This is the last update of this journal thread. In February I am starting a new one, as I realized "liminal" doesn't really describe the space I am in. I think I have picked a title for the next journal that will set a theme I will be comfortable sticking with for a while.
What with a few snow days keeping wife and child home, and my mother's gambit to make my free time hers, it has taken a little longer than I would have thought to decompress fully from my horrible last job. But decompress I have, and I am burning bright, but not manic. Also, god, I love a mid-day nap.
I have been doing a lot of organizing, and now with my nervous system finally healed, a lot of learning.
Scripting
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One piece of organization I have done is to get my computer life right. I am still on the command line rather than these new-fangled graphical user interfaces (hot take: GUIs are just a fad), so through a combination of Bash and Python scripts I have it to where any operation I do regularly is cut down to very few keystrokes.
My favorite is a Python script that has a loop of options that I type a number for and then have bash script to call that Python script [1]. Thus the Python shortens the way to call Bash scripts, and the Bash script shortens the way to call the Python script to ./p
Deep Time
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A theme has emerged for the book learning I am going to do over this little breather I am taking: deep time. I read Andrew Knoll's A Brief History of Earth, which I thought was going to be a geology primer, but was really about the mutual interaction of life and geology. According to Knoll, going back through what we can find, we run out of in tact rocks before we run out of signs of life. Good book to extract knowledge from. At no point did I learn about what any of the experts were wearing or what their work space looked like.
I put some books on hold from my library system to learn more geology proper, but one book that I picked up because it was already available at my branch was Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. This book is going to be more of a poetic, spiritual capstone. Just flipping through, the idea of "from the perspective of deep time, why should anything matter?" is addressed:
For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come...
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[1] Do I have error handling in case I screw up and type a string instead of a number? No, fuck you. This ain't no corporate software. Besides, I didn't put in a "quit" option, so causing that ValueError is more often than not how I end the loop.