I think I've officially hit hobby overload living in my own mess of stalled out projects. I've made a lot of progress, but sometimes you just don't have anything to show for it except a pile of unfinished work that keeps getting bigger.

I took on my first electronic project making something called a ZeroWriter. Essentially, a small computer with the sole purpose of being a word processor. Fascinated by digital minimalism, I'm drawn to devices that serve a single purpose. I worked through the coding issues, and have a product that functions, but I wanted to explore what it would take to build an enclosure and make it portable. This would involve some woodworking and building a rechargeable battery mechanism that added quite a bit of complexity.

After a lot of research, a couple weeks of waiting to receive dev boards, ordering the wrong one, reordering the right one, and another couple weeks of waiting, I finally had all the electronic parts I needed. Excited to start testing, I plugged in the battery but was immediately met with a sharp stabbing sensation at the tip of my thumb. I thought it came from the edge of the casing. As I quickly realized I had in fact burned myself due to the brand new battery being wired with it's polarities reversed, it immediately caused a small pop and a comically tiny puff of smoke to explode off the tiny computer chip mounted to the board. ZeroWriter progress halted until I can fix the wiring on the battery.

On the sewing front, I've been working on a wool peacoat since January. It took me several months of small sprints of work just to transfer the pattern and get all the fabric cut out. I've paused on the actual sewing part. Something about making a wool coat in the dead heat of summer just took the wind out of me.

Lastly, I've been wanting a film camera since high school and finally picked up a Canon AE-1 from a shop in the city. I've owned several digital cameras over the years but was excited to take the plunge into another stupid expensive hobby. I've been really into the idea of intention, and I think reverting to film is a way to help refocus my intention with photography. Anyways, I shot a roll of film over a couple of weeks, carefully selecting my shots. Sent it to the lab, and got a notice saying all the photos came back blank. With some troubleshooting I figured out the shutter curtains weren't working correctly. Camera is back at the shop being worked on.

I remind myself that accomplishments are not the marker of progress. Progress is making consistent incremental steps toward a goal. They may be small, and the goal may be more of a general direction than a finish line. But it’s a good reminder that progress requires breaking things and failing forward.

Some small wins:

1. Made my own leather camera strap
2. Picked up some flower frogs to display the flowers from our side yard
3. I'm crushing through books at a faster pace than any other time in my life

Winter tends to be a particularly introspective time for me. The cold and the rain, the bottom of a long exhale before the warmth.

After gripping with fact that my phone screentime was creeping up to four to sometimes six hours a day, I've mostly been off social media since the start of the year. When I started to pay attention to where time was being consumed, I wanted to make some changes.

This comes off of the self reflection that my time is truly my most precious asset, and distraction is such an easy thing to manipulate.

A life spent distracted is a life watching time scroll by. It's robbing us all. It's not a coincidence we all feel the years pass quicker each year. I intend to slow this passing by getting back to focusing on intention.

When I look back at all the things that have brought me true joy, it's always spending quality time with the people I love and focusing on something new to accomplish. I feel weighed down by anything else that leads me further from seeking deeper connections, higher knowledge, and mastering my crafts.

This isn't an announcement that I'm leaving social media or something. More of a statement that when I am on social media, I aim to be more intentional with my time. Because it's mine to spend. This means rewiring my relationship to my phone as a tool for my goals instead of an impulsive distraction to fill every second of perceived down time. I'll admit, I still have work to do.

I want to return to why I came to Instagram in the first place: to journal through my photos and to share the music I'm finding. I want this space to be a reflection of my life, not a station to absorb an algorithm's influence.

Even the term "consumer" gifts us with the vital clue that holds up the mirror to our relationship with social media. We "consume." And if "we are what we eat," then we are a sum product of the time we spend on social media and the junk we are fed. Doom scrolling and memes gives us the shot of dopamine we crave, like sugar or umami in junk food, but ultimately leaves us hollow, craving for real sustenance. Craving for real life experience.

I just started to read Dune and found this quote to be particularly apt:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Also, currently reading The Anxious Generation and would highly recommend How to Break Up With Your Phone.