felinejumper | is it just more check in wednesday, at this point? (Reply)

scuffing a shoe guiltily against the floor so my partner and I...got Breath of the Wild....two Fridays ago...and it's eaten all my spare time...like....ALL OF IT, like 5 hours a night of it every night since, and more on weekends. (It's so good, I am Deeply In Love with our boy Link and my girl Urbosa). Also, I learned to embroider this week, which has been so fucking satisfying and waaayy more addictive/relaxing than expected.

AND, oh, yes, also, in what is technically much bigger news, I went from working 0 hours a week to 40 hours a week, under very surprising circumstances— like, an emergency call on Thursday morning asking if I could, basically, pinch hit for a project I used to work on, because the RA quit with no notice. And it's going ok! It's super weird to be back after a year away, and I am mentally already preparing a fucking dissertation on the unintentional abuse of RAs practised by everyone higher up—like, ten simple steps to avoid crushing your passionate but very young, actually, underlings, beneath the massive weight of your expectations so they don't have a mental break down like all of the RAs I've know who've worked here, me included; if they work, that is. The simple steps to not having a breakdown. crosses fingers

I am also reading books, although...not too many, given all the new hobbies.

She Rises, Kate Worsley

Somebody on DW had a post in early March with, I think, just...books about queers? maybe boats? in the past. I apparently forgot to put it in my memories, which is annoying, because now I'm reading it and would like to tell them personally! But I don't remember who!. It's about, uh, being poor in 1740s England as a (lesbian?) dairymaid and as a 15 year old boy pressed into the Navy, with alternating viewpoints. The impressment chapters are pretty grim, and pretty interesting for that reason. I don't know that I've ever read fiction that directly narrativized what being small and delicate and kidnapped by the Navy would be like; I find those chapters distressing and—how do I say this?—the prose is serviceable rather than beautiful or overwhelmingly immersive, which is good, because I am very happy with this level of distance from 1740s British Navy.

Middlemarch has been a reading WIP since like November; I love it everytime I pick it up but never make it a priority read, I think. But it's amazingly comforting for a book I've never read before, and I do not understand how I keep hard identifying with every character. Anyway, currently it's Dorothea's impending crush on Will and also her desperation to be useful. Literal same.

generally on the book front, I had dinner with my cleverest reading friend yesterday, and as usual the two of them sent me home with 9 loaners + the results of picking through their "getting rid of pile" so...I'm a monster, and have my assigned reading for the next two months, also. I'm excited, though, because it includes:

Carson, red doc, which I've been dying for since August when I read Autobiography
two Valeria Luiselli books
Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
two Fanny Howe books? novellas?
Robinson, Housekeeping

In addition to Nimona, which I've never read in full, and then some assorted short stories, and also some very cool non fiction about memorials to death in America.