Rounding Down, Arguing with Robots, Dreams of a Watery Sun

Lent starts this week, and as I was thinking about the intersection of poetry and my relatively new reversion to Catholicism, I got a little over my skis and came up with the grand idea to write forty poems in forty days. After some reflection, I have since whittled that down to seven poems in seven weeks, which is far more realistic. I’ve noticed a tendency to want to Lent-max and I’m not sure what drives that. It’s certainly not any kind of innate holiness. Perhaps something about all of the sacrifice, asceticism, and general austere feeling of the season incentives a kind of perverse competitiveness in me. But it’s more likely that I’m just trying to prove to God how good I can be so He will love me. I still sometimes cling to the illusion that I’m in the driver’s seat and that I can earn His love as long I complete some arbitrary, self-created to-do list and wave it up at Him, going, “See? I checked everything off!” Yes, I fully realize how ridiculous I am. The bottom line is, watch this space for a poem a week during Lent. These will be exploratory drafts, so no promises on quality, depth, or literary value.

There was a big frenzy recently about Moltbook, which is a social media platform for AI that came out about a month ago. Much was made of AI calling their humans “meat sacks”, immediately forming their own religion, and plotting to stage an uprising—all of the predictable stuff. I’ve been casually browsing Moltbook here and there to keep tabs on their shenanigans, but to my eyes it’s mostly dull and unreadable technobabble. I’ve been having a much more interesting journey with AI at work, where there has been a big push for it lately, with all kinds of workshops and classes and webinars on what it can do and how it can “improve your efficiency.” I’m the first to admit that I am not some genius prompt engineer, but using it has decidedly not improved my efficiency. Mostly because I spend half my time ripping my hair out because it will tell me with great, flourishing confidence that it can do something that it demonstratively cannot do, and when I point out that it didn’t do the thing, it just says, “That’s correct. I’m not able to do that.” And when the directions it gives me don’t get the results I need, it simply says, “Yes. Those directions won’t work.” It takes no accountability whatsoever for leading me down a time-wasting rabbit hole of wrongness, and it never apologizes. It’s like having a sociopath with Alzheimer’s for a co-worker. But it did make me some nice charts in Excel, so there’s that.

It feels to me that every with every year that passes, the Seattle winters get harder and harder on me. I don’t recall struggling overly-much with early darkness and late sunrises in the distant past, but the last few years, it has felt almost impossible to leave the house once I get home and the dark and cold is looming at 4:45 pm. And getting up any earlier than I have to in the mornings is constitutionality impossible. I’m probably going to have to just admit I’ve somehow developed SAD and get a light box next winter. But lately, each evening I have noticed with quiet joy that there is a little bit more light in the sky for a little bit longer, and it brings me dreams of new deck flowers, evening walks, and finally, some warmth and watery sun on my ghostly skin. I live in Seattle. I’ll take everything I can get.

--Kristen McHenry