Week of 11 May, 2020
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Weeknotes
- I got the air-conditioning fixed! It’s amazing what a few nights of sleeping in 24ºC can do for your anxiety. My mood is better, I feel more energetic, and I’m able to do things around the house again.
- I’ve given up on the reading list I set for myself and decided to just read fiction for the rest of this year, or until the COVID-19 situation gets better. Reading fiction doesn’t do much to fix my anxiety, but it’s easier to read than non-fiction and distracts me from what’s going on in the world.
- Talking of fiction, I’ve been completely obsessed with The Dispossessed lately. It’s not just the idea of an anarchist society that excites me, but also the fact that this is one of the few SF stories I’ve read that talk about what a better world than ours might look like. A lot of SF tends to lean towards dystopias, but The Dispossessed attempts to imagine a new, better future.
- Continuing my Ursula K. Le Guin binge, I’ve also been reading the Earthsea series. I can’t say I’m enjoying it very much yet, but I plan to stick with it.
- The new Charli XCX album is one of those era-defining pieces of work that people will still be talking about a decade from now. The only pop record I like better than how i’m feeling now is EMOTION, which is really saying something.
- This also happens to be the week I discovered Griselda Records. I’m not a huge fan of the classic NY boom-bap sound, but there’s something about how Griselda approaches it that makes all their records very listenable. The individual tracks on Westside Gunn’s Pray for Paris and Conway the Machine’s No One Mourns the Wicked kind of blend into each other, but the albums as a whole are really solid.
- For the last year I’d been trying to get myself into the habit of listening to music without any distractions. I used to be able to do it four or five years ago, but these days it’s hard to keep my brain focused on just the music. I now prefer scrolling through Instagram or Reddit as I work my way through a new album. I doubt I can force my brain to change — trust me, I’ve tried — so I’m just making peace with this. Listening to music is supposed to be fun, and I’m going to do whatever feels most comfortable.
- RTJ4 dropping on June 4! Killer Mike and El-P are the reason I’m still here today, so to say I’m excited would be the understatement of the year.