I read a James Patterson title for the first time last week for the book club I'm in. We do a theme each month, rather than a specific book, with the goal of expanding our literary horizons. The book (technically a Chris Grabenstein title) was... not something I would've otherwise read. I'll say that. Anyway, the book focussed heavily on Albert Einstein - though more as a brand than a person, let alone as a scientist - and I wanted to make a point about relativity. Over the past couple of years, I feel like I've been advancing, personally. Gaining new skills, trying new things, developing a better awareness of myself and the world. But, all the while I feel like the net movement has been downward. I was gonna start this post with that old joke about life being like the elevator business, but in my case the elevator seems to be in a building that is being lowered into the bowels of the earth. Even as I add new floors and sometimes even ascend to them, I still feel lower and lower, relative to the skyline. In the book, relativity is exampled by a fly aboard a subway train moving against the direction of travel. I'd rather not put myself in its place, though, because - spoiler alert - the fly is killed by another passenger. The past couple weeks, I've been digging into an increasingly involved overhaul of the website: shifting to more adaptive layouts, trying to make viewing and navigation more accessible, and doing this while also simplifying things as much as possible. I can see why so many websites' code are big ol' piles of spaghetti, or why their designers don't bother with accessibility at all. It's a lot to get into. The temptation to just chuck the problem at some AI content generator is strong. But, even if nobody ever sees this thing aside from AI content aggregators, I can't convince myself to surrender the responsibility. Caring is hard work. Even just caring. There are days I get nothing done, and I still feel exhausted from looking at the mountain of things I need/want to do. I generally manage to get something done every day, but that mountain keeps rising. Or maybe it's just me that's sinking again. I'm not totally sure that's it, though. Because it doesn't help that so many people seem to not care. Not even in the sort of way one must to keep from cracking under pressure, but in the sort of way that displaces pressure onto people who do care. I'm not responsible (or solely responsible, at least) for a lot of the domestic work I do, but if I don't do it, I know it will remain undone, or inadequately done. I could spend an hour arguing with my room-mate or landlord about how unreasonable this is, but I know from experience how fruitless that can be, so I prefer to invest my limited energy in ensuring the chores are done. So, I'm tired. I'm tired of carrying the weight; I'm tired of caring; I'm tired of arguing with apathetic people to try and balance the load. Still, though, I keep pushing where I can. But, there seem to be very few places where that's possible, and all the while, the horizon keeps rising against me. Today I shovelled the driveway, fussed with website code, and tried to keep peace in the well. Stay tuned for the aforementioned website overhaul, though, ideally, most of that will be largely invisible.