Quick Hits: Scrolling to Sleep and Book Desecration

A non-scientific way to fall asleep and scribbles in the margins.

Welcome to Quick Hits, a format of this newsletter where I share my brief thoughts or “quick hits” on multiple topics that don’t merit a full post.

Here are my quick hits for this week.

Photo by Akshar Dave🌻 on Unsplash

Quick Hit #1 - An Unconventional (Unhelpful?) Way to Stop Nighttime Rumination

We’re all trying to spend less time on our phones. Maybe you’ve tried putting your phone on grayscale mode or downloading an app that limits time on social media/blocks specific apps.

But when I’m in a rut of overthinking and feel the anxiety rising in my body, there’s nothing that stops the overthinking faster than whipping out my phone and watching a few YouTube videos or scrolling through social media.

I did this the other night while I was experiencing the human equivalent of feline zoomies at 1 am. I was lying awake in bed with thoughts bouncing off the walls of my noggin like the balls in a pinball machine.

Here’s what happened: I woke up at 1 a.m. to learn I had passed out with my bedroom light still on (shout out to my honest friends who will also admit to doing this and not having exemplary bedtime hygiene).

Then, I realized I couldn’t find the bottle for one of my medications, panicked, scoured my room while quietly trying to lift stuff so I wouldn’t bother my roommate, felt like an idiot, and returned to bed.

Cue the racing thoughts. Five, ten, fifteen, and twenty minutes passed with no sleep. I know the experts recommend getting up and walking around or reading a book when insomnia strikes, but I reached for my phone.

Lo and behold: the scrolling worked like a charm.

Within a half hour of watching a few YouTube videos and browsing on Threads, I could feel drowsiness setting in. I quickly plugged in my phone and descended into slumber for the next few hours until the morning calls of finches awoke me.

This wasn’t the first time I scrolled myself to sleep, and it probably won’t be the last.

I’m not sure why scrolling on my phone works to quiet my brain at night when it often agitates me during the day, but I suspect it’s because it serves as an effective distraction from the racing thoughts keeping me awake.

Have you also scrolled on your phone in bed at 1 a.m. to fall asleep? If so, confess in the comments.

Some margin notes from Negotiating with the Dead.

Quick Hit #2 - We Need to Go Back to Marking Up Books

A few months ago, I was sitting in the park reading Margaret Atwood’s book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, and I let out a chuckle. Not just because of what Atwood had written, but because of a comment the previous reader had made in the margins.

Here’s the first sentence of what Atwood wrote (and which the previous reader highlighted):

For instance, there’s the F-word.

Here’s the rest of what Atwood wrote:

If you’re a woman and a writer, does the combination of gender and vocation automatically make you a feminist, and what does that mean, exactly?

Here’s the comment the previous reader wrote in the margins next to this passage:

Haha, I wanted to hear about this from a writer.

At first, I assumed the previous reader wrote “Haha” because of the obvious play on words, since I was expecting the “F-word” in question to be something quite different than “feminist.” Something about seeing the “Haha” made me realize Atwood’s play on words was funny, and I laughed out loud in a way I wouldn’t have if I had been reading the text without the previous reader’s words whispering in my ear.

Then, I wondered if the previous reader simply wanted to solicit another writer’s take on third-wave feminism within the context of novel writing.

Whatever the case, I knew one thing for certain: my mind was more present with the text because I had the steady companionship of the previous reader.

Without their insight sitting in the sidelines of the margins, I’d have been tempted to skim the passage or not read as closely in my eagerness to speed up the reading and hastily move on to the next chapter (a common occurrence for many readers, no doubt, in our age of distracted reading).

I had picked up the book secondhand in a Little Free Library, and it seems like a previous reader had picked it up from a used bookstore for $3.50 at one point, according to a pencil scratch on the first page of the book. It’s unclear if the person who purchased the book secondhand was the same person who marked it up (or the same person who plunked it in the wooden little house on a pole next to a community garden, where it found its way to me).

The whole experience made me wonder if I should start some kind of book mailing club in which we each annotate a book and then mail it off to a stranger, who in turn does the same for another reader. Perhaps one day…

Have you read a book secondhand and gleaned something insightful from another reader’s comments? Or have you perhaps passed on a college textbook with your scribbles in the margins to a friend and wondered what they would make of your notes? Let me know in the comments.

Until next time…