I wrote this email recently to an audiologist. Maybe it can help you find the words to describe something you struggle with too.

Hi Dr. ***,

I’ve been trying to find an audiologist to help me because I have a hard time understanding people when they talk. My dad suggested I talk to you about it and I really appreciate that you’re willing to take the time. I figured I’d start out by explaining what I struggle with and why I think an audiologist might be able to help.

I’m generally able to understand people okay until the environment becomes even mildly noisy. When that happens, I feel like I correctly understand around half the words anybody says. I can get by most of the time because I’ve gotten very good at filling in the blanks from context clues. If I don’t have context to help me fill in the blanks, it’s pretty hopeless. When I listen to music with English lyrics, it sounds like a foreign language because I can’t depend on the cadence or tonality of everyday speech to clue me in to what the singer is saying.

I regularly have to ask people to repeat themselves, and earlier this week I had to ask someone to write down what they were trying to tell me!

My general sense is that I don’t struggle to hear sounds, but rather struggle to distinguish words from background noise. It can also be difficult to translate the noises that make up speech into actual words in my head. If there’s such a thing as dyslexia for spoken words, I think I’ve got it.

I don’t think that I have hearing loss. I’ve had normal audiograms throughout my life. I think my most recent one was 2016 with you! I also don’t think I have any language development delays. I enjoy reading books and professors always described me as a strong writer.

I think an audiologist can help because I’ve read experiences of people with similar difficulties who benefited a lot from hearing aids. They usually describe “low-gain” hearing aids which end up easing the burden of picking out words in a cluttered soundscape. They also describe them as being helpful for both filtering and masking irritating sounds. As somebody who is easily overwhelmed by mundane noises, that alone would be life changing!

I want to do something about it because I’m tired of struggling every single day. I’m tired of all the work it takes to keep up with normal conversations. I’m tired of doubting myself or feeling down on myself when I can’t understand people.

Do you think I’m looking in the right direction wanting the help of an audiologist and hearing aids? Is it something you’d be interested in exploring with me, or do you know of any resources I should look into? Let me know if there’s any more information you need. I left out a lot for brevity.

Thank you again for taking the time,

[Evie]

My vacuum was jammed so i un jammed it and made a dusty mess in the process but it’s okay because I have a vacuum to clean up dusty messes

A small part of my job as a unit clerk is to give reports and medical records to the hospitalist. (There’s always so many papers in their office. I feel like I’m entombing them Cask of Amontillado style).

They’re the doctor and I’m the secretary so I try to be unobtrusive. There’s this corner of their desk that I can drop stuff on without interrupting the doctor’s work.

One day, earlier this week there was a banana on the corner. I think I actually looked at the doctor and went “er… you want these here?” <gestures with papers at banana>. He said yes and I put the records on the banana and left.

The next day, the banana was still there. I put the imaging reports on the Inbox Banana and left.

Day 3, we had a new hospitalist on rotation. I thought the outgoing doctor would have taken his banana with him or the incoming doctor would have thrown it out (or maybe eaten it? I’m not a doctor and I don’t like bananas so I’m not sure how these things work). But the banana was still there so I put the papers on it and left.

Day 4 (yesterday) was the second day of the new hospitalist’s rotation. When I brought the morning rounding list the banana was still there so I put the paper on the banana and left.

I’m off now but on Day 4 the banana was getting a lot of spots on it. I think some people like it when their bananas have spots? I’m not sure, but I hope the Inbox Banana is gone by the time I start up again next week.

Timeblocking

My rendition of what it’s like waiting to waiting to see the doctor for an eye infection.

Indeed @odd , @hollyhoneychurch. But it’s quite alright because I still like moss. And rain. It’s even raining today. And on some moss, no less! Meager though it may be from dry weather.

Google maps needs Anxiety Mode. Yes I see that left turn yield across three lanes will get me there 3 minutes faster, but would you please unfold that into 9 right hand turns at lights? Thanks.

Ah, Friday. The day I spend a few hours playing at being a normal adult but then I get to spend a few hours pretending to be a warlock.

Dear Hiring Manager,

When I saw the position for Cover Letter Writer on your website, I was, under threat of financial ruin and social ostracization, very excited!

I am oh-so-desperate for a job. Every day I scroll Indeed.com, a nervous wreck as my eyes glaze over so many jobs I do not want and simultaneously dread I cannot have, the pit of nausea in my stomach deepening as my thoughts spiral that I am unworthy of your salvation, the need for continuous employment having leeched its way into the groundwater of my soul, poisonous oil that coats everything in the interminable belief that my whole life must align to the holy North Star of My Career, and that the slightest deviancy therein will foul me forever as untouchable. The gap on my resume, I can explain. Please!

Fortunately, this has prepared me to be the very best Cover Letter Writer. You see, in this hour of darkness I have turned to masochism to cope, warping this degrading farce I perform even now into an act I take perverse, bordering on erotic satisfaction.

Every time I write, “Cover Letter Writer position at Your Company,” Hiring Manager, I hope to remind you that YOU are special to me. This is more than those other companies I sent applications to. That was just to make the Unemployment office look the other way. YOU are who I WANT, Hiring Manager.

To write, all day, “I am very excited for ABC position at XYZ company,” to call HR departments to “ask some questions” when in reality all I want is for you to hear my name and render in your mind the slightest Pavlovian link between me and my resume, to FORCE YOU to hear the ragged madness edging into the corners of my voice, that you will know me by our shared Humanity and not SIMPLY as one of your Resource girls. … Such sweet nothings, long into the night.

But alas, I am undeserving of having my voicemail returned. I was a naughty girl, Hiring Manager. I didn’t do my Networking. I spent my time building meaningful bonds with friends and family while my LinkedIn profile drifted derelict, and when a classmate in college who only ever spoke to me to copy my work wanted to Add Me To His Professional Network on LinkedIn™! … I routed the email to spam. Why, I could be capable of anything, Hiring Manager, and I deserve to be punished.

Thank you for the transient light of your consideration before the long dark,

Evie

Phone Number That is Very Easy to Reverse The Digits of By Mistake

Gmail Address You Will Drop The Middle Letter of And I Will Never Hear Back

🍃🌧

Rain.

Each Sunday, a task pops up on my to-do list to “goodwill or trash something.“ And, y’know, I feel like writing about that.

Surprise! This is a blog post about minimalism. I’m very self conscious about being a huge cliche. Seriously, let’s take a quick cliche inventory for minimalism writing:

• Indie blog? Check.
• Disposition to disparage material things? Check.
• Hints of an underutilized liberal arts degree? Check check check.
• Black turtleneck?

…Crap.

Okay, but why am I so skeptical of being an Internet minimalist blogger? I think my wariness comes from how easy it is for such writing to spiral into caustic cynicism railed against material things.

To explain, let me tell you about my relationship with stuff.

I’m no stranger to the binge-purge cycle of “hey, I think a 3-in-1 hygrometer-barometer-thermometer would be pretty nifty, thanks Amazon!” that makes for a nonstop stream of <$20 nicknacks arriving on my step until something snaps. Suddenly I have to move, or I’m just overwhelmed with all the stuff around me and then comes the fiery purge of 14 garbage bags to abruptly relieve the constipation of material accumulation.

I rinse and repeat this cycle through the rapid fire move-ins and move-outs of college and then unironically guzzle anti-consumerist media. Suddenly I’m uncharitably roiling with fury against possessions, describing them as “burdensome tat that accumulates to fill every space in one’s life, suffocating the mind and soul.”

Yikes. Slow down there miss liberal arts education. Look around you. There are plenty of things in your life that don’t suffocate your soul! Just look at this material possession:

Yeah. You can’t look into those eyes and call them tat.

And what about this thingamajig:

It’s that thing that doesn’t actually do anything but you keep because it really caught your attention as a child and it still feels special in a way you cannot explain.

Or hey, how about this literal actual rock:

It’s a rock. But it looks pretty. And the blend of warm earthen grey and icy blue sure does remind you of home.

On the same windowsill we have these things:

You hold onto them because they remind you of playing with your brother.

Things themselves aren’t evil, but I do want to acknowledge the truth in the feelings that make me cynical about them. Having too much stuff for me is stifling. Clutter makes me stressed. When I was depressed, the junk on my floor got knee deep. I don’t want to live like that.

So how do I practice some degree of minimalism without loathing things to the point that I turn on all the nice stuff above?

My advice to myself is: Don’t loathe things. Instead, value open space.

There is a gentle kindness to an empty desk, shelf, or countertop. It breathes with opportunity, inviting you to make of it what you will. An empty desk is an invitation to write, to sew, or even to do your professional work. A desk busy with things is limited. Fill a desk with job trinkets, and it no longer affords the mind with the open potential to do anything other than work.

Open space has value in that it invites one with the opportunity to play, express, create. Open space invites you to imagine. When you say things suffocate you, this is what you mean. It isn’t that the things are bad. It is that your heart yearns for the whimsy of emptiness.

When I acknowledge this, the weekly “get rid of 1 thing” task starts to make a lot of sense. It invites me to walk through my home and to look over my things. Without malice, I can ask “does this thing bring me more value than the empty space it takes?” If the answer is no, then I may kindly allow it to leave my life. This way, instead of the furious 14 garbage bag purge, I allow for a gentle flow of objects through my life. My home is allowed to breathe with open space for interests to bloom and perhaps to fade, and then to leave and allow their space for something else. Each week I do not think of how I will remove a thing. I think of how I will gain a small patch of happy emptiness.

This is a letter to the past. It is meant for myself, years ago, when I was choosing my own name.

I don’t think I need to justify to you that you should like whichever name you choose. The real question is how you like it. You probably have some sense that this is something more than a Discord screen name or a D&D character. Cool, interesting, or mysterious are all adjectives that describe names that work in some circumstances. This name needs to work in all circumstances.

It needs to be something you’ll like hearing your boss and your partner say. It need to look right on your takeout receipt and your grave. It needs to dignify you even when someone is using it to scold you. All these cracks in life that your name seeps into, it must fit perfectly.

The adjective you’re looking for is “resonant.” In all those contexts, the name must shimmer with an ephemeral yet eternal importance. The feeling it sparks should be instantly recognizable, even if you cannot explain it with words.

The name should also be timeless. While you exist in this exact phenomenological moment (see, that philosophy class is still good for something!), your name will stretch forward and backwards in time. It will be applied to the present version of you making the choice, but it will also apply to all the future versions of you. The career person, the wannabe blog writer, the hopefully happy retiree must be happy with this name.

It will also be applied to the you of childhood: When you reminisce, you are going to speak of yourself with your chosen name, not your given name. Strange, right? To know this letter is deliverable to you only under a name you’ve yet to choose? No peeking at the envelope!

Finding a name both timeless and resonant is a rather tall order! Don’t worry though, you end up figuring it out. You make yourself a sieve for names and keep filtering names through it until you’re left with only one.

Here’s how it works: Take names you like, names you’re interested in, common names in your birth year, names of literary characters, whatever. Just get a list of names you think could be yours and dump them in the hopper.

Take the list of names. Turn them over in your mind. Drop the ones that have no luster or allure. They didn’t resonate.

Forget the list for a month. Come back to it. Laugh or cringe at all the silly names you thought for sure could be yours forever. Seriously, Cecil? What were you thinking 3 weeks ago?! Drop it from the list. It was not timeless.

Do this over and over for many months and take as many as you need. Is there a name that keeps floating to the top of your sieve while dozens of others fall straight through? Of course there is. It’s that name. You know the one. The one you were instantly enamored with when you first heard it at 10. The feeling never quite went away, did it. It’s the name that makes you glance furtively in its direction like it’s a crush you’re too scared to ask out, lest it turn out the name doesn’t like you back. Part of you knew from the start that it would be this one. Still, somehow you’re sitting here looking at what your sieve has left you, surprised but joyed. Congratulations.

Of course, you’re still the cautious type. This is going to be your forever name so you take it out of your sieve and you start testing it.

First test: Are there any infamous Nazis with this name? That would suck. Thankfully not.

Okay, so what famous people do have this name? When you say your name and somebody says “Like the ____?” you’d better like what they blurt out. Thankfully, one of the more famous figures with your name was a pioneering surgeon. Nice. Also a cool fact: There’s a silent film actress with the same name and her last name is your middle name. There’s also some instagram entrepreneur with the name and your same last name. Good. Let them soak up the SEO. You don’t want to be Google-able.

Next test: What year was the name most common in? You don’t want a boomer name because you’re not a boomer (hint: “Karen” becomes a cursed name later on). You also don’t want a name that’s up-and-coming because it would be hard to nail a job interview if your name makes somebody think of their fussy kindergartner’s classmates. It turns out that your name had its heyday at least a century ago. Don’t act surprised. You wanted something timeless.

At this point, you’re really plumbing the depths of this name and you start looking up what it means even though you never put stock in that kind of thing. Consider the meaning of this one. It ends up mattering more to you than you would expect.

You also look into potential nicknames. There’s TONS. And you love each and every one of them by their distinct quirks and flavors. There are quirky ones, cute ones, mysterious ones, and even the single letter initial has some allure. Your only fear is that they’ll never be used. It turns out that they ALL get used. Ask that boy out. He uses your favorite one.

You explore different spellings. Of the more grounded ways of spelling the name, there is an English way and a French way. You lean to the English if only because you think it would save you the hassle of always having to correct people. You’re not wrong, but don’t discount the French way. Isn’t there something pretty about it?

At last, you’re out of things to research. There’s no more stalling. You take your typesetting stamps and make a card, printing the name in silver ink on black cardstock. You look it over. There’s something materially real in the imperfections of the ink. Say it out loud. Show your friends. It’s your name now. But you already knew that, didn’t you.

Does anybody remember Chibi Robo? It’s this kindhearted game where you’re a tiny robot that that heals a broken family by cleaning their house with a toothbrush. Oh, and the toothbrush plays a little song while you clean.

Today, for the first time in too many years, I walked to a park and laid down in the grass under a tree.

The occasional ants that patrol near the sliding glass door killed an earwig that had squeezed its way into my kitchen. You, friends, may join the ranks of the kindly spiders who guard my home from even creepier bugs!

Office plant update: So much new growth! Alas, this photo is several days old and she has been returned to the office after a successful month in rehab. Best of luck, plant friend!

Here’s what it looked like:

I guess I’m a bit of a sleepy hedonist.

Let’s break it down a little more to see what else we can find out.

Free Time

Intentionality

There are two categories here that I would label as “free time”: intentional recreation, and loafing. One of the earliest goals of the time tracking project was to minimize loafing and maximize my free time spent intentionally.

Time where I can give the recreational activity my full attention is inherently more valuable to me than time I spend spaced out, not really present with the world. Think about the difference between a fun D&D game with your friends versus scrolling an algorithm-curated feed that only wants to keep you mentally engaged enough to read ads.

Fortunately, it looks like the project was a success in this regard! This is a graph of my loafing which tells a rather decisive tale:

I attribute this completely to the time tracking. When I’m forced to press a button to declare how I’m spending my time, I’d much rather press any button other than the loafing button. Bored and too braindead to do anything super engaging? May as well clock into Household Maintenance and sweep while I listen to a podcast! Seeing too much loafing on the graph this month? Guess it’s time to block Reddit (maybe the single best tech decision I’ve ever made).

Alone or with friends?

I also tracked separately whether my recreation was solo or with friends. It came out to 414 hours solo, 1282 hours with friends, and some uncategorized hours before I started marking the difference.

Frankly, I already knew that I’m horrible at entertaining myself. My partner and my brother will both attest to the extent to which I hound them for things to do together. In general, I want to get better at entertaining myself. There was a brief (60 hours total) interlude where I tried to take up sewing but that’s a bit too intensive to do every day. How much I envy people who can lose themselves in video games and in books!

Health

Planned versus Unplanned Health Maintenance

Like recreation, I tracked Health Maintenance in two different categories: planned and unplanned.

Planned, I hope, is pretty self-explanatory. Regular workout routines, daily walks, scheduled therapist & doctor visits, brushing my teeth at night, basically all the things I could have told you were going to happen in advance.

Unplanned is a little more spicy. That was where I hit some mental or physical threshold where I had to drop what I was doing and take a little bit of time to take care of myself. This could be something benign like taking a nap after pushing myself really hard at work. It could also be something dangerous like an injury, illness, or mental breakdown.

Overall, there’s always going to be some amount of unplanned health work. The only way to reach 0 hours of unplanned Health Maintenance would be to be completely unforgiving of myself, never taking breaks when it turns out I need them, never allowing myself to cry. It’d be a recipe for calamity.

Still, I do want to guide my time toward planned health maintenance. Better to plan to spend 1 hour a week with the therapist than surprising myself with a 3 day long mental meltdown.

So how’d I do?

The split was 422 hours planned, 194 hours unplanned. Not bad, not necessarily good. Like recreation, tracking the difference did guide me towards choices that helped me affect the balance. It turns out a daily walk goes a long way towards keeping the demons at bay.

This is the graph of unplanned Health Maintenance:

What can I say? Times are tough. We’re one week into May and I’ve already clocked in 10 hours which puts me well on track to a record setting month unless something changes (don’t worry, it has!).

I think this is where this kind of data becomes extremely valuable. A sudden bloom of unplanned Health Maintenance is my canary in the mine that tells me something in my life has become unstable and there’s probably a loose bolt somewhere ready to fly out and rip everything apart if it hasn’t already.

Conversely, we can see a relative period of stability in October - January where unplanned health events were at an all time low, intentional recreation was high, and loafing was low. It’s probably worth looking into replicating what I did to create those circumstances in the first place!

A Tale of Two Jobs

In September 2020, I quit Job 1 (which lines up with another bloom of unplanned Health Maintenance in the graph above? Fascinating). The decision to quit was, as it so happens, guided by my time tracking data.

The fall of Job 1

Job 1 was originally a nice gig where the pay wasn’t great but I was good at it, got to work from home, and didn’t think about work for more than a minute past when I clocked out. Then I got a promotion and my responsibilities skyrocketed (pay did not skyrocket of course), and the stress was unbearable. I remember some of those unplanned Health Maintenance minutes that I just spent crying the moment I got off the clock.

What was so fascinating was that the time tracking showed me the ripple effects the promotion had in my life. One extra hour at Job 1 wasn’t just one hour not playing D&D, or one hour not working out. One extra hour at Job 1 made a couple hours of unplanned health maintenance. It was 20 minutes shaved off sleep on a regular basis. It was more time loafing because I was too tired physically and emotionally to do something fun. So Job 1 had to go, and it did.

What about Job 2?

Job 2 replaced Job 1. It was a part time job where I felt challenged but not overwhelmed. I was doing fulfilling work but I wasn’t ditching sleep or time with friends to do it. Funny how that lines up with the October - January period of stability, right?

So where are we right now? Well, there was a bloom of unplanned Health Maintenance from March - Present so that must tell you something happened. Basically I transitioned from working from home to working on-site with a whole host of new responsibilities that became a little bit too much for me to handle. Doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the promotion in Job 1, right?

In the future I’m going to look long and hard at promotions because a little bit more money and prestige isn’t worth it if the new work destabilizes things to the point that your life starts falling apart!

Everything Else

Sleep

What can I say? I shoot for 9 hours every night. If you’re just getting into managing your time better, I’d highly recommend starting by blocking out sleep on your calendar.

Morning Routine

I like coffee.

Household Maintenance

Always a good place to reallocate time if you feel like you’re at a loss for what to do with yourself. A clean home is vital to a healthy body and mind. Read the introduction to “Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House” by Cheryl Mendelson.

I also track time spent maintaining personal relationships as part of maintaining a healthy household. I do this as the highest form of respect to those people. Even if I don’t live with them, my parents are still part of my home.

Travel

For when I’m too much of a zombie after a flight to even loaf successfully.

Admin

Setting up task manager apps, time trackers, GTD weekly reviews, “systems.” I’m really proud that the time I spend doing things eclipses the time I spend theorizing about doing things!

This review

1 hour, 45 minutes. Intentional Recreation, Solo ⏱

They have new tablets that are 96,000 times faster than mine, but I still love my chonky bezeled friend. Sorry Tim Cook 💙

I grew this happy looking ivy from a cutting off a sprawling plant from the landscaping for this office building I used to walk by a lot. Does that mean I pirated the plant? Is plantbooting a thing?

I bet I’d spend more time outdoors if I didn’t have to get in a car to drive there. When I drive out to a trailhead I feel like I really have to do the hike. No chilling by this stream and listening to the birds, we drove out here to HIKE dammit!