I'm pretty sure I've made it possible to sign up and get these posts by email, but you don't have to give me any information if you don't want to. Just stick that RSS feed URL into a feed reader, and that reader will automatically check the feed every so often for new posts.

(As an aside, at the moment, if you see any ads before or after a post in your feed reader, they're not coming from me. I don't put ads on .plan right now and I don't have any current intention to add them.)

Ghost seems designed to compete with Medium, Substack, and Patreon, which is most evident in its insistence that I shouldn't consider you all readers, I should consider you members, and my focus should be on getting more members. Which... isn't really what I'm looking for right now. (It might be in the future. I have to see how my venture into reopening my Patreon goes.) I just want a place to put down my thoughts that isn't a microblogging service, and let whoever wants to read them.

And in that respect, Ghost is fine. It's got a rich text editor, which – look, I'm clearly in the minority on this, but I'd really rather have a code editor that supports limited markup and lets me have fine control over what you see^[1]. That said, Ghost's RTE works out of the box and it's ... fine^[2]. Its management of previous posts leaves something to be desired, at least in my eyes; there's a lot of "well, I know what I meant" in the design language, and if you change a post slug after a post is published, there's no automatic redirection for the old slug; it just goes away, which can be confusing because Ghost saves the post slug the first time your post is autosaved and then doesn't auto-update it if you change the title, which means that if you don't write the title of a post first, your post slug is going to be untitled - or untitled-17, depending on how many times you've made this mistake.

Anyway, if you want to move away from Substack, Patreon, or Medium to a self-hosted option, Ghost will probably work as you expect and do what you want it to. For me, though, Ghost is the first blogging software I've used where every time I use it, I'm thinking about what I could use to replace it.

1. Decide that you are going to write a novel.
2. Think for a while about what you want to write about.
3. Realize you should be taking notes.
   1. Find an envelope that doesn't have too much writing on the back already.
   2. Jot down some notes. Like, three sentences.
      1. You think they call that an elevator pitch.
      2. But is your novel too high-concept now?
      3. Stop getting in your head.
4. Okay, you know roughly what you want to write about. Time to make an outline.
   1. Do you really want to make an outline or do you just want to start writing?
   2. The writing is the fun part, after all.
   3. Outlining reminds you of high school.
      1. And specifically that one English class where you had to turn in notecards–
5. You get some notecards. You forgot how much you actually liked writing on notecards.
   1. You get to shuffle them around on your desk. It's fun.
   2. Doing it in Freeform just isn't the same.
   3. Wait, you should write the outline before you start with the notecards. Notecards after outline. It's not like that high school class where the notecards were for taking notes – one notecard per citation.
   4. When you're writing, the notecards are for expanding on the first outline and shuffling ideas around.
   5. Wait, why are you doing the outline before the notecards? You can't shuffle an outline around like you can with notecards.
   6. Maybe you should write the outline on the notecards.
   7. No. Write the outline, then do the notecards. You can make another outline later. This is just a first draft.
6. Write "OUTLINE FIRST DRAFT" at the top of the env–
7. Your pen is out of ink.
   1. Go refill your pen.
   2. Notice that you have dishes waiting to be done.
   3. How long has that tea mug been there?
   4. Don't get distracted.
8. Doodle something in the corner of the envelope to see what the new ink looks like.
   1. It looks good.
9. Okay. Now write "OUTLINE FIRST DRAFT" at the top of the envelope.
10. You should really have a cup of tea while you're doing this.
    1. Go make some tea–
    2. Go wash out that mug.
    3. Then make some tea.
11. Text three friends about how you're finally outlining your novel while the tea steeps.
12. Back at your desk. Finish writing "AFT" at the top of the envelope.
13. Hang on, what's the highest level of line prefix?
    1. It's Roman numerals, right?
    2. All the lists you've seen on the internet start with numbers, though.
    3. What does Google Docs use?
       1. Numbers, numbers with parentheses, Roman numerals, capital letters, numbers with capital letters–
          1. wait, how is that last one different
          2. oh, the letters in the first one are lowercase, got it
       2. Well, that's not helpful.
    4. You're pretty sure it's Roman numerals.
14. I. 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕭𝖊𝖌𝖎𝖓𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖌
    1. A. ...
    2. Beginnings are really hard.
15. Oh hey, your friend texted you back.
    1. They're going out for sushi and want to know if you can come.
16. What were you doing again?

As I was writing it, I was unhappy that so many of my reasons relied on external feedback. After all, I can't (e.g.) write for myself if all of my reasons for writing are about how other people feel about what I make.

So this morning I sat down and made a (non-comprehensive, of course) list of – well, like the title says.

• It helps me remember what I wanted to say/the image that was in my head.
• I get to come back later and revisit what I made without having to recall everything I was thinking in the moment.
• It helps my self-identity as "a creative person" feel more legitimate to me.
• It's what I want to do. (Why? Who cares?)
• Seeing improvement over time helps me feel better about myself.
• I am treating myself like a friend, and I would encourage my friends.
• It's the whole reason I got my laptop and tablet.
• I enjoy the process of creating, and seeing something come together from the parts I'm assembling.
• Having something tangible (you know what I mean) that I made will help my self-esteem.
• I'll finally have something to do with all the websites I have.

That seems like a good start.

Oh well. There's still time tonight, I just have to muster the energy.

I wonder if I should start cross-posting these to Tumblr and Mastodon. On Mastodon I would want to make them followers-only - but on Tumblr they might break containment. Hmm.

I also wonder how to get an emoji keyboard on my desktop computer, but I can fudge that, at least. 🎉

Today I am grateful for:

• 9:00 AM: The new foam topper on my mattress, which is substantially reducing my back and neck pain
• 10:00 AM: A car that Just Works
• 11:00 AM: Good documentation (especially the Python docs)
• 12 noon: coffee
• 1:00 PM: My flexible work schedule
• 2:00 PM: Robust debugging tools
• 3:00 PM: The blue jay who just flew up and chattered at the (sleeping) cat¹ for a few seconds before flying off

¹ the cat was sleeping on top of a shelf just inside the window, he is a strictly indoor cat

I have a tendency to get lost in things I don't really care about - scrolling Tumblr, playing a video game I've already played, getting nerd-sniped by an interesting question, scrolling Tumblr¹, etc. - and this helps bring me out of that fugue and keep me spending time on things I actually want to be doing.

(Sometimes "scrolling Tumblr" is actually what I want to be doing. But then I can make that decision.)

It's been five days, and so far I'm pretty pleased with the results. I feel more focused and connected, and my mood is better.

Today I'm grateful for having cool, clear weather to start July off, and for already being halfway through the year.

¹ Yep. Despite my best intentions, I do this a lot.

In theory, the new job gets me closer to where I thought I wanted to be as a professional. But as I've thought about moving over to the new team (and it is a new team – not just to me, I'm a founding member), I've realized that I'm not entirely clear on what it is I want to actually be doing. This is both frustrating to me and unfair to the people I've asked for guidance!

(Also, the more I think about it, the more I realize that what I'm saying I want to do boils down to "...but what I really want to do is direct".)

So I've been taking some time to think about my actual goals as a software professional. Where do I want to be in five years? What kind of legacy do I want to have among the people I work with, and what kinds of things do I want to learn along the way? I'm not ready to share the results yet, but ... honestly, this is the kind of long-term thinking I've always been bad at. (I tend to answer "where do you see yourself in five years?" with "I might get hit by a car tomorrow, so I have no idea". I know that's a bad answer, but I really do have trouble looking more than a few months out, especially given The Vampire.)

Watch this space, though. Hopefully I'll have some answers soon.

Today I'm expressing gratitude for:

• Insurance that keeps paying for medication even when they complain about paying for anything else
• My work planner, which has done more than anything to keep me organized during work hours
• The unbearable luxury of sleeping in an extra hour this morning because I knew I'd have to be at work at least an hour later than usual so I could start late
• The rumble of thunder and the soft patter of rain
• The local recycling center, which is open 22 hours a day (they close from 7-9 to empty the bins)

(I think I count that walk around the grocery store - it's one of the big superstores, so in addition to groceries they have electronics and clothing and sporting goods, which is convenient when I need both ground beef and windshield washer fluid - as my five-minute walk for today; heck, just getting from the checkout to the car might have counted before I got a handicapped plate.)

Now that I have some extra money each month, I try to not just make a given shopping trip about essentials; instead of just buying the things I'm going to need to make food, I try to get something on each trip that's going to make Future Me's life a little easier. Today it was some Scotch tape and some yard-waste bags; the Scotch tape is because mine keeps wandering off my desk and not coming back, and it's inexpensive enough that I can just replace it instead of digging around the house for it, and the yard-waste bags are because they actually make pretty great containers for household recycling, given that my curbside service does single-stream recycling. I can just dump the whole thing, paper bag and all, into the outdoor recycling bin and then open up a new one.

I did also get groceries, of course. I'm making chili tonight. (I should go soak the beans.)

Today I'm expressing gratitude for:

• The understanding that my friends extend to me.
• Therapists past and future, who have not only helped me figure out things about myself but given me a framework to ask the right questions.
• Scented candles. I know a lot of people don't like them, but the flicker of the flame and that I get to choose how the environment around me smells really helps me find my balance.
• Glasses cleaner. Anyone who wears glasses knows why.
• My Hobonichi journal, which helps me record my thoughts on the day and lets me go back and see how things have been going. Also, it's decorated with seahorses.

Yesterday evening, a friend sent a link to a blog post they said they thought I'd like, and about halfway through the author started talking about how their life had improved since they'd started being mindfully grateful for things in their life instead of focusing on the things that were causing pain or needed improvement.

Today I decided to do something different, so I picked up Rob Conery's The Imposter's Handbook, which I'd left off a few months ago due to getting distracted and forgetting about it. I read back over the last pages I'd seen, then turned the page to a new section - which was about establishing a practice of gratitude.

Okay, universe, I get the idea.

Today, I'm thinking about how I'm grateful for:

• My cat, Bioux, who has been a great comfort to me, and whom I nearly lost a few months ago
• Dialysis, which keeps me alive and as healthy as it can
• My family, who are broadly supportive even though they don't know how best to support me specifically
• My job, which keeps my brain occupied and my bank account at a reasonable level, and my coworkers, who are more specifically supportive and generally kind
• The feeling of the sun on my skin; I've spent far too much of my life artificially confining myself to the indoors

(If I didn't mention something or someone here, that doesn't mean I'm not grateful for them; I'm listing five things a day but also limiting myself to five things a day so I don't run out!)

Then I stuck them in my browser's Bookmarks menu - not realizing that on my daily driver, which is Linux-based, the Bookmarks menu is two clicks deep in a different menu, and that's if I want my bookmarks sorted by last-created, not the way I want them to be sorted.

.plan was one of those bookmarks.

Which is why it's totally slipped my mind to post here until now. As the title says...

I've moved the bookmark back to my bookmarks toolbar, which does display on all my browsers. Maybe now I'll remember that this is here.

I have always been a generalist - I find nearly everything interesting, and know bits and pieces about a lot of subjects - but even when I get really interested in a subject, my brain tends to record information about it in a general way, and I have trouble holding on to most details.

The problem comes when I encounter people who hold onto details really well, and who are interested in the things that I'm interested in. In those situations, when I talk about the subject in common, I nearly always get "well, ACTUALLY" in response - and more and more, I find that I'm always in those situations.

And while I try very hard to accept being corrected when I'm wrong, having someone effectively say "no, I know this better than you" nearly every time I talk about my interests makes me feel like I've gotten a Bad Grade in Being Interested In This. The constant correction feels like punishment, and like I'm being told that I'm being a fan incorrectly.

(This is in addition to being in places where I've learned that I shouldn't talk about being interested in things that people there aren't also interested in, because the response is anywhere between "well, I don't care about that, so please stop talking about it", "lol you care about that? loser", and "actually you're a bad person for thinking that's interesting".)

So over time, I have learned to talk less and less about the things I enjoy, and I've realized in the last year or so that as a result I don't really get interested in things anymore; I can do "hm, that's interesting", but there hasn't been anything that I've actually been a fan of in a long time. (After all, you can't get a bad grade in a class you're not taking.)

I don't know what to do about this. If I get really interested in things, I want to talk about them, but if I talk about them, I feel punished for it, and if I don't talk about them, then I don't have the social reinforcement that keeps the interest going. I want to fix this, but I don't know how, and in the meantime my life is turning more and more grey and feeling less and less like a life I want to keep living.

I scored very high – as I remember it, my parents said that the scoring scale stopped before my result did – and as a result, because you could do this in Baltimore at the time, my parents decided to not send me to kindergarten, and instead send me to first grade. At the time I had no idea of the import of this, except that everybody I knew at the preschool I attended was going to kindergarten.

Ten days before my first day of first grade, I turned five. I was the youngest kid in the classroom - but some of them remembered me from preschool, and since we were all new at the school (it didn't have a kindergarten attached), I didn't have much trouble, as far as I remember.

349 days after that, my family moved twenty miles out of the city. A week after that, I turned six. Nine days after that, I entered second grade at a brand-new school.

All of those kids knew each other from kindergarten and first grade, and while I wasn't the only student who was new that year, I had the double whammy of being new and the youngest kid in second grade. Because of my August birthday, I was always going to be one of the youngest kids in my grade, but at this point I was the youngest by almost a year.†

For my entire childhood, I was play-acting being older than I was so that I could fit in better. (Spoiler: it didn't work.) Beyond that, because everyone I interacted with was older than I was, I had trouble drawing the distinction between older-than-me peers (my fellow students) and older-than-me adults. As a result, I started feeling like I was always the kid at the grown-ups' table, constantly seeking approval from them so that they'd accept me in the role they were forcing me into.

I still feel like the kid at the grown-ups' table, forty years after that IQ test. I feel like all my relationships are parasocial, because I'm just a child among proper adults. I put a huge amount of weight into the approval I get from others for the things I say and make. Being called out or contradicted makes me feel like a small child being told "hush, the adults are talking".

There's not a good end to this story. I don't know how to fix this. I just know that I want to, and I think the first part is acknowledging it.

† The one kid that year who was willing to unconditionally be my friend, I wound up abandoning when I got to middle school. I don't remember if we grew apart or if I went out of my way to lose touch with him, but regardless, it was an awful thing to do, even for a ten-year-old. Brian, if you're reading this, I apologize.

Maybe tonight I can get some proper sleep? Maybe?

I find that I like having different journals for different things. On a spiral-bound 2"x4" pad, I'm writing down what I eat each day, along with whether I've taken the phosphorus-binding pills I'm supposed to take every time I eat. In a company-branded notebook my employer sent to everyone last Christmas, I'm keeping longer ... essays, I guess? ... on mental-health blocks; the most recent is a page on feeling fear and how it affects my daily life, and then a page of things I'm not doing because I'm afraid of what might happen. A fourth journal, a Moleskine my sister got me for my birthday years ago, has notes for the games I want to make. And, of course, this blog - and Tumblr, to some extent - is public-facing, full of the things I'm okay with the world seeing.

So the hobonichi journal feels like home, in a way; where the others have a purpose, the hobonichi is just my daily life, and it feels good to have the non-monumental, 日常 feelings written down too.