A few weeks ago, I finally had mental energy to allocate to starting a migration out of Spotify, and in the process, I rediscovered Ida Kudo and found her song “Born in the Sun,” which is now in my solar music rotation:“I’m walking on my dancing feet / running down on Worship Street / I’m gone, yeah, I’m gone …” It has a lovely shudder-and-stop to the music before the tight harmony of the chorus, which the title comes from. There’s a tension in the song between pulling back (“putting my fat headphones on” and memory and so on) and journeying, which reminds me of a podcast episode I listened to a few years ago that did a dramatically-acted version of Ra’s journey in the solar boat. It’s a melodic and beat-rich piece.
The pendant that I have for Hermes, which I bought sometime in the mid-2010s, is copper and in a vaguely Art Deco style. I’ve been wearing it more frequently. I’ve been praying to Polymnia more frequently. Both of them have something to do with speech, and perhaps with liminality, or a reaction to it, in the case of Polymnia’s veil.
For a long time, I was navigating everywhere on foot or (sometimes) on transit or (rarely) via rideshare. In my old apartment from before 2018, the landlord had forced us to stop keeping our bikes in our apartments and instead put them in the basement, but the stairs to take them out were crumbling apart, so I stopped riding it to commute and do errands. After moving to a new place, I knew I needed to get the bike serviced before riding it, but I had no idea what to expect during the phone call or how to get a bike in obvious need of TLC to the shop or how much it would cost, so I literally held off from February 2018 to June 2025 … and it just sat there outside of my apartment door. A friend of mine had an e-bike voucher, so we went to the bike shop together one day when she was in town. We were at the shop for a bit of time waiting, so I got to see a few people interact with people at the desk. Eventually, I asked about how servicing worked and learned that they service bikes for free that were bought there — so I only had to pay for parts, and my friend helped me bring the bike down in her car when she was going there to pick her new one up.
So now I have a usable bike again. I’ve been to the farmers’ market for the first time in a while — it’s about a 15-minute bike ride, but it would be about an hour including the waiting time by bus. Praise Hermes, the traffic has been very light at 8:50 AM on Saturdays. This week, I bought three sweet purple peppers, salad greens, an eggplant, and eggs. Last week, I bought eggs, scallions, a sweet purple pepper, salad greens, and sunflower sprouts. I’m eating down my pantry/freezer, with a focus on pantry sauces and random things in my freezer, so the veggies are strategic.
This morning was actually a really lovely day to do the bike ride. It was cool and calm, unlike the heat and humidity of the past few weeks. Suddenly having more range, especially with the traffic calming efforts that my city has been doing over the past few years, has been really eye-opening. I read When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency by Anna Zivarts in July, and biking again has really helped me process some of what the book was discussing about reasons people don’t (or can’t) drive and how important it is to consider that 30-40% of adults can’t drive (including those people pressured into getting or keeping licenses who don’t drive). I think the low speed of the bike and the haptic feedback from the road is about right for my brain’s reaction time and capacity to feel where I am in space, and that’s apparently a sentiment shared by a lot of disabled adults who just want to be able to get around and run errands.
On the “in the loop” front, Pocket announced in late spring that its parent company was ending support for the software. The way I keep up with blogs is (um, was) by exporting them to Pocket and reading them on my Kobo e-reader using the extension. I don’t have a way to do that until Kobo finishes the Instapaper integration that they’re working on. Part of this is just me using the death of Pocket as an excuse for needing way too much time to recover from how boisterously busy my late spring was. And my near-vision glasses prescription being incorrect, which is now fixed. And my phone breaking when it’s always Something Else to adjust to whatever the new Android version is like. And then there’s just way too much AI slop online now, and YouTube auto-dubbing, and … every time I open a web browser, I feel like part of my soul has decided to go on vacation past the heliopause, and ugh.
I did see an announcement from a blogger about an album called Astrologia, which I’ve listened to, and it has an experimental vibe. I like ambient, electronica, and post-rock, so I found it pleasant. If you like those genres, you might, too.
In the analog, I’ve been working through my TBR, and I’m currently reading (and enjoying) Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt by Erik Hornung, translated by John Baines. I have a thought-dump, messy journaling practice, but I have always aspired to do prompts. After following Moon Lists online for a few years and never doing any of the prompts because it would break the flow of neat text from margin to margin in my journal (yeah, I know), I decided to acquire the physical Moon Lists journal, and I really like it.
We’re about to head back into the hectic bustle of a new academic year after what has been a very eventful summer. I’m working on changing my work-from-home day because I have a standing telehealth appointment on a different day of the week from a provider who had had a months-long waitlist, which will upend … a lot … if it goes through, because Mondays offsite enabled me to do spin class at the local gym for years, which would have been a tight squeeze coming directly from the office. There’s nowhere to take private video calls at work. Schedules and routines in my life tend to follow a pattern like the Age of Zeus and Age of Kronos in Plato’s myth, where everything is smooth until it shifts into strife and then is smooth and orderly again. I’m trying to lean into the upheaval this time instead of bracing and tensing. Which just brings me back to the instinct of reaching for the Hermes pendant once again.
I hope that you all have a wonderful August, and for those who are just coming out of your first harvest observation (e.g., Lammas), happy holidays.
I’m going to put my big headphones back on and listen to Ida Kudo.
KALLISTI 