the quirky brunette: Sunday Summary // I'm in love with a strict machine...

Dear FOQ

I write this sitting, not in the kitchen sink, in the manner of Cassandra in I Capture the Castle... but in an oversized armchair at Costa, looking every inch the pretentious hipster nerd (complete with nerd-emoji glasses) who can only bash out her wisest words in her local coffee emporium.

Which is probably true but I may also be procrastinating the increasingly necessary task of tidying and decluttering my desk.

My thought processes continue to be of huge fascination to all, don’t they.

So. How are we all?

The world remains up in flames on the account of a tiny man's power complex.

That pesky pandemic is still dragging its heels.

Neighbours has been cancelled after almost forty years. (I knew its fate was sealed when they tried bringing back cast members from the Sacred Eighties – Des, Jane, even Clive Gibbons, I heard! – but I didn’t like to say...)

And yet... it sounds glib and self-indulgent to admit, but your QB is on a strangely even keel at the moment. (The good sort.)

I won’t go into specifics, but I feel like my attitude towards everything (except maybe The Patriarchy) has flipped-turned upside down and I feel strangely empowered, not to mention facetiously compelled to use hashtags like #crushingit and making playlists entitled #bossingit (suggestions for suitable songs welcome).

I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, as they say, but so far, my feet remain fully clad.

I went through a prolonged phase of ennui/malaise and other existential crises with French monikers (moniquers?) last year, partly prompted by the pandemic, and partly prompted by the feeling – imposed by society and seeming to be enforced by workplace culture – that for whatever reason I was not enough because I wasn’t: a) married, b) a parent, b-part2) a working parent; c) a homeowner; or d) a CEO of anything. << What even does that mean, consumers of social media, to say ‘CEO of...’? Means nothing unless you’re literally running a business.

Anyway, given I’m none of the above things (a, b, c or d) it occurred to me that I actually had the power and the opportunity, and none of the shackles or obligations, to change the situation, and take control of what I could, starting with my health, branching out to my routines, and panning out to my job.

Now, I feel epic.

Well, OK then.

And I am enough.

In fact, too much, sometimes. *checks self for signs of toxic positivity, realises self is still very cynical, relaxes.*

But the sheer fact of my being able to sit in Costa on a Sunday lunchtime is exactly the sort of privilege I want to be able to own up to and to enjoy.

---

I was going to capture this little update within the ‘This month, I have been mostly...’ segment of this blog post, but it seems prudent to mention it now.

As part-and-parcel of Things I Can Do to Reclaim Autonomy Over My Life, I have been mostly reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Newport is the author of Deep Work, which, along with Atomic Habits by James Clear is one of those books that the YouTube Productivity Gurus push, and cite with almost cultish reverence. (And yes, it bewilders me too that I trusted the Cult of YooChoob with influencing my reading choices; blame the pandemic.)

Both books offered a handful of useful takeaways but ultimately I didn’t think either deserved the attention or adulation they both received from the Choob Community.

Digital Minimalism was, however, different; it wasn’t so much a prescription for tossing your phone in the sea and living the Luddite Life with Glee.

It was more of an invitation to reflect upon how the digital media companies make their consumers feel they 'need' certain products, or need to engage with certain products that they deliberately put into the commercial space without any particular demand for them.

Quoth I:

We didn’t ... sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it. – Cal Newport

I won’t bore you with all my ‘takeaways’ from Digital Minimalism, except for these two:

One of Newport’s most useful recommendations, which is also championed by be-bearded YT Productivity Guru (albeit one of the Good Guys), Thomas Frank, is to make it harder for you to fall down an app rabbit hole.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re standing in a queue in a supermarket or café or somewhere. Our truncated attention spans no longer allow us to revel in boredom and exercise monastic patience; we must pass the time with distraction. Ergo, you pull out your phone and start mindlessly scrolling. Next thing you know, you’ve 'accidentally' ordered a stack of translucent sticky notes on Etsy, and you’ve double-clicked to Like your favourite actor’s latest post on Instagram. All before you’ve even collected your coffee.

Newport’s simple suggestion is to sign out of your apps. The effort of then having to sign back in again to engage with the app or simply to use it as a distraction tool is often too much for you to bother with, with your truncated attention span.

And even with logins and passwords saved to Google, or Norton, or apps accessible through biometric logins, it's still a bit of a faff.

The second most pivotal

takeaway was this:

Delete the most distracting apps from your phone.

You don’t have to go full cold-turkey on Facebook; you can still engage with the browser version, but you are likely to find that it occupies far less time, because you’re checking in with intention and potentially with a time limit in mind, if you’re checking in during your work lunch break, for example.

I’m still engaging quite heavily with Instagram in lieu of Facebook, and my posts can automatically be shared from IG to FB, but I’ve set a timer on the Instagram app, so I currently get no more than 30 minutes on the app per day before it greys out and locks me out.

Leaving me free to read all the books I've got piling up.

It is, of course, a damning indictment of our modern times that such behaviour is even necessary, but there we go.

Of course, Digital Minimalism is not without its flaws.

You may or may not remember that when I read Caroline Criado Perez' superb Invisible Women

it opened my eyes, and wide, to the abundance of data bias.

Digital Minimalism has come under fire (on Goodreads) for its data bias: more than one reader (and aside from me) has flagged up that Newport canvasses a significant disproportion of men over women for the purposes of statistics and anecdotes.

But he's not alone.

Even the book I'm reading that's written by two women seems quite heavily balanced in favour of male opinions and voices.

Perhaps it's down to the imbalance of male to female bodies in, dare I say, influential corporate positions... but I suspect it's more to do with the volume and insistence of certain voices as to who actually gets heard.

In pursuit of shut-eye...

The other thing I’ve been trying to do, and with still-limited success, is to pimp my sleep.

I no longer have digital devices in my bedroom (except the iPod and the smart clock).

I try to keep to a regular bedtime and wake-up time so as not to disturb my ~~cicada~~ circadian rhythm (see article linked below in Link Love for more on that sort o' shenanigans).

I don’t drink caffeine after noon.

In the last 18 months, I've invested in a new pillow and a new mattress. (Both of which, I will admit, have done wonders for my old-lady back and neck.)

And yet.

My sleep is a joke.

I wake at stupid o’clock, and it takes me far too long to get back to sleep again.

Cue, sleep meditations (as played either on the iPod or the smart clock; am I missing some irony here?).

I'll profess that I didn't do a lot of research before I alighted upon Lauren but she seems to work for me.

She has her woo-woo moments, but she also allows you to breathe in and out in your own time: I've tried meditations in the past when an enforced rhythm of breathing actually makes me feel like I'm hyperventilating, which is the absolute opposite of calming.

Plus, she can lull you to sleep just by telling you to 'sit down, or lie down', and 'relaaaaaax', 'it's OK'... and 'you are enough' in her soporific Aussie accent.

Hey, I may be feeling awesome right now but I still need a bit of validation.

As well as sharing her forays back into boxing on Instagram (she's a bit badass); she's also recently started broadcasting 30-minute 'lives' on YouTube, which are surprisingly and pleasingly similar in tone to the Kind Mind Academy's lamentedly now absent weekly check-ins, or Soft Landings, although as Lauren reads people's live comments, her mind and her attention flickers somewhat, and it takes her a while to recentre on what she was saying (I suspect there's a hint of ADHD there), which is a shame for her, as she has a lot of wisdom to impart.

Based on what, I don't necessarily know, I've not exactly checked all her credentials, but I enjoy it.

So, with that digression and a half done and done, let's get back on track, shall we?

---

This month, I have been mostly...

Reading 📚

All the things.

I know, after What I Call a Literary Hiatus of sorts, I am back on that book horse and cantering away. Much like Pa QB, I currently have several books On the Go, and I've even managed to finish a couple, including:

A Theatre for Dreamers

I have a lot of feelings about this book, not all of them positive.

I think I mentioned before, but I really loved Polly Samson's Out of the Picture, the story of a naïve 19 year old, Lizzie, who's absented herself to London to erase a family scandal from her memory but also search for her estranged father, only to hook up with her charismatic-yet-manipulative man-child of a boss... against the backdrop of a photography agency (hence the title). Lizzie was so well-drawn, and her motives clear.

Compare, then, OOTP with A Theatre for Dreamers, about a (mildly) naïve 18 year old, Erica, who's absented herself to the Greek island of Hydra to process her grief in the wake of her mother's death, and to escape an abusive father... but also search for answers about her mother from her one-time close friend, who transpired to be (actual factual, fated Australian author/poet) Charmian Clift.

Clift, her husband George Johnston, and several drifters play host to Erica, as well as a very young Leonard Cohen, and numerous actual factual musicians, poets and 'bohemians'... blah blah blah.

The descriptions of Hydra are luxurious (even the rough parts); the traditions detailed and revelled in... and this, I did enjoy about the novel, especially the descriptions of all the stray cats, who are such an integral feature of any Greek island – Andros was one such case-in-point and I'm not even a cat person but these kittehs were beguiling, I'll give them that.

But.

You know I like big buts (...and I cannot lie); there's a hugely infuriating lack of characterisation in this book, with the exception of Samson's sometimes gushing, sometimes damning, portrayal of Clift. She is clearly the true heroine of the novel, and perhaps her (equally tragic) daughter Shane, who's depicted as a moribund tween before tweens were a thing, and her (yes, again tragic) son, Martin, a prodigy.

A quick rootle through the wilds of The Internet tell a hugely upsetting series of stories of the fate of the whole family, except the youngest son, who is still alive, and somehow agreed to consult on this absolute teardown of his family, and his infancy.

Despite being pitched as the protagonist, Erica is no more than a vehicle, a medium, through which to justify turning Clift into a work of fiction, albeit one to be adulated, or revolted by, depending on how drunk Erica or any of the other characters are in any one scene.

And as for Leonard Cohen... I wasn't expecting him to have been translated into some sort of caricature but aside from a name, and the anecdotal accounts of his loyalty to Marianne [Ihlen, his actual partner in actual real life, to whom the following song is dedicated...], he could have been anyone, when he clearly wasn't.

In 1999 I wrote my dissertation on the perks and pitfalls of combining fact with fiction in literature; and I am now in the throes of hunting down that document since I seem to have no physical record of it. I'm intrigued to reconcile myself with 20-year-old academic QB's take on the whole thing; I may have scored myself a modest 2:1 for my degree overall, but I seem to remember scoring a first on my dissertation.

I suspect I, and 20-year-old QB, still hold firm to the belief that while incorporating factual characters into a novel can lend it a certain gravitas and historical context, you tread a fine line into libel if you depict a historical figure without honouring how they were widely perceived by the people who really knew them, or, on the flipside, if you remain entirely impartial, you risk imbuing them with zero personality.

Best just to create a universe of fully-rounded fictional characters so you circumvent that issue, IMHO...

Also reading...

Walden | Henry David Thoreau

No Hard Feelings | Liz Fosslien & Mollie West Duffy [of Liz & Mollie fame]

Self-Compassion | Kristen Neff

and picking up again:

Dare to Lead | Brené Browm

Cautiously trying to redress the bias balance one woman author at a time. (Or, two if you count Liz and Mollie.)

Watching 📺 🎥 💻

The Bold Type

(Again.)

Aw, I wish I liked all of you girls more.

In my defence this repetition of an entire series is not necessarily indicative of any sort of Quirk, shall we say, and not that there's anything wrong with that... but the first time I binged this series, I was for the most part laid up with the 'Rona so there's a good chance I dozed, Covidly, through some of the nuances (if indeed there were any).

But the principle motivation behind the fairly immediate repeat viewing is that ~~Girl~~ Boss Jacqueline Carlyle is an absolute breath of fresh, feminism-forward air (apart from the way she makes her robo-sons introduce themselves but that's a story for another day).

Jacqueline is goals.

And speaking of feminism...

Misbehaviour

This happened to be on the telly-o-vision last weekend while I was loafing a chez Ma and Pa QB for the latter's Birthday Shenanigans. It did manage to incite some actual Quirk Rage at the point whereby Keira Knightley's Sally Alexander is told by her university tutor that her proposal for a dissertation on women workers in the industrial revolution is "a bit niche" and that she should "broaden the scope" to give her subject "genuine relevance".