I tried to sit down and do another of my intermittent daily routine check-ins, but everything I wrote was more or less about Rufus’s schedule. We’ve heard from friends that for the first year you have a new-parental brain fog – from lack of sleep, stress, hormonal changes, etc. It takes that long, they said, to feel like yourself again.
Other parents have said two years. Or longer. But I have been noticing expansions, lately, in my attentional bandwidth. One way I can describe it is self-awareness, in the awareness of your own thinking. You notice what you’re doing as you’re doing it – without sidetracking the doing. On lower bandwidths, I can still focus on the task at hand, but only that. On higher bandwidths I make more outside connections. It’s the difference between reading something and reading something to try to understand how its written. That’s what I feel, in my most optimistic moments, coming back.
Or maybe it’s just the summer heat breaking.
September’s Digital Mending Circle is next Tuesday, September 9th, from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern. As usual, we’ll spend this co-working session on
the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.
We use the same Zoom link every month. If you don’t already have it, just hit reply.
Speaking of heat breaking – I loved Lisa Heschong’s Thermal Delight in Architecture. A slim book on an overlooked sense that, while often lumped in with touch, is very much separate. Echoes of In Praise of Shadows (mentioned in issue #442); one of my favorite arguments in the book is against thermal neutrality – an environment in which temperature is perfectly stable and changes go unnoticed. Here, Heschong compares it to food:
A few tubes of an astronaut’s nutritious goop are no substitute for a gourmet meal. They lack sensuality—taste, aroma, texture, temperature, color. They are disconnected from all the customs that have developed around eating—the specific types of food and social setting associated with breakfast, with a family dinner, with a sweet treat. And they have none of the potential for significance of those special foods used for ceremonial occasions such as a birthday cake, the Thanksgiving turkey, the symbolic foods of a Seder.
The thermal environment also has the potential for such sensuality, cultural roles, and symbolism that need not, indeed should not, be designed out of existence in the name of a thermally neutral world.
I found myself thinking about this as Julia built a fire in our backyard fire pit and the first pizzas of the season came out of our portable outdoor oven. The best crusts have plenty of char.
Speaking of thermal delight – My favorite subreddit at the moment is /r/TheNightFeeling, self described as “the thoughtful nostalgic emotion you feel when you drive alone at night, or see a city skyline at dusk with the wind in your face. It's the feeling you get when you're lonely but at peace, thoughtful but melancholy, and homesick for something you can't quite remember.”
The coinage comes from John Green, answering a reader question in an episode of Dear John and Hank. For me, this redditor photo probably captures it best: Empty streets with warm windows, and solitary streetlights, under snow-refracted sky. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is rife with the night feeling. As are Wong Kar-Wai films.
Speaking of films – I really enjoyed American Animals, a docudrama about a group college freshman who in 2004 attempted to steal several rare books – including a first edition of Audubon’s The Birds of America – from Transylvania University’s special collection.
But “docudrama” isn’t the best description for what this movie is. Genre-wise it’s much closer to a based-on-a-true-story narrative feature. There are some incredibly clever shots where the actors who play the students interact with their real-life counterparts, and a White Lotusesque title sequence – that predates White Lotus (Animals came out in 2018).
I watched it on Kanopy which, if I haven’t gushed about it before in these letters, is a sort of public-library-access version of Mubi. Or a Libby App for movies.
My agent Jessica recommended the Move 37 newsletter (named after the turning point in the AlphaGo/Lee Sedol match). It’s written by two literary agents, Lauren Hamlin and Aaron Shulman, grappling with the effects AI might have on their roles and publishing at large. The two have differing levels of enthusiasm and skepticism – which I appreciate!
Lastly – Opal is as good the the top app charts suggest. I’ve used Freedom off and on over the years to block distractions but it’s never worked that well for me. After Opal, I’ve realized that it’s because the way I’d set up Freedom was too restrictive; throughout the day I’d often need to quickly look up something work-related on, say, YouTube and Reddit, and the obstacles to temporarily stop and start Freedom made me less likely to use it in the first place.
I needed my distraction filters to be more porous, not less. And Opal’s thoughtfully designed experience around breaks is working much better for me.
Jack