Ruhee Dewji

Retro #10: February

Somehow January felt like it lasted a million years but I barely remember February happening at all. Is this what life is like with increasing sunlight? I’m into it.

Notebook with some days crossed off in February for ear training and mobility - lots for ear training and very few for mobility

As you can see, I did a lot better on my ear training habit last month and a lot worse on the mobility (in my own defense, I had a terrible cold for almost two weeks). Consistency is really hard! I was only aiming for 2-3 days a week for mobility work and didn’t even hit that, and I can tell because my body feels a lot worse. I’m hoping to be back on the wagon this month. The ear training has become easier to maintain because I’m accustomed to doing it regularly, whereas I’m still trying to get in the groove with the other one. Also, my ear continues to improve with practice, incredibly rude.

I also saw a few great shows in February, including Ratboys, who are somehow better each time I see them (this was my third time):

The band Ratboys onstage at Lee's Palace

I’ve also spent a ton of time thinking about this article about the “phantom obligation” of RSS (thank you to Sameer, who is among many other things a great link curator). Basically, why do RSS readers look like email clients and make you feel like each article is a task that must be attended to, and that you must attend to them all? We don’t necessarily expect to read every single article in a newspaper or magazine, and often we wouldn’t want to. But we always feel like we’re “falling behind” or never “caught up” in our reading, and this creates the feeling of obligation—as though our feed readers are to-do lists.

A lot of us spend a lot of time complaining about the busy-ness of modern life and how you’re always behind and catching up. Much of this is for structural reasons (we have to work longer to make ends meet, or work more jobs, or commute further—any number of legitimate reasons), but I do think a little piece of this is manufactured in interactions like the feed reader with the 9,000 unread items or the Slack interface with unread channels lit up everywhere. I don’t know about you, but at many jobs the number of Slack channels I actually needed to monitor regularly was a tiny fraction of the channels I was actually in, and yet I often felt like I had to read everything as it came up; effective for manufacturing a sense of “tending to things” but not effective for getting actual work done.

I think about this, too, when friends reply to my texts right away just to reassure me they will definitely get back to me ASAP—the harried nature of the interaction makes me worry I’m inadvertently putting pressure on them. I think some people see texts as much more synchronous than I do and therefore requiring immediate response, like another to-do item they have to cross off as soon as it appears. (I also worry these friends think I am incredibly slow at texting back.) I see texts like leaving an answering machine message: it is none of my business if you’re at home listening to the call come in, just call me back when you want. (I am aware this reference is a lot more dated than I would like it to be.) Time-sensitivity just feels like another stressor to add to the pile. Normalize responding slower! Please reply to me eventually, but please don’t freak out about it on my behalf. We are all stressed enough!

Anyway, that article is great and really does make me wonder why RSS never experienced a paradigm shift.

Stuff I liked this month