annals of somewhere

idiot mode I suck at resting. If I'm mildly sick with, like, a cold or flu, I get all excited to take a day off and watch lectures or dabble in OSINT. I had COVID when the OceanGate Titan thing was going on and you don't even want to know how many screens I had propped up around me in bed while I supervised the situation. I kept staying up too late because 'things were happening.'

This past weekend I convinced myself a great way to spend a restful sick day was to launch a little Shopify store. (My friend and I wanted hats made, and I thought, why buy hats when we can sell hats?)

In theory, this sounds like a harmless personality quirk, but in practice it contributes to burnout and it certainly doesn't help me get over a bug when I'm sick.

So I'm trying a new thing that I'm calling 'idiot mode.' Idiot mode is where I have to pretend I'm an idiot for a few hours, so that I can actually rest. “But you're already an idiot,” you might say, to which I would reply that you're probably correct. But in idiot mode, I'm a different kind of idiot. I have to place an artificial cap on my mental burn, kinda like a rev limiter. This is to prevent me from accidentally tripping into fixation. Fixation happens when I get so caught up in some subject or phenomenon that I lose all sense of time and bodily awareness. I'm particularly vulnerable to new fixations when I'm bed-bound and mildly unwell. In that scenario, I'm not in a good place to be doing actual work, and I can feel that. But passive information consumption feels okay at first. And it can quickly trip into fixation, at which point I start ignoring my body altogether. This is the danger zone when you're trying to recover from a bug! Hence! Idiot mode.

In idiot mode, with my mental rev limiter on, I have to consume dumb stuff. It's a great time to catch up on the bubble-gummiest of pop culture. I'm feeling a little unwell still tonight so I'm going to try it and report back.

problem first

Never just sit down and write marketing copy. What flows freely will be shlock. Slop. You have to obsess over the problem space first, and the reader's mindset. Get in there. Only from that place can you come up with anything that'll convert.

hello tiny part of the world

I'm launching this mini-blog in a new place. I've faffed around for years with writing. I have reams of notes and fragments and notes titled 'fragments,' I have essays in draft and archived status, I have Google docs and handwritten journals and all sorts of things. And I rarely publish.

I know why, for the most part. I'm beset by perfectionism. I am also cursed a little by knowing too much about what works and what doesn't online. I've been a marketer for so long that it's very instinctive for me to push something toward a definition, a purpose, a measurable goal.

I've also been a workaholic that struggles with burnout, and that makes me view my side projects and creative endeavours (like writing) through a ruthless lens. They have to be for or about something, serving some higher goal. Otherwise, why am I bothering? That's valuable energy that could be focused on something else.

But what has happened is that I end up in this sort of perpetual state of paralysis. I write so freely on my own, and I rarely write about marketing, and probably the worst thing I could do to myself is try to write in service of my earned income. That feels oppressive. I've always been the kind of person who ambles between obsessions and interests, and although I have my consistent areas of focus (the things upon which I base my living, and some running themes), I'm often 'on about' one thing or another.

This is an annoying sort of character to possess if you're trying to wrangle your work into a legible little format that can be packaged and consumed. Who am I, and what am I doing, and why should you care?

I see now that I really rob myself of the fruits of regular creative expression. Even if I have few, if any, readers — to be able to get my thoughts down in writing, and push them out there, and little by little overcome my sense of resistance — that's gotta be worth something.

So I'm going to stop worrying about everything and just post again. If for no other reason than to carve 'kristin wuz here' in some far-flung corner of the internet.

I'm setting up this little shop for random musings over here, away from the algo-fied essay factory of Substack (about which I have many good things to say, but .... the culture over there is starting to feel a bit constraining).

Here's a place for my little fragments and ideas, in an earlier-internet format that feels more suitable for my purpose. Or lack thereof.

Welcome xo