Issue #15 I think we may be in an alien zoo

Hello, friends! I missed last week but in my defense, we had company over the weekend and up until this past Thursday (not the dog) and we've started the process of closing down the cabin which is pretty time intensive. Don't be terribly surprised if the newsletter is haphazard in the next few weeks.

Before I begin this weeks newsletter, I must shill for a bit: on November 5th, I'm going to walk for the Out of the Darkness Suicide Prevention 5K. My fundraising goal is modest $400 and every dollar counts. If you can't contribute, would it be so bold of me to ask you to pass my link around? I would super appreciate it!

(P.S. I solicited for donations on Facebook and raised my first goal, $200, within 24 hours and have gone on to nearly $400 within 36! Since I have 30 or so more days to fundraise, I hope I can make $750!)

What else has been going on with me? Not too much really. I've been at the cabin for the last month and I'm starting to get a bit squirrely. We're here for another weekish until my brother gets married in Grand Rapids, then it back to L-ville! I think a month here is my limit. Last year I was here for two and half months as we waited for TEH's Jeep to get fixed (it died on our way back from grocery shopping) and finding out after a monthish wait at the shop it was beyond repairable. Good times. (Plus driving 40 minutes to get to the city kind of gets old after awhile.)

I've applied for a few gigs in L-ville since I've been here and the most promising one is tutoring students online (and when I'm in L-ville, in person). Pay isn't wonderful but it's something and it'll alleviate money worries. (I was/am up for three positions a singular place in L-ville who specialize in curriculum design. One position rejected me immediately; the second position required a personality test and I was rejected after taking the test and I'm still waiting on the third position outcome. Getting one of the positions would be a boon since it's walking distance from Throbbing Condo but at this point, I'm not holding out hope.)

I wrote a piece over at the writing blog on managing writing projects with a list of all said projects I have in my queue. They are as follows:

• 26 fiction book ideas

• 33 fiction story ideas (shorts / novellas)

• 19 fiction stories in progress

• 6 non-fiction essays in progress

• 6 fiction short stories finished

• 8 fiction short stories to be edited / revised

• 1 themed short story collection started

• Afraid to say how many #100DayProject entries (i.e. not many)

And the big one:

• 10 life projects

While the other categories are self-explanatory, the life projects category may be a bit eyebrow raising. Life projects are things I need / want to do that requires quite a bit of time. When I was applying for librarian / archivist gigs, "finding a job" was a life project because it ran about 30+ hours a week of work between writing applications, researching jobs, references, and so on. Another example of a life project was developing a secret project website (now on hold) which entailed about 10 - 15 hours a week of work. Think of life projects as a todo list on steroids and centered around a particular topic. 

So I have ten of them. I've put on hold four and consolidated two as it was obvious I was spreading myself out to thin. I'm working on getting a schedule together that is reasonable and taking into consideration daily life adventures like eating and yoga.

Obsessions

Email newsletters are the new hotness.

The last few months I was thinking what and where I was getting my news and what kind of news it was - global? Pop culture? Local? Specific? Generalized? The truth was I wasn't really getting "news" so much as a mish-mash of information. I would hear comments on something ("aleppo moment") and then furiously google. I want to be the person at cocktail parties who can conversate on anything and right now I feel as if I can only carry on a good conversation with my dog. 

So I started subscribing to newsletters of all varieties and shapes. Everything from New York Times op-ed pieces to breaking news from The Guardian to pop culture updates from Vulture. Personal websites, large commercial sites, blog newsletters: nothing was safe from my subscription trigger finger. Newsletters are the new RSS. (One of the major newsletter carriers, MailChimp I think, told me I subscribed to too many newsletters in a short amount of time so I was temporarily banned.) 90% of the links at the end of my newsletter are from my trolling these newsletters. 

At  last count, I was hovering around 110 newsletter subscriptions.

When I mention my particular habit in conversation, people look at me in that weird way when someone tells you something odd and yet strangely interesting. Common response borders on my obvious stupidity: Why would I want to get something so many of us are desperately trying to get less of? Even my explanation didn't garner any sympathy. Admittedly my zest for staying up on news front isn't without peril -- if I don't stay on my email daily then it gets cluttered pretty quick. But now I will be the life of the party!

Books / Movies / TV
Shameless, South Park, Scream Queens, and Survivor's Millenials vs GenX  have started. New shows This is Us, Luke Cage, Insecure, and oh my god! Westworld is amazing. Thanks to TEH's cable account, we have all the apps (HBO, SHO, etc) as well as my accounts on Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. TEH is also beta testing a new product from $the_man which allows us to watch cable channels (sans abc, nbc, cbs, and fox) live so I can get Project Runway and RuPaul's All Stars as it is broadcasted rather than a day later. This seems like a lot of TV, and it is, but shows will be added and removed as the seasons wears on. Personally, I cannot wait to we get back to L-ville so I can DVR all these shows rather than app hopping. (Plus we haven't touched the series premier and new shows that are still coming up!)

It's fall so I've started watching my absolute fall necessary movies: Harry Potter. Since all but one of the movies premiered in November / December, they have to be watched when the leaves start to fall.

Book reading remains as it was a few weeks ago. I keep adding titles to my library's wish list or my Amazon wish lists as I come across them (a good portion of my newsletters are literature / books related in some capacity). Having company, picking up knitting again, and completing projects around the cabin has kind of bitten into reading time.

Curated Link Love

• I am not going to lie, I have a vested interest in "mystic core" | Salon

• The burgeoning times of video dating (which lead to Tinder and OKCupid) | Atlas Obscura

• Nice people do have better sex | Salon

• Paintings on the adorn the pages of books | Atlas Obscura

• What fairy tales can tells us about online trolling | Electric Lit

• Tales from a cleaner in upper middle-class New York | The Guardian

• Top 25 memes from the first 25 years of the web | Washington Post

• Neil deGrasse Tyson on the needed humanities in STEM | Open Culture

• On the creation of the burkini | The Guardian

• Two of Van Gogh's paintings have been found | The Guardian

• You guise! A Brit Brit movie is coming to Lifetime! | Pop Sugar

• The rise of Kate Middleton style bloggers | Racked

• On being dependent on the internet | Aeon

• NBC is remaking The Italian Job (which means more MINI Coopers!) | The Verge

• On being young, tattooed, Muslim and staying true to yourself | Flare

• A constantly updated listing of Wikipedia's most unusual articles | Wikipedia

• Texting "bread crumbs" | New York Times

• 25 women on overcoming (literature) rejection | New York Magazine

• When your online true love doesn't quite work out in real life | P.S. I Love You

• The Legend of Zelda gets Studio Ghibli fan inspired trailer (and it is gorgeous) | Paste

Until next week!
xoxo

You can find me across the internet as @byshieldmaiden or
you can like my Facebook page A Most Unreliable Narrator.

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