I Refuse to Call This Procrastination

I’ve been thought-collecting again. Obsession-hoarding. Noticing-without-knowing-why-yet. It’s a magpie kind of accumulation: things that aren’t ideas yet but have clearly stopped being nothing. Call it pre-idea. Call it sediment.

I’ve learned not to mistake this stage for wasting time, mostly because I’ve wasted enough time to know the difference by texture now. A half-heard word. A crack in a wall with an interesting shadow. A Wikipedia spiral that starts with Byzantine trade routes and ends, two hours later, in the metallurgy of early Norse penannular brooches. By the time I realize I’m working, I’ve already started.

All of which is a very elaborate way of telling you I’ve been playing Stardew Valley for six hours a day. I downloaded it for a flight, and now I farm digitally for the same reason people smoke: it’s something to do with my hands while my brain gets on with the actual work somewhere off-site.

The rest of the time I make lists. They’re not mood boards, because a mood board implies you’ve already found the mood. Mine haven’t. They’re closer to a deposition: evidence gathered about a self without that self’s full knowledge or consent. I’ve hired a sexy private investigator to follow myself around and he keeps coming back with things like seven photos of doorknobs and one obsessive four-day interest in Finnish sauna architecture.

Unfortunately, my brain refuses to believe that thought-collecting counts as work, no matter how many times I tell it. It still wants one piece of evidence a day. A single, verifiable deed I can point to when the guilt arrives at its usual hour. Otherwise the whole day dissolves into a blur of scrolling, farming, making lists, taking notes, and half-reading books, all activities I refuse to call procrastination. To keep the peace, I try to produce one tangible thing. Sometimes that’s a picture book. Sometimes it’s a pile of increasingly strange collages. Lately, it’s been clay. I dig it out from under my nails, accidentally press it into the pages of my notebook, right into the margins, fossilizing the day’s latest obsession.

• The Viking jewelry I saw at Stockholm’s Historiska Museet, and the very specific kind of civilization-grief it gave me. Looking at it, I couldn’t help thinking we’d spent the last thousand years overcomplicating jewelry, drowning it in gold and rubies.

  

• Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, a miniature museum of his own work packed into a suitcase!

  

• Fonts, and how I accidentally became someone who makes them. It started when I complained that every existing font-making tool required plugins, desktop software, and a relationship with technical setup that I refuse to develop on principle. My partner responded by building DoodleFonts. It won second place in the Figma Makeathon. He later made an iPad version. I make fonts all the time now.