Author: Graeme McMillan

One of the lessons I’m learning late about my job is the need to let go; I write for a number of sites daily, which means that whatever psychic slate recording victories or defeats is essentially wiped clean each and every day. You wrote a great piece that got a lot of traffic and was extremely popular? Great, but that was yesterday, what you gonna do for us today? so to speak. I’ve always understood that in terms of doing well — that is, that you can’t rest on any laurels on the Internet — but, until recently, have struggled with it when I have shitty days.

I’m not sure what happened to make me realize that the clock gets reset after a bad day same as a good one, but it’s something I’ve really started to take to heart recently. Didn’t write enough, wasn’t funny enough or interesting enough? It doesn’t matter, I’ll have a chance to do better tomorrow. It’s something I’m still trying to be okay with, and unsure if I’m succeeding at, this whole shaking it off thing. Maybe 2015 should be a year when I try to make Taylor Swift my animal totem.

I am breaking my own (entirely arbitrary, self-imposed) rules today, writing work before writing this; the reasons for that speak more to my workload for the day — I have, thanks to both scheduling issues and my brain simply slowing down when I really didn’t need it to on Wednesday,  too much work to finish up today to feel comfortable with, and so wanted to get some of it off my plate as quickly as possible when I woke up — than any failure of my willpower, but sure, let’s call it that as well.

Nonetheless, I feel guilty for not writing something here first today, no matter how relieved I may be to have one essay out the way already. These daily posts here, whatever they are (A diary, I guess? Daily pointless ramblings seem to fit into that description), were a promise I made to myself to write something that wasn’t for work every day, no matter how silly or dashed off. I realized at the end of last year that, while I was writing more than ever before — in December, it was around 4000-5000 words every weekday — it was all for publication, and all for work. I felt like I needed to reclaim something for myself. Even though no-one’s reading — and that’s not a veiled request for people to comment if they are reading, I don’t want to know! — it feels nice to have somewhere to ramble, with no rules.

Well, two rules: to do it first thing every morning, and to do it every morning. I’ve broken the first of those today; I hope I don’t break the second until the year is over, at least.

My Kindle Fire temporarily died last night, reminding me that our relationship with technology is a close, and probably unhealthy, one. I was reading PDFs for work while helping Kate prepare dinner, and at some point, it decided to go from showing me Lee and Kirby’s early Fantastic Four to showing me a giant question mark and a message that announced that the Kindle couldn’t boot and maybe I should restore everything to factory settings.

My response to this latter message was to start lying to myself, internally comforting my worries by thinking things like “It’s okay, I can just restore the Kindle and don’t really need all the information that’s on there, it’ll be a hassle to add all the passwords and everything, but no big deal” over and over again, instead of the more honest oh God this is a disaster, I love my Kindle, please don’t die on me Kindle please don’t. Perhaps the deity of personal tech heard the latter, more true, monologue, because despite what the screen said, the Kindle eventually rebooted and worked fine, all by itself. Consider it a near-death experience that makes me think that I should really consider backing up data more often.

Woken up by a car alarm outside our house — it wasn’t our car, although that was the first thing we both thought, immediately followed (by me, at least) by isn’t our car alarm more obnoxiously loud? — and the dream I was having before then is already fading. It was something about having to attend a comic convention for work, but having to commute for that convention, for some reason. I can remember coming home to discover my family was visiting, and being surprised that they’d decided to buy food for dinner and also redecorate our house. I’m sure that says something about my relationships to both work and family, but because I’m still quasi-asleep and because I didn’t get to see the dream through to the end, I’m not going to draw any conclusions. For all I know, my subconsciousness had worked out a hell of a last-minute reveal that’d turn the whole thing around.

rachelandmiles:

Listeners!

Due to a scheduling SNAFU, we’ve got a little extra lead time to collect questions for Episode 40, in which we’ll be sitting down with writer G. Willow Wilson to talk about her current run on X-Men. If you’ve got questions for Willow—or about current X-titles in general—please send ‘em our way by Friday!

Cheers,
R&M

Long after it has conquered everyone else, I’ve become obsessed with The Great British Bake-Off, which is now airing in the U.S. as The Great British Baking Show. (I don’t know why the title was changed; was “bake-off” too confusing a title for American audiences?) I could try and explain why, talk about the fact that it manages to marry what I enjoy about reality contests like Top Chef and Project Runway — neither of which I’ve seen in years, admittedly, and so may be entirely misremembering — with a kindness that’s surprising and pleasant, or that I find Mel and Sue’s hosting to be particularly charming. The truth of the matter is, though, that it makes me want to start baking again.

A couple years ago, I was big into baking, and experimenting with what I baked; a new (and eager) baker, I’d get books from the library and devour them, thinking well, what if I did this…? or maybe if I took this method and matched it with that recipe like an eager scientist. It was fun, and new; I enjoyed doing it a great deal. And then… Well, I’m not sure what happened; I want to be glib and say that 2014 happened, with its bad vibes and oppressive worldview, but I’m not sure that’s true. Somewhere, I started feeling as if I didn’t have time, or I was always too tired, to bake. I just stopped.

Watching The Great British Bake-Off, I feel — inspired isn’t the right word, but I feel excited about the prospect of baking again. This might end up being the year I get fat from baking cookies again. Watch out, world.

It sounds like boasting to write this, but I don’t really have anxiety dreams anymore. It’s not that I’m not anxious about anything — little could be further from the truth! — but merely that I don’t tend to dream about that, for some reason. When I was younger, those would be the kinds of dreams I’d have on a worryingly regular basis, waking up nervous and convinced that I don’t measure up, but something about growing older meant that those faded, to be replaced by stranger (and generally, more entertaining) dreams.

I say this because, last night, I had an anxiety dream, and one about the strangest, least likely thing imaginable: a podcast. Specifically, I had been drafted in to help out on  particularly popular podcast I listen to, and was convinced that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong personality and just very much not what the fans of this particular podcast wanted. What was particularly amusing to me, though, was that even in the midst of this feeling of pressure and being seconds away from letting everyone down, I remember a clear sense of this is ridiculous, this is the Internet in my head. It was as if my subconscious wasn’t really willing to entertain the scenario it had generated itself.

I put this down to working online every day, and that giving me a sense of perspective when it comes to expectations. That perspective being, “Well, of course you’re going to disappoint someone. It’s the Internet. Get over it.”