palmerpink

I’d consider myself very online; Facebook, Insta, and Twitter, the latter more recently replaced with Bluesky. And yet I’ve never been tempted to engage in “Discourse.” “Discourse” probably means different things to different folks, but from what I’ve observed it's online discussion that can often end up heated, vitriolic, and even toxic. And some people thrive on it—on putting people in their place, one-upping each other rhetorically, and being “right” all the time. But not me. Maybe I’m too weak willed or easily flustered or conflict averse, or maybe I just don’t need it to enjoy the internet on my own terms. Instead, I trade in memes and affirmation: I love being silly and supportive with my friends because that makes me happy. I can’t speak to why people go headfirst into Discourse on a daily basis (they sound exhausted by it a lot of the time, tbh), but I also won’t judge them for it. I do know, tho, it’s not for me or and isn't how I use social media. On Twitter—which us...

I, generally speaking, love art. I wish I understood it better; sometimes I can articulate its effects on me and what I think; at other times, that's tough for me. This is an attempt at understanding art, if only by trying to understand my experience of it.¹ The title of this post is a bit funny, tho: "New" is misleading—I first drafted it 6 years ago in Dec 2017, updated it in Aug 2018, and revised it a bit this week (Feb 2024). I'll write more about visual art and my ability to interact with it another time, but here's what I've got for now. So I finally went. There's a show right now at the Phillips Collection on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, my longtime favorite artist, and I went. I got to see more of his work at one time than I ever have before. And I found myself a new favorite painting among them—not just a favorite out of Renoir's work, but perhaps a favorite among all art I will ever see. The exhibit itself explores the story behind one of Renoir...

I hate to be another millennial making an abrupt aside to go "meta," but I do want to pause and figure out what I'm doing with this blog.  I feel like, every time I reboot this blog, I post some self-assessment swearing up down how much different things will be now—and most notably, claiming that this time I’ll stay consistent and not fall off and all that. (Which is, probably, the hardest part about blogging—being consistent.) But in the meantime, I’ve thought of a few areas to mull over. I don’t plan to really edit this post as much as I have done with the most recent two, but I’m ok with that. Let me know what you think in the comments!   1. Content and tone Finding one's voice as a blogger is, usually, more of a process and less of a decision. Over time, it emerges as one figures out what they like writing about and what’s resonating. I can speak to that a bit already, tho, or at least wonder at it some. So far, if these last two posts are an indication, I want t...

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea...

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...

My grandmother passed away about 2 weeks ago. I hope to write about her more soon, but for this moment, I want to speak briefly about where I'm at overall: Her passing has led me to reevaluate aspects of my life because I'm realizing that the status quo amounts to just wasting my life away. (This is another "quick post," which means it's a short update that I likely didn't edit and revise quite as much as the more "thoughtful" pieces I aim for. I say this because I'm self-conscious and worry that you, my reader, will judge me!) I'm up in Boston and have today and tomorrow off, and I want to spend at least a portion of each day figuring out (some of) my life. I say this fully aware how often I've variously done so before: asserted a need for change, described how I was going to do it, made an attempt, then fallen off in the follow-through. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that, though. It frustrates me now just as much as eve...