I've told myself I can turn on the fridge again after the novel is out with my agent. 😅 Not exactly a starving artist, but we weirdos have to live up to some expectations, right?

Not ready yet, but I'm cleaning the fridge anyway & thinking about things I'll eat again when I can store leftovers & acquire more than single portions of perishables.

And... in the process, I'm marvelling at how easy it is to take the lil' things for granted.

This has been a good year for gratitude, if nothing else.

A friend of mine's been out of work for a while now. After helping two others land jobs, I finally had a chance to see his materials, which are 100% out of date... but I just wish he'd felt comfortable sharing them sooner. It's a whole other skillset, presenting one's career to stand out in the slush piles today.

So if any of you are ever entering the market after a long time stably employed?

PLEASE reach out for CV help from job centres and market-savvy friends.

Your life story should SHINE.

Possibly the runner's high talking, but just before I pop into class:

Gosh, I love the heck out of you, ya tramps.

😘

Go. Do good crimes!

💪 Maybe they're born with it. Or... maybe it's the result of a week of frustrating daily returns to the park.

But I *finally* got a full run without pauses for pain or breath again. (Just don't ask me my time per mile. 😅 That's next week's challenge.) Never too late to start over!

Morning, CoSo.

Just off for a wee run before class.

A lot of the world's unkindness is sticking to me like white lint to a black shirt after laundry day this morning. I keep trying to pick it off, but there's always more.

If it's sticking to you, too, take good care of your hearts today.

You are more than the person that worldly trauma sometimes makes of us.

Hold fast to the spaces where you can lean in, make a difference, and see another, more dynamic version of yourself grow. 💛

Today's piece took far too long, because it involved a lot of careful revision and consideration.

I knew I had to write about the 100-day mark for Israel and Gaza, but what I really wanted to call our attention to is how much these last few months have taught us about ourselves - when angry, when hurt, when afraid.

We are *very* good propagandists when we've been thrown into more brutal war.

We have a lot of healing to do from how good we are at wielding news this way.
https://onlysky.media/mclark/lessons-after-100-days-of-another-war/

This series is an important project for the new year. I'm thankful to @A_Jay_Adler for reminding us that integrity is something we have in abundance, in lives maybe lesser known but no less fully lived. Let's lean in to as many better examples of human striving as we can.

“I have no personal reasons,” he told an interviewer. “Everything I’ve done or hope to do is because I hate persecution. A human being has to look out for other human beings or there’s no civilization.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/ajayadler/p/extraordinary-ordinary-people-i

A little behind my time because I was up working for half the night again - but I'm emphatically sticking to the new routine this morning, to reset.

I didn't finish everything I wanted to last night, but I'm not going to let this consume me with nervous energy and drive me back to messy work windows and poor health like last year. If a personal project takes longer due to paid work, so it goes - but no more midnight oil to try to do it all at once.

Off to walk/run. 🤞🏻💪

I have many words for this situation. None of them good.

When in blazes will we start doing better?

"[T]he combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world – Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg – ha[s] increased by $464bn, or 114%. Over the same period, the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people – making up 60% of the world population – has declined by 0.2% in real terms."

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2024/jan/15/worlds-five-richest-men-double-their-money-as-poorest-get-poorer

What's your mood song tonight?

#CoSoMusic

😂 It finally happened.

Thinking in Spanish, writing in English, I just sent an email with the words "others ideas" and didn't catch the error because I was reading "otras ideas", which is FINE.

Sometimes I've seen my English prepositions slipping due to how differently they're used in Spanish, but the pluralization of adjectives is a HUGE shift in language theory.

Go home, bilingual brain.
You're drunk! 😂

Newsletter time!

Today’s piece has a wee essay for all, on the struggle for many writers to make sense of violence in their times.

That’s then followed by a fuller essay for my paid subscribers, in which we deep-dive into lessons to be gleaned from Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War, and Athenian struggles for a democracy we still haven’t perfected here and now.

#History #Democracy #BetterWorldsTheory

https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/lessons-from-ancient-fools

Folks who know what it's like to have a low-grade stalker know the self-doubt that rears its head when, a few days after a near-encounter on the street, said person actively tries to get in contact with you again. Did they see you after all? Or is this unrelated persistence after many months?

It is so annoying when you know there's not much to be done but wait for the persistence to end, keep to your avoidance routines, and be thankful you have a good street crew looking out for you. Ah, life.

A fellow caked in grime and clutching his crackpipe came past the vendors today, and greeted me having remembered I'm Canadian, so I talked to him as I would anyone else, we made light jokes about how his grime-blackened arms are cheaper than tattoos, and... amid his gesticulating he noticed his drug paraphernalia & tucked it away, then left looking a lot calmer.

One never knows what mood a person on drugs might be in, but people know when they're being seen as human... and when they're not. 🕊️