Day 93: Writing gooder

My thoughts aren’t quite coherent these days, and I’m having a hard time stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. So today, I will ramble!

My body seems to be breaking down in funny ways. I developed a rash on my neck, my lips are swelling, and there’s a stye in my right eye. I was wondering whether that tick got to me after all and I’m now about to descend into a delightful experience of Lyme-disease-caused facial palsy and arthritis, but my housemates suggested that perhaps I might just have allergies. I don’t remember ever having allergies thanks to my flawless genetics (pretend with me for a sec that breast cancer didn’t ravage my mom’s side of the family) but late-onset allergies are a thing. Fingers crossed that allergies are responsible for my crumbling body and not something more serious.

In other news, I finished reading The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, and it’s brilliant. It chronicles the evolution of advertising as technology has developed over the years and helps explain how we’re in the situation we’re in today. I loved reading this book because sometimes I think about the absolute absurdity of our current attention economy, and it’s comforting to know that there are others who also see how awry everything is.

This is the first book that I’ve finished in several months, and it’s inspiring me to get back into the habit of reading. I also want to think more about how to retain more from the books I read. There were so many bits in The Attention Merchants that I’d like to reference in my future writing, but I can already feel them slipping from my mind. I’ve tried writing notes while reading in the past, but it made reading feel too much like work and unenjoyable. Perhaps I can start small and begin by copying over the highlights I made in my Kindle over to Notion or something and progress from there instead of trying to create an elaborate system.

Reading this book also made me much more aware of how much I have to grow as a writer. I feel like my writing vocabulary is like 100 words max, and while there’s power in writing simply, I’d also like to incorporate more flavorful words from time to time. Consider this sentence from The Attention Merchants:

For in its totality the web seemed to be bobbing in the crosscurrents of an aggressive egotism and neurasthenic passivity.

Hot diggity. If you’re like me and had never seen the word neurasthenic before, it means “an ill-defined medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.”

But even more than using a wider vocabulary, I’d like to improve in is using more imagery, metaphors, and concrete language to make my writing come alive. Here’s another example from the same book:

In retrospect, the first wave of bloggers and their fellow travelers can be likened to a first wave of visitors to some desert island, who erect crude, charming hostels, and serve whatever customers come their way, and marvel at the paradise they’ve discovered. As in nature, so, too, on the web: the tourist traps high and low are soon to follow; commercial exploitation is on its way. Such, unfortunately, is the nature of things.

What a dank metaphor. He could have written something like, “After the first wave of bloggers, the web became saturated with commercial exploitation”, but this comparison to discovering a desert island makes the commentary land much more powerfully.

Last thing. I can’t stop eating, and I think it might be stress-induced. In general, I don’t feel too stressed by my work (or at least, it feels that way at the conscious layer), but I get the feeling that the underlying uncertainty of what to do and what to focus on is leading me to wander into the kitchen more frequently than normal and shove whatever I can find into my face.

Anyway, that’s all for today. My mind feels cloudy, and I almost want to just stay in my room for a few days and veg out by reading or watching movies until my body and mind feel excited to jump back into things. Maybe I should take a break? I guess I haven’t taken a meaningful break in a very long time. Am I burning out or am I just sick?

Meep.