Pertinent to my Interests

I mentioned a few posts back that I had a college friend on hospice due to cancer. He died yesterday, on his oldest son’s seventh birthday.

My friend’s son woke up on his birthday yesterday morning having had a living father for 7 out of his 7 years on this planet, 100% of his life. But today when he wakes up that percentage will begin its slow, sad descent. The flip book of missed milestones begins writing itself today, page after page.

See I’m trying to make sense of a loss like this by assigning numbers, but of course numbers don’t correlate to the depth of human emotion or richness of experience. My friend knew–for years–that his diagnosis was terminal, and he made an effort to be present in his kids’ lives as much as his illness allowed him to be. I hope when my friend’s oldest son wakes up on the day he turns eighty he has some bittersweet thoughts about quality and quantity, and he finds the number 8.75% to hardly be meaningful at all.

Still, there are so few memories to hold onto at the age of seven. Such grief to be experienced and for so long. So many empty chairs in auditoriums, so many Father’s Day cards unpurchased. So many mixed emotions when his friends don’t begin losing their own fathers until they are well into middle age.

I want to be able to reinterpret this story–my friend’s story, his son’s story–rewrite it as a bittersweet, triumphant arc that makes the heart soar even as it breaks at the same time. But I cannot do this. Tragedy has arrived for the family and it is here to stay, sitting in all those empty chairs along the way.

Every year my friend gently bullies me into setting a “reading challenge” goal on Goodreads. This year I did not achieve my goal of 50 books, landing hard at 47 (prime number!) instead.

The shortest book (144 pages) I read this year was All Systems Red by Martha Wells, the first book in the Murderbot series. Many people have not-so-gently encouraged me to read this book and it only took me six years to get to it! I enjoyed it, but not enough to continue the series. Sorry.

The longest book (868 pages) I read this year was The Patriarch by David Nasaw. This is about Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of JFK and RFK and Teddy and pretty much everyone. This is the book that kicked off my Kennedy era in reading and it’s very good.

Other notable books from 2023:

• Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. Just a fun one all around, and short!
• The Melody Lingers On by Mary Higgins Clark. Guys, I just can’t anymore with Mary Higgins Clark. I was enjoying her as a fun cabin read but her books are so vapid and formulaic it turns out five is my limit. Never again!
• Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram. Fascinating walk through a teenage boy’s brain and bonus introduction to Iran.
• Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver. Addresses our life and our times and I just keep thinking about this one even months later.
• Greenglass House by Kate Milford. My kid brought this one home from the elementary school library; I stole it and read it in two days. The setting alone is worth the read.
• Pageboy by Elliot Page. Elliot, you seem great, but I did not enjoy your memoir.
• Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry. Matthew, you seem great, and we all had no idea how much you were suffering this whole time. One of the most devastating memoirs I’ve ever read.
• We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter by Rachel Hanel. I really loved this memoir. It’s not about graveyards so much as it is about time and family and heirlooms.
• All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley. Struggling to find meaning in his life and his work after his brother’s early death from cancer, Patrick Bringley takes a job as a guard at the Met in NYC. This book is beautiful, meditative, and hopeful. And it made me miss the Met even more.
• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. I adore Emily St. John Mandel, but this one sat on my bedside table for over a year before I finally picked it up and read it. I am sorry it took me so long, Emily. You’re a motherfucking genius and I love you. Please come to Minnesota so I can get my book signed. K thx.

I didn’t start actively reading as an adult until my second kid was born in 2015. I was desperate for the baby and the toddler to nap at the same time; I really needed the mental break! The toddler would go down and stay down just fine for 90 minutes, but the baby was a baby and wouldn’t stay asleep unless I was laying right there next to him. So I got in the habit of laying in the bed with the baby during naptime. I couldn’t wake him up with television, so I started reading instead. The habit has stuck, and although I did not make my reading challenge goal this year, I’m still pleased with my reading accomplishments.

I always feel frazzled this time of year. I need to find homes for the piles of new stuff sitting around the house. The kids are out of school and will be for another week. This year I have a job I’m trying to apply for that closes in a day. I need to go grocery shopping. The nativity set still needs to come down. One of my kids has a birthday in less than two weeks and I need to prepare for that. I think I need to start going to the gym again tomorrow if I want to meet my 2024 exercise goals. Oh and with all four of us at home the house is in a constant state of disaster.

I can’t even focus long enough to write out a real to do list!

I am stressing out a little about my job search. I have had several people tell me recently that “places are desperate for employees; you’ll get hired soon!” but 1) that doesn’t make me feel better about all the applications I’ve submitted that haven’t even resulted in an interview and 2) yes, they are desperate for workers at Dairy Queen but that doesn’t mean I want to work at Dairy Queen.

On the other hand, the longer I’m funemployed the more time I can spend on this blog and bring joy to the six people who read it.

Despite serial sickness (cursed Christmas), most of us made it to church on Christmas Eve.

My mom still goes to the church I grew up in. The pianist at Christmas Eve service this year was the same woman who played the organ in church when I was a kid. She moved away, they took out the organ, and now that she’s back she plays the piano instead. It felt like stepping back in time to have her up there again.

And Mr. S was there. Mr. S has been doing the reading from Isaiah at the Christmas Eve service every year since I was a small child. He always gets about two sentences in before his voice starts to crack, his eyes get wet, and he is overcome by emotion. Every year of my childhood I would smile awkwardly from the pews, perplexed at this show of emotion from a normally very steady man.

“Oh good,” I thought to myself when I walked into the sanctuary and saw Mr. S sitting in the front pew. “It’s not really Christmas Eve unless Mr. S cries during the reading.”

The service started, we all stood to sing the first hymn, and I was suddenly, painfully aware of missing my grandpa’s tenor which should at that very moment have been booming out from behind me. My mind searched for my grandma, who should be beside me, whose voice I should hear most clearly as we all recite the Lord’s Prayer.

And there I was, crying in church on Christmas Eve. I had not even made it through the first hymn, let alone the first line of Isaiah.

It wasn’t even the music, or Christmas Eve, or the fact that my grandparents are gone. It’s just the end-of-year accounting of all the tragedies and the accounting of all the joys and knowing that there is more of both to come. It’s the all the big things and all the mundane things that have happened and will happen. It’s just all too much to keep inside.

I understand now. One day you’re a carefree six-year-old just hoping the service will end quickly so you can go play with the organ pedals while all the adults talk, and thirty-four years later you and Mr. S are both crying in church on Christmas Eve.

How could you not?

It’s a week until Christmas. My youngest kid puked at school this morning and had to be picked up from the nurse’s office. I have an awful cold, and vertigo stacked on top of that. It’s great fun.

Have you ever had vertigo? It’s the stupidest thing you can have wrong with you. Tiny little stones inside my inner ear, the ones responsible for balance and feeling movement, migrate out of their proper spot. If I look up the world spins. If I look down the world spins. If I lay on my back the world spins. And when the vertigo is this bad I have a general sense of imbalance. I find myself hanging onto countertops and gripping the banister as I go slowly down the stairs. It feels like preparation for being elderly.

Anyway, as I noted in the first paragraph, it’s a week until Christmas. Three days until we get on an airplane. When you have children in school there really isn’t much you can do to prevent illness from impacting travel. My youngest will be better by Thursday morning, but maybe by then the rest of us will be vomiting. And if we are, I guess we’ll deal with it and reschedule. Traveling early gives us a little buffer.

And I am trying to remind myself about our trip to Disney earlier this year. A freak blizzard on April 1 cancelled our early flight to Florida; we managed to grab seats on the same flight out the next morning, squeezed into the very back of the plane. Instead of rope-dropping Magic Kingdom that next morning, we ended up arriving in the afternoon and heading into Magic Kingdom for dinner and what turned out to be an extremely magical and extremely late evening riding Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean with the kids.

So. Even if we all wake up puking on Thursday morning it will be okay. And in the meantime, I’m digging out the Lysol wipes and hand sanitizer and not looking up.

I went on two field trips this week, one with each of my kids, because this is the sort of thing you feel compelled to do when you are an unemployed mother of two.

Actually, both field trips involved tromping around in the forest, and mid-December is, in my opinion, the perfect time to be tromping around in the forest, so I was happy to go.

Do you remember field trips in elementary school? I barely do. I actually hated field trips in elementary school because I never knew what to expect on them. I recall doing my best to get out of field trips several times, but I was always stymied by teachers and especially my mother who was aware of my desire to avoid new experiences. (I got better at field trips by late middle school.)

It was weird being back on a bus with a big group of kids, teachers, and chaperones. I forgot how being in school forces you to lose some individuality. The entire day is built around keeping this large herd of excited children under control. We had stupid rules that I, as chaperone, had to help enforce, like no picking up sticks. Who brings kids into the forest and then decrees that they can’t even pick up a stick?! I whispered to some of the fifth graders who were having trouble with this rule that I thought it was a stupid rule too, but we had to follow it or else we would all get in trouble.

Being part of a classroom of kids is like being part of an organism in some ways. We are all doing math right now. We are all lining up to get on the bus right now. We are all being reminded to use our quiet voices even though only two of us were actually being loud. The only place that adults are treated like this is in prison.

I am not saying school is prison. My kids’ school is great, and they like going every day. I don’t think they chafe under these controls because it feels completely normal to them. I liked school too, and I don’t remember feeling particularly oppressed by the crowd control mentality. But it was very weird to step back in time and experience it all over again. Twice in one week.

As a child I was often flummoxed at hearing China and Japan collectively referred to as “The East.” I grew up on the west coast of the United States; China and Japan were very clearly to the west, not the east. Chapter labels like “Eastern Art” led me to expect Roman sculpture or portraits of English kings for an embarrassingly long time, and I was always a little surprised to turn the page and see a Buddha instead.

I can’t remember how old I was when I finally stepped back in time far enough to realize that from a European perspective China is indeed to the east. Did this confuse other west coast kids or was it just me?

At some point as a very young child, I asked my mother if we lived on an island. She correctly replied that we did not. But how could that be if the ocean existed? Was the world covered in more land than I realized and the oceans were actually giant inland lakes?

I didn’t have the ability to ask the correct follow-up questions, so I was stuck on that one for a while. At some point we acquired a globe and it was clear to me that we were living on an island. Now I was concerned about my mother’s mental faculties. How could she be SO wrong about such a simple question? I didn’t think she was dumb but… maybe she was?

Imagine my relief years later in school when we learned about the size distinction between continents and islands. (My mother is still smarter than I am and she will kick anyone’s ass at the crossword puzzle if they doubt this.)

Well, it’s been about two weeks since I shut down my personal Instagram and enacted new rules about watching TV.

I’m reading a lot more.

The first week was weird. I panicked at least once a day thinking that one of my favorite influencers had stopped posting and are they sick? Are they depressed? Are they okay? Then I remembered they’re probably still posting. I’m just not seeing it.

I just stare out the patio door now while I eat lunch. If I’m lucky there is some squirrel or bird action. If I’m unlucky I just consider the patterns on the patio stone. I sigh and wish someone would give me treats. I am turning into a cat.

That first week I did really well. My phone stayed in my pocket a lot. But it’s amazing how the smart phone acts like a gas to fill all the empty space. I’ve (mostly) removed Instagram from my life and all of a sudden I’m much more interested in reading the New York Times in its entirety. I keep catching myself endlessly scrolling through the dumpster fires of Reddit. I keep checking in on all the defunct blogs I used to follow.

Getting rid of Instagram (mostly) has been really good, but it is clear to me that I need to do better and I am considering my options. The trouble is figuring out how to carve away all the disease of the iPhone without losing the utility. I could remove Safari completely. But what if I’m out and about and need to google something?

And will the iPhone continue to fill the missing space? If I get rid of Safari will I suddenly find myself way more interested in the Goodreads app than any sane person has a right to be? Will I scroll endlessly through my camera roll looking at old photos?

I have some dread about the lesson I might be learning here. Do I have to throw the whole thing away to win my bandwidth back?

(If you do not play and are not interested in Animal Crossing I suggest you skip this entire post. I am going to write it as if the reader also plays ACNH.)

I’ve been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons daily for almost exactly a year, like a sucker (who needs a real job).

I’ve done well for myself this year. I paid off all my home loans, achieved a five star island, and have every type of fruit. I own a large collection of stuff, am best friends with several villagers, and have completed the fossil section of my museum.

Wow, that sounds much more impressive if you think I’m talking about real life.

Anyway, Animal Crossing has been fun, but also infuriating.

Despite purchasing and donating art daily for the past six months there are still five pieces missing from my art museum. I’ve never even seen three of them offered! I still need three insects for the insect collection, and they’re all ones that only appear on palm trees in the middle of the damn night in the summer. I am not awake at midnight! Not in the summer and not any time!

The randomness of the game frustrates me more every day. Example: I have been wanting an upright piano for most of the year. Not once in the 365 days I’ve been playing has Nook’s Cranny offered me an upright piano. But the antique table and imperial bed seem to come up weekly! Why!

I’m having a similar problem with DIY recipes. I usually acquire three DIY recipes every time I play, but for the past couple months it seems that 90% of the time they are duplicates of ones I already have.

I know these strategies are all very intentional on the part of the programmers. Nintendo doesn’t want us to grind for bells for ten hours at a time, they want us to play slowly, a little every day. Well, that’s what I did! But I can see that in order to get and achieve All The Things I would need to do this indefinitely. And I don’t appreciate that. I have other things I want to do with my free time. Not like… useful things, but… you know, things. I think. I can’t remember what I did during screen time before Animal Crossing.

I would also like to note that I am a completely different person in Animal Crossing than I am in real life. Animal Crossing me enjoys changing outfits daily (she types from day three in her favorite sweatshirt). Animal Crossing me checks in with her animal friends regularly. Animal Crossing me buys all the things all the time whether or not she wants them or needs them. Animal Crossing me spends hours decorating the bathroom, and then more hours carefully planting flowers around the island.

And for those who are wondering, here are the museum items I’m still missing.

Art I Still Need:

• Familiar Statue (The Thinker)
• Robust Statue (Discobolus)
• Amazing Painting (The Night Watch)
• Warm Painting (The Clothed Maja)
• Nice Painting (The Fifer)

Fish I Still Need:

• Giant Trevally
• Mahi Mahi
• Barreleye
• Giant Isopod

Insects I Still Need:

• Scarab Beetle
• Goliath Beetle
• Giant Stag

Anyway, it’s been fun Animal Crossing, and I’ll always think of you fondly, but the heady early days of our relationship are long done; it’s time we entered the weekends only phase of our relationship.

I recently turned forty years old. Apparently this is a Big Deal and I’m supposed to have a lot of feelings about it.

I am not having a ton of feelings. Forty feels about right. When I was a kid I had trouble even picturing myself as a teenager and I interpreted this as proof that I would die before reaching that stage. This inability to see the future has persisted–to my ongoing disappointment–and I continue to be surprised at every birthday.

Every birthday brings with it a poignant new math problem. You see my college friend Katie died in 2004 when we were both twenty years old. It was sudden and shocking and happened over the summer. Later that year I turned twenty-one, but she did not. After that I turned twenty-two, but she did not.

You see where this is going. My fortieth birthday marks a doubling of Katie’s time here, and when I picture my forty years I don’t see four sets of ten. I see two sets of twenty.

I have another college friend who turned forty this year who is currently on hospice care as he winds down a multi-year battle with cancer. He has lived double what Katie lived, but his life won’t extend much further.

He knows he won’t ever turn forty-one, but the rest of us have no fucking clue what’s in store for us. Maybe I die at forty too. Or fifty. Maybe I’ll hit eighty and double his lifespan and quadruple Katie’s. God, that would be something.

Not a single moment is guaranteed to us, so I am pretty pleased to have made it to forty.