Why Does This Feel So Bad?

Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears. Here’s an example. In the first year that I really got into bird-watching, I used The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America. The book has a checklist in the back where you mark the different species you’ve seen. That many birding books have such a list tells you a lot about how people tend to approach this activity; in its most annoying form, bird-watching potentially resembles something like Pokémon GO. But this was somewhat inevitable for me as a beginner, learning to pick out discrete, individual birds. After all, when you learn a new language, you start with the nouns.

Over the years, my continued