another bespoke mental illness i have recently discovered
snuffle mats, if you don't have a dog, are an alternative to a dog's food bowl (usually a cloth mat with lots of frills and pockets for food to hide in) that are used to slow the rate at which the dog eats their food (there are also more complex hard-shell puzzle boxes but we tried some early on and miso was not smart enough for them and would just eventually give up).
the snuffle mat we currently have "works" for miso in the sense that she takes 30 seconds to eat instead of 15 seconds (100% improvement! the deception of percentages) to unhinge her jaw and vacuum her unchewed kibble down her gullet and last night i sheepishly asked deborah to take back the large spoon she had brought to the dinner table for me for our poke bowls because i had already gotten myself a small spoon, which i was thinking of as a human snuffle mat (it doesn't make me eat that much slower, but i will take improvements where i can get them).
we have this app at work that sends people a "getting to know you" question every week and then compiles the answers and sends them to everyone. probably the best answer i have given is in response to the question "Do you prefer daily stand-up or weekly check-in meetings?" where my answer was just the word "no" but recently we had a question about what is the most interesting project you worked on in your career and taking "career" broadly (since i never was even close to making any money at it) i talked about the tumblr i made of scanned high resolution images when i was younger, which had its subdomain forcibly migrated and was offline during some period of time but is (at least for now) back up and i curated these particular things to share, which omit some of the less work-appropriate/more extremely online stuff but i think still has some bangers:
- A freeze pop at various stages of melting
- Eggs and toast
- Piece of carpet I found in the ocean that looked like Florida
- Leaves
- A kite
- Urban Outfitters catalog
thinking of when i was making that tumblr (before i had a smartphone) and was interviewed by leon in the new york observer in another life about the momentous personal event of me unsubscribing from the london review of books in google reader (it's so hilarious to me in retrospect that it wasn't even unsubscribing from the physical magazine, just the RSS feed), a train of thought which came up for me in the context of the recent festival of torching lauren oyler's new essay collection (primary sources: 1, 2, 3). i haven't read the book yet (lol) but i do generally like her writing and probably will like it, though i have also enjoyed ingesting the eviscerations of it because just generally i like to read mean writing (which is part of why i like her writing in the first place, because it is often mean!). among other things, today in tabs pulled out this exchange she had with sheila heti in the paris review (a magazine i would never read anymore because of all the short fiction 🤮 and writing about writing fiction 🤮):
INTERVIEWER
One thing that distressed me in your collection was the sense that someone as obviously intellectual as you are nevertheless does not carry around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read. It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches. It made me feel the relative shallowness of the contemporary mind that many of us share, compared to the intellectuals of the past who had a world of references inside them. Is this something you feel, or are bothered about in any way?”
OYLER
Let’s first please allow that I am thirty-three years old, so I’ve had only about a decade of reading that actually counts. It’s probably true that I read the way a “digital native” reads, which is to say broadly and not as deeply, because of the way our technologies of reading work. But I don’t know if you’re right that many of my references come from, like, bopping around Wikipedia at 2 A.M., which is not something I do.
which like lrb lbr it is 2024 who among us is still out here living in the crystal palace quoting goethe from memory or whatever?? whose cognition is not at this point completely pickled in the brine of the internet and then diced up into one million boxes in an endless tab stack in their mobile safari of the mind??! idk maybe you (good for you!) but bob dylan voice it ain't me babe. tabs identifies the pull quote of the bookforum review as calling oyler "the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot" and it's supposed to be this big burn but also i'm like well what percentage of the audience for this review or that newsletter has actually read an entire book by renata adler (i think i read all of speedboat when it had an NYRB reissue moment during a grad school summer but i didn't like it that much and may have given up before the end even though it's short yes i know she didn't just write fiction) and what percentage has at best a glancing wikipedia or first-page-of-google-search or read-an-old-article-once level of familiarity with her that is enough to make that burn kinda hit you for five seconds as your eyes spiderweb around the pixels representing the text in jamesonian schizophrenia before you float on to the next box of content 🤔 well if i had to bet money i'd bet on the latter!
which is not to say it's wrong to want less pseudo in your intellectuals, though i am, as in many areas of life, in a "why not both" kind of place on that (as a person who spends a lot of time on my phone i...do want digressive shallow overshare-y pop phenomenology/sociology about that experience in my life!). anyway, none of this actually matters at all kim people are dying. in the same issue of bookforum, there is also an appreciation of nicholson baker's new book about learning to draw (and his oeuvre more generally) that i enjoyed (i have loved a number of his books deeply and he's pretty foundational to this project and also i'm still mad that traveling sprinkler is one of the worst books i have ever tried to read!). elsewhere in mean writing, i have been enjoying pop-up newsletter hate read, even though the quality of the takes is mixed and i think making them anonymous is cowardly and people should publicly own their hatred for things that don't really matter! on that note a new item that i added to my list of Things Reasonable People Love That I Hate is: all varieties of (korean) cold noodles (i.e. naengmyeon, bibim guksu), which deborah had some for lunch yesterday and really enjoyed but which is just not a food concept i have ever been able to get my head around.
we watched survivor because it is thursday and as i have previously reported to you they have completely perfected the machine of producing this show and i am powerless against it. another bespoke mental illness i have recently discovered and diagnosed in myself as patient zero is survivor aphasia, which is how when they're introducing the immunity challenge and jeff probst goes into the the montage explaining the multiple steps of it and the rules and conditions for winning my brain almost always (even since i have recognized this phenomemon and tried to be aware of it!) goes into some kind of deep trance state outside time and space and the next thing i know is i am slipping out of it just as he's saying "sound good? okay, let's draw for spots and get started" and it cuts to the challenge and i realize i have absorbed nothing about the rules that have just very carefully been explained to me (which is ultimately fine because this is american reality television and everything will be explained many more times as we go).
Previously on this day:
- 2016 (from julia weston) (panic attacks; the only time i ever pray; this moment sitting in a golden-brown room with sunlight streaming in, warmed by a flannel shirt and a blanket)
- 2016 (2) (ruth curry's coffee & tv, kool a.d.'s verse on "nutmeg", mondegreens)
- 2017 (nice facetime with my parents, how much i love my bike, when the pharmacist handed me the multiple antidepressants i rely on in order to stay sane)
- 2018 (posted in in our HR department's slack channel that i was having trouble writing the constructive criticism i was supposed to write for five of my teammates, golden hour, even warmer today and tomorrow than it was yesterday)