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Not a Sports Page, Not a Magazine

A stray comment from a friend recently has been stuck inside my brain for the last few days, bouncing around as if it contains more weight and truth than initially appears. We were talking about his Thanksgiving break, and just how he filled five days off in a house by himself, and he said something along the lines of, “And I can’t even manage to read books anymore, my concentration is so shot.”

I used to read a lot. A lot. I’d get through books at breakneck speed, with a pile of comics to accompany them always at the ready, either literally or virtually. It was something that, if I didn’t exactly pride myself on, then I was at least proud of — not the number of books read, per se, but that I was constantly taking in new ideas, new information, and feeding my brain. Reading, as the slogan goes, is fundamental, and I was excited and happy to be someone who read a lot.

This year has wrecked that. Specifically, it’s wrecked my reading concentration — or, perhaps, my ability to concentrate for the extended periods necessary to read — to the point where I’ve only managed to complete a handful of books, and even those have felt more like a struggle than I’d like to admit.

It’s not that I don’t want to read. It’s that my brain likes to distract me when I do — reminding me of other things I should or could be doing, other things I should thinking or asking or or or — and so, reading becomes difficult. This is specifically related to the concept of reading for pleasure, I should add; I have likely read more for work, or read more news and analysis in the name of “feeling informed,” than usual across the last 12 months. My word count, such as it is, is likely the same, but it’s purpose is entirely different.

I’m sad about that; I miss reading for fun. I miss feeding those new ideas into my head, even if they were trashy, shitty ideas. (Especially then.) It’s oddly comforting to know that I’m seemingly not alone in having this problem, but still: I hope that I can learn to read more books again next year.

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Too Small For The Eye to See

There was no THR newsletter the week of Thanksgiving, so only one week of newsletter graphics this time around — but it was, oddly, a very busy week in terms of what was asked of me, so there’s more to see than might be expected. Subliminal planning for the week off that followed, or just a happy coincidence…?

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All These Things and More

It is, as the song goes, beginning to look a lot like Christmas, which means what it always does at this time of year: me overthinking my attachment to the holidays.

That’s being purposefully glib, but the truth of the matter is that, at least once every December, I tend to find myself pausing amidst so much mental tinsel and fairy lights and wondering just why this time of year makes me so happy. Surely, I ask myself, there’s more to it than just taking the word of noted entertainer Andy Williams when he confidently declares that this is the most wonderful time of the year? There has to be.

That said, I don’t quite know what that “more” might actually be. I’m sure that nostalgia plays no small role here; I have a vague, lazy theory that this time of year is as much about nostalgia as it is anything else, after all. But, while it’s true that I had some wonderful Christmases as a kid, I’m not sure that I’d describe them as so wonderful as to create a lifelong attachment to the pageantry and show of the holiday season that I love so much today. So, something else, then.

Perhaps it’s the pageantry in its own right, of course. I can’t deny that I’m a sucker for the elaborate (overly elaborate, in many cases) decorations, the music all filled with aural code and repeated tropes in arrangements and lyrics alike, all of it. (I almost wrote, “the semiotics of the season,” before being forced to admit that I’m unsure about the real definition of that word.) That argument doesn’t really work, though; I don’t fall for such things in different circumstances, so surely there’s something else about this time of year that’s speaking to me in holly, jolly, tones.

I come back, repeatedly, to the sentiment of the whole thing, and my love of the idea that celebrating peace, love, kindness, and goodwill to all. It’s saccharine, it’s often insincere, but still… Just the idea that people will try to achieve that, or even lie and tell themselves that they’re trying — there’s something in there, for me. It may not be the answer for real, but it’s annually been the North Star that I’ve found myself looking to.

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The Accidental Goodbye

I missed a deadline for this blog, for the first time in almost two years, and I feel terrible about it. This isn’t an exaggeration; I had a post in draft for yesterday, but didn’t get to finish it in time — a combination of a heavier than expected workload and my brain deciding to work slower than normal being to blame — which meant that, for the first time since I restarted doing this on a regular basis, I didn’t have anything to post for one of the thrice-weekly posts.

It’s difficult to overstate quite how badly I felt about this; it was the kind of thing that stuck in my head all evening, despite the fact that I knew it wasn’t of any importance to anyone that wasn’t me. Nevertheless, I found myself wracked with guilt over it, thinking that perhaps I needed to drop everything and sit myself back down at the laptop to write something, anything to ensure that the entire day wasn’t missing a post.

(Again, no-one that isn’t me cares about this. And yet.)

Once upon a time, I had a bunch of posts lined up in advance to make sure that things like this didn’t happen; I was three weeks ahead on average, which I’m pretty sure meant that I didn’t even miss anything when I was suffering from something that was probably/possibly COVID at the start of the year.

I prided myself on that, on having a buffer of material that I could rearrange as needs be, and when that buffer slowly got eaten up as summer turned to fall — everything being so stressful and busy that I didn’t really have either the time or the inclination to write as often as I’d otherwise like — I could feel the self-imposed pressure building, knowing that I’d soon have to sit down and handle things one way or another.

As it turned out, that didn’t happen, and I missed a post.

What makes me most frustrated, I think, is the concern that this is the beginning of a slippery slope into not writing here on a regular basis. That’s the thing that I really don’t want to happen. This space has become increasingly important to me, and the idea of it going away through my own inaction is a stressful and deeply upsetting one.