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2023-01-25 - 5:56 p.m.
late january
every morning, i turf out the overnight pornbots from my social media. and i wonder, whose fantasies are they, all these kittens 4 u and princess brats and spicy accountants? are these the stolen pictures of real women, or ai-generated, with all the attendant teratologies of teeth and feet and hands? here, my own fantasies drift toward the arctic circle, toward sturdy women who raise yak or musk oxen or a heritage breed of hardy sheep. who look like the late singer meat loaf with the opposite politics. who smell like wool and woodsmoke and warm spices. how foolishly might i react, if someone made a pornbot to target me?
* * *
lately, every day, i marvel at the sloughing-off of long covid. i didn't realize how much it had burdened me until the weight began to lift. more things begin to feel possible. and yet this time of year is always hard for me. this year especially, so many of the little strings that pull me through the winter have failed to cohere, no niveous bonfires, or ice skating or fort building, or walking through subzero woods crisp with the ozone smell of sublimation. no squeak of fresh powder underfoot, no reflection of moonlight. instead, everything is mired in a sad wet brown. there has been no ice, the merest dusting of snow. it seems as if one must be able to pose this as a question with an answer. water drains from a cylindrical tank with a radius of 2m and a height of 6m, such that the water level drops at a rate of 0.1 m/minute. a conical tank with an upper radius of 4m and a height of 5m begins to drain into the cylindrical tank (see figure). if the water level in the conical tank drops at a rate of 0.5m/minute, at what rate does the water level in the cylindrical tank change when the water level in the conical tank is 3m? 1m? for full credit, be sure to show all work. but there is no precise and accurate solution to this problem of related rates, just as there is no clear inflection point between ill and well. one woe ebbs, another will rise in its place, and all we can do is the best that we can.
* * *
reading: my mom asked me to edit the family history she has been working on for many years. i go through to add context, remove sentence fragments, make the verb tenses agree. all these donnellys and conellys and tomminys, their names and narratives teased from a shuffle of old documents. says pratchett, in one of his marvelous phrases - "what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"
listening to: an online lecture about the gods of prehistoric britain. i retain no information until i sit down with a pen and take notes.
working on: preparing to paint the walls in the back room. this involves properly taping the inside corners - a detail neglected by the slipshod builders, filling knicks and holes, and scraping down paint runs ignored by the initial, indifferent painters. when i am done we will have one green wall, two white walls, one wall of books.
in the garden: just a few weeks until we start the earliest seeds.
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