Sometimes, I get very jealous of people who are religious. The assuredness that someone is taking care of them, looking out for them. A warm, supportive embrace knowing your struggles and tells you, go on, you are doing great, keep trying, I’ve got your back. My husband is wonderful, my friends care deeply, my family will help me, but, there still remains, for me, a need for someone to take care of me without wanting anything in return. All human relationships require a back and forth and maybe I want something that only gives to me. As I was writing this, I guess I want an AI friend? Is that where this is going? My AI friend will ask nothing of me and knows all my secrets? Sigh. OK, that’s not what I want. Maybe I have no idea what I want. Now I think I’m doing this: god=ai. Gah. This is not what I want. Hahaha, maybe I’m rebelling – Elka used to love to snuggle with me at night and press up right against me. But now, she’ll snuggle if I make her and she’ll do it for about 10-15 minutes and then she’s like…ummm, I gotta go. I can’t sleep like this.
I’m still struggling with a bunch of church logistics and craziness. This is a three year term and I’m like one month down, 35 to go. Now, we are at a very confusing point in the capital campaign process where we’ve gotten a bunch of wildly different proposals ranging from under $10K to over $50K and I’m stuck. I’m stuck! I literally have no idea what I’m doing. And it was apparent that I was stuck and so a lovely, competent project manager who is a congregant stepped in an provided project management advice and spent a long time drafting up like a 40 page document for project managing – this is for you! to help you!. And I really like the underlying ideas, and I’m 100% grateful for the efforts, and I’m going to implement a lot of the ideas but I’m having a tough time digesting this enormous document. He freely acknowledges that he used AI to compose it, turning a weeks long project into two working days, but I’m struggling to 1. read it and 2. edit it. It’s unwieldy to edit because it’s not really written by a person. It’s written by a machine and it’s self referencing and a little recursive in a way no human (I think) would write? So I have no experience editing a document like this. So I am procrastinating.
I was looking for a project to keep my hands occupied while I was at meetings/sermons/waiting rooms, etc. Reading was not cutting it for me, you can’t read during a meeting and waiting rooms, the wait is too short and I have a small anxiety about my name being called that I can’t really concentrate on a book. I was discounting knitting or crochet because…how boring. I was thinking about rubik’s cube or coin manipulation, but then I was like..this is super ridiculous, I need to knit because it’s really perfect. There are actually other people knitting in these situations, so it’s perfectly acceptable. In the past, I’ve stopped knitting because I’ve been concentrating on the outcome (everything I make is ugly), but I need to reframe to the process. I’m only knitting to keep my hands busy and to calm my mind. There is nothing else I ask from it. It is only there for that. I do not acutally need to make anything, to figure out anything, to make any progress in the craft. (The last time I knitted was in 2023 and I knitted three or four hats in a row and then I got too greedy and tried a brioche knit which overwhelmed me and failed and then I put my needles down and I didn’t pick it up for three years. I will not attempt to do that again.). This is my rage against the AI/algorithmic slop. Don’t pick up the phone, pick up the book. Don’t pick up the phone, pick up knitting. Call the people. Host the thing. Bring messiness together. If it’s messy, it’s what it’s suppose to be.
