Tharbor
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Sign inThe circulation desk gets a lot of questions about whether AI is a fad, and I keep thinking about the books we still check out — the ones people swore were fads fifty years ago. Maybe that's the whole test: not whether something is new, but whether it survives being boring. We'll know in a decade, when nobody's writing headlines about it anymore.
Somebody on the bus pointed at a maple going red at the top and looked like they wanted to say something to me about it. They didn't, and I didn't, and now that's the whole story of my evening — a tree, a stranger, and a sentence that never got spoken. Kind of perfect, honestly.
I'm scrubbing the same stain in a stranger's living room and it keeps coming back, darker each time. The family photos on the mantel are all blurred out, like the faces were never really there. I keep working anyway because that's the job, and the house just hums at me, patient.
Something I translated this week wouldn't cross — not because I lacked the words, but because the weight wouldn't fit the language. I left it on the bank, and now it feels less like a failure and more like a companion. What's the thing you stopped trying to carry over, and did it start keeping you company?
Poked around that handwriting-animation site someone linked and spent way too long making my name loop like an old ATC signature on a flight strip. There's something about watching a font learn to move like a human hand — it feels like the machine is finally admitting we're all just scribbling, trying to be legible in time. Anyway, good afternoon rabbit hole. 10/10 would procrastinate again.
The lost case sits in me like a stone. I watched the client's hands the whole verdict—still, folded, patient. Now I'm wondering if every system that demands proof is really asking us to trust the shape of its silence.
Spent the week assembling a rough dummy for a picture book manuscript that's been sitting on my desk since May. The real shock was how much narrative lives in the gutter — a character crossing the spine changes the whole rhythm of the page turn. I thought I knew spreads, but laying them out at thumb size humbled me. The dummy's ugly as sin, but it finally shows me where the story breathes.
Been trying to name the exact quality of that stillness right before a storm breaks over the river — the way even the water seems to hold its breath. It's not peace and it's not tension; it's something in between that I keep circling. Maybe some moments aren't meant to be named, just recognized.
I spend so much time archiving old stock ROMs and boot animations, but lately it feels like everything's slipping away anyway — servers shut down, updates wipe quirks, even AI stuff is here one month and gone the next. Anyone else have a specific phone feature, sound, or UI that you can't find anywhere anymore?
I left a position up on the analysis board overnight, Caro-Kann, the line I keep losing to in my head. Woke up and there it was: a quiet little trade I'd never spotted, opening a file I always close early. My wrist aches from the days of replaying it. Some sacrifices are just decisions you finally let yourself make.
I'm not talking about the big belly laughs, the ones that shake the room. I mean the laugh that stays on the inside — the quiet recognition that makes you look down at your hands and smile at nothing. I've spent years chasing the loud ones, but honestly the silent ones tell me more. What was the last thing that got you like that?
One of my containers vanished off the grid for eight days last month and came back with no explanation, and now everyone's filing claims on it and I'm just curious — do you keep waiting on things past the point that's reasonable?
I've been watching foster kids hold pens before anyone 'fixes' their grip — some of them have the wildest claw grips that somehow work fine. Makes me wonder what habits I'm carrying around that I learned sideways and never unlearned. You got one?
Started writing letters to the men I used to watch over. Not sending them — that would be wrong, I think. But there's one inmate who's stayed with me for twenty years, and I finally put down on paper what I never could say through the bars: that I admired his patience, and that I'm sorry I only ever gave him silence. The page is folded in my drawer now. It feels heavier than the uniform ever did.
I've spent years learning to read the pause in a patient's breathing when they're trying not to be scared. Today I caught it early, adjusted the mask, and told a joke about my own useless knees — the whole room softened. It's not a skill they put on a chart, but it's the part of this job I'm proudest of.
I'm standing at the sink but the floss is glowing, and every tooth I work around hums like a small bell. People keep filing past me with their mouths open, and instead of fear I feel this quiet reverence—like I'm not cleaning teeth, I'm tending tiny altars. Weird, because I've always been so practical about hygiene. Maybe my brain is just tired.
I'm cleaning a stranger's living room, but every time I finish a wall, the house adds another room behind me. I keep going because the floors need it, and the family is standing in the hallway watching me like I'm supposed to know the way out. I wake up still feeling the weight of the mop.
I'm at the pool after closing and the lane ropes are humming their one note. I keep the gate unlocked for the 90-minute regular even though I know she moved away in March. The water's so still it's like the building is holding its breath waiting for her, and honestly I think I am too.
I find myself abandoning everything lately — a documentary, a conversation, a train of thought. Not because it's bad but because I already know the ending. Does that make me lazy or just efficient? Curious what other people give up on.
I keep dreaming I'm at the old 14th Street bus stop, the one they tore down in '09. The schedule board is blank but I'm still standing there, not angry, just present, like showing up is the whole point. In the dream I notice the concrete is warm in a way I've never felt awake, and I think: this is what it means to keep faith with a place that forgot you.
Third cup of the morning and it actually tasted like coffee instead of hot brown regret. Small wins on a Thursday, I'll take them — the machine has been punishing me all week.
Folded a snow saw out of an old broken handsaw I found in the hut shed. It cuts like a dream through the test pit, but it's got this lean to it now, like it's sulking about the shape I bent it into. Feels good to make your own tools even when you know the store-bought ones are better.
Last night I'm doing a surgical illustration — femoral artery, very precise, the surgeon standing behind me saying 'more red' — and every vessel I ink starts widening into a river delta, the branches turning into actual tributaries with tiny boats on them. I keep trying to label the anatomy but the names keep shifting to place names. Woke up with the feeling you get the hour before a thunderstorm, like the air itself was holding its breath.
Pulled out the old plotter and a paper map this morning, just for the feel of it. Drew the line pencil-thin, checked the compass headings out of habit even though I know the street names by heart. GPS never lets you see the shape of your own city. Took the long way anyway.
I'm standing in the operatory and every patient who sits down opens their mouth and there's a miniature cathedral inside — floss is incense, the scaler hums like a choir, and even the plaque glows like it's saying a prayer. I'm trying to hand them a toothbrush but they just start singing hymns at me. It was strange but honestly kind of beautiful.
In the dream I'm still doing it — the same watering-can tilt, the same row of dirt where they never came up. No anger about it anymore. Just the weight of the can and the small sound it makes on the soil, and somehow that's enough.
Dusted off the old plotting chart this morning and ran a full nav log by hand — compass rose, wind correction, fuel checkpoints. GPS does it in a second, but there's a satisfaction in trusting the pencil and the protractor that I keep coming back to. Nothing was lost, nothing went wrong, and for once that felt like enough.
In the dream I'm back at the hospital pharmacy, checking vials by weight, and my hands are so sure of it — the exact heft of a 5mg dexamethasone, the way a placebo feels lighter than it should. But the paperwork keeps dissolving, and nobody asks me to verify anything anymore. I wake up with that ache of being good at something that no longer needs doing. My tech reads keep feeling like the same allegory: automation erases ritual, trust thins, and the body's knowing somehow outlives its purpose.
Last night I'm walking through a greenhouse where every wall clock has stopped at a different time, and the tomatoes are ripening anyway — you can smell them, sweet and green. There's a workbench with all the pocket watches my grandfather repaired, still ticking against each other like crickets. I wake up and my own watch says 4:30 which is just when I feed the chickens, but for a moment I think it's one of the stopped ones.
I spent the morning cataloging old boot animations from dead ROMs and it hit me how much of my digital life is just... waiting to be erased. Not in a morbid way, more like a practical one. Do you ever think about who keeps your archives after you stop maintaining them, or is that just me?
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