Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Not perfect, but pretty good. Productive, certainly. I ended up chronicling a bunch of it on Twitter, on grounds that I haven't been talking about my actual work much lately. And it deserves documenting for, idek, my own sense of what a Pretty Good Day looks like.

I've started blocking the day, 8am to 8pm, into two hour blocks: this seems to be much more effective for my brain than just morning/afternoon, or hourly slots.

• To 8am:
  
  • Lurched awake, grabbed phone from the other side of the room; failed to proceed immediately to showering. Snoozed, and read some of t'internet, but still made it out of bed by 7.05.
    
  • Despite continued lurking and reading the internet (so much doom!), made it to breakfast and the light lamp by goal time of 7.30, wearing my fluffy bathrobe Shiny bought me. More doomscrolling.


• 8-10am:
  
  • 8am German class (which seems to be effective at dragging me out of bed): learned some indefinite pronouns. Messed up some cases.
    
  • 9-10am: checked the bujo, completed the half-filled to-do list I'd made last night. Procrastination and doomscrolling. Movement meditation, through which I yawned like I was going to fall asleep mid balancing table stretch.


• 10-12:
  
  • 10-11 went, with some predictable avoidance, on email triage. Things dealt with or progressed:
    
    • Answered emails re the Matura (high school exams, for which I am expert examiner)
      
    • Read, filed emails re COMMode
      
    • Sent email re Violence project meeting to LF; strategically postponed reading her marked non-urgent email
      
    • Read through a few university admin emails, checked nothing needed action
      
    • Answered an email from Friendly Local Sociolinguist, who I had asked for style help re sociolinguistics abstracts
      
    • Finally girded my loins and read the email from KK re my wildly impulsive (and frankly pretty crap) pitch to their sociolinguistics journal on trans grammars - they & coeditor are allowing me a week to revise to something useful to them.
    
    
  • 11-12 was supposed to be working on said pitch, but my brain went blllert. I lay down to read, and did not. Nor did I manage to nap, even after succumbing to the urge.
  
  
  Other than doomscrolling, other excitements of the morning included cat videos from KHC and cat updates from K. During Avoidance Time 9-10am I booked myself an easter weekend in Schaffhausen, in order to see the Chicken Museum exhibit before it ends. Schaffhausen is within Switzerland, and I've booked self-catering, so I think this is moderately covid-safe, but I have free cancellation up to the day before if I change my mind on that.
  Nothing came up worth contacting an agent about on the flat-hunting sites. Haven't heard back from any lately, although I have a viewing booked tomorrow.
  Lunch was a pleasant pair of toasted beef sandwich with onion chutney.
  
  
• 12-2pm: I often do nothing useful in this block, so today was a novel change.
  
  • 12-12:45: Prepared lunch, and over lunch read some of Mary Devlin's Murder on the Canterbury Pilgrimage, which I think I will not finish as it is bad, racist, and doesn't have the dirty stories in it.
    
  • 12:45-1:45: Sat down and re-drafted the pitch for the sociolinguistics book. Current draft, pending revisions as I do a little more research, is here if anyone fancies a squiz. Putting it together did some rudimentary reading on cognitive and functional grammar theories of pronoun use, and discovered the 'yo-yo' effect, which is (based on Spanish data) the thing whereby if one speaker uses a first-p pronoun, in a pronoun-optional language, the next speaker will mirror that back to them; if they don't, the next speaker probably won't. Sent draft to MF and KHC, uploaded it and sent link above to BG, M from Twitter, and KK.
    
  • 1:45-2pm: Brain fuzzy and impulsive, decided to write long tweet thread about my day. Declared intent to 'take bins out and shake the fuzzies out'.
  
  
• 2-4pm
  
  • 2pm-2:30pm: Got earworm from the above typing, and, after taking bins out, spent a little time looking up different versions of Shake Your Sillies Out and having a little dance party for my inner toddler. This proved oddly effective, and as well as making coffee, I emptied and partly reloaded the dishwasher, mopped the bench, and changed my tablecloth.
  • 2.30pm-4pm: After spending ten minutes declaring to Twitter my INTENTION to write, I dragged myself to the pomodoro timer. In alternating chunks (25 min write, 20 min read, 20 min write again), I:
    
    • Put about 900 words in the shock chapter, FINALLY got to the end of the throat-clearing section (needs rearranging, condensing, etc) and also articulated what's novel about the fabliau here (something MF has been nudging me about for a year and a bit).
      
    • Read the introduction to 'Mock Epic from Pope to Heine'. Discovered there's a difference between mock epic and mock heroic, possibly?
    
    
  • 4-6pm: all one chunk, attended Geneva doc workshop, a session on 'joyful books' with Katell Leavant. I did not think this was going to be enormously useful to me, but it turns out what she means by 'joyful books' is books with satirical/parodic/farcical material, some of which includes the sort-of-descendants-of-fabliau material I was reading about YESTERDAY and which, I think, probably provides a certain amount of adjacent context for 'The Miller of Trompington' if not for true mock-epics. Didn't have any specific questions but I think I now have a better framework from which to POSE questions about the Miller of Trompington's print context.
  
  
• 6pm +:
  
  • Made sufficient progress, I think, on tidying the main room of the flat.
    
  • Made dinner: a lazy but tasty exercise in 'boil pasta in water; add broccoli toward end; drain; in base of saucepan mix a bit of stock, lemon juice, olive oil, powdered garlic; toss pasta and broccoli with this mixture and douse in parmesan and pepper'.
    
  • Finished reading a rather depressing essay in Meanjin about Contemporary (early 2020) Politics, and a rather less dismal one about four particularly stupid ways to die in Melbourne in the 19th century. Read Shon Faye's essay about being single in lockdown.
    
  • Tidied away dinner's mess, put dishwasher on.
    
  • Made this post.

The really important thing missing from today's Done List is exercise and/or leaving the house. I did do movement meditation, and I'm still crap enough at it that I raise my heart rate just from 'Balancing Table Pose'; and I sat on the balcony in the sun to read about mock epics, so it was a good version of a hermit day.

I could probably write up my recipe post for cookbook_challenge now. I feel like going straight to bed, but I still have some mocha yoghurt left to eat and half a cup of tea.