✅ List Dump: 16 August 2026 - settling in, body at midnight, task transitions, geographically restricted nutmeg yogurt, survival thriller score composers, slow reading and processing time
just a list of things I want to share in no order other than the sequence of remembering
Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.
Words (not including the ones describing the words I am typing to tell you about the word count):2,063
[008]
Eight weeks straight! Boo-yah! I am back in Brooklyn and I am not happy about it. While I was working as I traveled this summer, I still found moments of reprieve where I enjoyed reasonably priced and fresh food. My gut is already unhappy. I am going to get back on my yogurt, bone broth, and miso routine.
***
Check out the first one, or TL;DR: territorial mice, nipple injury, improv, an expensive orifice, dumplings, games, garden poems, friendship lore, and good times; the second one, TL;DR: spite-based newsletter writing, gil scott-heron and nina simone wish you a happy 4th of july, castle rock, bad dating app AI, bone broth, speech disorders, open-toe sandals, harper’s findings; the third one, TL;DR: cute patio situation in Montpellier, FR, facts about cicadas and acoustic defense, my love of tajin, unpublishing, Pope. L, falling in new york, and my new doggie friend; the fourth one, TL;DR: pigeons, citrus, compost, bad birthdays, making music; the fifth one, TL;DR: casablanca, unseasoned fish n’ chips, weird skin, basic pigeons of london, an evacuated center, archives and death; the sixth one, TL;DR: borrowing english, translation, a waxing moon, community ovens, doors and windows, unmatchable hearts, 41st birthday on the atlantic ocean; and the seventh one, TL;DR: stranded in paris, playlist, more pigeons, relearning reading, atmospheric reentry, bye casablanca!, OCD, telos, chimerical colors & other sensory illusions, prime numbers
Settling back into the city has not been easy. Last week, I wrote about atmospheric reentry, and I think I am feeling the friction quite intensely. For one, my sleep is completely off. I am passing out near 9 pm and waking up at 2 am. And no matter how much sleep I get, I am still tired. I know I need to give my body more time to reacclimate, but staying in bed all day brings me so much shame. On my fifth day back in town, I finally went into my living room. There, I began to reorganize my bookshelf. I need more shelves, but also, I need fewer books. This full-wall living room shelf is the best gift I could have given myself. It is a manifestation of my childhood dreams that centered on being an information worker who lived in a home hemmed in by books. I also tended to my neglected plants. Their sad, downturned leaves were the first thing I saw when I entered my apartment on the 10th. These little thirsty guys had finished all the water I left for them. I like talking to each plant and had not done that in quite some time. The view from my window is blocked by scaffolding that hasn’t moved in two years, but it is sunny, and I get to water my babies while getting sun on my face first thing in the morning.
***I am trying to settle into these small, gentle moments.
***My schedule is changing significantly this year, and I am so excited to finally spend time lounging at home. I really love what I have done to my home. Getting to a place where I finally felt emotionally safe to really settle in has taken a long time. I moved here almost two years ago, and I finally feel like I am at home.
As I wrote this newsletter, I began to fear that I might not have enough to write about each week. Turns out that’s not true. However, I do think writing publicly induces a very particular anxiety. I find my life quite riveting — tea time, Jeopardy binges, Tajín on everything, dancing with my plants, infodumping, and singing loudly and poorly.
***I am not going to lie, this week’s newsletter took a lot out of me. It had been easy up until this point, but feel fatigued. I took a break and coded for a few hours because that is what someone does when distracting themselves from other tasks. Returning from that task, I was feeling resentful, not tired. Resentful because it is very difficult for me to transition to another task. I’ve spent the last week on coding projects, and I didn’t want to leave my little troubleshooting hole. I wanted a frictionless day that did not require so much energy not to complete the task, but to “simply” transition to a different task.
***Obviously, I made it here, but I am reflecting on the systems that allowed me to write with ease. I learned that I write better (?) and more fluidly in transit, literally in motion — on trains or a plane, regardless; something about itinerancy and locomotion aids my writing process. I also learned that I need the sound of a fan while I write. Another thing I learned is that when I cannot get myself to sit down and write or transition into writing, I record voice notes and write from those transcripts. I talk a lot, so writing can be frustrating because I try to type at my pace of speech.
There is a Siggi yogurt brand flavor I really love that they apparently always sell in France: nutmeg. It was a slice of heaven after a long hot day. My nutmeg yogurt, grapefruit juice, and magnesium. They do not sell it in the United States, and I am upset because I’d developed a routine around it. For my routine-compelled homies, please make sure your routines and habits do not rely on anything that is inaccessible. Now I am stuck with the mixed berry flavor and an attitude. I considered learning to make yogurt to approximate the flavor, but I know that is not the best use of the limited time I have left on this earth.
One of my favorite TV genres is thrillers, particularly survival thrillers. In these films, people are trapped somewhere and must figure out what happens next to survive. I feel an adrenaline rush when watching them. Add in some paranormal bits, and I am completely captivated. I was a big Lost watcher. People have strong feelings about the show; what I can say is that any feelings of disappointment and betrayal are definitely justified. I am now watching FROM. I remember reading that FROM was written by the same writers as Lost, so I braced myself. I spread this fact. Now, the internet says I am wrong, so I apologize to whoever took a wayward path in response to my showrunner rant. While they do not share the same team, they shame actors (specifically Harold Perrineau — not sure if there are others) and, I would argue, some of the character archetypes.
***Okay, so boom. The team is not the same, but my brain keeps telling me it is. I was trying to figure out what was causing this memory echo (a non-scientific term that is kind of a hybrid of deja vu or elastic pattern recognition (pareidolia?), but is something else because there is no temporary glitch where the mind’s pattern recognition system “matches” a new experience to a past memory).
Echo memory is an ersatz description of what I am trying to articulate, there is something called echoic memory. Wikipedia describes it as
"a type of sensory memory that briefly stores sounds (auditory information or stimulus), allowing them to be digested and comprehended. Unlike most visual memory, where a person can choose how long to view the stimulus and can reassess it repeatedly, auditory stimuli are usually transient and cannot be reassessed. Since echoic memories are heard once, they are stored for slightly longer periods of time than iconic memories (visual memories). Auditory stimuli are received by the ear one at a time before they can be processed and understood.
Echoic memory has been described as a momentary "holding tank", where a sound is unprocessed (or held back) until the following sound is heard, and only then can it be interpreted in a meaningful way.This sensory store is capable of storing large amounts of auditory information that is only retained for a short period of time, typically 3 to 4 seconds. This echoic sound resonates in the mind and is replayed for this brief amount of time shortly after being heard.[4]
Echoic memory encodes basic features of sound, such as spatial location or pitch. It does not store complex semantic information.[5]"
And I realized I am not confused; rather, I was struggling to identify the triggering sensory experience. It wasn’t characters or plots; it was sound. Lost and FROM sound the same. To set specific moods or to create audience anticipation, FROM uses similar scores as Lost! Not being a music scholar of any sort, I did some research and learned they do not share composers. However, the preliminary hunch sent me down another road. So for Lost, Michael Giacchino created the score. Lost has one of my favorite scores. To create the score, they used a live orchestra! And this immediately reminded me of silent films accompanied by a live orchestra and how fascinating it is to think about human-machine synchronization. I kind of couldn’t shake the inkling that the sound was the same. I am not great at a lot of things, but pattern recognition, my spidey sense, and my ears could not have been so far off in the wrong direction. And of course, I found the FROM subreddit! It was a relief to learn that I am not the only one who heard the similarity. And some of the posters identified the specific types of scenes with recycled sound — and I agree. Anyway, while scrolling through the meager number of comments (more people should be invested in this mystery!), I came across another comment that confirmed my suspicions. Chris Tilton is the soundtrack composer for FROM, and he has collaborated with Giacchino and J.J. Abrams on several projects. So maybe they recycled, or maybe they collaborated on some elements of FROM. Thank you for going on this very unnecessary, but enjoyable rabbit hole with me.
A friend who has been having a hard time got some good news. This was actually the highlight of the week. Congratulations, dear! Another friend is struggling a lot, but I am grateful that they are reaching out and accepting support.
Last week I wrote about being a slow and distracted reader. Part of that reflection was engaging in more defamiliarization rituals in the reading process. And this made me think about how defamiliarization and suspicious reading require something that is perpetually stolen from us: processing time. One of the common reminders in IEP meetings or conversations about students with disabilities is that we “need more processing time.” And I remember hearing this before I was one of the kids they were talking about, and thinking that not only should the students in the special education classes have access to “more processing time.”
***We are expected to write, think, and speak at a dangerous pace. We move from project to project, job to job, with nary a moment to process. And then there are all the moments throughout the day when actual, perceived, or even manufactured urgency requires us to stay on autopilot to remain efficient.
***Maybe this is a long way to say that interrupted, cropped, and inconsistent access to processing time is dangerous. This is clearly not just about reading as a narrow cognitive process; it is about READING — literally, how we process the world around us. For one to engage in suspicious reading of a text or the world at large, we need processing time. But that’s the gag, isn’t it? Our processing time is stolen from us, leaving us without the capacity or incentive structure to do anything but keep up with a routine even if that routine is killing each and every one of us.
***We are consuming at a pace that discourages slowness and intentional reflection. Maybe there is a fear that if we got a little more time, we might have enough time to complete the series of thoughts that might push us out of this ongoing nightmare. My little conspiracy theory is that we were all forced to return to the office after the introduction of remote work because a lot of overworked and underpaid people in the comforts (I hope) of their home with a modicum of more control over their time really had time to strategize, revise, and stand firmly in their anger.
See you next week for another list!
Thanks for being a pal!
All the best, always,
Kameelah 👽
How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL