Lexical Gap No. 59: Schifanoia

January 2025 summary

In a hotel in New Orleans

It’s been A Year, and it’s only the end of January.

I spent the first few days of the new year trying my best to get back home to North Carolina after visiting my family in southern California for the holidays. An unusual fog had descended, preventing planes from landing, which effectively threw my entire itinerary out the window. The thing about living in a relatively small city in the south is that aren’t a lot of flights in or out of the local airport.

A few days later, fires erupted in Los Angeles.¹

As far as previews go, the first few weeks of the new year were spectacularly terrible. A terrorist attack in New Orleans, a horrific plane crash in South Korea, the most destructive fires in Los Angeles history, our weird return to imperialism, the banning then subsequent unbanning of TikTok within 24 hours in the baldest, most transparent political stunt by the incoming admin, our immediate head dive into fascist authoritarianism, etc. If this is what the rest of 2025 is going to look like, I would like to unsubscribe now, please.

Despite this, I have been quietly, privately, cultivating my life offline, and I find it flourishing in small, tangible ways that are untouched by the horrific events in the greater world. Bear and I visited New Orleans with a potential eye toward moving there. My area of North Carolina received measurable snowfall for the first time in years, and Castor and Pollux got to frolic in the flakes for the first time in their doggie lives. I made 떡국 for 설날.² I started reconnecting to my creativity after a long fallow period. I am reading more. This is a privilege, I know, but I am making the effort to acknowledge the little joys in my life, lest I succumb to a nihilistic despair.

Whatever else the rest of 2025 holds, we keep surviving until we can thrive.

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Who are you? Who are you? Hello? I’m sorry, I got ahead of myself. Hi there, you on the table. I wonder if you’d mind taking a brief survey.

Sorry for the Severance reference, but I was wondering if you lovely people could do me a favor and help me get to know y'all a little bit better. The internet is an incredibly difficult place to get to know people these days, and I am forever trying to find better ways of connecting to people. Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? What do you like? How can we better get to know each other?

I won't do anything with your responses, I promise. No selling or sharing your data; it's just for me and me alone. I'm a knowledge dragon sitting on their hoard of knowledge and will protect it with fire, if necessary.

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In this issue

1. JJ’s magical world
2. Lexical gap
3. The Morning Realms Dispatch
4. This creative life
5. In case you missed it
6. What I’m reading
7. What I’m watching
8. Other things of note

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lexical gap: schifanoia 🧩

Found this in a book I was reading and it’s too perfect.

I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, but I did tell myself I would make a concerted effort to read more physical books in 2025 and it’s already paid dividends. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen is a delightful look at how the notebook as we knew it came to be, and as a consummate diarist myself, it was incredibly informative, inspirational, and also just plain delightful. To wit: my discovery of the word schifanoia, which is apparently the 15th century Italian equivalent of the gift book, filled with puzzles, quotes, and other errata the writer thought the recipient would find entertaining.

Also as someone with ADHD, my entire life is in search of mental schifanoia.

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the morning realms dispatch 🌞

First pass pages for YULI were turned in before the end of 2024, which means that *gulp* ARCs are starting to trickle out to early readers. I stay away from reviews, but this it’s at this stage I find it the hardest to resist looking because it’s the first time people are getting to read the story that had been living in my head for years (yes, YEARS). I hope people love my sapphic northern princess and her best-friends-turned-rivals-to-lovers romance as much as I do! And if you do happen to read it, I would appreciate it if you left a review and told your friends about it.

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this creative life ✨

As I noted in my intentions and affirmations for 2025, I made the conscious choice to purge myself of social media brain rot³ and I am both surprised and unsurprised by how much of an immediate effect this had on my creativity and, yes, productivity.⁴ I’ll be turning 40 this year and although I lived in a time before the internet, it wasn’t until I started returning to analog life that I actually remembered what that was like. All of a sudden there is…space? in my brain? Thoughts are filling the void social media left in its wake and I feel rejuvenated, not bored. What a relief.

I’ve also returned to journaling in earnest, as well as reading more physical books.⁵ There’s something about the tactile nature of handling paper that helps me retain information with my actual brain, instead of off-loading reminders and quotes into a digital one. I’m not only more focused, I am paying better attention. I’m getting better at recognizing brain rot more quickly, prompting me to exit out of a social media app and turn to my journal. I have also made a concerted effort to opt out of the algorithm wherever possible, browsing my actual “Following” tabs instead of letting my attention graze the “For You” pages. It’s amazing how quickly you catch up on all the interesting things when a bunch of code doesn’t keep supplying you with new things to look at. Unfortunately, the side effect of this is I’ve developed an aversion to short form video. Takes too long. I’m sorry; I just skip them now.⁶

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in case you missed it 🦭

Fulfillment

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what i’m reading 📖

• Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chavka. I wouldn’t say there are a ton of revelations or new insight in this book that I haven’t arrived at myself, but it definitely reinforced the rightness of my decision to leave the algorithmic rat race.

• “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin. I read this essay back in college, but in the current climate, I found myself thinking about it again. I don’t wholly agree with all of his theses, but these days I think about the devaluing of art into content or commodity, and can’t help but return to his idea of how this feeds into fascism.

• Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg. This was…fine. A lot of the things outlined in this book were things I already instinctively do when communicating, although it did drive home just why Discourse™ online goes so bad.

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what i’m watching 📺

• Severance: Season Two. IT’S BEEN 84 YEARS. No lie, this show’s return has probably been my most anticipated since it first aired. Waiting for it week by week is going to be torturous, but I’M SO GLAD IT’S BACK.

• 오징어 게임 (Squid Game): Season Two. I admit I was skeptical about this, especially as I thought the first season was a great send-up of capitalism. To my pleasant surprise, this season is about solidarity under capitalism, a theme that feels more necessary than ever. I dislike allegory and at times Squid Game toes dangerously close to that line, but the characters keep the show elevated and me emotionally engaged.

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other things of note 💾

• Bond, Lewis Michael and Bond, Luisa Liz. “Nothing is punk anymore.” The Cinema Cartography. YouTube, Jan 2025.

• Embers, Ashley. “How algorithms are erasing culture & ruining our lives.” Ashley Embers. YouTube, Dec 2024.

• Thompson, Derek. “The Anti-Social Century.” The Atlantic, Jan 2025.

• Shapiro, Lila. “There is no safe word.” The Vulture, Jan 2025.

• Greenberg, Garth. “A Moral Education.” The Yale Review.

• Petersen, Anne Helen. “The Social Media Sea Change.” Culture Study. Substack, Jan 2025.

• Wright, Kelton. “An inconvenient life - #149.” Shangrilogs. Substack, Jan 2025.

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사랑해,

1. My parents let me know that my childhood home in Altadena was lost in the Eaton Fires. Thankfully my family moved out several years ago, but still, it’s a lot to process.

2. Seollal, or lunar new year

3. As much as realistically possible, of course.

4. A word I loathe for its capitalistic implications.

5. Also a plea for a return to paperback originals; my EDS wrists can’t handle hardcovers anymore!

6. I was never much of a TikTok user, although I had an account; I just opened that app to waste time.