Saturday morning, reading by the window. I’ve got no plans. Maybe I’ll read all day with a cat on my lap, pausing only to eat and make coffee.
Probably I won’t do that, but it’s a nice dream.
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Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami) and Tootsie -
It’s 5:52 am. I’m up in the bleachers at the cavernous aquatic center, café Americano in a paper cup by my side. The white noise of the kick-splash from the swim team, the echo of the coach’s instructions from the pool deck, and the muffled beat of pop music (much better for afternoon than early morning) makes me drowsy despite the white bright light.
I didn’t swim today. I’ve got too much work to do. I signed up for a really cool project where I get to work closely with Tumblr support (the company I work for recently acquired Tumblr) to help transition a part of their operations. It’s exciting to dig in and learn the nuts and bolts of another support organization, get to know a whole new team of people, and welcome them to Automattic.
It’s also a lot of newness and thinking and figuring things out, and my brain is asking if the week is over yet. Today I can finally say, almost there, brain.
Yesterday at the end of my work day, after rushing out the door to pick our daughter up after swimming, when I returned home all I could do was lay on the couch with my eyes closed. I heard my stomach gurgle. My husband clear his throat in another room. The click click click of our son’s mouse and the murmur of his voice as he played video games online with his friends. When my brain could finally form a thought, it thought, Tomorrow is Friday! I can finally get my French fries!
Friday is take-out night at our house. Take-out night has evolved over the years. It used to be we’d alternate pizza and Five Guys from week to week. If given the choice between Five Guys and pizza, though, our son would almost always choose Five Guys. Except Five Guys didn’t really have anything our daughter likes, so we added a Zaxby’s stop. Then my husband and I got tired of the gross greasiness of Five Guys, and we added a stop to a Mediterranean place, Mezeh. Then our son decided he liked Mezeh.
Which leads me to why I am particularly excited about this Friday. Today. Last week, our daughter was out of town for a swim meet on Friday. I for sure thought we’d be getting Five Guys, since it’s our son’s favorite, and I was SUPER excited about French fries. But when I asked him what he wanted for take-out, my eyes gleaming for salty greasy Five Guys fries, he said, “Mezeh.” 😭It was pouring rain, and I was absolutely not going two different places. So I got a Mediterranean bowl that was exactly like the meal I’d been eating at home for lunch and dinner the previous three days. Lettuce and chick peas and hummus decidedly did not satisfy my Five Guys fries with Zax sauce craving.
Today, after this week, and in the state my brain is in, I don’t care what everyone else wants for take-out, or how many stops it takes to get everyone what they want. I have not stopped thinking about these damn French fries since Wednesday, and I’m getting them tonight.
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Some people process the world through movement. Some by sitting still. Some talk to navigate problems and understand life. Some write.
Joan Didion famously explained in her Why I Write essay,
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan DidionThis emerges over and over again in essays, interviews, and memoirs from people who write. Some variation of “writing helps me refine [process, understand, know] my thoughts” or “writing is how I discover.”
It will probably come as no surprise that I relate to all of this. Each time I read or hear someone who writes say one of those things, I think, Yes! Me too! I get it! We are kindred! I belong!
I wrote a few days ago about how since I began working from home, I’ve struggled with figuring out when to shower each day. When I sat down to write that blog post, a blog post about how routine gives me space to think, I had no knowledge of where it would end. Yet, by the time I got to the final paragraph I had an aha! moment about how to fit showers into my work-from-home life.
Beginning the day after I wrote that post, I started setting my alarm 10 minutes earlier so I could get up and shower. That’s it. Showering first thing is now part of my routine, and I feel like I have an extra hour in my day because of those 10 tiny minutes.
It’s a small, dumb example of how writing helps me process life, but I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.
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Yesterday morning, instead of blogging first thing or browsing social media, I spent the first few minutes of the day reading Offscreen magazine’s interview with Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing. At first, I wasn’t particularly interested in learning how to do nothing. I can relate to the feeling she mentions, that we all feel like we always have be productive, to be doing something with our time, and to have something to show for the minutes and hours of our days. But that’s how I’ve always been, and I don’t particularly think it’s something I need to fix about myself. I like doing and being productive. Having something to show for my time is satisfying to me.
However, the very first question of the interview maybe changed my mind:
Much of your book and your work overall is about observation. What are the skills required for observation and where or how do we obtain them?
Interview with Jenny Odell in Offscreen Magazine, issue 22I would really like to improve my observation skills. How does one do that? Odell’s answer didn’t really address that question, at least not in a way that resonated with me, and I’m left wondering if it seems obvious to those who are good observers. “How do you observe? You just observe.” You want to be a writer? Then write. Do the thing you say you want to do.
When I picture myself out in the world, in the scenarios I think I’d want to observe, I’m always with book, notebook, or camera. And when I’m actually out in the world, I’ll pull out my phone or my notebook or my book when I’ve got idle time. By doing — by scrolling, writing, reading — I turn my attention to something that’s not the world around me. I do not observe.
I thought I didn’t need or want to learn about doing nothing. But perhaps the thing about doing nothing is that doing nothing, and allowing yourself to do nothing, makes room for observation.
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Our son took the PSAT this school year. He’s 16 years old. About a week ago, he started receiving letters in the mail from colleges. “Go to our website and sign up for more information!” Every day, the mailbox contains at least one or two letters with a fine logo embossed in the upper left corner of the envelope and addressed to our son.
I was not prepared for this. I was putting off thinking about it until his junior year.
I knew he would grow up one day and leave home. I know that day is approaching. We make conscious choices as a family to make the most of the time we have together because we know it’s growing short.
But still, the day he leaves home has always been vague and in the future. I avoided picturing it because I didn’t want to picture it. I was in denial, though I didn’t realize that until the letters started coming.
These letters make it real. They say: your child is no longer a child. Even if he didn’t want to go to college, if he wanted to travel or go straight to work, he’d still leave home one day. I’m so proud of him, of who he is as a human being, and I want him go out into the world and be free and be him. But goodness my heart aches when I think of his sweet little boy face, his sweet little boy voice, his teenage smile, his wry wit, the emptiness that will be left behind when he goes on his way.
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When I was contemplating a subscription to The New Yorker, I talked it out with my friends wondering, will it be worth it, or will it just stress me out because it comes so frequently? One friend laughed and sent me this bit from The Good Place, which is one of my favorite scenes from the show:
Torture in the bad place: a giant stack of New Yorker magazines. And “they’ll just keep coming.” Despite my friend’s warning, I subscribed. And in January, the issues started piling up.
In my zeal after finishing my massive reading project, I put myself on the waitlist for multiple books at the library. At first, because I had to wait in line, there was no pressure, and I read magazines and unwanted books at my leisure.
But then one of my holds became available when I was midway through another book, and I knew I had limited time to get to the library book and get through the library book before it would expire and go to someone else, so I had to hustle. When I was midway through that library book, one of my other holds became available. Then another one.
Meanwhile, the New Yorkers piled up. I kept them in a small stack behind my reading chair in the living room, thinking, oh boy, the more those pile up, the more overwhelming it’s going to feel to get through them, and then they’ll stress me out and I’ll never get to them and I’ll always be behind.
Yesterday, I said, Enough. Forget the library books. I can get those again another time. I’ve got all the January issues of The New Yorker here, and it’s only four, and four is manageable. If nothing else, I can read the short stories and the cartoons from four issues and call it a day.
So I did, and now I feel better. I’ll be able to actually sit down with the next one that arrives in the mail and read it unburdened. And, since I was between books when I finished the backlog yesterday, I was able to begin a new novel last night: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.
Butterfly Mind 