The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.

Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.

"Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts." This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings.

I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.

These are all wildly different books and I loved them all! At that age, I had no idea what I even wanted from literature. I just asked the Children's Librarian for books and she decided for me. Almost all of these books were plain old good stories.

It took me years to figure out what my reading preferences were. And as I got older, my fiction choices dramatically reduced in breadth. I kind of miss the lack of discernment I had when I was a reader of exclusively Children's Lit.

Now, it's really hard for me to read anything that's not the very specific genre of Psychological Thriller or woman-authored LitFic that I prefer.

I miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever I got. That there is the real magic of Children's lit.

My rheumatologist wanted to put me on methotrexate but I declined out of fear if the side effects. He never mentioned anything about diet, but clearly a dietary intervention worked for me.

The cacao was contaminated with cadmium from the soil during harvest.

Kava is a nonintoxicating plant with alkaloids that improve mood and enhance sociability.

The kava bar a fantastic place to sit by yourself and easily fall into a conversation with other people at the bar or the kava-tender.

I do think kava is illegal in some countries, which is unfortunate, and being that it grows on pacific islands, it's probably rather hard to import for most places. But a wonderful plant and wonderful concept.

If you do believe in an afterlife or continuation, you'll have spent your life preparing accordingly.

The point of her writing generally isn't to reflect to reader. And what makes her autobiographical writing so compelling is the the way she dissects her own supremely unrelatable life and emotional landscape.

The contrast between her gorgeous but also coldly precise writing, the grieving mother vs the lauded writer, the tension of watching her muse (very delicately, very distantly) on the nature of being an adoptive mother and wondering as a reader: what sort of wounds did Joan Didion pass on to her daughter and what wounds did her daughter inherit from her biological family, the contrast between the vibrant streets of New York and the cold hospital where her daughter was dying in a coma, knowing as a reader that this writer had just gone through the grief of losing her husband a few years earlier...

It was haunting, beautiful, and, naturally, a little voyeuristic by its very nature. I still think about it to this day.