Hi, welcome back to readywriting.org. Looks a little different. I had to move to from Ghost back to WordPress because…reasons. It has to do with the kind of shared hosting service I have through Georgetown Domains, versus the kind of hosting service I need to run Ghost and that I’m cheap. Fun fact: Ghost makes it easy to import an old WP site, but WP does not really play well with the JSON archive file that Ghost gives you. So, I spent all day Saturday copying and pasting and recreating every. single. post. from the last almost four years.
Thankfully, I had already found a suitable theme, at least acceptable (I am going to miss that lovely, clean Ghost theme), so I didn’t have to spend hours and hours and hours down that rabbit hole (see why below). But there is always a sense of, I don’t know, loss I guess when it comes to this kind of migration. I just had everything the way I liked it, and boom, I have to change everything. Again. They don’t call it a migration for nothing, I guess.
There’s some sort of metaphor for my life in there…
The migration did give me an excuse to hide in my room and catch up on my podcasts, so not a total loss.
And now I finally have to get used to Gutenberg (ugh, sure, I guess so, whatever, it’s part of my job and I can handle it). And even though I literally just did a 10-year retrospective, this was during the pre-COVID-19 time. So, you know, a million years ago. And, going through this blog, again, with COVID-19 goggles, was a new and less-enjoyable experience.
I had completely forgotten that a year ago, I was having the nerdiest and best experience of my life with my kids. God, was that only a year ago? It feels like forever ago. Even the most recent COVID-19 blog posts I wrote last month feel like they are on the same plane of forever-ago as going to Awesome-Con and meeting the voice of Goku and getting a picture with Will Riker. Everything is now and not now. Everything is ADHD time turned up to 11.
I had to pick categories for all of my blog posts. Ok, well, I didn’t, but I didn’t like how every single blog post at the top or on the page all said “uncategorized” as true as that might be in my own mind and in my own writing. So I started to organize, to collate, to decide. I tried to keep it to one, if only for my own sanity, for simplicity, but now I am forcing myself to take one extra step before hitting publish, making a decision about where the post belongs.
Is this one COVID-19 or is this one Writing? Or Mental Health?
Does it fucking matter?
Weekends are the worst for me, and I was grateful to have an activity with a clear goal and end-point to work on. I hate the even-more shapeless time of the weekend now. Where once it represented possibility, now it is all just wasted time, more wasted time doing nothing of any importance. At work during the week, I can tell myself that people are relying on me to get my work done, that they are struggling just like me and that we can keep on keeping on to help each other, our faculty, retain some sense of sanity, of structure, of support.
Weekends are just for me and just for me feels terrible right now. I’m done taking care of myself by the time Saturday afternoon rolls around. And then what?
And then what. That’s the question we’re all asking right now. And then what. And then what. And when what. And how what. No one knows. Literally. No one knows. It’s not like there is a secret being kept from us, or that we’re waiting for the revelation. Nope. No. one. knows.
So I migrate my site and my hosting service tries to help me keep Ghost but it gets too complicated on the back end making the user experience, well, unusable, so I cut-and-paste and download and upload images and make decisions on categories and miss my old theme and play with my new theme and learn this new interface and listen to a podcast about hockey when there is no hockey but the hosts are like old friends and I almost always end up laughing so hard I almost cry at least once a podcast, so there’s that, I guess.
We’re all just waiting. And while we wait, we do things. It’s when I don’t have anything to do that I start to fall down.
