Author Archives: janaremy@gmail.com

short shameful confession #28

I have an IRL fetish.  I have a few of them, actually, but the one that’s on my mind right now is my IRL fetish for paper.

We have boxes full of creamy think white paper leftover from wrapping dishes in our recent move, and I love the texture of it, the color, and its soft wrinkles.  This weekend Catgirl and I used the paper to create a skirt pattern for sewing, and it was an utter delight to use a thick artist pencil on that paper, too.  So much so that I was dreaming about all kinds of ways I might use paper again (digital schmigital).

That, and I’m also thinking about the book that sits on the edge of my bathtub to entertain me during my evening soaks.  Wet fingers on paper (and the wrinkles that those wet fingers leave on book pages after they dry) are a texture that feels so much more bone-deep satisfying than a swipe of a finger across a screen.

 

Previous short shameful confessions

 

Note: featured image is of the old-timey letterbox (and nearby elevator) in the lobby of  the Hotel Allegro in Chicago.  It made me want to mail a few snail-mail letters to friends…

short shameful confession #27

As part of my “reading lots of books” project, I started reading Cloud Atlas (kindle edition) over the holidays.  Quite frankly, I’d been completely underwhelmed by it but kept plugging away because of the hype assuming that it would eventually get better.  Eveon so, yesterday, as I was sort of slogging through a low point in the narrative I clicked through to the “home” screen on my kindle and realized, with a sigh of relief, that I was nearly finished with the book.  And it wasn’t until that point that I logged into goodreads to consult all of the ah-mazing reviews of this book and finally figured out that…all this time I’d been reading the wrong book.

Because, apparently, The Cloud Atlas is not the Cloud Atlas.

 Previous short shameful confessions

2012 Retrospective #3 (finishing)

The next installment on my 2012 Retrospective series:

Finishing my PhD meant the end of a lifetime school career.  With the exception of a few months between the births of my two kids, I was a student my entire adult life.  Until June 2012.

I’m still grappling with the loss of the “student” discounts for movies and museums and so many other things…

This resulted in an identity shift that’s much larger than putting aside the laminated student ID card that I carried in my wallet everyday.  Not being a student somehow means that I’m a grown-up now, in a way that I wasn’t before.  It gives a feeling of no longer being “in progress” but of having reached an endpoint of a journey.  There’s something in my soul that has had a hard time accepting that feeling and figuring out what’s next.