me about it unprompted! AAAHH!
Maybe writing more often and not just for my businesses would be beneficial I seem to have a lot of thoughts stored up right now.
ANYWAY! It's August! Today makes me feel like the rest of summer is at least going to be possible!
I might watch Sex And The City from the beginning again because it's been a little while and it really is a different show each and every time especially now that I'm right around the age of the characters which is a TRIP. I watched it the first time the summer between my junior & senior year of high school because it was about a writer and I was rippin' torrents on the daily so I also got all the DVD extras back then. Ahh, 2008. It really was a simpler time!
Okay well, if there's thing you feel like you want to let go and leave behind in this new month, I wrote about the list I made over on the Meeting Medic blog this morning if you want to do some writing of your own:
And I can't find a way to make that image smaller so we're GOING WITH IT!
Happy August! Make sure to take a bunch of snippet videos that you can set to Taylor Swift's August come September! (Oh, that was just a tiktok trend from two years ago and those tend to be fleeting? WHATEVER!)
Thank you for reading and I'll be back with more thoughts and rants at some point.
Oh and please come to my workshop!!! It'll be SO FUN! I would say guaranteed or your money back but it's free, so. Can't!