A round bundt-style cake with chocolate chips, sitting on a floral-pattern plate.

So, what are we doing with all this free time?

Social media is dead. The internet is a tire fire. The group chats have gone quiet. What are these new ancillary minutes for, exactly?

  1. Upping the meditation timer from 10 to 15 minutes like a champ
  2. Pinch-and-zooming old photo prints
  3. Figuring out where your local library is, and then picking one that’s a bit further away
  4. Cataloguing the action figures, their weapons, and their overall state of readiness (for what? who can say)
  5. Re-reading Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics (season 9, specifically)
  6. Dusting off recipes that you never tried 20 years ago (due to cowardice)
  7. Managing those recipes easily (due to skill)
  8. Re-watching Star Trek Prodigy Season 2 on blu-ray
  9. Half push-ups
  10. Reading on the couch, arm flung over head, ideally for longer than it takes to lose track of time
  11. Goodbye “Everything Shower“; hello “Everything TheraGun”
  12. Extended Editions
  13. Egg sandwiches
  14. Battlestar Galactica
  15. Trying to reconstruct our grandmother’s Ciambella recipe through trial and error, basically from taste-memory (she died in 1996)
  16. Watching the snow fall, and fall, and fall
  17. Killing our darlings
  18. Eating a lot of cake
  19. Playing Echoes of Wisdom
  20. Doffing the AirPods and just walking in silence
  21. Doffing, generally
  22. Expelling mucus
  23. Watching stuff from the Letterboxd Watchlist as soon as the availability notification drops
  24. Concentrating
  25. Condensing
  26. Limiting
  27. Google drive: clean as a whistle
  28. Tabs: closed
  29. That reading list?: organized as fuck
  30. Playing with tape
  31. Napping, which is one of the Five Greatnesses
  32. Unsubscribing
  33. Re-prioritizing
  34. Writing
  35. Re-writing
  36. Clipping and saving
  37. Getting out the Pirates of the Caribbean figures (not all of them, obviously)
  38. Reading British travel guides from 1984, i.e. the ones that still feature “telex numbers”
  39. Clotting our own cream
  40. Writing D&D campaigns
  41. Stoptimizing
  42. Spring cleaning
  43. Writing out the longest possible version of our name; and then concentrating, condensing, limiting
  44. Not even noticing Daylight Savings Time
  45. Building all the old Lego and then designing elaborate wall-mounted mooring plates
  46. Defining queerness, and then defining it again
  47. Considering empire
  48. Having breakthroughs
  49. Writing short stories
  50. Watching the rain fall, and fall, and fall
  51. Hanging out with the best people.

Speaking of

  • Speaking of free time, this is a great write-up of an episode of LOST (as it happens, a personal favourite) because when I started reading it I was like, man, I gotta watch LOST again! and by the time I was done reading it I was pretty sure I will never watch LOST again. LOST is just too god damned exhausting. (The Reframe)
  • Speaking of libertarian morons (I wasn’t, but it’s never far), I definitely want to read this book, not just because it has libertarian morons, but because it also has libertarian bears. (The New Republic)
  • Reading the debut novel of a trans writer I already adore sure has the capacity to make me feel like a total fucking fraud in fourteen dimensions at once. Anyway, Woodworking is terrific! (Emily St. James)
  • Speaking of feeling like a total fucking fraud, I saw Scaachi Koul talk about her new book at the Central Reference Library this week and she was perfect and outrageous and so glittery. I need to get out more.