MeghanIsMe

An analysis of 'reasonable' sunrise and sunset times based on different permutations of keeping or entirely removing DST.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/5/18245095/daylight-saving-time-2019-begins-spring-forward

Personally, I'm sad that I'll lose morning sunlight again soon. Today was the first time I've felt like I was going to work with actual daylight and it felt really nice. Getting more sleep helps too. I got to bed a little early and the dog didn't get me up this time!

From Vox: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult.

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship

This article gets at one of my many objections to car-centric sprawly development. It's an important one. As I said to my undergrad advisor, whose post brought the article to my attention:

-The concept of repeated spontaneous contact is, I think, so critical to creating friendships. Maybe it's like those studies about how so many ideas in professional settings come not from formal meetings, but from people who meet in the break room for coffee (the proverbial water cooler) and talk. Like ideas, perhaps friendships are things you can't specifically plan for; you can only create environments that foster their generation.

This kind of largely unnoticed, unintentional, but widespead and systematic degradation of the social environment makes me sad, and a bit angry. People shouldn't have to be isolated in the ways that we are. We can do better than this.-

What I didn't say there in Facebook land is that social isolation and my overall life priorities are something I think a lot about lately. For a lot of reasons, through most of my twenties, I was really bad at making friends and being social. I was finally developing those skills and making real progress at forming a social network. Going to events, meeting new people, making friends. Then I went back to school, and that slowed things down. And I got involved in two relationships with people who lived relatively far away. I wouldn't trade those for anything, but they slowed things down more. The time I wasn't spending on school was going to them. But I kept thinking that once I was done with undergrad, even if I was in grad school somewhere, I'd be settled in one place and I could be social with a recurrent group of people while I wasn't occupied with school. I could be part of a real, local social network.

But now that I'm here, school takes so much of my time that I can't. I have no time to be social. And it's intensely frustrating. It makes me increasingly resentful and unhappy. I'm hoping my time-management will improve, or workload will reduce, or I'll otherwise get settled in and this will seem less insurmountable. If it doesn't, I honestly don't know if this is worth it to me. And knowing how many hours most academics put in to their work, I have to wonder in general whether this is a path I really want to be on.

But that's a major divergence from the article, which is addressing car-centric sprawly development.

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From the article:

"But I do not think we should just accept that when we marry and start families, we atomize, and our friendships, like our taste in music, freeze where they were in college. We shouldn't just accept a way of living that makes interactions with neighbors and friends a burden that requires special planning."

I'm feeling sad today about the release of the last Discworld book and the finality of that event despite the fact that I've only ever read the Rincewind the Wizard triology, and that was at least fifteen years ago. I understand personally the depth to which one can be involved in a fictional realm, and it's clear to me how deeply so many people I know were involved with Pratchett's Discworld. People talking about their hesitance to start reading the last book in the series because there will never be another are expressing a feeling I know very well, and It has me feeling a bit down.

But I do hope that, one of these days, I might have time to read some more of it.

(In fact, there are so many writers of fiction I want to read more of and haven't. That makes me sad too.)

I really don't like being at school until 8:30 on these nights when I have a gym class. I don't get much done between my last regular class of the day and going to Yoga and Pilates. It's totally dark outside, which is kind of a reminder of how little time I have during the day. Nothing negative about the class on its own, but I'm glad that it will be over in a few weeks.

I attended the second meeting of the Parkside Green Party. It was just the organizer and I for the first one. We had a third attendee this week, so that's a good trend. I'd like to be more involved in politics, especially on a local level where I feel like I can make more of a difference. At the same time, I'll be moving at the end of the summer, so it feels a little odd to dig into organization now.

On that topic, I miss social interaction in general. It really is the biggest hole in my life right now in terms of things that make me feel unhappy or lacking. I am lonely sometimes, despite the relative nearness of people like Serinthia​ and Posi​, whose friendship I deeply appreciate. Part of it is time, and part of it is living in three different places. It's hard to form a real social network when so much time goes to traveling on the weekends. I'm going to miss a lot of people here tremendously when I leave, but I'm really looking forward to living solidly in one place for a couple of years. I intend to actively form a social network in Syracuse, with people who are geographically nearby to me. I need more of that.

But for now, I have to run off and get changed for gym.