Tag: quotes

Hard (??) Times (???)

Hope ZaneGeneral

It’s occurred to me that I can just straight up use Tiktok et al wrong.

No I will not be elaborating at this time!


…but unrelated, man it feels kind of hard to be a person these days, doesn’t it?

I’ve been kind of happy knowing less these days. I’m barely on social media (if you’re here because you clicked a link on social media, hi!) This blog is a bit of an echo chamber, but I kind of like that. I like saying things and not necessarily hearing anyone saying anything back.

Which isn’t to say I don’t love you, but more that I want to hear myself think.

I think a lot, these days, about something Zadie Smith said in an interview:

“I have seen on Twitter, I’ve seen it at a distance, people have a feeling at 9 a.m. quite strongly, and then by 11 have been shouted out of it and can have a completely opposite feeling four hours later. That part, I find really unfortunate,” she said. “I want to have my feeling, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind. I don’t want to be bullied out of it.”

I think I’m also looking for the ability to be wrong, you know? Or at least to have my thoughts independent of validation.

It does get a bit lonely sometimes. I’ve been playing a lot of Skyrim again recently—that’s kind of new, like the fact that I’ve been cross stitching. I’m picking up hobbies that I used to love a long time ago. I put most of them down because they didn’t seem very productive, but frankly, fretting about being productive is also not very productive. Also it makes me unhappier.

Politics and the news are freaking me out these days, as I assume they’re freaking everyone out. I don’t know, I am trying to manage. I assume that you are, too. I just cooked some pork chops, and I am probably going to go and eat them while watching bad TV.

Maybe later I will write a little and be wrong about something.

Serial update: Also! We are currently up to chapter 13 in Koreatown. And I’m writing something about Chaeyong and witches (Fairytale character cameo incoming).

When she’s hungry, she looks for the garden

Hope ZaneGeneral

I love Annie Dillard. I love her writing, which seems to possess a kind of singular beauty. I’m once again thinking of this quote of hers and finding it at once bolstering and convicting:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

– Annie Dillard

I confess I haven’t felt like much of a writer lately. My words have slowed down. I’ve been prioritizing other things. Life and health have become sometimes sad—maybe moreso than usual. This will pass, and yet it still seems hard.

Ah, I want to end this blog post triumphantly, but maybe it’s most honest to say that writing is still someplace I can go. That even when the light on the porch of my own creative practice seems dark and dim, it never goes out completely.

And there has to be something very hopeful in that.