Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023 - 9:38 p.m.

I made split pea soup today and brought some to mom and she shared it with her friend for dinner. It was good soup. Maybe if I bring her soup every week she’ll be happier.

New work tactic: instead of transcription-doomscroll-transcription, today I tried transcription-work on the textile thing-transcription, and I think it helped me get through the files quicker while allowing me to progress pretty well on the textile piece too. Working on the components of that is a telic activity, unlike doomscrolling, so I can still take lots of breaks but then there’s a clear end to it.

Took a nap this evening and while I napped, E came to studio, put on some of my perfume, spilling a little right at my computer desk in the process, and got into my ink, left it on my new brush to dry. Fortunately it’s not acrylic. Anyway now my studio smells and the ventilation in here is terrible so who knows how long it’ll be before it clears out.

The other day I heard this guy who was a historian of the Highland Clearances talking about how when he was a kid in school they fed them some line of bullshit about people just moved away for work or whatever, when the truth was quite a bit more brutal. He talked about reflecting on the wrongs done to his people, this clear sense of oppression, and needing to balance that with knowledge of what those people then went and did to the indigenous people in Canada and the US when they ended up in the Americas. He mentioned how this sense of being an oppressed people can easily play into a bad kind of nationalism, and it’s important not to run from either truth.

Been thinking about that a lot lately. People can be the object of the worst kind of treatment, and then turn around and dole out the same to others.

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