This one’s a mostly Maram update. First off, I’m awake! Yay. After a roughly 24-hr travel day, I slept hard for at least eight hours, and woke up feeling only moderately tired, rather than to-the-bone exhausted. Progress.
Managed to wake up in time to brush my hair and throw on sufficient clothes to look decent to take a meeting with a new person interested in the makerspace, someone Kel met at Stitches, Faith Humphey Hill, a local artist who turns out to have a background in arts administration. I almost cancelled it, for exhaustion, plus after yesterday’s big reassessing e-mail, I wasn’t sure it even made sense to meet with her.
But then I thought, no, might as well take the meeting — I’m awake, after all. Great meeting, actually — we talked for an hour and a half, and Faith’s going to go off and learn more about us and makerspaces and then come back to talk more. It may go somewhere.
And I’m now feeling not quite so much down-in-a-well generally (sleep is awesome), so I’m actually scheduling an admin team meeting with Faith and others for the first week of September, just to have an in-person conversation about next steps. (If you’re a local who would like to be part of that conversation, let me know, though I’m going to prioritize including the people who have been working on Maram for the last year, and what works for their schedules.)
I’m tentatively thinking this fall is primarily ideation stage & Maram as arts and tech collective — in other words, I don’t have to actually drive anything. And then we see where we are in January.
I was honestly super-bummed after sending the Maram message out yesterday, about stepping back, because I am so protective of my baby and I didn’t want to abandon it, or hand it over to people who wouldn’t take good care of it. I love this project. I wanted to grab it back this morning, honestly.
YET — I’m going to try to restrict Maram to one meeting per week this fall, so maybe 2 hrs. That’s….WAY less than I’d been putting in; if I start counting the actual hours, the way Kirsten Jackson is making me do, it’s a little shocking how much time I put into it. It didn’t feel like work in a lot of ways, because I was having meetings with interesting people, talking about fascinating things, and MAKING lots of stuff. So much fun!
But even if it was fun work, it still took time. Lots and lots of time. And if there’s one thing you learn from poly, it’s that while love may not be finite, time absolutely is, and there’s only so much of it to go around.
GOAL FOR FALL 2019: I’m trying to be realistic about my time and energy levels, and I have Benjamin’s voice in my head saying that it really doesn’t need to be me, doing all the things, and also Paolo’s voice in my head, saying that I’ve given more than enough time to community stuff for now.
I think he may have actually said: “The universe owes you a novel.” Which I’m not quite sure I agree with, that the universe owes me anything, but I know what he means.
It’s not really selfish of me to take the time to write my novels, even though it feels like it is.
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