reflections

I read a comment referring to polyamory as scheduling kink while on a break from hacking on the planner, which I just updated. I thought about when I would take the time to say an individual good night to each of my stuffed animals and to a portrait of Hamlet's father Shakespeare, dead before this play began. Still I missed a few appointments last month, but for COVID. I found facsimile where I could and noted where I couldn't and thought about identity on a costumed walk for Dany's birthday we took in lieu of the 5k we'd normally run.

A relative identity as I ripple through the fabric, the edges of myself dissolved and reshaped as I walk about. An absolute identity, some bits of fabric bound up like a fixed point in the shape of black holes and plastic. The virus bound my lungs to 2020, a temporal nerve connecting a collective body that walks through time. I picked up a copy of "Launch Me to the Stars, I'm Finished Here" and wondered about cycles of grief and time travel in art. It's certainly in my vocabulary here now. I think I got it from Woolf, Proust, and Joyce, who all developed it roughly simultaneously. Connecting through history seems natural enough for anybody at an individual level so in cases of widespread trauma, conflict, and plague it might emerge in some perceptible pattern like the synchronizing of cicadas, these periodic self-organized anthologies of intergalactic reflections of the garden our molted shells left hanging on the trees for our future selves to find.

Rescheduling and making new plans to look forward to absorbed the brunt of having to cancel so I indulged in getting organized. I fleshed out my calendars with fancy recurrences and updated the checklist tool to support them. I added a tool to generate a calendar with dates for Easter for any number of years. I based it off skyfield at first to find the full moon using the definition of the date from Wikipedia. It was relatively expensive and a little maddening because I couldn't find clear guidance on which timezone to use for measuring the start of March 21. The other tools accept a timezone so I implemented the same for this declaring that even though I'd have to make a choice for the sake of generating the thing the tool itself didn't necessarily impose an opinion beyond a default. Then I found that dateutil, which I'm already using for handling recurrence rules, implements a closed form calculator so I switched to that. Free of that burden I wondered which sects have an opinion on the timezone and which years it could affect the determination and induce a schism. That would be the year Nonna insists on keeping "the old date", the true one she says, before choking on a piece of ham. Vicki, away in Miami as his grandmother lay dying on the kitchen floor, thinks about the dinner he expects to have the following Sunday before hearing the news.

I also added a tool for populating a business card template from an event or contact. I started planning a party and put the details in a calendar. The tool generates HTML from that similar to the checklist tool, as well as an embedded SVG of a QR encoding of the thing being serialized. I generated the printed samples from the source repository so they should be reproducible, although the sunrise and sunset times might vary slightly. The sample configuration uses the Penn statue on Philly City Hall as its point of reference but these were based on the point of view of the flag pole outside North Wales Boro Hall. It was easy enough to add contact support so I did that as well and thought about adding VJOURNAL support to the checklist. I think if I add the component type to the grouping then I could render the group of event types like I currently do and for a group of journal entries on the same day, process their bodies as Markdown into HTML fragments I could render in their own block. Then if I had a journal dated Monday with a few thoughts for the week it should appear as the first block followed by seven for each day. I currently squeeze six blocks onto one page but with that layout I could spread an entire week over one sheet.

I also want to add monthly and yearly granularity to the checklist grouping. I consider what I have now "daily" so the other two should mostly fall in place when I finally get around to shaking them off their branches. More things to do to occupy myself. Eli Whitney thought he'd make less work but made more because he forgot to fill the space with emptiness. Planning to plan is an infinite time hack if you ignore the 500 flowers wilting from neglect while you do, a meadow full of metaphors. I was reading about Mattison and Thaddeus Stevens while I was sick in bed and as the Lexapro was ramping up and I felt a rush to spin more plates. I joined a few group hikes and embraced a budding extroversion. I wondered how much was there already, how much of human nurture manifests as social nature, how much of the art is in the artist.

I saw a guy on a reel refer to humans as an apex species and I called his speciesism vanity. I thought about trees developing fungus to serve as their nerves. Shaped by the power exchange that they're compelled to enable in silent witness the fungus find themselves attempting to assert their own identity, cannibalizing the trees and evolving their own fleshy shell to stand upright. But for all their evolution and hairy knuckles they're still as much a piece of the tree as the roots and bark and leaves and the colony they thought they left behind. I thought of some cave dwelling ancestral aunt who between cuddling the wolves and singing with the birds drew pictures of her and Big holding hands between the cedars. Made so aware of his position he banished Carrie, who took the birds and flowers and all the rest of the garden but left the wolves. And one night alone and cider drunk Big longed for the flowers and thought how unfair it was to have been banished from the garden, because self awareness is the gravest sin of all. So he invented a god in his image, righteous for having been the banisher, with Charlotte, Samantha, Miranda, and all of the City warring on their behalf, entire forests fed by the fire. After generations of so branching the fruit of the tree finds itself repulsed by where it came from, full of inherited guilt, and the tree seeing itself in the fruit is repulsed at the sight and so the two run from each other. And as the fruit breathes freely feeling the grass on its skin, and as it laments its fall and weeps into the soil around it, I cannot help but wonder if there would grow a tree different than the one before but tree all the same?