Whenever somebody says something nice about the blackouts, I think, “Oh, maybe I should make some more of those.”) Marc was interested in the source material for the poem he shared, and I had to admit to him, “I don’t ‘read’ the article first when I make these — I try to think of them as a raw field of words, like a word search puzzle.” (Almost every blackout I make is from the Sunday print edition of The New York Times — the ones in this email are all from the August 28, 2022 issue.
In last Tuesday’s newsletter, I wrote about “Comfort Work”:
We talk about “comfort food” and “comfort viewing” but I’ve never heard anybody talk about “comfort work.”
Comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do.
I know I need to work, but I don’t know what I should be working on, or I can’t work on the thing I should be working on because I’m too tired or depressed or otherwise unmotivated.
Comfort work must be comforting and it must be actual work. This sounds simple, but it’s an odd combination. Comfort work is work I’ve done before that I know I can do, but it still must present enough of a challenge to be considered actual work.
Readers filled the comments with their own forms of comfort work. Read more in the newsletter.
