Hi, I’m Austin. This is a place for me to write about and process my untidy thoughts. I like to be stupid and not take myself too seriously. Life is pretty h...
Our dishwasher is dying. Why does it make me emotional? The death of an appliance. It's been acting strange recently. Over the past couple of nights, it's revealed a new sound that it can make... like a performance. The last chance for it to say what it needs to say before departing this earth. It's been a good dishwasher to us, for the most part. Well, it's ruined many of our bowls with its rusty…
My partner is out of town. That means I have the house to myself… I’m all alone… just me and my kitties… spooky! Whenever my partner is away, I like to scare the shit out of myself by watching scary movies in complete darkness. I like being scared. It gives me a rush. Maybe I’m an adrenaline junkie, but I’m too unathletic to chase that high via sports and too straight-laced to chase it via drugs.…
Blogging is hard. Sharing your thoughts is vulnerable. Even when I’m doing it pseudo-anonymously. I talked previously about my debilitating condition of feeling cringe and embarrassment from reading the writing I put out into the world . Back in the day, I used to even delete tweets hours after posting them because I would overthink, second-guess, and feel embarrassed by what I had written. I…
I came across this post "make communal meaning" by Imperfect and really liked the framework that they discuss, which was originally from a Substack post by Ben James called "Aliveness and where to find it." Ben proposes a two-dimensional framework for categorizing activities and experiences. On the one hand, activities can be broken into CONSUMING vs. CREATING; on the other hand, they can be…
I'm in a book club. A queer book club. We typically read literary fiction from queer authors. This month was an exception when the group voted to read Heated Rivalry. How fun! How hot and playful! I thought this would offer a reprieve from the deep, critical analyses common in the discussions of our literary fiction books. I was a fool to think this. We haven't met yet, and already in our Discord,…
This past month, I've almost entirely replaced social media and mindless scrolling with surfing the web old-school style: reading blogs here on Bearblog and on the indie web in general. It's been a lot of fun! One of my favorite parts of reading blogs is seeing how the blogger expresses themselves in their style, both in their visual aesthetic and in their writing. But all this exploration has…
For the past month or so, I've been working a lot on a Zettelkasten using Obsidian for work writing. And more recently, for personal writing, too. It's been super helpful for me to jot down my thoughts in a more organized and structured way. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Zettelkasten method is a way of taking notes and linking them to other notes to build a network of knowledge. To…
A few months ago, I started doing about 20 minutes of yoga in the morning. It has been a game-changer for me. For the past week or so, I haven't been able to do it because of my sickness and lingering cough. But, I returned to my practice this morning, and it felt so good. Sometimes it feels like my body is a sponge, soaking up all the tension from the day. Doing yoga feels like it's wringing out…
Yesterday, I wrote about my frustration and hurt with a coworker who gave me unsolicited feedback about my work . After processing it with my partner and writing about it on this blog, I was reminded of a valuable lesson I've learned in therapy: what others say or think about me is not about me. As one of our greatest living thinkers, RuPaul, says: What other people think of me is none of my…
I left work today feeling pretty annoyed and, behind my annoyance, hurt and insecure. Near the end of the workday, I was chatting with a coworker and was commiserating about [a specific work-related task]. I was just trying to complain about [the specific work-related task] to someone who also has experience with [the task] and understands its unique challenges. But, out of nowhere, she says,…