Elena Existing

Agreed!

You don't need an alarm clock. You need a sunrise chorus of great-tailed grackles.

Miami is a top-tier breakfast airport.

I still needed the cardigan.

I don't know why I am perimenopausal and still carrying around a cardigan to wear on planes 'to stay warm.' I should be carrying a little cooler to hand out iced drinks to everyone in a three foot radius instead.

I keep thinking about all the different experiences I had with ap English teachers. I had one obsessed with Hemingway and Steinbeck. Another that loved classical horror: Poe, Shelley, Stoker. Had a Shakespeare teacher a Bradbury teacher. They taught what they loved. Ai doesn't love anything.

Industrial Zone The fluorescent lights are lit, the buildings are lit, the machines are lit exhaustion is lit, the blueprints are lit... this is a night on an endless work week, this is the night of the mid- autumn festival the moon lights up a disk of emptiness, in the lychee trees a light breeze sways an interior whiteness, many years of speechless quiet, insects humming in evergreen grasses, the city's lights illuminate the industrial zone, so many dialects, so much homesickness, so many weak and insubstantial bodies placed there, so much moonlight shining on the endless work week of machines and blueprints, and it rises to shine on my face, a sluggishly dropping heart So many lamps are lit, so many people pass by the industrial zone's lamps, past, workstations the mute moonlight, lamplight, and me so much paltriness, small as spare parts or filaments warming the industrial zone's bustle and clamour with their feeble bodies And the tears, the joy, the pain we've had our glorious or petty thoughts, and our souls are all illuminated by the moonlight, collected, and carried afar hidden in rays of light no one will notice

Industrial Zone
Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼）
Translated by Eleanor Goodman

A poetry chapbook: Zheng Xiaoqiong, In the Roar of the Machine, Selected Poems translated by Eleanor Goodman. The cover is off white with a neon orange phone handle shape covered by a large dark blue open square shape. There are several bookmarks in the book.

2025 Book #40

In the Roar of the Machine
Selected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼）
Translated by Eleanor Goodman

A fitting read in between trips to visit the industrial workers of emotional labor.

I will. It should. My early US History class did as well.

Agreed! I do love that Kentucky's community college system has such a wide variety of classes available online.

Do I have the bandwidth to take a community college course this semester? Absolutely not.

Did I just enroll in a History of Colonial Latin America class? Yes, yes I did.

It would be much nicer if I wasn't trying to motivate myself to pack for a trip!

What strange disease have I caught? What are the symptoms of West Nile virus? I ask, groggily stumbling towards bed and slipping in and out of consciousness on a Sunday afternoon.

(Until I remember that I absentmindedly took a Benadryl after lunch because my mosquito bites were itching.)

Literary solutions to male loneliness:

First they came for the plums
And I said nothing because the gyre was widening
Yes
YES
The tiger is out

I picked most of the rest of my melons today (6/10 remaining) and sacrificed two that had been burrowed through to the garden gods, insects, and critters.

My biggest melon challenge has been figuring out how to pick them at peak ripeness before they split and/or get eaten.

It was great to meet you!

The man who just swivvelled my head in the park is a dad who brought his adolescent daughter to watch a play, made sure she had snacks, and took the time to point out to her where the bathrooms were before finding their seats. What can I say? Caring and competence are hot.

Will do!

A hero!

A castle-like stage design for Twelfth Night beneath the towering trees of Central Park, a blue sky, and fluffy white clouds.

Without hating on 95⁰ Shakespeare in July, have you heard about 80⁰ Shakespeare in August?

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models rep… The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour

I will never pass up a chance to re-share this piece. Best way I ever found to talk about AI to anyone: softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llme...

A big white cat and big black cat both sprawled out and snoring on a brown waffle-blanket covered lap, vaguely facing in the direction of a television with a still from the movie Jauja with a dead or dying man in a white shirt and dark pants on his back in the green, green grass beneath a tree.

Trying very hard to stay awake during a mostly silent movie and this audience is not helping.

Given the range of individuals who have mentioned "Anyone But You" today, I may have to check it out at some point.

That's the movie a coworker mentioned today. I'm just going to continue blindly assuming she's a character from Sweeney Todd, a musical I have also never seen.

I'm pretty sure I'm am both middle-aged and uncool because I had never heard the name Sydney Sweeney or seen her face before this week.

I'm glad that's not the case for me. I'm generally solid on 6 to 7 hours, but was short on sleep due to travel schedules this week, and really needed the extra hours.

A reclining golden Buddha statute is on display in a glass case. A cat is asleep on top of the case in the same position as the Buddha.

Good morning

Eight hours sleep in your own bed. A+ activity. Highly recommend.