Van Gogh One of the things people generally admired about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it. Or a pair of boots. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress anxietyobjects
The illusion of anxiety Or because of hormones. And so which would not really have been anxiety at all, but only an illusion. Even if one would certainly be hard put to explain the difference between an illusion of anxiety and anxiety itself. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress anxiety
Chilled-out anxiety Working in the typical dot-com office was an admixture of frenetic pace and a relaxed overall atmosphere, exemplifying that chilled-out anxiety which was the general mood of the 1990’s. Nikil Saval, Cubed technologyanxiety
Paranoia What's worse? Thinking you're being paranoid, or knowing you should be? Shane Carruth, Primer anxiety
What's wrong? Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King anxietylife
Distraction To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredommelancholyanxietyattentionpain
Test anxiety It was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. Shackleford's observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in 'test anxiety' might well be a fear of the tests' associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread—and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King anxietyattention
The Waiting Place A Poem by Dr. Seuss silverbirchpress.wordpress.com Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. waitinganxietytimemelancholy
barnsworthburning.net A Website by Nick Trombley barnsworthburning.net What this site isColophonContact meShortlist of interesting spacesBehind the scenes Five barns worth burningExtract (n)Kicks Condor: barnsworthburningNodal pointsMonoskop collectionsnotetakingconnection
What this site is A kind of commonplace book. A kind of digital garden. A kind of Zettelkasten. The front end to a brain. Part research, part dissertation, part art project. A kind of essay, in the sense that it is an attempt. ...but at what? What is a commonplace?A Brief History of the Digital GardenZettelkastenare.naHighlighterThe Art of Looking SidewaysReading DesignEssayerGlaspMaintenance and Care gardens
Colophon airtable stores the majority of the content for the site. the front-end is written using svelte and its companion toolset, sveltekit. it is hosted as a digital ocean app. figma was used for some of the design – the rest was done in code (as I increasingly believe it should be). it is typeset with IBM plex sans Designing with code
Contact me You can reach me using this Airtable form – I would love to hear from you. I'm also on LinkedIn.
Shortlist of interesting spaces craftworkwalkingwwwnotetakingwordseuphonymelancholyzendarknessgardens