andrea gibson said:

at any given moment, i can measure my wellness by answering the question "how much of my attention is on loving, and how much is on who isn't loving me?"

i think everyone must have different questions that make sense, and it'd be fun to collect them!

for myself: a friend of a friend of a friend journals in the morning with the prompt m "what do i need?". i tried it out and found myself answering in the vein of "i need to walk the dog" rather than the intended spirit of something like "i need space". so maybe i could measure my wellness by asking "how much of my attention is on what i need to do, and how much on what i need to feel whole."

another friend suggested nostalgia as a measure: "how much of my attention is on longing for the past, and how much on being excited for the present?"

how about you?

Social justice is an intergenerational project. The hardest thing to accept is that you're not going to be the one who crosses the finish line. It's not a sprint. It's not a marathon. It's a relay.

• Toby Rollo

We are always learning. This process need not be arranged, managed, or coerced. Not any more than a healthy heart must be forced to beat.

• Gabriel Zacuto

Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?

• Rumi

Children don't get traumatized because of the hurt. They get traumatized because they're alone with the hurt.

• Gabor Maté

certainly seems like it applies to other beings than children as well!

so i made a thing. well, actually, i made quite a lot of things over the course of 5 years. but i'm now finally making the tiniest, most recent little part of that thing public and usable!

if you go to pal.garobrik.ca, you will see a primordial version of Yet Another Collaborative Note-taking application. here's a spoilerific screenshot of a convo i had with a dear friend in it:

you can link it to your other devices to have all your notes synced between those devices. and you can share a document to collaborate on it in real time with someone else. it'll keep working when you go offline, & sync your changes when you come back online. and it does all of its communication directly between the devices involved: the data never passes through a central server (a central server is used to help your devices find each other, which is unavoidable unless they are all on the same wifi network).

i started learning one of my ancestral languages when i was 27! it's the most different language i've learned from my first language (English). it's also the only one i've learned well enough to be (kinda) conversational as an adult, when i already have some pretty established ideas of how the world & language works

i'm planning to compile here an ongoing list of words and expressions in Հայերեն that delight me!

• կար ու չկար: gar oo chgar. literally, "there was and there was not". but it's used to begin stories, like "once upon a time". i will probably never get over what a beautiful way this is to introduce a tale! also the title of a very well-written and honest book by Meline Toumani, where i learned that there is an equivalent phrase in Turkish, which makes me wonder what other languages are blessed by this lil nugget!
• բարի լոյս: paree looees. translates to "good morning", but literally means "good light"! ☀️
• եղաւ: yeghav (that's like the french R in the middle). maybe my favorite singl...

i've been contributing to Civic Dashboard, a volunteer community effort to make the City of Toronto's municipal government easier to understand and participate in. that's pretty broad! we're still trying to figure out what's most needed. but here's some screenshots of our website to give an idea of what we've done so far:

we recently reached a milestone we've named Enthusiastically Shareable, so i'm sharing it here. enthusiastically! there's still a lot of rough edges, especially when it comes to explaining what the thing actually is, but like, look, we did a cool thing!

i'm going to explain what we've done, and what i've learned in the process.

what are we doing here?

and who even is we! civic dashboard emerged from the primordial goop of democratic frustration when our resident Big Talker gave a talk explaining why our existing tools are old & busted, and a surprising number of people said "where can i sign up to build the new hotness".

most of its contributors found out about it through ...

this is my first (public, internet, under-my-name, self-published) noodle. turns out i need a lot of caveats to make that sentence true.

i realized i have noodled in public before! on public pianos. then i realized i've noodled in public on the internet before, in comment sections and the like. then i realized i've done so under my name too, as part of my OSS work. so maybe it's not such a big leap to self-publish them

and yet i can't quite shake the feeling that making myself a website makes me an egomaniac, despite knowing oodles of wonderful and humble people who have websites. even my mom has a website!

welp. nothing for it