WRITING FACTS

It’s said that time moves faster as you get older because each moment is a smaller and smaller fraction of the total time you’ve been alive. Obviously this is not the only rule governing the perception of time, so there will naturally be exceptions; given “time flies when you’re having fun” and its corollary, “time slows to a crawl when you’re miserable,” a particularly enjoyable day for a 10-year-old may zoom speedily by compared to the agonizing shamble of a week spent as a 70-year-old trapped in a coffin-shaped capsule filled with ants while being drip-fed Soylent and having air pumped in that smells like your least-favorite grandparent’s house (and let’s not even get into what happens if we toss both the child and the pensioner at a black hole). Suffice it to say that in general, particularly on larger timescales, the rule holds true.

I Couldn’t Write for like a Month and a Half and It Sucked

• Handwriting: completely out the window (in fact, handwriting was largely the cause of my predicament)
• Typing: hurt to do, could only manage short bursts, usually early in the day
• Speech-to-text: doesn’t really work with how my brain does writing, the way you have to talk to it to make it accurate is so deliberate and stilted that it kind of hurts; also I have an instinctive reluctance to speak out loud when there’s no one else there, or even more so when there is someone else there but I’m not talking to them, or sometimes even when I am talking to them—basically there are some contexts in which you cannot shut me up and others in which I will stare out a window for hours at a time rather than use my voice
• Amanuenses: difficult to come by in this uncivilized age, also see above about not wanting to talk (that being said my sister, mother, and roommate were all very helpful in filling out various medical forms and I’m grateful to them for that)

“What’s an amanuensis?”

My roommate

/* the use of "hello, world" as a programming tutorial goes back to at least the 1970s, and is notable in that there is no possible version of it that does not require more typing than simply typing "hello, world." But that's always the way with writing: the text on the page is only a fraction of the work. */

writing()
{
   for(boolean thoughiambutadropihavecausedarippleontheoceanoftheworldsconsciousness = false; thoughiambutadropihavecausedarippleontheoceanoftheworldsconsciousness = false;
drop them drops, baby)
   {
     post("hello, world, or something to that effect")
   }
}

So sometime in 2023 I had the idea "hey, why don't I take all the songs I chose to highlight in my Year in Review list for 2022 and make a giant mix out of them, and then make a second part that's all of my alternate selections" and I started doing that and then completely forgot about it for months.

After finishing my Year in Review lists for 2023 I remembered this idea, came back to it (the 2022 version, since I'd already started it), had a blast making the mixes, and then found myself with these two 70+ track mixes that I was pretty proud of and nothing to do with them. So I decided as a bit I would give what ended up being a 3-disc set (for space reasons) to a couple of my coworkers with whom I frequently discuss music, without telling them ahead of time (the exact nature of this bit and the degree to which I did not tell them varied over time for a variety of practical and interpersonal reasons but we don't need to go into that here).

Now, for me an important part of the mix cd is the homemade aesthetic, harkening back to the original mixtapes. Thus, all my mix cds have handwritten tracklists on index cards, and if you noticed that number up above you may be seeing the problem. 148 songs, 2 copies. That's 296 track numbers, song titles, and artists. On top of that, I'm fitting these into a roughly 5"x5" space (or about 3 tracks per line on the index card when you squash the text down to half height so you can write the song title on the top half of the line and the artist on the bottom half), so that's some very small handwriting. Also, I've learned that one of the two coworkers is going to be leaving in April, and I want to make sure I have time to get him the Best of 2023 mixes if he ends up liking these, and since I haven't even started putting 2023 together yet there's a bit of a time crunch. But hey, I don't mind, I'm enjoying myself, I'm feeling creatively fulfilled and I'm connecting with people through art. It might lowkey be the happiest I've felt in a while. Life is good(?).

So it's Thursday, February 22nd. I've started making the tracklists the previous day and I've got some idea of how difficult this is going to be, but I also have a three-day weekend (because work is slow in February and I've got a bunch of PTO burning a hole in my pocket, he said, laughing, staring at the monkey's paw on his desk) so I'm feeling confident I can get it all done by Monday (to clarify for those looking at their calendar and feeling confused, my 3-day weekend is Th/Fri/Sat, but one of the two coworkers starts his week on Monday and I want to give them their copies on the same day, so even though I work Sunday I have until Monday to finish.)

I wake up in the morning with an odd discomfort in my right pinky—when I unbend it, I get this weird kind of clicking feeling at the base. It's a little distressing but goes away after about an hour, so I ignore it. And sure my wrist hurts from all the tiny handwriting...and the several hours of Elden Ring and/or Need For Speed Unbound I play in between writing sessions, but I keep stretching it out and figure that's good enough. And I keep on that way through Friday as well—after waking up with the same weird pinky issue. Which I also have Saturday morning.

At this point I'm pretty sure something's going on, so I scale things back, but it's not until I wake up on Sunday feeling downright sore that I put a stop to all nonessential wrist functions. I call out of work, take the day to rest, go to bed early, and figure I'll feel basically fine tomorrow.

At approximately 11:30 pm I wake up and can't move the fingers on my right hand.

There once was a man who was writing
commentary that was quite biting.
He thought, Hey, this seems mean,
let's break then reconvene
with a tone that's a tad more inviting.

Daily writing prompt

What does freedom mean to you?

View all responses

I think it might be time we stop, for a moment. Oh hey, what’s that sound? Maybe everybody should look what’s goin’ down.

“My concern is that in using just my left hand/arm for things I would normally do with both, such as carrying things or writing emails, I risk injuring the left hand/arm through overuse. Frankly, my arm hurts just from writing this email.”

Me, February 27th, in an email to HR

“After some ups and downs it finally seems like I’m making consistent progress (I can sort of type with it now!). That being said, especially given the unpredictability of this injury so far, I may not be 100% recovered by next week.”

Me, March 7th, in an email to HR

Right from the start I took this wildly defensive approach to emailing HR, where I would swing between trying to make it clear that I was, in fact, quite injured in order to justify my continued absence, and cheerily predicting my return to work (for which I was, of course, excited beyond all comprehension). I tend to get paranoid when my anxiety spikes, and I was convinced they would fire me if I didn’t get back to work as soon as possible. Which, sure, in a lot of jobs would probably be the case, but I’m union, so I’m pretty sure they can’t just fire me for getting injured. It also maybe should be pointed out that the HR person I was communicating with was not the same HR person I dealt with a few years ago.

WRITING FACTS

So April 3rd is my first appointment with the hand specialist. My assumption for how this is going to go is that I’m going to explain my symptoms and he’s going to say, “Yeah, that’s pretty standard for this kind of injury, here’s some sort of medication or some other specific treatment and a referral for physical therapy.” That is not what happened. After I explained my symptoms he had me do all these movements with my hands that the urgent care physician had had me do and had then told me that I definitely didn’t have carpal tunnel, and so of course the hand specialist tells me he thinks it’s carpal tunnel. “So the test for that is a nerve conduction study, those usually take a while to open up so we’ll try to get that process started as soon as possible, and in the meantime we can run some more blood tests just to rule out arthritis.” “How long is a while?” “Probably two months.”

Boy This Sure Has Lasted for a Long Time

• From my initial urgent care appointment I thought it would be 2 weeks
• From the internet I thought it would be 6-8 weeks
• From talking to my cousin who used to work in urgent care, I thought it would be 8-12 weeks
• It has, at time of writing, been 13 weeks. My nerve study is in 4 days. My next doctor’s appointment to discuss the results is in a week. My hands are still hurting.

“The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘constraint’ as, simply, ‘a limitation or restriction.’ This terse, general definition of the term allows for a broad delineation of what constitutes literary constraint because almost any rule or factor intrinsic or extrinsic to the act of writing can be considered a limitation…. This broad definition of the term…reveals the way in which all writing is in some sense constrained.

[T]o make literary constraint a discrete, meaningful theoretical category, I define it according to its social practice and usage…and use the term to refer to texts that willfully inhabit what could be called the constraint-based tradition…. [L]iterary constraint announces itself as such, declares that it is imposing constraints upon itself over and above the constraints always present in the act of writing…. As a rule, constraint-based writing craves self-reflexive attention, does not want its use of constraints to go overlooked or ignored….”

Louis Bury, Exercises in Criticism

/* I'll be honest, that first code block already strained my hazy recollection of my college CompSci classes, so I'm just gonna pass on this one. */

Epilogue: 06/21/24