Omar

I have a single resolution this year. Just that one. I will endeavour to complete this task regardless. I won’t avoid it when I’m tired or anxious. When I’m stressed or angry. I will always do it. I can’t not, really. It takes seconds. If I can’t do this then I can’t do anything. But in my head I will remember the converse. I I can do this, I can do anything. So I do this thing so that I can do anything. I have a thousand more resolutions. I pick them up from the ground. I borrow them from friends and family who give them with love. I steal them from strangers whom I silently give thanks to. I do them until they become habit or until I let them fall because they didn’t work. They are not resolutions for the year but for-ever and ever or for just this moment. Both work. I have many, but one that matters.

I’ve got all these things floating around in my head.

Anne Mueller’s piece about pain. This Ask Metafilter for it’s discussion about the line between pushing our children too hard and not hard enough (is that a thing?) and how when we put our children first, we become a not even close second.

This won’t be the last time you’re faced with options that are good for your kid and bad for you;

And how I do get pretty decent sleep and exercise regularly and eat ok(ish) and that these things are keep me sane despite feeling overwhelmed constantly. Sabrina Benhaim’s Poem - Explaining My Depression To My Mother.

“Mom, I am the party, only I am a party I don’t want to be at” is boucing around my head.

That I heard sampled on Fred Again..’s New Year Mix on Apple Music. Which I did because there’s only so much I can listen to his Boiler Room mix before it becomes a problem. But seriously, I do love his Actual Life albums. This Oatmel comic on compliments.

He used to find it hard to take a compliment. It was easier once he thought of them as borrowed, instead. Tucked away for the next person who needed one.

Steve Makofsky’s Makoism newsletter too, for being one of the few things or places on the Internet I actually read instead of letting my screen-adled brain skim over. See also Kottke. I keep meaning to donate something but I’m too busy spending my money on things that aren’t important to me. He posted a link to this article Humans Need Play and that’s in my head too recently.

Under stress, we focus on what we need to do: submit the project, feed the kid. Perhaps we find time for what we should do: answer the email, clean the counters. But under pressure, we tend to drop the things that feel… optional. Frivolous perhaps. In particular, play.

And how the regular-ish games of table tennis I play with a colleague is probably also keeping me saner than I realise.

The opposite of play is not work – the opposite of play is depression. Dr Stuart Brown.

1. Make an album on your phone for each month. (For bonus points share it with your mum.)
2. Add a photo a day. Don’t worry if you miss a day. Don’t make any extra effort to take a photo. It’s ok if you’re photo is a screen shot of a QR code.
3. Buy an album.
4. Print photos.
5. Put photos in album.

Finally finished my 2022 year of photos this morning. It’s like a lazier one second everyday.

We have all these photos but they’re stuck inside our phones. I wanted to get them out but do so in a way that I would be able to stick with. Sometimes I forget to add or print photos and that’s fine, I just go back and do it later.