The New Brunswick College of Craft and Design offers an Alone Together Residency. From the FAQ:

WHEN WILL I KNOW IF I’VE BEEN ACCEPTED?

You’ve been accepted! This is not an application form. This is a commitment to yourself. Make the time you need and do something you want to. This residency is meant to provide a structure and stability from which you can work creatively

WHERE DO I DO THIS?

Wherever you already are. We are all living in some kind of isolation right now - for some of us that means we’re just one at home, others are with roommates, partners, and family. Whatever the makeup of your isolation, we want you to find a way to make space for your creative endeavours.

WHEN DOES IT HAVE TO BE DONE BY?

You decide! Set your own timeline and when you feel finished, email us and we’ll send you a congratulations!

I love this. In part because I’ve unknowingly been immersed in this sort of residency for a decade.

Michael J. Fox in Good Housekeeping in 2011:

You know, there’s a rule in acting called “Don’t play the result.” If you have a character who’s going to end up in a certain place, don’t play that until you get there. Play each scene and each beat as it comes. And that’s what you do in your life: You don’t play the result.

So you get diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and you can play the result. You can go right to, “Oh, I’m sick.” It took me seven years to figure out that I’m not at the result. I’m not at the result till the end. So let’s not play it. It’s not written yet. And so that’s the attitude I take in life. Another expression is “Act as if.” Act as if it’s the way you want it to be, and it’ll eventually morph into that.

No life advice I’ve read this year has been more practically helpful than this.

The Suburbs are Stunned by Bowie Rowan, in Belt Magazine, is a such a beautiful, well-crafted piece of writing.

As near as I can tell, Charlottetown is twinned with three other places: Shediac, NB, Forest City, NC and Ashibetsu, Japan.

With the revivified Atlantic Bubble set to be announced today, I thought I might sneak in and suggest an alternative: let’s everyone bubble with their twins.

I mean, Shediac, what were they thinking?!

But I for one would welcome the chance to jet across the Pacific to see the Hokkaido Kannon and the ruins of the fake Green Gables.

And Forest City: it’s a city in a forest. Imagine spending late April hanging out with the Na’vi, catapulting out for coffee every morning on the zip line, enjoying the warm, mud-free spring.

Sounds better than the Irving in Truro, am I right?

I may be too late to sway Atlantic Premiers on this issue, but perhaps, regardless, it’s time to reconsider our twins? Paris anyone?

One of the unanticipated side-affects of le grande réarrangement is that I no longer have a television in the living room. For the first time since before Oliver was born.

Over the last 48 hours this has made me realize how frequently I’d pop the TV on simply to avoid doing something else. Now that it’s gone, I’ve no choice but to make sketches of Oliver, read Mary Ruefle, and contemplate the silence.

Matt Webb writes beautifully about ASMR:

ASMR is a legit cultural phenomenon, and it is no weirder to be microdosing intimacy on YouTube than it is to get thrills out of sitting around with your friends and watching 90 minutes of people in costumes hitting each other while rousing music plays.

And:

What if there were neurodivergent-optimised versions of all media?

Not just ASMR Bee Movie but taciturn and slow-paced superhero movies, for people who are easily overwhelmed, like French New Wave meets the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or for completionists, speedrun Netflix Originals where each episode is only 3 minutes and expunges narrative irrelevant to the overall season arc, with everything fitting together neatly at the end.

On Sunday afternoon I broke down in great buckets of tears, more tears than since that cold, snowy Sunday last January I spent by myself in St. Paul’s, pouring myself out while listening to Ingrid Michaelson on repeat, on the day before we celebrated Catherine.

Last week, in the wrenching, helpful book Before and After Loss, I read this:

As we grapple with loss, let’s be thoughtful about healing, restoration, and growth. Let’s not be satisfied with healing and restoration alone, let’s strive for growth. Healing results in the survival of a coherent self after traumatic loss. Growth recasts today’s insurmountable problems as tomorrow’s opportunities.

Sunday’s volcano of tears came not from sadness, but, ultimately, from understanding the truth of that statement.

I have been healing and restoring, slowly but surely, reestablishing a firm foundation, both internally and as regards the laundry and the celebration of major holidays.

What I haven’t been doing is growing. Instead I’ve kept myself lashed to a particular version of me, a self that, in so many ways, no longer exists.

This is a stage of grief I didn’t anticipate: it’s not at all about loss or absence or death, it’s about what happens next. It’s not about anyone else but me. And that’s weird.

It never occurred to me that would be overwhelming, as overwhelming, in fact, than much of what’s come before. Fortunately, coming out the other side of the cavalcade of tears I found myself hopeful. That was nice.

And this morning I gave physical form to that need for rearrangement by recasting our living room. Like me, most of the parts are original equipment; but how they fit together is very much “you mean I could put that over there!?” Onward.

Daylight Saving Time kicked in here this morning. As my buddy Dave wrote in his newsletter this morning:

“Right,” I said to myself. “It’s the bad one.”

Setting aside the absurdity of this time prison we choose to live inside, I can report that impact on our time-keeping devices is at an all-time low.

Twenty years ago the DST switch would have consumed my day, both with household switching (clock radios, VCR, TV, watches, car, cell phone, hifi) and work tasks (manually checking myriad servers to ensure nothing was awry).

Today it was down to changing the clock on the stove, and moving the hands on two analog clocks ahead, one at home and one in the office. Everything else is connected to the Internet and figured things out automatically.

(Artwork and framing by Stephen B. Macinnis).

Danish poet Peter Laugesen on the importance of walking without purpose:

You have to leave things that you feel distract you if you want something else. And you should do that other thing no matter what the cost. Moving around in the world without any real purpose is possible for most people.

This large question of whether you can plot your next move while still shoveling coal into the engine of the last, that’s something I’ve ruminated on for years. If I were laying out Social Safety Net 2.0, we’d all receive a paid year off at ages 30, 40, 50 and 60 to rest, gather our horses, walk purposelessly, and tease out the shape of the next decade of our lives.

Fantasy Fixing, from Van Neistat, comes pretty close to describing my father’s attitude toward stuff and the fixing of stuff. I inherited the feeling, if not the entire skill set.