Back to Business (Not) As Usual
Plus, DALL-E is the new WALL-E, the dark side of TikTok brain & more reading recs
I have a love-hate relationship with being sick. The "hate" part is a no-brainer: Racing to grab a tissue before someone sees your nose drip. Coughing so hard, it hurts. Having killer headaches that make you want to die. When I'm sick, it's like everything I touch is covered in an invisible film of mucus, making the world appear as shitty as I feel.
And yet, being sick can bring back memories that make me smile. Sure, naseuous mornings sucked as a kid, but it meant I had the rare chance to be at home with my mum during the day. She'd nurse me back to health with blankets and cartoons, ginger ale and chocolate chip cookies. To this day, I can still hear the crisp sizzle of the bubbles in the can, and the sweet smell of chocolate fresh out of the microwave. Sometimes I wonder if having those things healed me faster than the sappy cherry-flavored medicine did. I was sick, but my mind was at ease. That’s what I remember most.
Sick days can be great. I appreciate when my body tells me to sit down, shut up and take a break so it can fix me. When I was sick with Covid a month ago, I took off work for a few days as my body (with help from the vaccine!) fought off the virus so that I could feel better. I was down bad for a minute there; I tried to chase my nostalgia high by watching episodes of Johnny Bravo and Totally Spies, but my head to hurt so bad, I could never finish an episode. Cold, snot-filled tissues piled at the corners of my bed as my room lightened and darkened, the end of another day.
As I regained my strength, something else began to creep up on me: Guilt.
No one pressured me to go back to work before I was ready. In fact, my colleagues encouraged me to take all the time I needed to get better, which was something I wasn't used to. I had an urge to bounce back quickly. Suddenly, being able to sit up long enough to watch a TV show made me feel like I was taking advantage of my days off. Maybe it was because I felt bad that others had more work to do in my absence. Maybe it's because I love my job and I was eager to get back to it. Or maybe I just wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of the same resilience that some successful people brag about. Either way, I was back at my desk after three days, brain feeling a bit foggy but hey, at least my temples weren’t throbbing as I stared at my screen.
In a way, my response presented an opportunity for me to reflect on how I operate and why. I just wish that I would have reflected a bit longer instead of giving in to the guilt so quickly. Just because I was physically OK, doesn’t mean my mind was ready to dive back in at full speed.
As a kid, such tenderness and care from those moments with my mom made me feel good from within, relaxing my mind so that I can perform even better the next day. That isn’t something to feel guilty about.
Writing update 📝
Pages Written:
Hey y’all, how have you been? It’s been a minute.
For those who subscribed before I went on my little hiatus, welcome to my introspective corner of the Internet! For those who subscribed long before that, welcome back. 🙂 As some of you know, I’ve been at a crossroads with this newsletter for reasons I described in a previous post.
Expectation: A fun bi-weekly blog where I write about my New York City life and keep track of my journey to becoming a published author.✨
Reality: On my off week, I keep pushing back when to sit down and write my novel and nothing gets written. On my on week, I end up wringing my brain reflecting on my lived experiences at 4 — sometimes 5 — o’clock in the morning the morning before I send this out. 😰
The easy solution would be to scrap this newsletter altogether, join a writers’ workshop, work on my novel and update y’all when I’m done. Or okay, maybe that’s not exactly easy, but it would feel a lot like giving up on this personal project of mine, which I decided I don’t want to do.
After all, as I wrote in my first post, I don’t expect NBD to be a big deal to anyone other than myself, and I think I lost sight of that. I felt like I was letting you all down whenever I’d tell you I’d written five pages in months (as though y’all don’t have bigger things to worry about in y’all’s lives)!
I say all this to say: I’m going to stop taking myself so seriously with this newsletter. I haven't found my rhythm yet, but I will. In the meantime, I still want this to be fun, for y’all but also for me. I won’t inundate your inbox, but don’t be surprised if you hear from me on a Tuesday instead of a Friday, or if I appear one time during one month and three times the next.
If you’re looking for a fun newsletter that’s more on the consistent side, subscribe to the other one I work on professionally: “Tech Things with Joanna Stern.” Joanna is like, a 100x times cooler than I am, so trust me, you won’t regret it!
Stories that inspired me this week 🔗
Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’ — by Taylor Lorenz for The Washington Post
Meet DALL-E, the A.I. That Draws Anything at Your Command — by Cade Metz for The New York Times
TikTok Brain Explained: Why Some Kids Seem Hooked on Social Video Feeds — by Julie Jargon for The Wall Street Journal
Estonia's Embrace of Digital Citizenship Is a Model for Us All — by Katie Collins for CNET
As Gas Prices Went Up, So Did the Hunt for Electric Vehicles — by Maggie Astor for The New York Times
Honorable mentions:
Talk about a single-mom house (party of 9).
The algorithm keeps trying to get me to watch Severance and you know what? Thanks to reviews like this, maybe I will.
Household robot Amazon Astro is already a reality TV star and I’m loving it.
Also, good news: I just got an Apple News+ subscription which means I can finally afford to read more stories from other news outlets! Hopefully that’ll help us mix things up more in this section.
BTW: You can now read No Big Dil in the new Substack app for iPhone!
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. It’s supposed to make reading these a lot smoother, so check it out and let me know what you think! If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
That’s all for now! Have a great weekend, y’all.
Note: The views I post in this newsletter are my own and not that of my employer.