Granola Bat

I have written in fits and starts for years, never reaching the polish of certain aspirational fashion, yoga, foodie type blogs. I wasn’t seeing my kind of pathos in blog content, so I figured there must not be a market for someone who was living a life that’s more of a warning than an aspiration. Finally, though, I was exercising and meditating daily, affording decent food, and the fog of trauma and anxiety were starting to clear. I felt like I had something to offer, at last. “Just write, just write every day, just do it.” went the pithy catch-line of a speaker at a bloggers’ workshop I’d attended years before. But these people’s lives, clothes, occupations… they looked nothing like mine. They’d successfully ascended into the Creative Class – in some cases, they inherited it from parents and grandparents who’d already been there. How to find the energy and time to write when you weren’t even getting enough sleep in the hustle to kind of survive? The reason, after all, there are ...

Photo by Flickr user binarydreams I'm starting a new and fairly extensive project in June. I've long been fascinated with the concept of minimalism as a self-improvement tool. This is something I've thought about, and even done partially in fits and starts, for a little while now, but I've never really focused on a massive, methodical, gradual overhaul of the way I relate to physical, mental, and digital clutter. In fact, my escapist nature appealed greatly to the amount of time I could hide in Twitter, Reddit threads, and other places where I could throw myself into a Cause, or see someone even more down-and-out than me seeking advice. There'd be intermittent periods where I'd put the phone down to get back onto another meditation kick, or attend a festival - but these were moments where I had nothing to escape. When sick or bored, the Web was a wide and appealing escape-portal. I was its willing traveler. I knew, in the niggling back corner of my brain...

Happy 3-day weekend eve to the workin' grunts like me! Here's a round-up of some links that have powered my inner light this week: Pure Geekery: Stop exercising. Start playing. "Every magazine seems preoccupied with telling us how to “burn more calories.” Being barraged with this toxic messaging makes exercise feel like another chore. Another thing we have to do. Another way we aren’t quite good enough. And it sucks all the fun out of physical activity." Becoming Minimalist:  Want to Lead a Happy Life? Science Says to Focus on These 10 Things Oleg Vishnepolsky: Life is too short for anything else! Already Pretty: The Spectrum "Stylish is one idea of flattering, one idea of sophisticated, one idea of creative. In these messages, stylish is complex, expensive, specific, and exclusionary. It is a niche into which we may never fit, but that we must always be attempting to fill. And it’s all bunk. All of it." The Blogging Goth: World Goth D...

Photo credit: Thomas Guy Gen Con is possibly the highlight of my entire year. So, when a major depressive episode hit, with some of the worst anxiety I've ever dealt with, I was unsure how it would go. And after I'd been so excited because Gen Con 2017 was the 50th anniversary? Now, needing 12 hours of sleep at a time, sometimes still needing naps, with low energy and barely even being able to eat more than a few bites at a time, because the anxiety made me feel like I'd throw up if I ate more than that. Within a matter of a month, I'd dealt with a minor but expensive bedbug infestation, broken up with my boyfriend, and then I got some bad news from work that knocked me over the edge of the worst episode I'd had in 6 years. But I was psyched to work with Iron GM again, so I decided that no matter how much I needed to take it easy over the other 3 days, Saturday, Iron GM World Championship Day, was going to be fantastic.  The people I work with for the I...

So very much has changed. I'm hopeful that one of those changes will be an end to years of not being able to fully partake and enjoy things that were nearly a part of me in the younger, easier days. I haven't truly, consistently blogged since probably before I was even legally able to drink. I lost my voice. There are several probable culprits, the most dirty being depression and financial struggle. I also don't do well with themes. So I've just decided not to do that! I'm probably not a niche blogger, so any attempt at finding a niche has felt too much like forcing the matter. I like so many things! I think about so many things! If it doesn't distill into a marketable, easily monetized kind of a brand, whatever! I put together sales proposals for a living now. My life isn't one of those. I should probably include a blanket content/trigger warning that one thing on my mind a lot, lately, is weight and health. Amazingly, a decade of #depressionmeals  an...

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