J. Martin

August 1, 2021

Hello Vacation, Where Have You Been for so Long?

Not that I’m actually traveling anywhere; visiting friends in Tokyo had to be shelved for yet another year. But muting my Discord servers, funneling work-related emails into a quarantine folder, and having breakfast and stuff on the balcony does a pretty good job already of giving me the post-stress migraines I’ve been waiting for after two years of uninterrupted work.

A brief exception to “not actually traveling” will be a trip to Berlin coming Wednesday (two weeks after my second shot) to visit my father for a few days. He’s back in Germany—after, I don't know, thirty years, thirty-five—and we haven’t seen each other since 2009. Just now, as it happens, my mother and her friend are also in Germany, if only for a few weeks. But they’re close-by, and I didn’t have to travel to see them.

What else? Well, vacation is about breaking routines, so I’m dialing back my social media engagements, web writing, photo uploads, and general news and research intake. Instead, it’s mostly games, novels, graphic novels/manga, anime/donghua, movies, and hanging about outside. (Sorry, no booze or weed so far, I need to get out of that migraine zone first.) The only routines I keep up are editing my writing project and running, both on a reduced scale.

Nevertheless, one fun stuff link. It’s a Twitter account I found only recently: pictures of the end. Granted, there are gazillions of meme sites on the internet, full of images depicting bizarre items, inexplicable activities, and absurd situations. What I like so much about this one, though, is its general frame—“documenting the end of the world / follow to witness the last era of humans and animals on earth”—which puts everything into a very distinctive mood. (But maybe that’s just me.)

Now, balcony time!
J.