Chat

Not too bad to start of my week. I have a long list ahead of me. Applying for teaching only positions, preparing coffee samples for the roaster I'm helping, and getting my last article before a summer break ready to publish on my Medium and Substack.

I'm busy, in other words. It's a sort of busy, however, that makes it hard to get 1 thing done to the best of my abilities. I am not whole assing one thing, but half assing two things. To reverse Ron Swanson's advice. I find my writing suffering, but my mental clarity and happiness improving. So, some balance is needed. I hope to use this week to better organize myself and my thoughts to attain that.

Wildfire smoke and reports of major droughts impacting my friends in Europe are difficult to process. I knew it would happen. But one of the many reasons I decided to call academic research and academia itself quits was because there's just not enough action in that space to tackle these challenges. I could scream all day about resilience narratives, trauma informed care, and neoliberal disaster recovery failures, but that doesn't change much. As the ED (CEO?) of The New Humanitarian explained at an event I was presenting at, academic research is too slow and too siloed to matter when action is needed. So that's been something on my mind lately as I watch the effects of climate and super El Nino hit the world hard; grappling still with the decision to pull my academic plug. Not to mention I finished Project Hail Mary. Egads. But, I digress.

So, that was a alot to say struggles, but all in all nothing bad!