welcome to night vale

Feeling Spacey

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m writing this on Wednesday night, approximately twenty minutes after I remembered it was Wednesday, which meant that tomorrow is Thursday, which meant I needed to write a blog. This is kind of how my week has been going, generally: I keep thinking it’s rather later in the week than it actually is, and I’m having a bit of trouble hanging onto coherent trains of thought long enough to be productive.

Still, despite feeling totally spaced out, it’s been a pretty good week all around:

  1. Last Thursday I made the last-minute decision to snag a ticket to the Welcome to Night Vale live show here in Chicago. It was absolutely incredible. The people involved in WTNV are so talented and engaging, and the musicians that accompanied them for the “weather” segment of the show were great, as well. Plus, I ran into friends while I was there, which was lovely.
  2. Thanks to the WTNV show, I’ve had some new music in my rotation this week, from artist Danny Schmidt. Mostly, I’ve had his song This Too Shall Pass on repeat for days.
  3. I really struggled to write a song for my songwriting class this week, and I really wanted to have something, because Tuesday was the last class of this session. I ended up abandoning the assignment entirely and chasing a concept that had been knocking about in my head for a couple of days. Turned out that was the right decision, because I really like the song I came up with (and it earned me a glitter unicorn sticker in class – the highest honor).
  4. While I’ve been anything but grounded this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about ways I can keep myself from flying too far off in whatever direction my brain is taking me. So far I’ve been pretty good at curbing impulses that will get me into trouble (mostly in regards to spending money), so that’s something, at least.
  5. Today I finally started reading Gender Failure by Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote, which I picked up several months ago and hadn’t touched since. It’s SO GOOD. Highly recommend.

A Tiny Blog for a Weird Week

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

This is going to be a short post this week, as I evidently have the cold that just keeps coming back, and spent the last day and a half home from work…with my partner, who also caught the cold. So it’s been a sleepy, sniffly, coughing mess at our house lately, and I feel like I’ve sort of lost track of what day it is.

On a brighter note, here’s a list of three things that have kept me smiling between coughing fits:

  1. I started listening to the Welcome to Night Vale podcast last week. I’m over halfway through the backlog of episodes already. It’s been exactly the sort of weird, dark humor that I’ve needed in the midst of some frustration with work and other life things.
  2. As annoying as being sick has been for both of us, it’s been nice to have some extra time to hang out with my partner during the week. Our weekday schedules tend to be packed on opposite days, so the bulk of our quality time together tends to be on the weekends.
  3. We just finished watching the season of the Great British Baking Show that’s on Netflix, and that was absolutely delightful. It’s a total departure from the cutthroat attitude of most American shows of that genre. We laughed, we cried, we got super attached to most of the bakers, and by about halfway through the season really just wanted everyone to win.