seabound | 23.09.2026

I know I said that real cards would have to wait, but I had a rough week and going to ye olde game shoppe and learning the basics of MTG with a very patient and helpful fellow was just what I needed. So now I have a foundations Commander set thing from the sci-fi spaceship series. I'm still mostly playing Arena, though, because I can't get to the shop on their more casual TCG nights, and my husband has zero interest in playing. I’m excited to go (deeper lol who am I kidding—I am a millenial with both finished and unfinished graduate degrees) into debt buying cards and unnecessary accessories for this game.

This really has been the year of embracing things my 12-year-old self wanted to do. It feels good, and sort of healing (certainly not as grueling and painful a sort of healing as the therapy work that I am also doing these days). In a return to sci-fi and Computers, I read Grace Chan’s Every Version of You this week, and I’m about a third of the way through Lisa Nakamura’s Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. The ways in which marginalization and social bonds are woven into both the literal infrastructure of the digital future we are all stuck in and our imaginings of such are fascinating.

Oh, and I also checked out season one of a Star Trek: Voyager from the library! My mom and sister are diehard Trekkies, but I was inconsistent from DS9 and didn't watch much after that except for movies. I wanted to, but for reasons I did not. Overall, I’m glad to be back to my geekier hobbies.

I still haven’t been able to exercise much aside from an exhausting walk around San Francisco (iykyk) thanks to a several-day PsA flare, which is making me think that maybe I need to find more sustainable options for fitness. While walking and strength training are good and good for me, I just can’t always do them. I’m thinking about doing water aerobics at the municipal pool. I know I said skating, but my body is hard at work growing extra bone in my feet. And my neck. And my pelvis, it seems. (Some of the x-rays are very Scully you're not gonna believe this-looking.) Strapping on skates may therefore be more torturous than I want to admit.

I’m a double fire sign and have always been skittish about water thanks to several traumatic experiences with it in early childhood, but maybe it’s time to face those fears! (Shopping for a swimsuit is perhaps the scariest part of that plan, mostly because I have a short torso for someone my height—but still longer than most average-height women—no waist; broad shoulders and a seething hatred of garish florals.) My ascendant is watery and mysterious: perhaps I have a secret shadow mermaid self. Maybe I’ll read some kraken romances to psych myself up, now that monster is a normalized subgenre you can find cheeky Etsy stickers about…