It's always easier to write about things at the time, than to try and recall previous feelings at a later point.  I guess that's why blogging every day after school always felt like a nice thing...

Most of last week was pretty busy (and even a few days the week before, honestly), mostly with work stuff, though that slowed down towards the end of the week.  I was left this weekend with a weird feeling of not knowing whether I should try to just catch up on some stuff that I need to do (to feel better), or to just try to not really do anything productive at all (to feel better).  When "being productive" and "being not productive" are sometimes two different roads to the same outcome it becomes difficult to evaluate where I should go.  As always, though, balance is usually the right answer, and my mind is quick to course-correct whenever it has strayed too far in one direction or the other.

Yesterday, for example, I didn't really get to check anything substantial off of the todo list at all, so today I ended up making up for it by handling an album release, then working on a song for 4 hours, as well as writing and finishing a letter.  Pretty much any day where I get to put significant progress (in this case, finishing the entire rough draft) towards a song outside of OHC time is usually a good day for me...

Did some "fun but also hard work" things this past week as well.  We had a sushi night where I got to play sushi chef and make 4 different types of nigiri.  Although my raw fish were not quite the ideal shapes/sizes, it was quite an experience trying to slice through them in one clean motion with my knife.  I can see why people use single beveled blades for this stuff -- you can really feel it when your knife isn't up to snuff for this particular task.  Forming the sushi rice itself was much easier this time, knowing that the "water" that you dip your hands into to avoid rice sticking should actually be a mixture of water and rice vinegar...  We also did a hair bleaching + dyeing session, so I'm back to a deep blue color with some purple tips.

I've got a mental "checkup" of sorts coming up and thinking about that was a good chance for me to inventory what has potentially been bothering me in my life, even if those things are not really rearing their ugly heads at me at this moment.  Usually it's the same few things, honestly...stress, people, family, and loss (not necessarily in that order).  Out of all of those loss is the one that is perhaps most pervasive, though it also is not really as much of an issue when I'm busy being distracted by all the other ones.  Thoughts about loss and "abandonment" are of a different nature really, than all of the other ones, and I'm sure that is obvious just from the way that I write about it.

As we settle into September it's important (as always) that we continue to track what makes sense for us to do in terms of our goals for Social Studies.  Listening to an online LGBTQ+ roundtable for the city that I live in, one of the takeaways I got from it was how important it can be to make it obvious in our communities and interactions that we are thinking about inclusivity and to call out gender typing / etc.  This is of course something that I've thought about a lot in the past as it relates to typecasting social dance roles, but there are a number of ways in which we can probably do better about that outside of dance as well.  I've tried to make my pronouns (now listed as "he/him/she/her all OK") present in a few more places as that is something that is quite easy to do.  I admittedly still have to get used to bringing that up when introducing myself, though that is difficult since introducing myself is something that so rarely happens in the first place...but I guess I can always start asking when I meet new people too.  Honestly though, a lot of the time I hardly even ask for people's names when I meet them...bleh

In other news, I've been trying to get a little bit more aware of my sleep cycles -- not just my schedule of sleeping itself, but trying to be a little more conscious of regulating exactly how much sleep I get.  After one too many times of waking up groggy due to getting "the wrong" amount of sleep I figured I should probably try to do a better job of figuring out what the "right" amount of sleep is.  I've figured out for example that I tend to come out of a sleep cycle about 4 hours after sleeping, but I've yet to solidly figure out whether 7.5 or 8 or 9 are good number of hours for me to really feel ready to wake up in the morning (though I can guess).

I've been a little less involved with positive activism than I'd like to be.  Granted, I've been busy, so that is sort of an excuse for it, but I don't think that's really the whole story either.  I think I skimped a bit on research that I should have done in the meantime for more critical activism.  Anyways, right now instead of that I've actually been thinking to sort of sidetrack my efforts and instead look for penpal programs.  I tried writing a letter for the Letters to Strangers project and I may do so again but I felt like it did feel a bit impersonal to be sending a letter into the void.  Granted, these blog posts are perhaps much the same thing, and there are certain times at which perhaps I would be ok with sending a letter to the void.  But it seems perhaps more in line with my sensibilities to send a letter that is actually directed towards someone.  I've joined up with a program that claims to pair writers with nursing home patients/workers to write to, so we'll see if that ends up going anywhere.  Who knows, maybe I will end up finding someone who will actually write back, unlike all of those many people who seem to only exist in the memories of my past.