some self-care things i am doing

[lotesse]

-I've been using the Finch self-care pet app for about a month. Your little virtual bird pet gains energy when you accomplish self-care tasks. The app has a decent first-aid kit contained within: breathing exercises, stretches, soundscapes, reflections. And you get to put little outfits on your bird, and build it fancy houses.

-I'm going to stop keeping up with the news. We all tacked in to "staying informed" last time the Orange Menace was in power, and, if anything, it just convinced the media that he's good for business. The media space seems to me very full of gossip, fearmongering, and propaganda, and very devoid of seriousness or expertise. So, I'm not going to follow along with every twist and turn of what's to come at the federal level. I'll stay in touch with my local polity, and the greater city-state we're a part of.

-I've been following the news avidly most of my adult life. In order to fill that space in my brain, I'm going back to some old literature. I mean to work through the last Shakespeare plays I don't know well, and I think I'll read the Aeneid, which I've never done. Ancient literature is still with us because centuries' worth of humans passed it along. There's the merit of the work, and then the meaning created by that chain of transmission. If I want to study mankind, I'm going to turn in that direction for a time, instead of to the news.

-I'm putting more of my juice behind writing regularly. Maybe a poem a day? I know that when I write more, what I write gets better.

Comments

[aflatmirror]

I've never read the full Aeneid, just the skim we gave it in AP Latin, but I keep meaning to come back to it. I absolutely love Dido, especially her drama at the end of her arc as her romance with Aeneas dissolves, her raw pain and rage and betrayal (I kind of lost interest in school after Book IV when her plotline concludes 😅). I feel you on ancient literature, there's something so powerful in reading words from thousands of years ago and knowing that at all times and all places, people are human.