I don’t use public transport as much as I used to, which is a shame because we are living in a golden era for entertainment to fill that particular gap of our time. When I make my monthly 3.5 hour trip up home, I have a habit of building a big playlist of music I’ve never heard before; usually, it’s a big and diverse combination of albums, though one time I made an entire playlist of performances of “Ryoanji” by John Cage to hear the many different variations at once – that was a fun day. Sadly, my sensitivity to motion sickness means I can neither read nor watch television on my phone, though there was one time I managed to keep it together and watch the then-entirety of Disenchanted on my phone over one bus trip. Despite the show not being good, it was nice to have something novel and fun to occupy myself.

That’s the nice thing about living in 2024 – there are these liminal spaces in life that I can fill with the biggest library in human history. Like everyone else, I have a nasty habit of filling this space with social media, but I find I feel a lot better when I genuinely enrich myself with something that’s fun to think about. I like having books with me when I’m going to anywhere that has a waiting room; I once managed to power through almost the entirety of Hell Island by Matthew Reilly (admittedly, a short novella) while waiting at Centrelink, and I’m often shocked these days by how few pages I actually get through before I’m called. Meanwhile, any time I have to use public transport, I tend to bring my handheld consoles because that’s the most comfortable, distracting thing when I’m at a cold bus station.

When I’m doing something unpleasant, like cooking or cleaning or folding clothes, I generally have one of my old standby favourite shows – something where I don’t have to look at the screen the entire time to know what’s going on. In fact, I’ve come to associate cooking with the specific pleasures of rewatching old faves and working out how to, uh, steal the good stuff from them and riff on their qualities in a modern way. I know a lot of people use podcasts for the same purpose, but my brain simply does not accept podcasts; I don’t know whether it’s introversion or anxiety, but I simply don’t process information that way.

What media do you use for the liminal spaces in life?