collections: a weekly (accidentally turned monthly) reset

I am well over a month late with these words. I’ve been writing quite a bit for work, and those words have drained out of me onto Google Docs, but not quite on this little blog of mine. Perhaps the larger lesson here is that my words don’t have to be perfect; I just need to find the will in me to write them.

  • color me imperfect: the renaissance of quarantined hobbies includes learning how to paint with messy, layered watercolors
  • the problem with pandemic storytelling: let’s agree to stop romanticizing the times we are collectively trying to forget
  • meaning well with hypocrisy: i can’t tell you how bad i am at something that i can’t take my own advice


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color me imperfect

the renaissance of quarantine hobbies includes learning how to paint with messy, layered watercolors

A few weeks ago, I decided I want to learn how to paint with watercolor. Given my historically established lack of artistic talent, I begin with overwhelmingly low expectations. However, I’m keen to learn and create some pieces that I might one day be proud of displaying somewhere in the open. Unvarnished, and susceptible to criticism.

For rigor, I want to be clear about how different this is from my normal expected behavior. Throughout the course of my life, I have been repeatedly reminded of how poor of an artist I am. This has been a constant hum throughout my adolescence. There is visual evidence of how this is more fact than exaggeration. There is something about the perception to brain to hand-movement that doesn’t quite connect. I am a perfectionist, and the loose figures and shadows and edges that my hand produces on paper has never quite measured up.

Drawing may require some modicum of established talent, but my post-grad self believes that anything is a skill that can be learned. So with infinite free time in my hobby-less young adulthood, I have taken upon less productive hobbies that still produce creative value and little to no academic progression. Everything else can wait, I suppose.

I admire how the colors bleed into each other: uncontrolled, chaotic. There is no stopping water that runs on paper, the imprint of dissolved pigment that binds to the page beneath. That the brush controls the strokes you make and the density of pigment and wash of color on textured paper.

I admire how terrible I am at it to start. The colors bleed into murky blobs of water and run all over. Watercolor is about deliberately coloring outside of the lines and letting the layers combine and collapse over each other. The deliberation in I follow YouTube tutorials destined for fifteen, twenty-minutes max that take me well over an hour. Scrub the timeline back to rewind the parts I missed, wonder how two people could have started in the same place yet ended up at wildly different midpoints (mine being the inferior version, of course).

The key to watercolor painting is patience. Layers need to dry before more paint is applied, or else the paper will saturate and curl up. The painting has its limits too; knowing when to push and when to hold back is half the battle during a painting session. Rush, and everything is ruined.

Still, there’s the feeling I can’t shake when I finally finish something. Some vignette of an abstract scene of bleeding water-flush colors stained upon paper. Something like looks like something real. Not perfect, entirely copied, yet nevertheless an artifact of genuine effort and concentration.

Maybe it feels good to be terrible at something. Maybe it feels good to put in that hour or two every weekend, knowing that I’ll produce something small that I might like, or something small I can tolerate at the very least. Maybe it feels good to do it over and over, and invest in nurturing this in the same way you invest in the things you like, buying supplies and bookmarking references and blocking sacred time to work on it.

Maybe someday I’ll feel good and be good at it too.

the problem with pandemic storytelling

let’s agree to stop romanticizing the times we are collectively trying to forget

I wonder if there are any good ways to capture the intricacies of the moment as it happens—without also then capitalizing on this innate impulse to record and fictionalize it.

Yes, there is a lot of story to tell here on the “the effects of quarantine and social isolation” and “how technology helped us stay connected” and “the power of the human spirit.” and these are valuable, worthy themes, and heady questions about the state of the human condition during these very strange times.

But it feels like we can tell those stories without “cheapening” it as entertainment made for distraction. We don’t need zoom meet-cute romcoms on reject network TV a la Freeform, nor did we ever ask for an Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor bank heist movie (we really, really didn’t. i promise you, HBO Max).

These lopsided fictionalizations do a disservice to the supposed “moment in time” they are honoring. It implies the moment is over, and we can move on and make fun of it and tell fictionalized stories about how maybe it wasn’t that bad under thinly-veiled humor.

This should not become a new genre. Executives should not be greenlighting scripts because the pandemic feels like topical storytelling. It’s not.

meaning well with hypocrisy

i can’t tell you how bad i am at something that i can’t take my own advice

I have a tumultuous relationship with the word hypocrite and the implication of hypocrisy. We ought to recognize hypocrisy everywhere. We’re all hypocrites; it’s what makes us human. Even AI is hypocritical. We are so hypocritical that we can’t even program our black box machines to be better than us.

Here is something I say to people who know me relatively well, and I say it so casually and off-handedly that it’s probably a plea to myself to snap out of the delusion that it’s okay: “I give good advice but I never take it.” It means that I will happily and freely dole out unsolicited advice about the best way for you to live your life, and turn around and do the exact opposite. I will advise you to care for yourself, to take that extra breather, to feel your feelings, to be pragmatic about the situation at hand.

If I were in the same shoes, I would act on my own advice. If I were really honest, I’d talk about how I’m pretty mediocre about being kind and caring toward myself, how I never give my space for the breather, how I ignore my feelings because it’s easier to deal with them later, and how I don’t really find room for pragmatism in emotional situations because I would have averted course much earlier. There’s a lot there.

I’m thinking about this because of this quote from a newsletter on work culture in remote work times (“feel free to take time if you need it,” they say. like i’ve probably said before. and yet, nobody has taken it):

I cannot tell you how deeply I believe that, how fiercely I want to dismantle this ethos of constant productivity and worksim, and how spectacularly bad I am at consistently taking my own advice. I am trying and failing and getting slightly better and backsliding. I have tried to be consistently transparent about that — because that is what unlearning an ideology looks like. It doesn’t mean that the work is bullshit. It means the work is hard.

How is anyone supposed to know what they need? Truth be told, we can’t even trust ourselves to know when to ask.

this past week