focusing on:
i recently had a small procedure done under my right eye. the gp introduced himself as "a bit of a cowboy", which i took as a joke until he began moving a needle toward my pupil with the confidence of a man who had just described himself as a cowboy.
how's everyone's screen time going? i am so addicted to my phone that it isn't funny. sometimes i miss when i was a kid and didn't have a phone. if i wanted to use the computer, i'd have to sit at the family desktop downstairs and get really embarrassed if anyone tried to see what i was doing, which was probably just reading something weird. if i wasn't reading on the computer, it would have been a book; my former addiction, before that little backlit bug caught me alongside everyone else.
i would hide books under my pillowcase, i would read in the dark, i would read in the bath, i would read in the car, i would steal books from the library to read more, and then take more books before i finshed the books i'd already taken. i would read my book hidden inside the assigned book in the classroom just to get a bit more.
i would read so much, and anything that i could get my hands on, appropriateness of the content be damned. i've been thinking about the content-heavy books i read as a kid recently, and i would like to recommend a few to you now.
- When She Woke by Hillary Jordan. this book was my introduction to the dystopian genre, and also the existence of pregnancy termination. in a world where your skin tone is changed to match your crime, the protagonist is a young woman who has her skin turned red for committing the act of murder. i'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a retelling of The Scarlet Letter but set in a probably now not so distant future. it's pretty good but i think it dips off towards the end.
- Chart Throb by Ben Elton. i recently found an entire collection of his works at the uniting church and allowed myself to purchase two, curbing my own excitement. having already read the out-of-print copies, it only seems fair to share the joy with other readers. elton's sardonic humour is even funnier than i remember, and with the benefit of google and a little life experience i can now properly acquaint myself with the cultural references and innuendo that flew over my head when i was younger.
anyway, all of this thinking about phone addiction and books has made me think about "fixing my attention span". having previously only watched The Sopranos in ninety-second increments, out of order, dubbed over by an ai voice bot, i have started watching it properly (and by properly i mean illegally downloaded with polish subtitles). it turns out it is a show about Tony, a man who had some ducks in his pool. Tony loved the ducks, but then the ducks leave and he has panic attacks and collapses a bunch of times.
his psychiatrist makes a comparison between the feeling Tony has about the ducks leaving and the fear he has about losing his family. i like Tony. i've been pondering perception and agency bevause of my Italian Fascism class, and i wonder what decsions i would make if i was a middle aged mafioso pretending to be a waste management consultant. there was no mention of the ducks in the ai edited tiktoks. tiktok did show me the guns and crystal meth dealing, but left out the part where Tony feeds the ducks in his dressing gown.
i am also watching Gilmore Girls for the first time, which is the exact same show as The Sopranos with less violence and the amount of talking is doubled. and so far there is less ducks and the same amount of infidelity, but also to be honest i haven't progressed past watching it in the before mentioned ninety second format.
generation 15 of the orb has been alive for ten days, which is the record by a country mile. i'll be doomscrolling away, and my stomach will drop. my heart will sink. !!! omg the orb is probably dead !!! i rush to log on, convinced i will be met by the sight of a corpse, just to find that someone else has kept him going. it's so heartwarming, i made a leaderboard at the suggestion of a friend and now we can all see who loves the orb the most.
( ｡◕ ‿‿ ◕｡ )
for those cowboys who saw the proto-lilywakefield.com.au many years ago, i have reinstated the love tester, which is a 100% accurate, scientific piece of ancient technology used to measure the love between two people. i will add that i am not personally liable from anything that occurs as a result of you using the tool and finding out that you lack compatibiilty with your partner, but again i reinforce the guarantee that the results are incredibly accurate and extremely scientifically valid.
❤︎ tony + the ducks = 100% ❤︎ — tested at lilywakefield.com.au/lovetester.html