a game i have long played with myself that i'll share with you all is a game called "sunday expert" where on a sunday i'll pick something/someone i was instinctively interested in (a 1920s writer, dinosaur hunters, the barbizon hotel, the history of a fabric or a fruit) and...

asked myself "what if i had to become an expert on this thing by the end of the day?"...not in a stressful way but say, what if you had to give a last-minute presentation in a class and you were looking for enough intrigue to wing it

and then you just...follow wild hunches. you look up old articles. you buy and read a few chapters of a biography. you watch videos. you read old interviews. you dig with the intensity of a lil harriet the spy. all you lose is a day! and you gain a twig for your brain magpie nest

anyways this is what i do with my sundays...i'm probably nuts! but it's always made me happier when i do it.

people ask me what this is for...it's not FOR anything, in the short term. but then years later when i am writing something and the only reference i need is a story of a haunted doll from 1910 and suddenly it appears in my mind...i guess that is what it was for?

it is also how i have trained myself to look forward to sundays instead of dreading them, which is what i did for two+ decades of my life

this used to be a better ritual when i could get out into the city bc part of the sunday research could include a trip to a museum or a walk through the neighborhood where the person i am thinking about lived...but it's also a thing you can do from your couch pretty effectively