Tag: box opener

idionkisson replied to your post:
who wants to rec me relaxing/distracting things to…

ANYTHING i read rewires my brain, that’s just like. literally what reading is to me. it’s like a magic charm that wears off after only a little while, and the only way i can back to it is to read more of whatever the thing in question is…i have no idea if this makes ANY sense, it’s super hard for me to articulate bc it’s so innate

garden-ghoul said: 

ugh what DOESN’T completely rewire my brain. I literally can’t even listen to music 95% of the time for this reason. the one thing I read specifically to rewire my brain is “If I” by psilent on ao3, which is a story about rocket raccoon escaping from a torture facility and trying to make a life as a guy with OCD. it’s very cathartic for me because of the progression from terrible to okay
when I was younger I’d read YA books and especially if they were written in first person I would spend like half a day legitimately thinking I was the protagonist? I think this is a DID thing

yeah i get very– i think of it as an altered state of consciousness almost, it’s more dramatic than being drunk and… ok probably not actively more of a change than being full acute sleep deprivation depressed, but i notice it more bc it’s a non-habitual thing/has an obvious external source.

at its most dramatic i feel like i’m both talking differently and processing emotion differently; i associate it with being almost manic/euphoric, funny in even weirder and more high-concept ways than i usually am, and sometimes with phrasing emotional and social concepts in a technical/unecessarily sciencey way if what i was reading leant itself to that. these are all states i can kind of access/behaviors i have regardless, but it feels qualitatively different and is clearly induced by what i was reading. i usually really enjoy it, though sometimes it totally rearranges my priorities in ways that– don’t usually have significant repercussions, but certainly can be inconvenient if i’ve just rewritten myself to be very strongly into manic makeup experiments and sweeping statements about the structure of reality, and what i need is to finish my dev bio assignment.

mostly it happens to me with fiction, especially fiction with a really strong, distinct, unusual diction, especially funny/witty diction. it’s happened with nonfiction pieces, more rarely, partly because standard science writing is a mode of thinking i have to engage anyway and so it doesn’t feel distinct i think in the way . it happens with long backreads of people’s blogs pretty frequently, which is actually my easiest go-to if i want to create specific aesthetic/subject-matter interests in myself: i have a mental list of people whose blogs to backread if what i want is “very funny, smart about character-driven fiction” vs “significant introspective access and high-vulnerability lyricism” vs “highest-integrity art opinions and mean jokes” vs “quantitative interests and gender shitposting” vs… etc. it’s actually super useful, or would be if i didn’t occasionally derail myself from actually writing the thing i wanted to write (or whatever) because i got distracted by the thing i was reading to put my brain in the right mode.

relatedly, if you (general you, not just you two) see a chicago ip address reading 20-200 pages of your blog, it is very plausible that it is me, doing that. pls feel free to let me know if i should stop, i absolutely will. i try to limit myself to ppl who seem to have a more archival/backread-encouraging ethos anyway, but it’s possible i’ve misread someone’s blog intentions and if so i am genuinely sorry

idionkisson replied to your post “who wants to rec me relaxing/distracting things to read? i’m anxious…”

also, curious: what’s the book of poetry u have?

the one i have on hand is anne carson’s decreation, which my friend gave me for my birthday and i paged through and embarrassingly never fully read! i keep meaning too, i like her poems quite a lot even if i thought men in the off hours has its distinctly uneven points. i have a plane ride coming up, i may save it for then (and the other book i borrowed and haven’t finished…from the same friend… sorry……..though in my defense i borrowed this one like three days ago ostensibly to cite for an essay)

reading poetry sort of builds on itself for me to create a “poetic mindset” but i have to be primed for it? it usually isn’t great for pulling me out of myself de novo unless i start from poetry specifically about the ways im sad and then sort of loop around, and even then sometimes i get stuck on sad poems and can’t move out further

dye-net said: 

I think I do this too (or a similar thing) with my thesis reading. to rewire I read scientific papers from my field, which is not the sort of work I do, but I find it so soothing to read a highly structured materials science/analysis paper.
I can definitely rec or send you some, but this might be a type of content that only rewires my brain, which is usually contending with qualitative research in the same or adjacent fields.

oh that would be fascinating! i’ve definitely had it work with not-my-subfield bio papers, although not usually with the more dramatic speech/mannerism/worldview changes (which i get from things w stronger “voice” if u will), but i totally get it as a soothing/anxiolytic thing. i’d love to see examples of materials science papers that do that for you

unopenablebox:

who wants to rec me relaxing/distracting things to read? i’m anxious for an assortment of reasons, mostly unjustified/not about what i should be anxious about lmao

my criteria are: ideally longish (>10k although a group of blog posts or something will also serve well), engagingly written (/medium to minimal jargon, this is supposed to not be effortreading), not a total downer (nothing graphically about murder/death/assault/similar tho can feature it as a “plot point” or whatever; also maybe not about uh the inevitable failure of interpersonal connection if that…. makes sense)

it can be a book or a blog or an article or whatever, fiction or nonfiction, im not picky i just need to think about something that isn’t me

oh last (and deeply weird, and thus also very optional) criterion: if you’re the kind of person whose brain/mode of thinking/tone gets kind of rewired by reading something that is engaging/tonally unusual/unlike your normal mode of thinking/etc, uh, rec me something that does that to you, partly bc doing that to myself helps me get out of anxiety usually and partly because i just really want to know if that’s a thing that happens to other people. 

actually fuck the rest of this post, tell me about whether reading things regularly remodels your brain and way of expressing yourself, and what kind of circumstances that happens under/what kind of writing produces it. i’ll probably write something elaborating what my experience with that is like later, now that im thinking about it

who wants to rec me relaxing/distracting things to read? i’m anxious for an assortment of reasons, mostly unjustified/not about what i should be anxious about lmao

my criteria are: ideally longish (>10k although a group of blog posts or something will also serve well), engagingly written (/medium to minimal jargon, this is supposed to not be effortreading), not a total downer (nothing graphically about murder/death/assault/similar tho can feature it as a “plot point” or whatever; also maybe not about uh the inevitable failure of interpersonal connection if that…. makes sense)

it can be a book or a blog or an article or whatever, fiction or nonfiction, im not picky i just need to think about something that isn’t me

joculatory:

An inquisitive spirit! You are excellent at pulling things apart and seeing what makes them tick. Great discoveries lie in your future! The people close to you are lucky, but not because you’re brilliant – because you’re very loving.