November 6: Exercise, Audiobooks and Managing Existential Dread

 I could not focus on writing yesterday. I eked out 450 words on Be That Way and then gave up and started doing Apothecaria illustrations instead.

I helped crowdfund Sandra Tayler's Structuring Life to Support Creativity book, which she's still editing. She released the "Creating in the Face of Existential Anxiety" chapter on Patreon yesterday (edit: post is NOT locked). Among other things, she suggested four possible activities:

* Take some small step to improve your home/environment, like hanging a picture or cleaning a closet. Preferably a non-recurring task.

* Take some manageable action to lessen the existential doom. Something you can handle sustainably. If all the things you can think of are too big to tackle, keep breaking them down until they feel manageable.

* Do a physical activity.

* Stop doomscrolling, except she put it in a much more sensible way with advice on figuring out what benefits you get from social media and ideas on how to get those benefits without wading through material that makes you feel a useless despair.

I did literally all of these. I cleaned out some space in my art-supply cupboard, in the process discovering some unhung art and unused frames. So I hung five pictures. (None of them are pictures I created. Even though I like my own art, I only have one piece hung and it's a pencil sketch from 20+ years ago. The art of mine that I like is digital and I'd have to make physical copies to hang it and ugh. Physical things. Bleh. I am especially bleh about physical things right now because I need to move sometime next year so I can take care of my aging parents and that means downsizing a lot. Hanging art a few months before moving feels ridiculous but, y'know, whatever. I'm still here. I can hang art.)

I donated money to my local library and joined the patreon for a trans artist I know.

I went for a walk, which is a thing I do pretty much every day but whatever, I did it. I listened to Fugitive Telemetry, the Murderbot Diaries novella that comes after the fourth novella and before the novel but was published after the novel. 

And I made some changes to social media. I muted a Discord that's become very active so I wouldn't be distracted by it. I turned "auto-open content warnings" off on Fediverse. (Fediverse has a content-warning feature that users can select to use or not on each post. It is Very Popular with the people I follow, who use it for everything from "post has content a significant fraction of people would find disturbing" to "post has content that someone, somewhere, might conceivably upset be by" to "post is long" to "post is a joke and punchline is under the CW." For six years, I've had content warnings auto-open because I didn't need the content warnings and it was easier to collapse the few posts I didn't want to see than to expand all the posts I did.) I also turned off all boosts, which kind of sucks but it meant I wasn't seeing three billion boosts about how everything that matters will soon be annihilated and I should just curl up in a ball of misery for the short remainder of my life.

Mastodon also has keyword filters, and I might add more at some point (I've filtered a few things for a long time now) but I haven't yet.

It didn't help enough to make me willing to write yesterday. But hey, I did five Apothecaria illustrations, and that was a thing I needed to do in November anyway. 

Today, I will probably do all four things again in some fashion. But not now, because I have a cat sleeping beside my foot and I don't want to disturb her.

Lyric is probably only sleeping on my foot because she wants to know the moment I stand up so she can follow me into the kitchen and get lunch. But she looks so cozy anyway. My poor cat: whenever I'm sitting or lying down, the only method she can think of to get me to do things is "lie down on top of the human" which is, like, the opposite of effective. I mean, it's great for me, I love cat snuggles. But she has never figured out that it just makes me less likely to move.

I finished listening to "Fugitive Telemetry" yesterday and moved on to the last Murderbot novel, System Collapse. There's an audiobook version narrated by Kevin Free, just like the other audiobooks of the series. And Hoopla even has this version. But for some reason, Hoopla only shows the "dramatized adaptation" version when I search on Martha Wells. The listing in the Hoopla app says it's "unabridged" but it's 5:01 instead of 6:36 so I'm kinda wondering if it really is the whole text. Maybe? People have different speaking speeds. The "dramatized adaptation" has a full cast and sound effects, instead of a single reader; I probably would've checked it out even if I'd seen the Kevin Free one, just out of curiosity. That said, I'm 20% through the book and not really a fan of the style. The sound effects and music are more distracting than enhancing for me. Having actual different voices for all the speaking parts is nice, though. One genderless character that Free voiced as vaguely masculine gets a femme voice in the dramatization, which is cool. I only get seven check-outs per month from Hoopla and I'm going through audiobooks at a pretty fast pace, so I'll finish the dramatized adaptation. But maybe I'll listen to Free's version too, sometime.

When I finish System Collapse, I'll check out some other audiobook. Murderbot audiobooks have been more motivational for exercise and drawing than podcasts have, so I'll see if the magic applies to other books, too. I haven't decided what to try next, though. A person in Discord recommended a nonfiction title, Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, which sounds interesting. I am wondering if it'll be more in the podcast-levels of interesting, where I listen to it because I'm exercising anyway, and not where I decide to exercise so I can listen to it. Guess I'll find out.