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| title | date | tags | draft | url | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| i'm falling down with shit caked on my shoes (week notes 25) | 2025-07-27 |
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false | week-notes/025 |
Doing
Joe and I visited some of his family with a lake house this week where my farmer's tan became more and more pronounced. I also "worked" two days this week: I had committee meetings on Thursday and then a joint meeting to coordinate middle school/high school/college GSAs in my area. I also went to a concert (more about that in the music section) with a friend who moved away a year ago and who I missed a lot!
Reading
I finished reading Return of the King this week, completing a long-standing personal mission to read The Lord of the Rings. I wrote up a big long post with my history with the series and my thoughts.
Originally, I planned to read Perdido Street Station by China Miéville next, but I wanted something breezy after the RotK gauntlet, so I picked up Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes and burned through it in a day. It was amazing. I'm adjuncting at my local college in the fall — it's a course for future English teachers about young adult literature. I'm considering offering students a choice of this or All American Boys. Both deal with a similar subject matter, but Ghost Boys is better suited for middle school. I'd love to teach the book to my middle schoolers, too, but I think that will be an uphill battle...1
My next read is Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. I'm about 100 pages in and really enjoying it — I'm not usually one for non-fiction, but I also am a noted Spotify hater (and have been for a long time), so this felt like a good way to dip my toe in. Highly recommend!
Watching
I've been rewatching Downton Abbey. I'm in season two right now; I'm debating whether to finish the series (I never watched past season five, I think) or if I'll stop when they kill off some major characters in season three. I am glad to confirm that I was always right: Mary is the main character and the best character. I am noticing more and more the ridiculous plotlines, however — I maintained for years that seasons one and two were actually good and after that it descended into soap opera melodrama, but I am older and wiser now. I think I'd still recommend the first season, but stop there.
Joe and I have been burning through a lot of Survivor seasons to prepare for 50. Mostly, they're rewatches for me, which I don't mind. We haven't been going in any particular order.
Playing
I'm big into Fields of Mistria lately. The developers just put out another update — I'm really impressed with how the game is coming along. I love Stardew Valley and have sunk hundreds of hours into it, but lately, I don't know how I could go back — Mistria has so many convenience and quality of life features that make Stardew feel old and clunky by comparison.
Listening
I've been spending a lot of time at my computer, which means I've been listening to a lot of music!
I've been listening to a lot of Rainbow Kitten Surprise lately as a lead up to seeing them in concert. I really enjoy them — when I last mentioned them, I think I'd only listened to RKS, on a friend's recommendation; I've since rounded out their discography. Here is my slipshod and unscientific personal ranking of their discography:
- RKS - their best and most consistent; this is an album, an entire vibe, worth listening through in one sitting. Listen to "Cold Love" and "Wasted."
- Seven + Mary - a rough sketch of what they would eventually realize on RKS, but I like it — I think I have a lot of 2013 nostalgia. Listen to "First Class" and "American Hero."
- How to: Friend, Love, Freefall - Great moments and some real stand out tracks, but it gets too same-y for me in places. Listen to "Moody Orange" (maybe my favorite song by them) and "Fever Pitch" (add in "Possum Queen" if you want a weird one that will stick in your head)
- Love Hate Music Box - I've had a lot of ups and downs with this one: I think it has too many songs and the good ones maybe didn't get to bake long enough. But the more I sit with it and take the songs as they are, the more I like it. Listen to "Lucky" and "Sickset."
I saw them in concert on Sunday and thought they put on a fucking great show. Amazing setlist, minimal talking, and fantastic performance. I've been so wishy-washy with concerts in the past, so it was nice to have a win.
Otherwise, I listened through to EELS by Being Dead as well, which is a real rad vibe all throughout. "Love Machine" might be my favorite song I've heard this year; "Van Goes" also has big "Bela Lugosi's Dead" vibes.
I also, for some reason, thought about the band The Madrigals for the first time in a long time, which I'm sure I discovered on MySpace or last.fm or some other defunct platform. There's very little remaining about them online, but I have a few MP3s of theirs that I probably downloaded from one of the aforementioned sites. There's a cool as fuck old radio archive website that mentions them (and has a radio show with one of their songs still archived!), and I stumbled on a music blog from 2011 that mentioned some of the members' later bands, which led to me downloading Horizon by Trash Kit. I gave it a listen through — there are some great, skittery guitars in here, and the vocals remind me a lot of Ponytail. It gets a little too jam band for me in places, and the songs are quite same-y. I really like "Happy Sad," though.
Plexamp recommended Random Spirit Lover and then Dragonslayer by Sunset Rubdown as a similar album after I finished listening through to Horizon. I've had both in my library for ages — I think I downloaded Sunset Rubdown's entire discography at some point because I like a few of their songs. I didn't particularly like either as whole albums, but I have loved (and continue to love) "You Go on Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)."
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But one worth climbing ↩︎