junk drawer

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.

I'm (finallyyyyy) off work for the summer - so this month, I'm focusing on self care and resting after the worst school year of my career.

July 2025 goals & plans

• RENT @ The Cape Playhouse (7/2)
• grad assing @ Hamline MFAC (7/9-7/21)
• eye doctor (7/22)
• Æsa visit (7/25-27)
• reread Saiyuki
• reread TSUBASA: RESERvoir CHRoNiCLE(?)
• go to the beach
• go to the beach again
• start Vantablack heist RP w/ [redacted] and [redacted]

I'm on page 812 of 1167 (according to Libby, with the typeface set to OpenDyslexic and the size on the lowest of the "accessibility sizes," whatever that is), or chapter 13 of 17. So far, the A Study in Drowning is dancing around the question of "what do you do when you are disappointed by your favorite author?"
( spoilers ✂️ )
I could be wrong but that's my guess.

Since I stopped using the-hellsite-formerly-known-as-Twitter and deleted social media off of my old phone, I often browse Libby booklists when I want to scratch that "mindless scrolling" itch. I can't remember where I found A Study in Drowning. I borrowed it from Boston Public Library but I can't even say for sure if I was browsing one of their booklists or one of the other libraries' and BPL happened to have it available now.
I can't even remember why I clicked through to read more about it; the cover art, the title - none of it has been my "thing" lately… or ever. I'm not into dark academia. I don't read much YA any more. It's been literal decades since I've had much to do with straight-up secondary world fantasy; once I discovered urban/low fantasy, portal fantasy, masquerade fantasy, etc., that's all I've been into.
… but I picked it up anyway.
( ✂️ )

Title: Stadium Love
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Characters: OC - Paisley Webster
Notes: I love fanmixes. I think we should bring them back. This isn't finished but I wanted to share it because it's been awhile since I posted any creative work here.

Link: 🔗

( I guess you thought you could just watch ♫ )

My cult radar was right(), so I dropped How to Meet Your Self: An Inspirational Self-Help Workbook before I got very far into it. I am still in the mood for self-help, though, so I browsed my public libaries' Libby (Libbies?) and found The Science of Stuck: Breaking Through to Find Your Path Forward and, honestly, it's refreshing after the potentially dangerous pseudoscience of Self Help and How to Meet Your Self!
Right off the bat, author Britt Frank, MSW, LSCSW, SEP, writes, Any practices that encourage you to examine your self-talk or "change your mind to change your mood" have the potential to be toxic and victim-blaming. … "managing your thoughts" works only if you are in a safe environment where choices are available. (Emphasis in original.)
Frank is also very responsible about advising readers to seek medical advice if they are experiencing physical symptoms, like, just because anxiety can cause a chest pain, don't assume your chest pain is caused by anxiety - rule out physical causes first. She seems kind of skeptical of mental illness as such but balances that with saying that medication can help, do not go off your meds without medical supervision, and that diagnoses can be helpful for accessing medical care, SSDI, etc.
I won't quibble with every little thing I find that rubs me the wrong way in this book; a lot of it is very good! This in particular was very useful for me: When you say "I struggle with motivation," what you really mean is "My brain thinks it needs to conserve energy to keep me alive."
💡 I have ME/CFS and survived a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad crash/burnout in 2019-2020. I am very protective of my energy envelope now that it's big enough for me to function in society again but I wonder if I'm being a little too fearful of pushing it? Trauma responses - and that big crash was traumatizing! - can look like… too little energy (depression/fatigue/procrastination). [big jump] If you're stuck on hour five of a Twitter scroll-a-thon, it's not because you lack motivation — it's because your brain thinks you need to conserve energy. It makes total sense to me that my brain has a hypervigilant threat response to "overdoing it" even a little bit to the point that I'm not expending enough energy and avoiding doing things, especially during the week, leading to my feeling that all I do is work and sleep.
I won't type up all of the quotes I've highlighted, but I will share a couple of the workbook-y activities Frank suggests: Fears/Needs/Resources list. Make a list of your three biggest fears, your three biggest needs, and the three biggest resources you have available to help you. and A powerful antidote to trauma is making a choice. Think of ten small choices you can make in the next five minutes. This can be as simple as what to wear… [etc]
All of the good stuff makes it even weirder when she cites The Five Love Languages and Marianne Williamson. What was I just saying about dangerous pseudoscience?
There's also some stuff I want to think about re: trauma - Trauma is an internal process — not an external event. … Trauma is your brain's in ability to process and metabolize information. - and autistic "bottom-up" processing but I have work to do, so I'll leave this here for now.

I don't really believe in "guilty pleasures" but self help/self improvement is my "guilty pleasure" genre. I think there's a lot of genuinely great books that get sold as self help (How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing, e.g.) but there's also a lot of dumb and dangerous self help books.
So I had avoided Gabrielle Bernstein's books, like Super Attractor, because a book about manifesting with a hot white woman on the cover? almost definitely dumb and very likely dangerous. ( ✂️ )

I saw this on verdande_mi's journal and decided I wanted to give it a go. My list is in (roughly) chronological order from childhood until now. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it's pretty heavy on children's literature.
( the list )
I'm sure I'll think of more I left out and add them later…
I'll also say, as an elementary educator generally and a librarian specifically, that inclusion on this list doesn't mean a book is of high literary quality or that it has aged well or even that I'd recommend it to anyone else.

It's so hard to annotate books I enjoyed, especially when I enjoyed it in a fangirly way? … which feels like a weird thing to say about a book in which ~47 children die violent deaths at the hands of the state but, like, you know what I mean.
( ✂ )

I feel bad for anyone who followed this community for my fanfic. I'll at least try to keep my annotations under a cut.
( ✂ )

I heard about The Secret History of Bigfoot: In Search of an American Monster on this episode of American Hysteria where the author, John O'Connor, gave an interview about his book.
I'm not a cryptid person. I have my own woo🔒 but it's not cryptids. I don't believe in any of them but in a different way than I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts but I've seen one (three, actually, not counting the cat ghosts that appeared when Turtle was sick) and I believe when other people tell me they've seen or experienced ghosts; cryptids, on the other hand, I'm like, "uh-huh, sure." I think because there's really no evidence for or against ghosts, except eyewitness testimony; surely a 7', 350+ mammal would at least leave behind bones? or poop? (This doesn't include oceanic creatures. If you want to tell me that there's a fucking fire-breathing serpent hanging around down there waiting to boil the seas when the Antichrist comes then you know what? sure, why not. It's not worse than anything we've found down there.)
So I don't believe in Bigfoot but I'm glad there are people out there who do. It makes the world a more interesting place.
Anyway… This book is very funny. Sometimes I think O'Connor tries a little too hard to get a chuckle ("Dinner that evening was, as my students might say, Gucci") but I've highlighted a lot that literally made me laugh out loud, like "a pika - a short-eared and pissed-off cousin of the rabbit - scampered from its ferny den to eyeball me" and "Assembled around the fire, we gave the lie to Bigfooting's alleged lack of diversity. We were old white guys, young white guys, middle-aged white guys" or "(there's a joke to be made here about a sausage party that's quite frankly beneath me)."
It really feels like O'Connor is spinning a yarn and it might be affected but it is genuinely funny and I'm impressed at how seamlessly he weaves 'having a beer and telling a story'-style humor with deep research; I didn't expect to see Saint Augustine cited in a book that makes a joke about not making a joke about sausage parties, but there he is: "Saint Augustine… took monsters of the distant East so seriously that he devoted an entire chapter of his fifth-century City of God to the question of their salvation." (I love this stuff, like, how do you fast for Ramadan in space? and is lab-grown pork kosher? like sci-fi religious questions.)
I also learned the concept of "half-belief" which, as someone with OCD, really resonated with me.
Something I want to follow up on later is research by Dr. Gary Wells, cited by O'Connor, that "when given misleading information under questioning, people 'remembered' entirely fictitious events." Given my own history of believing things that aren't real🔒, this is a study I want to track down. The bibliography is frustratingly incomplete; it jumps from "Walls, Laura Dassow" to "Wiseman, Frederick Matthew" with no "Wells, Gary." Rude! Not to mention, none of these things are cited directly; there's no footnotes or parenthetical citations that would make it easier to cross-reference the texts that even make it into the bibliography… which I guess might be too "academic" and potentially distracting for popular nonfiction but it is annoying to me, personally.
… all that said, I'm ~50% of the way through this book and I am really enjoying it so far. It's fun reading and well researched and a good romp.
I wrote more about this book after I finished reading on 3/6/2025.