Willa Magland

There Goes Jammin' January

Posted Jan 29, 2025

I can hear the tree outside of my window tossing in the wind. Although the weather this month was wild and unpredictable, I was not. Nonetheless, it was a good start to 2025. Things feel very uncertain right now, and I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to disconnect with the digital world for a while.

I've spent a lot of time going through things, making collections, and savoring the what I own and can control. I have an immense pride in my personal library and read three titles from it. I've continued using Librarything.com as a catalog, and I love managing and sorting them. It makes me feel a bit like Golem from LoTR, but I'm happy.

A new part of my life this month is an obsession with CDs. I realized that my parent's CD collection is an unrealized, dusty goldmine of music. I have been using https://www.freac.org/ and https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ to rip and organize them into my own personal music library. I plan on making a more in depth post about this next week after a certain device arrives... I had no idea that CDs held such high-quality data. I don't want to say I'm becoming an audiophile, but it's all really fun!

I go back to school soon, which I have been earnestly looking forward to, and I can't wait to regain the comfortable routine I had my first semester.

I don't have any links to share, due to my disconection. But I highly recommend taking a step back from things, focusing on your environment, and rediscovering what's around you. Take things apart and put them back together; examine a piece of clothing with new eyes; root through your family's old junk.

Sometimes I think I'm distracting myself from the state of the world, but my little world is no less real than the one outside. If anything, my phone is a distraction from those meaningful things in life: old cameras, broken alarm clocks, postcards, painted rocks, the contents of junk drawers, etc.

But now January comes to an end, and it's time for me to step into February!

With love,

Willa

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