view from the present
view from the present
drmollytov
an extended meditation on presence
Latest Posts
Remember when Marie Kondo was telling us all to ask if things "spark joy"? And we all lost our damn minds folding our underwear into perfect rectangles and arguing over whether we were allowed to own more than 35 books? Good times....
"Garden" never means the same thing to any two people. I don't usually list "gardening" as one of my hobbies. I don't usually tell people "I'm a gardener." Because everyone has varying ideas of what that means, and because even other...
There's a scene in Angeline Boulley's novel Firekeeper's Daughter where the main character, an Ojibwe teenager, describes her coming-of-age "berry fast." She loves berries of all kinds, so she committed to not eating any for an entire...
No, really. I'm sitting here reading about the Bath School disaster: Bath School disaster and I discover that the building was rigged with a bunch of dynamite and something called "pyrotol." I'd never heard of the latter, so I Wikipedia...
At this time last year, I was scrambling so hard to get everything done that I straight up closed the library for the last week and a half of school. This year, I'm better at my job. Better enough that instead of closing the library, I'm...
Since ChatGPT launched, I have had a hypothesis. Since it is a probability-calculating machine trained on the text contents of the Internet, it should return the "average result" for Web-content-based questions. For example, if I want...
I am not a historian. I'm sure this is all very simplistic and reductive. BUT I got spicy this morning and searched "why did the Roman Empire fall?" And this pop-history listicle seems to have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to teach us in the...
The following exchange popped up in the teacher group chat just now: First Year Teacher: I have several seniors absent. Do I mark them as present? I know today is Senior Skip Day. Principal: You mark them absent. Senior Skip Day is not...
For those of you in the United States, Canada, or the Bahamas, may I recommend: CoCoRaHS - the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network CoCoRaHS is, as the name implies, a community volunteer effort to measure rain, hail, and...
Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the fact that my titanium bones make me a human barometer who detects every change in said weather with screaming bone pain. Maybe it's the end of the school year. Maybe it's a lot of things. But:...
One of the other librarians emailed this morning asking if the rest of us had gotten an email from an outfit called Librar Labs. We hadn't, but I looked them up. And yeah, this whole webpage can fuck off: Librar Labs How can it fuck off...
Most of my friends pull out their phones even in the middle of the woods. I tend to roll my eyes and tolerate this. Merlin and PlantNet are certainly useful. But I grew up on field guides and conversations with more experienced...
Quackgrass, aka couchgrass, aka Elymus repens: (this little mumbletyswear) has long been my sworn foe. Only recently did I learn its roots and grains are edible. i'm sorry, you can eat WHAT Close up, quackgrass reminds me of corn: a...
My library shelves are organized by genre. There about 14 subdivisions. Within each subdivision, books are arranged alphabetically by author's last name. Each shelf has a tag indicating its range (which authors, alphabetically, are on...
I grew up tromping around the woods of upper lower Michigan. I am one of the few people I know who would not starve to death if dropped into the middle of said woods. Yet every single year, I learn that something else is edible. Here are...