12282024. good morning flounder

i figured out yesterday that i have less anxiety picking up the phone at work if my voice is already in use. i had some idea of this correlation already because i always find my phone hours less effortful when there's someone in the room to talk to in between calls. but yesterday i got more regimented about it and just started reading aloud from my book. there was no one else in the room with me. i was surprised by how symptomatic my voice was at first--instead of just voice breaks there were some real stops/stutters. but it got better after several paragraphs. i could feel the difference between picking up the phone while reading and picking it up cold, and i could also hear the literal difference. the book was "how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy" by jenny odell

weirdly, voice preservation / rest doesn't do much for me. it's not what my voice needs, most of the time. my voice actually just needs to be pounded into relaxation

there is some psychological + environmental aspect to the reading aloud. like it doesn't have the same benefit if i start the day by reading alone at home. it has to be in the environment that i need to perform in (work). like in exposure therapy. there has to be the possibility of people hearing me, because this is part of the fear

of course i can't do this exercise at every desk, it doesn't make sense to. but i am a little pleased with myself for developing this tiny hack. nothing from speech therapy ever helped me this much because all of those exercises were out of context. the speech language pathologist actually never asked me about which speaking scenarios are most stressful/effortful. she was treating my voice disorder as if it had nothing to do with anxiety, or like it goes voice --> anxiety and not also the other way around

i wonder how many spasmodic dysphonia people would benefit from weird exposure therapy type things. compared to the effects of the standard treatment (botox injections into the larynx). i think most people who have the time and money to notice and go get a spasmodic dysphonia diagnosis also have the money and willingness to get botox injections. i exhausted my resources and energy for treatment shortly after the diagnosis though. which is why i am trying new things

i'm practicing my cursive (no reason), and also running more which feel related

12122024. hello flounder

semester is over. no trip this year. recently i reread last year's happy december flounders from i visited [college town and dear friends] which i had planned to do again this year but D forgot i was coming and made plans which they offered to cancel, but no one who really wants someone to visit them says "i made plans but i can cancel." so i'm visiting my parents instead

last night i read "anyone's ghost" by august thompson. it was beautiful and made me want to reread "a home at the end of the world." it also made me curious about listening to metallica but i got over that quickly

sometimes i feel really annoyed by the way people write about books. like this goodreads comment for example

If you're looking for a read that combines hauntingly beautiful prose with a gripping narrative, Anyone's Ghost by August Thompson is the book for you. Thompson has weaved an intricate, emotional story that keeps you hooked from the first page to the last. The characters are richly drawn, each with their own unique depth that makes them feel incredibly real.

you could sub in like any title into this review. i think people sometimes overthink it when they're writing book reviews and lean on language that they lifted from other book reviews. you actually don't even have to describe books in terms of how "richly drawn" the characters are or how "gripping" the narrative is. you can actually just talk about the characters and the narrative themselves

another thing that i think is kind of related: recently i was trying to figure out if a certain title included alcoholism as a strong theme, and in what way (to decide if it should go on a certain book list). i searched its goodreads reviews by the term "alcohol" and it pulled up a bunch of reviews but in almost every instance it was just a user including "alcohol" in a long list of content warnings with no further engagement, no reflection on the theme itself. if everyone is on goodreads just independently making determinations of how "richly drawn" and "gripping" various aspects of the story are and tagging content warnings then what's the point. the quality of user reviews doesn't get much better on book instagram, a part of instagram that instagram thinks i want to be on. it's just people being like "this book wrecked me. so tender" (fiction) or "radical honesty. hard-won wisdom" (memoir). get me out of there