Derik Badman's Journal

Finished up How to Do Nothing last night. I'm not sure it ever really gets anywhere in the end. She talks about attention and distraction and tuning out from society and problems with social networks, and there's definitely a political slant to it about ecology, history, and such, and her conclusion has discussion of a bunch of local projects (to her, that's in Oakland) about ecology and history and a dam that got undone to help endangered species, but it's not clear how attention resisting, social networks and the attention economy leads to action and doing things like that. I'm not convinced it does. You can pay attention to a lot of things, but that doesn't lead you to do anything about them. I feel like she skips over a certain moral or ethical discussion that she implies and seems to believe but doesn't actually write about. In a way her title kind of displays that gap in that the book gets called How to Do Nothing and she never really gets away from why that is the particular phrase that is relevant, because if paying attention is doing nothing then that is not taking action.

Buddy's been sick for a few days, throwing up a lot, and it's got me stressed out trying to not give him any food for a little bit which is stressful too cuz he just meows and meows and meows and meows til he gets what he wants. Part of the reason I took a walk this morning was to just get away from him meowing at me for breakfast.