Freewrite/braindump/linksave.

My parents came to visit me in Rochester this weekend, which was nice - and not only because I got to eat out more than I usually do. I like how my relationship with my parents has been slowly evolving into one between adults, one of whom happens to be the child of the other two.

They came to Imagine RIT, which is a huge student (and non-student) project display festival. It's massive. Massive. And it's also the largest-scale interpreting setup I've ever seen to date -- interpreters everywhere, stationed across campus, ready to walk over to whatever exhibitions needed them. Seeing DHH folks in a mix of both presenter and visitor roles was also quite nice.

I'm still navigating how to interact with groups of people when some of them know me as "a person who speaks" and the others know me as "a person who signs" -- which language do I use when? -- but it was also nice to watch my parents interacting (fairly smoothly!) with signing DHH people. Mostly I stood back and watched them chat with each other, but a few times I dropped in (signed) comments and it felt pretty smooth. (But generally, it would feel weird to sign to my parents through an interpreter... about as odd as if they spoke Chinese through a translator to me. The presence of other people is what allows us to use those combinations of modalities and moderations with each other.)

The semester is winding down, and I'm staring at the research projects that remain. I am quietly excited about some of them, eager to be challenged by others, and (honestly) hoping to find ways to redirect yet others towards other people as quickly as possible before I'm locked into something I don't actually want to commit to - the work of how to say no and frame that no in ways that actually work for others. (It seems silly when I write this, but... the intellectual and emotional labor associated with that last part are tremendous sinks for me right now. Tremendous.)

I'm still trying to... maybe not "rediscover" my scholarly soul, but to keep a scrawny, struggling flame alive. I want to read things. I want to just sink into ideas and learn and think, and sometimes it feels like there's so much friction around all of it I want to give up on it all. Still working on this.

And then random links I don't want to lose. I found an old newsletter from Erik Kennedy about Magic Ink, which is a lovely longform piece on interface design that would probably make for a nice inflight reading at some point. And then there are the things I want to read and do, like the Chinese chicken soup recipe my mom just sent me (yep, we ate this as kids).

Okay. Back to... things. I feel like these posts are me surfacing for air and gasping; this space (online, text, long-form) is still where I can most easily breathe. And I need air, and company, in spaces where I can breathe... well.