kshithij

∙ arts & design ∙ ∙ digital minimalism ∙ ∙ linguistics ∙ my name is pronounced kʂɪt̪ɪd͡ʒ

[analogueing]

boredom; or the absence of patience

exploring linguistic alternatives to being bored

this one's a long ramble sorry guys

how do you say "i'm bored" in hindi? i've never known. it's not a phrase i find myself saying often as an adult, but proclamations of boredom littered my vernacular as a child. boredom was not much of an issue when i was at home or school because there was always something available to distract myself with - toys, a book, a tv show, a cd in the car, girlsgogames open in a tab on the side. i think the only times in my life i've experienced true boredom have been the times i visited my maternal grandmother's house.

we call her dodda (literally meaning elder in tulu), and she lives in a village that's right by a smaller town in south india. to get there from the nearest city involves a short plane ride followed a one to two hour drive. the area is mostly just houses; to get to any stores or malls or restaurants you have to take a rikshaw or bus to the town. dodda has lived in her house for decades, but currently only occupies half of it; after the death of her husband she had a boarded partition installed that neatly separates the house into two so she could rent out one half of her house to support herself. right in front of her home is a buzzing, colorful garden full of native plants. she tended to them but never manicured or arranged them. the plants grow as they wish, and as a result, walking through the garden feels like taking a hike, despite the surface area being very small. to the side of the garden is a groundwater well, and across is the neighbour's house.

dodda doesn't have internet in her home, and cell signal is also weak. she has an old box tv that has a handful of channels, which are the local news, the national broadcast or the hindu prayer and spirituality channels. she has a nokia button phone that she has difficulty operating, and only uses for dialing calls. she has important phone numbers memorized and her calendar is a paper one on the wall; i have memories of napping in her bed being watched over by hanuman holding his mace with the days of the week below him.

As a child who spent their first ten years of life in an american suburb detached from nature, distanced from their native languages, and constantly surrounded my gadgets and distractions, visiting dodda's home was mind numbingly boring to me. every year, when we visited, i would prepare myself by packing an arsenal of distractions: books, toys, an ipad, and when i got older, my phone. and every year, despite my preparations, the day would come when i exhausted my arsenal and had nothing left to occupy myself with. i'd start to feel aimless, wandering between the garden, the well, going in and out of the rooms, reading the ingredient labels on dodda's soap and talcum, trying on her chappals and repeating all those activities again and again.

a big part of the reason i got so bored while at dodda's house in particular is because we didn't share a language in common. dodda speaks tulu, kannada, hindi & marathi. i spoke english. i used to be able to speak some tulu and konkani as a younger child, but when i started preschool in the u.s., my teachers encouraged my parents to speak to me in english at home as i was lagging behind the other children in my english proficiency. and so, as i gained fluency in english, i lost tulu and konkani, and to this day, i cannot recall any vocabulary i might have once known. as i got older, i never really made any attempt to relearn these languages, despite the fact that my immediate and extended family have all at some point expressed disappointment about my inability to speak any indian language, let alone the ones i was meant to inherit. living in the us during my early formative years had instilled in me a sense of english superiority, and it's embarrassing to admit, but as a child, i often wished dodda would learn english so that i wouldn't have to learn tulu in order to speak with her.

neither of those things happened however, and the two of us remained unable to communicate verbally without the assistance of non-verbal gestures or my mom as translator. despite not speaking or understanding english, there were an handful of english loanwords dodda used. when i think back on these, it's very fascinating which words in particular became a part of hindi vernacular and why. most hindi speakers in urban communities do not actually speak pure hindi; what's more common is 'hinglish', a mishmash of hindi grammar with heavy borrowing of english nouns. pure hindi is something that's spoken more commonly in rural areas, and in urban areas, pure hindi is seen as excessively formal, academic, and in some contexts pretentious.

a big reason for the prevalence of english loanwords is simply the lack of new hindi vocabulary, particularly for technological terms that were initially conceptualized in english. i've never heard a hindi word for radio or tv or phone. for some words like airplane, train, spaceship, there are words such as rail-gaadi रेलगाड़ी (lit. rail-car) or hawai jahaaz हवाई जहाज़ (ship of the wind) or antriksh-yaan अंतरिक्ष यान (space vehicle). but these words are clunky to say and are really only used in formal speech, less so in colloquial conversation. sometimes dodda would offer me a biscuit; even after having lived in india for eight years, i've not heard a different word for biscuit used colloquially. this is where i notice standardized hindi is much different from modern farsi for example, because farsi has developed its own vocabulary for many english words that hindi has simply adopted the english for. for example, the english word 'station', which is just station स्टेशन in hindi, in farsi is istgah ایستگاه.

less commonly, english loanwords will be abstract nouns, feelings, or concepts that either don't have a direct equivalent or are simply more wordy to express in hindi. one of these is boredom. i don't think i've ever heard a direct hindi translation of the word. in urdu boredom is boriyat بوریت with the arabic origin -at suffix mod. in hindi, boredom is just boredom (बोरडम). i can think of ways to express the feeling in more roundabout ways - such as 'mere pas kuchh karne ke liye nahin hain' मेरे पास कुछ करने के लिए नहीं है (i don't have anything to do). but not having anything to do is not quite the same as being bored; i've experienced plenty of moments where i have nothing to do and yet am not bored. at dodda's house, when i inevitably became restless and antsy after a few days, she would turn to my mom and ask "bore ho gaya?" (gotten bored?). she said this to me and about me quite frequently. 'bore' and 'bored' were among some of the few mutually intelligible words between the two of us (some others included phone, biscuit, ನೀರ).

a few days ago, i received an email from a weekly newsletter of a persian language teacher explaining how the concept of boredom is expressed in farsi, which offered me a hint of insight into why there might not be a word for boredom in hindi. to quote the text:

The phrase is hoselam sar rafté — حوصله‌ام سر رفته. The root is hoselé, which means patience, but also your energy, your will to do things. You can be bā hoselé — patient, easygoing. Or bee hoselé — irritable, short-fused, out of patience. Now, back to hoselam sar rafté. Sar raftan means to overflow and spill out. So hoselam sar rafté means your hoselé overflowed and left. It's gone. Boredom in Persian isn't "nothing to do" — it's that your patience quietly spilled over and walked out the door.

i got excited reading for a couple of reasons. on the linguistics side of things, something felt familiar about this phrase even though i've never heard it before. hindi has a lot of persian loanwords, and hosele, sar, and rafte, all exist in hindi as well, just conjugated differently to fit hindi grammar. in hindi, हौसला (pronounced a little flatter, than in farsi, closer to hausla) means patience as well. सर (sar) means head or mind, and रफ़्ता (rafta) means gone or departed. so the hindi literal interpretation of this persian phrase would be "patience has left the head", which is not very far removed from the original meaning at all. if i were to phrase this in a way that fits hindi grammar, i would say something like हौसला सर से रफ़्ता हुआ (hausla sar se rafta hua). something more colloquial and shorter would be मेरा सब्र ख़त्म हुआ (mera sabr khatam hua - to use the arabic origin word for patience that is slightly more common in hindi usage) or मेरा हौसला चली गई (mera hausla chali gayi). none of these really retains the short sweet crunchiness of the agglutinative grammar structure that persian uses, though they retain the meaning.

this is the second reason i got excited about hoselam sar rafte though; the meaning. i've always viewed boredom as a a thing that happens to me, like an illness or a state of weather; not something that i have control over or something that i play a role in, just a state of being that could wash over me at any time of it's own volition. even as i've more recently been trying to retrain myself to sit through boredom rather than avoiding it, i've been passively waiting for boredom to engulf me. i've never considered that there are things i could do on my own to become bored. patience, on the other hand, feels more involved. it's far more common cross-culturally, for patience to be viewed as a virtue or as a capability that one can become better at; it's difficult for me to conceptualize practicing or getting good at being bored. as a child, the phrase 'bore ho gaya' always made me feel helpless -as if boredom was inevitable- and ungrateful -as if i wasn't capable of being entertained or present in dodda's home. boredom was like an affliction i couldn't shake, and i think that's why it felt so acute those times. but patience is something actionable. considering how focused on meditation and yoga - activities that build patience - ancient indian culture was, maybe the failure of indic languages in developing a word for boredom is a reflection of this: a refusal to view the circumstance of boredom as a passive state of being, but as something you might not have to experience if you train your patience well enough.

i think instead of 'bore ho gaya?', had the question been more like हौसला है? حوصلہ ہے؟ 'hausla hai?' (do you have patience?); 'do you have the patience to reread the book you just finished?', 'do you have the patience to sit and watch me go about my daily tasks?', 'do you have the patience to look out the window in silence?', 'do you have the patience to do nothing?' - i would have hesitated to give in so easily. having patience is a challenge i want to partake in and excel at, not a feeling that randomly occurs to me, and hearing the concept of boredom expressed in terms of patience makes me wonder if the reason i don't feel bored nowadays isn't simply due to having too much to occupy myself with or having become immune to the feeling of boredom, but that i've actually developed the patience to get through boring situations. maybe the next time i do feel bored, instead of asking myself bore ho gaya, and resigning myself to the feeling, i'll ask hausla hai?

an example of the usage of the urdu word 'boriyat', from "the death of sheherzad" by intizar husain, translated by rakshanda jalil. the translator footnote explains boriyat better than i can.

[analogueing]

script practice!

learning to read and write the alphabet is usually the easiest part of learning a new language for me, especially when the alphabet is phonetic or somewhat similar to other alphabet systems i'm already familiar with. the alphabets i'm currently learning to read and write are tajiki cyrillic, bangla and kannada; the alphabets i can read but still need practice writing in are urdu/farsi in the nastaliq style. i can easily read and write in hindi in the devanagari script but i still practice it frequently to maintain my spelling and handwriting. although scripts are the easiest part for me, they're the most tedious and often boring to practice. for me, getting good at writing requires a lot of repetition, usually writing the same letter or word over and over until i get it into my muscle memory. this has been fairly easy with scripts like cyrillic, where each letter only has two forms, and uppercase and lowercase that more often than not look very similar, the letters do not connect to each other, and diacritics are uncommon. the more challenging script to learn to write has been urdu nastaliq, because it's written right to left and diagonally, each letter already has anywhere from one to four forms and the letter will get smaller or larger depending on it's position in the word and which other letters it's connected to. here's a few select photos of script writing practice i've done over the past year. i rediscovered these notebooks recently and i think it's cool to look back and see how my handwriting and spelling accuracy has changed over time!

[analogueing]

a first attempt at writing and transliterating bangla

like with kannada, i decided to learn the bangla alphabet via hindi rather than english because the alphabet and grammar systems are much more similar and i think trying to learn any indic language through english would make it harder for me. i used teach yourself bengali as a reference for the alphabet and pronunciation guide while transliterating the text to devanagari alphabet. the bangla text itself is the very first few lines from this book of short stories (āgunbāṛir kothā?? i don't rly know how half letters work in bangla script yet. but i know kothā means story because this word is used in hindi and kannada too, as katha/kathe).

learning the alphabet by transliterating helps me learn the letters much faster than just memorizing by rote or even writing them generally, because transliterating involves making associations between the unfamiliar letter and a familiar one in different contexts, because the same letter can look different depending on where it's placed in a word. the first time i wrote any letter i would have to make each stroke slowly to check i was writing it correctly, but each consecutive time i got faster. for a few of the letters, i memorized them immediately after this exercise; some because they resembled their devanagari counterparts (ও उ, ঔ ऊ, ক क, ন न, থ थ, ল ल), and some because they appeared frequently in the sample text (অ, আ, গ, ছ, হ, স, ম).

the main thing that i'm struggling to grasp in bangla pronunciations is the inherent vowel. the first indic language i learned was hindi which has a mid central vowel, or schwa (ə) as it's inherent vowel. this is pronounced kind of like 'uh'. the hindi accent also has a tendency to flatten and sometimes shorten vowels in loanwords from other languages. many good examples can be found in farsi loanwords, if you hear the iranian pronunciation of these words, the vowels sound rounded and open, the same words in hindi tend to be pronounced more flat and with less length. these pronunciation habits have influenced how i approach vowel sounds, and i find it awkward to pronounce vowels that are more rounded because i'm not used to it. reading a word like কথা, i instinctively pronounce it katha rather than kotha because i'm not yet used to the o inherent vowel. i have the same issue with my farsi pronunciations, where i tend to flatten the rounded a vowels, saying words like 'man' (من) as 'mun' and 'khūbam' (خوبم) as 'khūbum'.

for the writing of the letters itself, many of them were close enough to devanagari that i got the hang of them pretty quickly. something i didn't realize is that in bangla the top line, or shiro rekha, is written after each letter, while the way i learned to write devanagari was to write the letters minus each of their horizontal rekhas and then line the whole word at the end. it makes me wonder if that's how other people also write devanagari or if everyone writes the line differently.

these are the words i recognized without having to look them up!

[analogueing]

a first attempt at transliterating + translating tajiki

basically converting the cyrillic text to latin and farsi (full of spelling mistakes i know) + translating to english. text taken from the first paragraph of the tajiki wikipedia article on tajikistan.

side note but the word gharb (غرب) is so interesting to me because in arabic and persian it means west, and the form gharīb (غریب) refers to a westerner, foreigner, or stranger. when the word got borrowed into hindi and urdu it took on the meaning "poor, unwealthy" as an antonym to the (also arabic-origin) word for wealthy / rich amīr ( अमीर امیر ), while the words ajnabi ( अजनबी اجنبی ) or pardesi ( परदेसी پردیسی ) are used to refer to a foreigner or stranger. i have no idea why the meaning change occurred but it's v fascinating to me.

[analogueing]

learning how to be bored again

aka staring blankly out of the subway window

i am a public transit lover. i am always complaining about the bus taking forever to arrive or the subways changing routes, but i still prefer taking the subway or the bus or walking over sitting in a car. for one, i like that while walking or taking public transit, i still feel like i exist in the world instead of being locked away in an isolated chamber on wheels where i can't interact with the environment or other people until i reach my destination.

the downside of taking public transit, is that my commute is usually way longer than it would be via car. i used to dislike having to take 40 minute train rides, and i'd feel tired and de-energized after sitting for that long. to keep myself occupied on the commute i'd usually put in my noise cancelling earbuds, play music, and then go on my phone and do several things at once until i reached my stop. i'd assault my senses with a barrage of sounds and flashing colors, while responding to emails, sending texts, scrolling social media without really paying attention to what i was looking at for for anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour straight, looking up only to check for my stop. so it was no wonder my mind would feel exhausted after all that.

but even when i deleted social media, i'd still habitually pick up my phone and find something else to look at just to pass the time, sometimes i'd find myself scrolling on depop, or etsy, or even scrolling the venmo feed out of boredom. i simply couldn't tolerate doing nothing. this felt like an impossible task for me, because i thought of the concept of doing nothing as very literally closing my eyes and zoning out and having no thoughts and engaging in no activities, which sounds awful. this wasn't restricted to just public transit, anytime i had to wait in line, or wait for my order, or wait for my friend to arrive, or wait for the train, or wait at the crosswalk i'd immediately open my phone to find ten thousand things i could mindlessly occupy myself with so that i never had to spend a single second of my day being bored or thinking my thoughts or simply doing nothing. i didn't even notice how dependent on doing something at all times i was until i made the switch to using an old blackberry phone for two weeks, where the only thing i could do on it was sms text (and use maps, but only if i was connected to wifi). i found myself habitually reaching for my phone all the time even though there was literally nothing to check on it. my phone was eerily silent most of the time, and yet i kept opening it, craving the buzz of a new notification or just anything to do on it.

gradually though, i got used to opening my phone only if i needed to send a text and then putting it away and existing in my immediate surroundings again. and it felt amazing. my mornings felt more peaceful, because i wasn't overwhelming myself with email and texts and instagram and news just minutes after waking up. i noticed more things about my surroundings because i wasn't looking in a screen while walking. i got up to give my seat to people with mobility aids more often because i actually noticed when they entered the train instead of being too absorbed by scrolling to look up. and i started having more thoughts. it feels silly to admit, but getting off my phone allowed me the space to fully pay attention to my thoughts instead of cutting them off to engage in something else all the time. in general, i've noticed myself being able to sustain attention to things for longer, whether that be noticing the instruments in the song i'm listening to, being able to read for longer and think deeper about what i've just read, being able to remember to do lists and my schedule and shopping lists better. i can also engage in my hobbies again, and they don't feel uninteresting compared to the short term thrill of phone stimulation.

all of this is great, but sometimes i truly do get so bored i start wondering if maybe i should redownload instagram for just a few minutes, or if i should open my phone and refresh my email five times just because i have nothing else to do. i was on the bus recently at evening rush hour, so it was very crowded. there were no seats and i was crammed against other people in a way where if i went in my bag to take out a book or my phone or my ipod, i'd be elbowing the people around me, so i had no choice to stand there and do nothing. a very simple task, really, but it felt so annoying to me. i was frustrated that i couldn't listen to my music and was forced to listen to the cacaphony of the one guy playing music too loudly on a portable speaker, and the old woman next to him watching ai generated fruit reels (the pineapple man was cheating on the cherry woman and they had blueberry children) and several people talking on the phone. i wanted so badly to have something to do to occupy myself with instead of listening to all that.

within a few minutes of having this feeling though, i zoned out on my own, stared out the window and just occupied myself with my thoughts. my mind drifted freely, from noting the street signs, to noticing how the city looked different as we passed through different neighbourhoods, to thinking about the tasks i had for when i got home, to planning what i was going to cook for dinner, and other random things. it just took a few minutes of agonizing boredom, before my mind occupied itself on it's own. and none of this took away my ability to pay attention to the people around me, and where i was. and it felt good, because had i been absorbed in doing something else that whole time, i wouldn't have had the time to remember important tasks, i wouldn't have had the downtime to let my mind unfocus. i got off the bus feeling totally normal instead of feeling tired and frazzled and unable to remember what i needed to do next. i didn't have to take a second to regain my bearings and look around me.

i had this experience again recently while getting a tattoo, i usually have my earbuds in or chitchat with the artist while getting tattooed, but at this session the tattoo artist was too locked in to chat, and i had left my ipod and phone in my bag, so i had to sit and stare at the ceiling while having my hipbone and ribs blasted for three hours. on one hand this was pretty bad because not having a distraction made me more aware of the pain and it felt worse and time seemed to go more slowly. pretty soon though, i got to to a state of alternating between zoning out, listening to the conversations going on around me, and being interrupted by a few seconds of pain. when a different tattoo artist across the shop exclaimed about getting ink splattered on their clothes, i was zoned out but still aware enough to remember i sometimes have a tide pen in my bag and offered it up, where i previously would have had my music cranked up too high to hear much of anything else.

these days i've come to love a long commute, i leave my house and i find myself looking forward to doing nothing for half an hour. it gives me the opportunity to destress, process my thoughts, prepare for the day, remember things, zone out, and notice things about the sidewalk, the streets, the people around me, etc. and i don't exit the subway feeling more exhausted than when i got on.

[analogueing]

everyday carry?

what's in my bag

since offloading most essential daily tasks from my phone i've started carrying a lot more things than i used to in my bag (i still use a smartphone, but only use it for messages, calling and maps).

at a first glance this might seem less efficient, however it's given me the ability to pick and choose what utilities i need for the day or for any particular outing, allowing me to leave certain things at home if i don't need them, as opposed to having one device that does everything and which i then can't leave at home. for example, i don't need to bring my phone with me to the grocery store, just my wallet, keys and a bag. i don't need to bring my camera to work, but i do need the rest of these things. i don't bring most of these things if i'm going to my friend's house, just my keys and ipod for the walk.

i also don't mind carrying a bunch of things; i'm used to having a bag on me at all times, and i feel unprepared going out without a bag, even if all the stuff i need is in my pockets.

so let's unpack my bag:

in my small things pocket, i keep:

my wallet, which contains my cash, cards, id, transit cards, and my business cards

eye drops

chapstick

perfume oil

aquaphor stick

hand cream

waterproof digital camera (this one is so great to toss in my bag because it's weather sealed and shockproof, so i don't need to worry about it being damaged easily)

mp3 player and anc earbuds

inside the main compartment:

book or ereader (currently on chapter 2 of indo-european poetry & myth by ml west)

tiny pocket notebook for to dos or grocery lists

bigger notebook for journalling or writing practing

saunf mithai (a sugar coated fennel seed mouth freshener/candy)

gum

many colored pens

keychain, containing keys, a clip on mini clock thing, an aux to lightning connector, a lighter, a doraemon charm, a usb to lightning to usb-c connector, and a teeny tiny pocketknife

and finally,

pocket calendar

phone (case design by me on photoshop :D)

charging cable for lightning, usb-c and micro usb (i don't actually need this anymore these days because i use my devices so little that i don't run out of batter in the middle of the day, but still helpful to have just in case)

i don't carry all of these things 100% time, but they do live in my bag most days, and having a bunch of things that perform separate utilities is super helpful in case i forget or leave one item at home, i still have others. for example, if my ipod dies i don't also lose my camera with it, if i leave my phone at home i can still plan events and look at my schedule and take photos. as opposed to previously, if my phone died, or in the event that it got stolen or lost or whatever, i didn't just lose my the ability to call and text, but i also lost my music and my camera, and my calendar, and my reminders and to do lists with it. diversifying and analogueing this way has also been so helpful in preventing me from unintentionally multitasking and getting distracted, because my mp3 player can't send me a notification and my calendar can't send me an email etc!!

[analogueing]

i actually need a phone less than i think

what detoxing with a blackberry taught me about smartphone dependence

tldr; we don't need an app to do everything for us, we already have the ability to do everything we need

about a month ago, i received a refurbished blackberry classic q20 in the mail. for quite a while prior, i had been weaning myself off of social media and deleting unnecessary apps off my phone, keeping only apps that couldn't be replaced with a notebook (calendar, reminders), another device (alarm, camera, music), or be accessed via computer website (instagram, memrise, email). it wasn't working as well as i wanted though. i still found myself redownloading and deleting social media apps just to check messages and then would end up scrolling for longer than i intended to, or just picking it up constantly to check apps that weren't there anymore and then just staring at the home screen waiting for notifications. it was ridiculous, really, how often i picked up my phone completely unprompted without having any reason behind checking it. the action was so ingrained in me. bored? open phone. waiting in line? open phone. on the subway? open phone. just woke up? open phone.

so i bought a blackberry about it. in researching different "dumb" phones and feature phones, the blackberry appealed to me the most because of the qwerty keyboard, and the fact that the blackberry servers are down, so there is literally no functional app store on it. i spent a lot of time and effort trying to set up the phone and make it work. i realized i'd have to start it up in a very specific way to bypass the blackberry id setup which no longer works because the blackberry servers don't exist anymore. then i had to spend hours finding and sideloading .apk files that were compatible with both its android runtime of 4.3 and the square screen aspect ratio in order to download essential apps like maps, messaging, email, etc. i sideloaded magic earth, google maps , kiwi browser, signal, telegram, whatsapp, yahoo weather, and set up email forwarding to the blackberry hub. out of all of these, none of the apps that required up to date security worked, which meant no signal or telegram. google maps worked for live location but not for transit directions, and magic earth worked for transit direction but not live location. the browser worked for simple google searches but most websites got too confused by the square aspect ratio and loaded with all the text and images stacked on top of each other. and all of these apps only worked when i was connected to wifi. that was fine, i reasoned with myself. after all, a big motivation behind switching to a dumbphone was that i wanted to relearn how to live with inconvenience and rely on myself rather than a device again. when i thought about it, i realized i really don't need to have cell signal when i'm underground in the subway, and if i was trying to use my phone less, the software restrictions would only help me to stick to it. so i gave it a good committed shot. i changed my phone carrier and ordered a new sim that would hopefully work with it, and it worked only partially. i had taken "4g phone" at face value, and not realized that the blackberry classic is in fact a 3g phone that is only capable of using 4g for mobile data. in practicality, this meant i was only able to text via sms or mms, but not make calls, because 3g is shut down in the usa. additionally, i couldn't access my group texts because of the lack of rcs capability, and i had to rely on my laptop for signal and whatsapp. this was all still fine because i don't really need those apps in my pocket 24/7, and with most apps in general, i'm more than okay with waiting until i get home to check them.

all this being said, it would have been impossible to make this switch without some important changes in the ways i rely on my phone. i got an ipod for my music, a paper calendar, a notebook for reminders and shopping lists, started carrying my wallet everywhere instead of relying on nfc payments, and got into the habit of looking up directions to new places the day before and noting them down, so i wouldn't be lost without 24/7 access to public transit directions.

it definitely was not an easy or convenient experience, but i loved using a blackberry so much. i loved the tactile typing experience, i loved the weight of it in my hand, i loved how small and easy to use one-handedly it was compared to the huge glass slabs all smartphones are built like now, i loved the square screen that worked for everything i needed and nothing i didn't need, i loved the camera that didn't do any of the iphone photo processing that makes images super fine and grainy. mostly though, i loved how it made everything quieter. while not being able to receive calls or use a million messaging apps was not ideal for communicating with friends who live abroad or extended family, having only one way to be reachable while i was outside meant that if my phone did buzz, i knew it was an actual message that was worth my attention and response, and not a random app notification, not a trigger to scroll somewhere, not a spam email, not a reminder, or an alert. it allowed me to compartmentalize communication. i could only check emails when i got home and decided to open my laptop, and not being able to receive group texts meant i ended up talking to people one on one more often, rather than my usual habit of spamming group chats with screenshots and emojis. my mind felt clear enough to give thoughtful replies to people because i wasn't overwhelmed with a thousand apps, and only had one messaging platform to pay attention to.

there were some aspects of it that were annoying, such as having to be connected to wifi to see maps directions, hence not being able to use my phone to guide my while i was outside. it took me more time to get places because i had to relearn how to rely on street signs and my common sense to navigate while walking places, and dealing with transit delays and changes that meant my route might be different from what i looked up at home the night before was also a new challenge. but overall, apart from giving me a momentary sense of panic, it didn't actually make my life harder. i still got places successfully, i still was able to communicate when i needed, and if my phone died, i was still able to pay for things, listen to my music, check my calendar, check my to do list, and get home.

it was scary to have a phone that i couldn't rely on for everything, but also freeing to realize how little i actually need a phone for. when it came down to it, i could still do everything i needed to in life except call and text without a phone, and the things i do need an app for are not as essential to my life as i thought. something about the form factor of the blackberry is also less addicting and attention demanding than a smartphone. initially, i would find myself habitually picking it up and checking it despite knowing there was literally no app to check, but two weeks later, i find that i no longer crave social media, i no longer feel drawn to check for notifications, i no longer have the desire to scroll. i recently tested this by reactivating my instagram account, and apart from checking my messages, i didn't end up scrolling the feed or watching reels, which is miles apart from how i used to get sucked in to social media.

the blackberry ended up being only a two week long experiment to rewire my brain and reset my relationship to and dependence upon phones, and the reason i switched back to a smartphone is because i do need a device that can actually make calls. the blackberry being a little too dumb of a phone was incredibly helpful in snapping myself out of smartphone dependence, but it's just not something that can work for me long-term. which i feel sad about! i miss the physical keyboard, and there is a part of me that liked the attention and curiosity i got whenever i pulled my blackberry out of my bag. i'm still keeping it around to use as a detox phone if i start to feel myself getting pulled back into the phone addiction. something i didn't expect though, is how uncomfortable it feels to use my huge glass slab after getting used to a tiny square screen with a physical keyboard. i've come to resent how i need to use both hands to use my phone, i find myself making more typos, i get irritated by the latest ios liquid glass design that somehow doesn't add any useful features to the os and instead just makes the software design uglier. all these things that once made it so easy to get sucked into my phone, the giant screen, the design animations, the bright colors, the notification center, all make me want to use my phone less nowadays because of how irritating i find them now. my screen time used to average 5-9+ hours a day, and now it's around half an hour a day. my mind feels more clear, my attention span has gone up, i can read for greater lengths of time, i can remember tasks and reminders and shopping lists more easily, my eyes don't feel as strained anymore, i find it easier to socialise in person, and i've picked up my hobbies again.

the blackberry q20 next to my iphone 12 case for scale, and magic earth transit directions on it

separate from my own phone usage, detoxing has made me realize just how bad most other people's smartphone dependencies are as well. i have a rule for myself to not use my phone while on the subway, and instead i just listen to music on my ipod or read or people watch or take a nap. on a superficial level, i've gotten really interested in observing people's outfits and bags and shoes, and i think about where they must be coming from or going. on a more important level though, not looking at my screen while on public transit makes me more aware of my surroundings; if someone with a mobility aid comes into the train, i actually notice and can stand up to give my seat if i'm sitting, and the amount of times i've stood to give up my seat recently has made me wonder how many times i've been too sucked into my screen to notice when someone needs to sit more than me, and it also makes me very aware of how almost no one else on the train looks up at each other anymore. looking at others on the subway or when i'm in line or walking down the street makes me feel like i've opened my eyes to a dystopia of some sort because everyone is on their phones all the time, and everyone relies on their phones for everything.

and then there's the need for convenience. when it comes to boycotting or discontinuing use of certain social media platforms, delivery apps, or ecommerce apps because of ethical concerns or sketchy investment ties, people hang on to them because they seem to think these things are necessary. and most of the reasons people continue to use these apps are not tied to an actual material need for them, rather a desire for convenience. people have been getting invited to houseparties and events before the app dedicated to this was created, but now that it exists, the convenience of having rsvps in one place overshadows the fact that it is still perfectly possible and very easy to invite people to an event without it. i don't lose the ability to share photos without social media, i can still invite my friends over to show them my photo album, and gain a more memorable experience out of it, or text people directly if they don't live near me, but we've gotten so used to depending upon photo sharing apps for so much more than just sharing photos, that it's now so difficult to conceive of living without them. it's still very easy and convenient to walk or drive to a restaurant to order take out, or just sit there and eat it by yourself, but it's more convenient still to use the food delivery app. it's perfectly possible to buy random items for cheap at a dollar store or for regular price at regular local stores but the convenience rather than the actual necessity keeps people attached to all the fast ecommerce apps and websites.

we don't need an app to do everything for us, we already have the ability to do everything we need and want and more, and stripping myself of the ability to utilise these conveniences, if only for a short while has opened my eyes to how truly unnecessary these apps are, and i feel so much more confident of my ability to rely on myself to get around and do things for myself and be aware of my surroundings because of it.

[analogueing]

'hindi nationalism', sanskrit, persian, avestan, and the interconnectedness of it all

just finished reading alok rai's 'hindi nationalism' and it's so interesting to think about how the the making of modern hindi was and is a de-persianizing process when you consider the actual history of how modern standardized hindi and it's predecessors such as hindavi/hindustani, and even vedic sanskrit itself, are so inter-related to the predecessors of persian, ie. avestan. avestan is the earliest language in the iranian branch, and vedic sanskrit is the earliest language in the indo-aryan brand of the indo-european langauge family, and if you look at the vocabularies of vedic sanskrit and avestan mythology, even superficially, there's so many similarities that link them as two languages that diverged from one. from modern cognates in persian / hindi such as namaz / namaste, to older words such as avestan xšaθra / sanskrit kṣatra (region/kingdom/dominion) , avestan raθa / sanskrit rátha (chariot), avestan ahura / sanskrit asura, avestan daēwa / sanskrit deva, and so many more. there's so much documented proof that modern hindi and modern farsi come from language and mythology lineages that used to be one and then diverged, and yet there's such a concentrated effort to purge as much persian vocabulary from hindi to make standardized hindi more sanskritized, and therefore more pure and more hindu in the eyes of hindu nationalists who view language as a tool of their agenda. but really you can take away as many later persian loanwords from hindi as possible, and a majority of the hindi language will still be traceably connected to persian and its ancestors, simply because vedic sanskrit itself was so traceably linked to avestan. it's a pointless task really.

[analogueing]

"u do have time to do all those things, u just spend all ur time on ur phone" is not a sentiment i fully understood until i deleted instagram for *one* day and my stimulation deprived brain needed something to occupy itself with so bad that i downloaded a tajiki alphabet game and learned to read tajiki in the cyrillic script in one day. i don't even speak tajiki. or understand it. or know anyone who speaks it. but i guess i can read the letters now.

[analogueing]

wait i left my calendar at home can i text u about plans when i get back

getting my calendar, reminders, and notes off my phone and onto paper

so far on this blog i've talked about decentering my phone in the sense of diversifying my devices, ie. getting an offline mp3 player and a digital camera instead of relying on my phone to do all those things. this one though involves actual analogueing and not just another device. for the year of 2026 i decided to get myself a calendar notebook to write down my schedule and carry with me. i got a doraemon calendar because a plain calendar is scary to me like ~oh look the unwelcoming book of Tasks and things to Do~

i haven't yet deleted the calendar app of my phone so my subheading is a bit of a lie. i'm maintaining both a phone and paper calendar at the moment, and trying to get used to referring to a physical object that i have to find and flip through and write in, while also not carrying my phone in my pocket at all times so that it's not the most immediately accessible object to refer to.

my reason for this switch is mostly just trying to get as many utilities off my phone so i'm not relying on it for every single thing i need to get things done and get through my days. there are also some specific things that bother me about the phone calendar though.

i can't view the full week in one tiny screen!!!!! i can only see two days in detailed view at once unless i flip to horizontal orientation, and then i can see the whole screen, but then the keyboard takes up two thirds of the space when editing or adding events. if only there was a calendar that didn't need a keyboard and didn't need to be scrolled through.....

it keeps events forever and takes up a bunch of storage space. i don't know if this is a setting that can be changed, but i don't want to investigate this when i can just use a yearly calendar that can be thrown out after it's full.

it has so many fields for details that i end up adding details i don't even really need like the address of the place i'm going and travel time and alerts, and i don't even need those things. while writing in a calendar notebook, i've noticed i just write in my schedule with phrases like "work 11-8" or "open mic 6" and i just know what i mean. i don't actually need to write down the address or how long it'll take to get there, or program a first and second alert or assign what specific color coded calendar associated with what email account to add it to. sure i could color code my paper calendar, but doing it with colored muji gel pens is so much easier and faster and more fun.

i actually know off the top of my head what date it is. this one feels a little silly to type out but i used to have to look at my phone to remember the date because it would just tell me, or the calendar would automatically highlight it. now i'm forced to remember to cross out each day and therefore remember the date because paper can't automatically stick a red dot on today's slot for me.

and best of all, it allows me to compartmentalize. my fear with getting a calendar that's not on my phone was what if i forget it at home or i leave it in the wrong bag, or my bag doesn't have room for it or i have to go somewhere and don't want to carry a bag and i don't have my calendar on me at all times in case i need to plan a hangout or look at my work schedule?? but not being able to look at my calendar (any many other things) all the time is kind of the point of this. i don't really need to have everything ready to refer to at all times. i usually do carry my calendar with me, but i have the option of leaving it at home and therefore assigning planning as a Home Task. my manager wants to switch my shift last minute? ok they can wait until i get home and have a chance to properly check if that works for me before i confirm. my friends want to plan a hangout? let me wait until i can give that my full attention before replying instead of on the fly in the subway or while walking somewhere.

it's not even just the calendar, i'm noticing that with decentering my phone in general, the tasks that i'm forced to wait until i get home to do end up being tasks that i'm able to give more full attention to and actually complete. i can't do random things on my phone anymore, so waiting until i get to my calendar or my laptop or my little notebook of reminders means i get to wait until i'm not doing anything else on the side. i plan things when i've decided to plan things, i complete errands when i've consulted my notebook and intentionally decided and made time to do them, instead of being prompted by my phone at random times.

when it comes to keeping a notebook for my tasks and to do lists, i've noticed that i actually end up completing and crossing things off more often than with the phone reminders app. on the app, if the day ended and i hadn't completed an errand, i could simply edit the date on it so i didn't see it on my today's to-do. an incomplete task on an empty notebook will keep staring at me though. i can't cross it out until i've actually done it. and there's something about the physical presence of a notebook that prompts me to open it more often, whereas i never opened the reminders app unless it notified me. there was just always something more fun, more interesting to do on my phone than look at all the unchecked reminders in red. even when i did open the reminders app, i'd inevitably get swept away by a notification from a different app, or start opening my social media on autopilot and forget about my to do list.

finally, i feel more satisfied and accomplished after looking at my list of crossed out items. i get a nice little visual of all the things i completed in a day instead of having the checklist vanish as if it never existed. i get to look back and remind myself that yes i was productive today and that just feels better.

[analogueing]

it might take me months to delete every screenshot i've ever taken

decentering the phone camera

a photo of mehendi i did on my hand, taken on my sony cybershot.

the year i was born, my parents bought a sony cybershot point and shoot camera and handycam camcorder. these were utilized to record clips of baby me toddling around, mumbling, harassing my younger sister, singing in primary school concerts, dancing to bollywood music videos playing on the box tv, standing awkwardly in front of various landmarks during vacations. video taken on this camcorder is the only proof that exists of me ever speaking my parents' native languages of tulu and konkani, both of which i didn't retain after learning english in preschool.

these photos and clips were utilized in a variety of ways. we had physical photo albums filled with both older yellowing, faded images of my parents from the first years of their marriage before i was born, with various aunts and uncles and cousins that were taken with slightly shittier cameras, as well as newer shots that featured me and my sister as babies in high saturation. we also had a digital photo frame on the ledge that separated the kitchen and living room that cycled between whatever photos were contained within the usb stick plugged into it.

their most time-consuming utilization of the point & shoot and camcorder involved a now-obsolete software: microsoft moviemaker. my mother would compile these camcorder files into long form video collages and slideshows complete with powerpoint-esque transitions in between each video clip framing comic sans text proclaiming what year or event the following clips were from before fading out or zigzagging into the media. the end results were lengthy videos that they'd occasionally play on the tv as a fun family time activity to show us what we were like as kids, or simply to provide visual evidence of me manhandling my sister when she was a baby. the making of these slideshows, films really, was no small or easy task. in addition to spending weeks putting each one together, it was also a highly involved process that required using specific cables to connect the camcorder to a large and heavy laptop (an hp pavilion i think??), name and save the files, upload them to moviemaker in the right order, decide where to add transitions, how many date ranges or events to group together and then one by one add the transitions, text, etc.

 barely twenty years ago, the act of capturing, preserving, and displaying photo and video was a multi-step process that could take weeks. now i can pull my phone out of my bag, open the camera, snap a photo, and share it to instagram directly from the photos app all in under five minutes. if i want a video collage of my year, i can just get the photos app to automatically mash together every video i''ve ever taken and add some shitty background music with the press of one button.

it's just so much easier, so much more convenient to take photos on my phone, it's just so easy to rack up hundreds and thousands of selfie duplicates, screenshots, overly filtered instagram story posts, more screenshots, etc etc etc over the course of one's smartphone usage lifetime. 

this is why i decided why one of the projects i would assign myself to stave off boredom during my two week top surgery recovery period was to go through my cloud gallery containing every photo i've ever taken since 2019 and delete all my screenshots. 

actually, delete screenshots and selfies. 

actually, delete most photos of myself, because when do i ever go back and look at all my fit checks?? 

actually when do i go back and look at any of these photos? 

i realized i never do. i take mundane meaningless photos constantly, of memes, of my face, of my clothes, of my window, my roommate's cat, my ceiling, my forehead, the stupid spelling mistakes people make at my job, my material possessions, and i never do anything with the photos other than post them once. i never go back and look at them, i've never put any of them in an album or tacked them up on my wall, and when i really thought about it, i realized very few of my photos were actually worth putting in an album, or keeping in general. why did i have so much photo clutter?

a sampler of some of the screenshots sitting in my gallery

going through my cloud storage and looking back at all my photos was very uncomfortable for me. i was confronted with an endless scroll of screenshots of texts from people that weren't in my life anymore, a quite embarrassing number of selfies from years ago, more screenshots of instagram memes, and so many photos that i not only didn't want sitting around in my gallery, but were also just uncomfortable or irritating or sad to look at. somewhere in the ease and convenience of taking photos, and in the centering of posting about every little thing, i lost the intentionality of taking photos. twenty years ago, my parents pulled out the camcorder to take a video of themselves speaking to small child me in kannada to ask if i liked the dupatta i was wearing to go to the temple, a pretty mundane topic, but they then put in the time and effort of editing this video into a longer collage organized by date of little clips of me at that age. whatever they took photos and videos of was actually meaningful, and there was an intent to do something more long lasting with the media, whether that be a video collage, or a physical photo album.

when i turned 18, i dug out the sony cybershot, the handycam, and all our other old or obsolete electronics to determine which ones i could take with me when i moved out, and which ones to give to e-waste. i couldn't log into the ipod touch, i had no use for an ipad, and the handycam was unrevivable, but i was pleasantly surprised to find that the sony cybershot, after lying dormant for my entire adolescence, charged up and functioned just as it did ten years ago and had a photo quality that far surpassed any smartphone camera i'd ever used. it's been in my possession ever since. recently, i got myself another digital camera, the olympus stylus tough. eventually i hope to have this digital camera replace my reliance on the phone camera, and so far it's been a great alternative. my sony cybershot still works perfectly, but it can never replace my phone camera because i'm too scared of it getting damaged to keep it in my bag and take it everywhere. the stylus tough on the other hand, is waterproof, shockproof, and has a screen that flips out 180 degrees so one can take a "front camera" photo. it has a wide angle lens, similarly to the iphone, but the quality is so much better. it doesn't do any of the automatic image processing that makes iphone photos turn out flat and grainy and lacking in color vibrancy. having to pull out a separate device specifically meant only for taking photos really forces me to be intentional about what i take photos of. i'm not going to fish around in my bag to take a photo of someone's misspelling of shimmer as shimer to send to my friends for a quick laugh . in the one month i've owned the olympus, i've used it mostly to take weekly photos of my post-op chest so i have healing progress photos to refer back to.

to give myself something to do with my photos, i got a photo album and a mini inkjet photo printer from ebay. my intent with all this has been to slow down my instinct to snap everything and instead utilize the minute it takes me to take my camera out of the case and switch it on to decide if i really want to capture whatever it is, if this is something i might actually want to look back on, if this is a photo i would print and display in an album. if not, i let it go. or i try to. i no longer use instagram that much, so i rarely end up taking the kinds of photos that i would take just to post once and forget about. i no longer take photos of my earring stacks or my outfits because those photos were never for me to look at, they were always for others in my phone to see and comment on for 24 hours. in the past month, i've noticed i've only taken a photo of myself when i got my hair cut so i could have an updated profile image.

getting a digital camera has kind of been to photos what an ipod has been for my music library. i've rediscovered the joy of capturing a photo, of making everyone hold a pose for a minute longer than they're used to, of how well the colors pop, of the sound of a shutter, of getting to choose what settings to apply for each moment. taking a photo now feels like an act, rather than a task, and i get excited to take a few minutes to pull out my camera, adjust the dials, take some time to frame, and snap.

a child's croc abandoned by a stream, and my father looking at a waterfall, taken on the cybershot.

[analogueing]

ipodposting

arguments for switching to an mp3 player

a month ago i bought a refurbished pink ipod mini from ebay. it came to me all the way from china and arrived in my mailbox a few days before my top surgery date. the timing was perfect; i had just enough time to load up a few songs for my surgery waiting room playlist to ease my nerves beforehand, and then i would have two weeks while i was at home recovering to get on my ytmp3 grind and download the rest of my 2000+ songs one by one. by the time i was back at work i could fully make the switch away from streaming and solely use the ipod to listen to music on my commute, during my lunch break, at the gym, etc.

and i love it so much. it's not only helped me use my phone for one less thing and thereby preserve it's battery life for longer, it's also changed the way i listen to music, increased the level of attention and appreciation i have for the music that i listen and forced me to be way more intentional about what i listen to and what i choose to download. at this point i've stopped using streaming entirely and despite all the seeming inconveniences of downloading and editing the metadata and organizing songs one by one and then waiting for them to sync to the mp3 player, i don't have any desire to go back to streaming.

my immediate reasons for buying an ipod were mostly frustrations with streaming and having to *be on my phone* to listen. the place i listen to music most often is on my subway commutes, and that's also where cell signal is weakest. i had set up my music library so that every song i added to a playlist was automatically downloaded, but i'd notice that even songs that were marked as downloaded would still lag or grey out if the signal was bad, and sometimes songs that i clearly remembered downloading would somehow be marked as undownloaded. much i later realized i had unknowingly had a setting applied that automatically offloaded downloaded music to optimize storage space. i also listen to a lot of regional indian and pakistani music and some of it frequently gets taken off streaming sites, i'm assuming due to licensing issues, but this unreliability frustrated me. why was i subscribing to a paid service (ok it's really a family plan my parents pay for so i get it for free but still) that promised unlimited access to all the world's music, if i couldn't even rely on a handful of songs to remain accessible offline?

the other big issue with streaming for me was that it required my phone to be actively on. and because i was so habituated to multitasking and scrolling, i very rarely simply listened without doing anything else. a text tone cutting through the song would steal my attention for the next few minutes, or i'd passively have songs i didn't particularly even enjoy anymore playing in the background while i mindlessly cycled back and forth between a few different apps. or i'd be actively editing my playlists instead of enjoying what was currently playing. by the time i got off my phone i wouldn't remember what i just listened to and i wouldn't have done anything particularly meaningful on the other apps on my phone either. but it was a habit i couldn't break. because having my music library on my phone necessitated having my phone turned on, i couldn't pull myself away from it. there was always something else on there calling for my attention and time.

the final argument in favor of streaming that i considered when making the switch to an mp3 player was that streaming was supposed to make it infinitely easier to discover new music. how was i supposed to find new artists if not for the apple music curated friends mix or chill mix or get up mix or new music mix or the personalized radio stations? i never truly listened to or particularly liked the music suggested to me in all these playlists and stations, but the fear of missing out on future great music without having to to the active work of looking for artists and albums i enjoy myself was enough to keep me on streaming for longer than i wanted to be.

when i said that switching to an ipod completely changed how i listen to music, i wasn't exaggerating. to those unfamiliar with the ipod mini, here's a photo:

it's smaller than a phone, has a clickwheel to scroll through the menus and change volume with five tactile buttons to select, play/pause, forward, and rewind, and most importantly: a simple black and grey pixel screen with an backlight option that's incapable of displaying color, let alone album artwork or autoscrolling lyrics or clips from music videos or ads. here's a lock switch at the top to disable the clickwheel so that the buttons don't get clicked in your pocket. it doesn't have a speaker or wifi or bluetooth capabilities. it's also got 64gb of storage and you can get models with up to 120gb which is more than enough for me.

one of the biggest changes i've noticed is that i pay so much more attention to my music now; i listen more closely to the vocals, the instruments used, the melodies, how the volume changes throughout the song, i notice new things about songs i've listened to so many times before that i never noticed before because i was always doing something else on the side. the extreme simplicity of the hardware is so refreshing to use. it doesn't need to have a lot going on precisely because it's not made to be looked at. the display shows only what you need and the backlight can be turned off when not in use, or permanently. i don't find myself scrolling on the side because there's no capability to do that on the device.

i had the lucky timing to have two weeks off from work to focus on pirating all my songs and editing the metadata and reorganizing everything into the correct playlists and genres, and while i find the repetitive organizational aspect of this enjoyable and a good low brainpower surgery recovery activity, i was also only going to put in the work of searching up the song, downloading it, editing the song title, adding the album and artist names, genre, year of release, etc for songs that i actively wanted to listen to. i had about two thousand songs in my apple music library and i cut this number down to ~1200 when downloading things to my ipod because there were so many songs in there that i either didn't like enough, only listened to once or twice, only added because they were popular, or just weren't to my taste anymore. when i was using streaming i could never put my entire library on shuffle because i'd skip a majority of the songs that came on. nowadays, i can put my entire ipod library on shuffle, and when i skip songs it's because i'm not in the mood for that particular tempo or genre at the moment, not because i just don't enjoy the song in general.

there's also a delayed gratification in this process because in order to add new music, i have to listen to it on youtube or soundcloud first to decide if i like it enough to download, then wait until i have a chunk of free time at home to open my laptop and sit down and download the file, add the metadata, and then plug in my my ipod and wait for it to sync up. i can't add new music right when it's released, and this makes me more excited to listen to new albums for the first time. i've found myself rediscovering the small joys of intentionally listening to music as an activity on it's own that i haven't experienced since i was a teenager.

and then there's the audio quality improvements: there's never a lag or latency, the audio sounds the same regardless of if i'm at home or in the subway or in a basement. it has the same basic sound check and equalizer features that the iphone has. if the quality ever sounds off, it's because the file i downloaded was funky, not because of a weak cell signal or shaky bluetooth connection. it only works with wired earphones so i never have to worry about my earbuds running out of battery mid commute and then having to deal with subway screech noises for half an hour.

the wired earbuds also force me to listen to music less often. while this might sound like a contradiction, it makes me more excited to listen to music when i do get to plug in. when i used bluetooth earbuds, i'd forget to take them out when i got home, and end up passively listening to stuff in the background while going about my tasks. i ended up in a state of constant noise for hours after i got home, and when you listen to music nonstop just to have some stimulation, it really becomes just noise. but this was also bad for me in a similar way to nonstop scrolling. the continued presence of some sort of external stimulation going on meant that i didn't have downtime to actually think my thoughts fully. this combined with my nonstop scrolling and content consuming meant that all my thoughts would come rushing back to me at once when it was time to go to bed, and i couldn't sleep because i was overwhelmed with all the reminders, observations, tasks, and mental notes i'd gathered through the day and not processed fully in the moment. an huge effect of disconnecting in various ways that i've experienced so far is that i sleep deeper and better now, and getting an ipod has been part of allowing that to occur because it compartmentalizes music and makes it not just another form of endless content to consume, but an intentional activity.

sure, the ipod is an inconvenience compared to streaming. it takes more time and effort to load up songs to the device, you can't delete songs or edit playlists on the device itself, you have to do it separately on your laptop and then sync it up. it takes a few minutes to sync. it's an extra gadget to carry around. you cant look at lyrics or album art. but these small inconveniences make the experience of listening to music so much more intentional, enjoyable, and just better. and i don't have to be on my phone for any of it. i truly have no regrets in making the switch, i don't miss streaming at all and i don't see myself going back anytime soon.

what i'm listening to most recently; abdullah siddiqui's album bad music. i'm not very inclined to sad music, but the electropop production is so different from the usual droopy mopey sad music music i've heard in the past