🪴 Jachére

A post at the end of summer vacation

Aug 13, 20236 min read

A post at the end of summer holiday

So, it seems like I had vacation. The first one this year, and probably the last one. I messed up my planning, changed jobs and started to study. And, especially, the studies and the start of the new job (as researcher) kept me apt busy. Then, in mid-September the new semester starts, with it four courses to attend, and no autumn break. That will occupy me until Christmas.

But, vacation was great. My people reminded me to not even think about my dissertation or the research project. I obliged, and these two weeks were fantastic. Many photos were made, a lot of swimming was going on, we bought an inflatable Kanu and discovered another side of the lake I’m living at, plenty of friends were met and drinks lifted and all after all, I found a good amount of peace and tranquillity. I’m happy I stayed in the region, it helped with not having anything to do and stress about anything.

All this leisure time gave me the chance to indulge in activities that need time and diligence. I created many personal archives, I made a few stickers, and cared a lot about the plants at home. We also cleaned thoroughly, which is just so satisfying.

Archives, archives, archives

Creating the personal archives involved sitting for hours and research. I catalogued all the plants we have in our flat. Often I didn’t know exactly what species the plant was. So I googled descriptions, compared photos, made notes, and collected everything first in the Planta mobile app, then transferred everything to a sheet. There are now 91 plants at least with their Latin name and a link to a page where one finds more info on how to care for them.

My partner introduced me to Letterboxd, a social platform for sharing one’s taste for film. You can bookmark films and series you saw and could also write reviews and make lists. I tried to mark all Sci-Fi and anime films I saw in my life as watched – an ongoing work. I tried to do the same with video games, on the platform Backloggd, which was created in the spirit of Letterboxd. Last but not least I went back to Librarything to catalogue all the books that I have currently. I will try to add books I once read also to it.

Stickers

Another thing I did this holiday is stickers! I wanted to make some for a while but never came around to investing enough concentration. I started with wanting to buy Sci-Hub stickers. But they were all of bad quality and not “official”. So I investigated the background of the raven illustration and came about some interesting things. More on that in this note on the sci-hub-logo. There has been a bit of collaboration after the initial release and I made a repository for the sticker that can be found here https://codeberg.org/thgie/sci-hub-sticker.

Another sticker I made was about antifascist archives. I didn’t find anything in that direction and had fun making one. There stickers can be found in their own repository under https://codeberg.org/thgie/antifascist-archives-action-sticker.

Last but not least, I made an INSORGIAMO sticker! I read an article on the Insorgiamo movement in Italy. The fine people of a GKN factory in Firenze took over their workplace when everybody got fired. Since then, they came up with a plan on how to work together, equally and in accordance with the climate-crisis.

After searching for some graphic material, I haven’t found a sticker with their famous banner. So here is one.

This sticker can also be found in a repository under https://codeberg.org/thgie/insorgiamo-sticker. Of course, I also printed all of these stickers in a good quality. The Insorgiamo sticker I also made in a cheaper version, which I intend to sell and donate the profits to the movement.

No-Stress

At the beginning of this year, I started to tackle my stress problems actively, after I got massive eczema on my legs in an especially stressful situation. I ended up having a therapist and a coach now, taking ADHD meds and doing neuro-feedback session. The progression is slow, even if the meds worked right away. But there is progression and I felt more balanced, calmer, take many things easier and less existential. That gives me at once the possibility to appreciate my life and all the experiences I’m making, but also the things I do for work and research. There is a just a tad more focus and presence. Especially the presence thing was something that I’ve been loosing in the last few years. There was a moment where I became acutely aware of feeling hazy and cloudy and parted from my environment, and I didn’t like it very much. It worried me. Now after all the things I learned and did these years to work on that (sometimes more, sometimes less) I guess it is really just being stressed out and slowly diminishing as a being, becoming a static variable in a capitalist system.

Dub and rest

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