These are trying times. New York State especially has been rocked with horrific news this week, and I had to get away from the media just to ease the awfulness of everything that is happening. Work is getting more and more stressful as far as workload and volume goes, and as I started to feel the weight of it all bear down and slow my ability to simply get usual tasks done. Add in our yard’s daunting spring clean up (which consists of single-handedly cleaning and pruning the gardens, and then filling about 50 lawn bags) and lending whatever support I can to my parents has my plate full – and I only ever want a full plate on Thanksgiving or Christmas. I realized I’m at a breaking point, due in part to the dismal fact that I haven’t had a proper vacation in several years. It wasn’t just COVID – we hadn’t gone on a vacation in the few years before that – and I understood that such a lack of relaxation is finally having an effect on me. 

As much as meditation and therapy has helped, there’s just so much anyone can do without periods of recharging and restoration, and the increasingly sporadic and spread-out weekends in Boston only charge bits of my battery. It’s probably time for a new battery entirely. 

In the past I might have barreled through such a lull in inspiration, forcing myself to just keep going. I know myself better now, and it’s ok to need a break, and to insist upon one. The world wears all of us down. Now and then we deserve a break. 

And so another Holy Week begins, signaling spring and all its themes of resurrection. We’ll start the week in quiet but sweet fashion, with this cinnamon roll I made using the base of a lemon cardamom sweet roll recipe and switching out the lemon and cardamom with cinnamon and brown sugar. Going back to basics in a delicious turnaround, and starting off Monday with cozy comfort. On with the recap…

A spring sakura jazz theme. 

A helpful reminder. 

Cheers for sky tears.

Flash point.

Boston spring preview.

A momentary meditation beside a stream.

April flowers.

The port where pirates hang.

The consequences of cancel culture.

A Fairy Godfather emerges from the shadows. (Spoiler alert: it’s me.)

Dazzlers of the Day included Alice Wu, Ramin Karimloo, Viola Davis, and Bo Burnham. 

“There’s no such thing as “cancel culture”. It’s “consequence culture” and demands more than an apology for transgressions of harm. “Consequence culture” aims to deplatform a person’s social capital until they make meaningful change.” – Annastacia Dickerson

That is quite the provocative quote, one with which I generally agree. While I’m not usually a big fan of cancel culture, I do believe in consequence culture – and sometimes the consequence of repeated offenses is cancellation. My own take on it is that I fully believe in personal cancellation, rather than a blanketed and enforced cancellation that becomes a public witch-hunt. It happened recently with someone who used to consider me a friend. This person has always been somewhat problematic with what she posts and how she posts things, positing controversial topics as click-bait, then waiting for the ensuing fights and arguments and wondering why such a flare-up resulted from her deliberate gaslighting. 

While I’ve known her for years, it finally became too annoying (her gross and public mischaracterization of what happened between us was the final straw), so I blocked her on all social media. She was bringing nothing of value to my online life, her writing has never been anything that particularly impressed me, and the people she was amplifying in her social media posts were often ghastly. Ridding my own timelines of such ghastliness was a personal choice, and my own little cancellation of her was a decision she likely hasn’t even noticed. 

That said, I never told anyone else not to follow her. I never asked anyone to stop feeding into what I considered pointless gaslighting. I never even suggested that anyone take a stance on the division between us. Because that aspect of cancel culture – when you try to enforce your own stance upon others – is not my style. 

My personal cancellation of this person didn’t involve harming her in any way, or cajoling others into jumping on the bandwagon of attacking her (though several people did reach out and share similar stories of their own), it was a simple and effective way of removing what had become a negative and toxic voice from my own social media feeds. Everyone else is still free to enjoy what she does and how she does it, I just don’t want to see it on my timelines anymore. 

It’s part of an ongoing effort to turn my social media time and engagement into a space reserved for things and people I find beautiful, talented, genuine and inspiring. If that means canceling someone who no longer embodies any of those things (personal opinion only, of course, as personal opinion is a beautiful thing) then the consequence of cancellation in this case is one that I absolutely support. 

{PS – I’ll probably be cancelled next week.}