Family Vacation, Brain Rot, Olive Update
Kimberly and I spent last week on a family vacation in West Virginia. For Kimberly, that means lots of board games with her mom, sister, nephew, and brother-in-law. I didn’t grow up in a game-playing home, and so I almost never take part. That’s a good thing, because I’m both very competitive and not nearly as good at board games as her side of the family is. (I can hold my own at Trivial Pursuit, but in any sort of word or puzzle games, they’d wipe the floor with me.)
For me, vacation is all about reading – at least it used to be. This year, as always, I packed a pile of books for the trip so that, whatever mood I happened to find myself in, there’d be a book for me. I somehow ended up not reading any of them, instead downloading a (nearly) free copy of the collected works of Walter Pater.
Pater was an English literary critic and essayist who lived in the mid to late 19th century. I’ve got a thing for mid to late 19th-century writers, and I expected I’d enjoy Pater’s philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean, which was the reason I downloaded the collection. But reading it was a lot tougher than I expected.
There was a time when I could, if not breeze through, at least move along at a decent clip through even fairly dense philosophical texts. I’ve not just read, but enjoyed (and, I think, more or less understood) Arthur Schopenhauer’s multi-volume The World as Will and Representation, William James’ essays, and a whole lot of Nietzsche. (On re-reading, that sounds like a humble-brag, which has compelled me to add that I’ve also read Spinoza, Plotinus, and Wittgenstein, and ended up mostly confused. Wait – was that an even humbler humble brag? Probably. I give up.)
Most of that reading happened before my brain rot set in. (Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2024.) Until this vacation, I had no idea how much my regular phone use had degraded my ability to focus for an extended period of time. I repeatedly found myself pulled away from one of Pater’s page-long paragraphs to check Google News, or YouTube, or my email for a quick hit of something new and shiny. I’m still plugging away at the book, but the experience has made me realize that I’m spending much more time scrolling down that tiny phone screen than is good for me.
I’m trying to cut back – really, I am. For the last two days, I haven’t even looked at my phone in the bathroom, which for me is a major achievement (yes, I know how sad that is). My next goal is to sit and read for 30 minutes without stopping to look at my phone. I sometimes pretend that I’m using my phone only to enhance my reading experience by getting more context on what I’m reading, but what begins as a quick query to GPT about what Pater might have meant by a certain phrase becomes a twenty-minute long discursion into whether the Steelers should have signed Aaron Rodgers as their quarterback for the upcoming season. (Short answer – no, they most definitely shouldn’t have.)
I was slightly reluctant to go on a vacation in the first place because of Olive. We left for West Virginia a week after she’d been attacked by another dog in the park. The vet assured us Olive was doing fine, and since we were just a six-hour drive away, I was able to put my qualms aside. Aside from some GI issues and lethargy, which our vet thinks might have been due to the stress of our leaving (because I needed something else to feel guilty about), Olive was just fine. Kimberly and I removed her stitches yesterday, and now Olive can once again do the thing she loves the most: go on long hikes in the woods with Kimberly and Gus (I tag along occasionally).
Entertaining, as always.