When I first got to claim a room of my own, I couldn’t wait to make it bright after working in a dark basement living room in our old townhouse. I painted the walls lime soufflé, and my coworkers called my office the Key Lime Studio.
When I moved to a different job, I thought I should change my space, too. I was still using the same office, since I was still working from home. It felt odd to be doing a completely different job from the exact same space. I painted the walls, but that’s about as far as I got. I didn’t redecorate; I didn’t really “move in”.
After rejoining Automattic, I wanted to make my office my home again. The monitor, desk, and chair I got from when I was hired in 2014 are still my sturdy constants, and I freshened the rest of the space by making some small changes. I paid our daughter to paint my bookshelf white, my husband made a chairmat out of plywood and vinyl tiles, and I bought a fluffy runner rug to soften up the place. Most exciting, with my new office color I can finally display the orange glass globe from my grandfather that I’ve carted around with me for 20 years but never had a good place to display it.
I love my office space now. I come down here and write before I work, and it’s a pleasant place to spend my days at home at work.
From the entrance to my officeMy window to the garden (but mostly the woodpile)Where I spend my daysMy glass globe
The landscape is grey and brown. The sky is heavy with stone clouds. Bare branches are wet with fog and rain. My poor garden, vibrant in summer, is sharp with plant skeletons, crinkly with copper oak leaves, and lifeless.
Winter gets harder to bear every year. The holidays are over, and I’m ready for winter to be, too. The clothes are bulky and there are so many of them. Thick socks, long pants, undershirts, overshirts, sweaters, jackets, coats, clunky shoes that cover your whole foot: toes, bridge, and ankle. In summer an entire outfit — a sundress and flip-flops — takes up as much space in a suitcase as a single winter shoe.
Today when I was driving home in the spitting rain, tires spewing wet road grime, and I was depressed about winter, the sun came out for a minute and I saw a rainbow. Is it possible to see a rainbow and not say, “Ooh! a rainbow!”, even if nobody else is around? They’re magical, and rare, and cartoonish in their universal message of hope and joy.
So I figured, FINE, I’ll think about some things I’m grateful for in winter.
Grapefruit season. Bright, tart, and glistening pink when you slice into them, grapefruits are full of Florida sunshine in the dark days of winter. Their astringency brightens whatever space they’re cut open in and makes me feel clean when I eat their juicy segments.
Red cardinals. The bleak winter landscape fills me with gloom right up until the moment a male cardinal enters it. Brighter than apples, when these little birds perch on a twig or a wooden fence, they become the focal point of the entire scene. Against the snowy white or dull brown backdrop of winter, their red feathers pop, and I cannot look away.
Wood fires in the fireplace. When we lived without winter, in our years in Florida, I longed for cold and snow and raw and damp so that we could have a fireplace, and fires in it. I don’t know if there is anything on earth cozier to me than the crackle of wood burning in a fireplace in the warm shelter of home when it’s cold outside. The smell of woodsmoke, the audible hisses and pops, the heat of the flames. Us and the cats piled up next to the hearth to read or play games or just lay with eyes closed, heads on pillows, as the flames dance and the fire warms us all.
Last night at the dinner table, my husband made a comment that he apparently makes every time our son eats the round ends of the Italian sausage we serve on spaghetti night. When our son said, “That’s what you say every time,” my husband had an oh shit moment. As in, Oh shit I’m getting old. And repeating Dad jokes.
He and I talked about not knowing which is more distressing: repeating ourselves, or not even realizing we’re repeating ourselves. I’ve said things to our son and daughter that I thought were brand new thoughts to me. Our daughter is gentle when she tells me I’ve told her something before; our son is blunt. “Yeah, you said that yesterday.” When they tell me I’ve told them something before, I’m like no way, I only just now thought of it. But honestly, I trust them more than I trust myself, and maybe I’m just already losing my marbles at age 45.
I do this when I’m writing, too. I’ll do a whole 15 minute write that I’ll think is fresh and new. I’ll be pleased with a particular sequence of words and will puff myself up and pat myself on the back for my genius. Then I’ll read an old blog post with the exact same phrasing and realize, for Pete’s sake, I’ve already written this.
The main problem with repeating ourselves, aside from the losing our marbles part, is that jokes and phrases become stale when they are overused. If they somehow manage to be good the first time, the chances of them being good a second time is very low. Scarcity makes them special; the second time they come around they’re just disappointing. For example, I’m reading a book now that used the word “panache.” What a fabulous word! We all know the word, but it’s rare that I hear it or read it. When I came across it in my book the first time, I was delighted! When the author used it again 50 pages later, I was deflated. It lost its specialness in its duplication. Perhaps the author is using it intentionally for two different characters whose fates will intersect, but I’m doubtful.
My memory has always been crap, so it’s unlikely I’ll suddenly start recognizing when I’ve written something before. Without editing full time, I don’t know that there’s much I can do about the repetition thing other than apologize to you, dear reader, if I repeat myself too much about the marshes and salt water, about books and reading, about dreams and desires, so that they become stale for you. If anyone is aware of a miracle memory tonic, please let me know!
Last year was a big year for my reading life. After reading a few phenomenal short story collections, and because I dared to try writing fiction, I wanted to study short stories. I subscribed to The New Yorker for a weekly dose of curated short fiction. I started with a 12-issue trial, and when in the 10th issue of my trial there was a new Olive Kitteridge story from Elizabeth Strout, I bought a 6-month subscription. Each week when a new issue arrives, and my husband deposits the mail on the kitchen table, I say “ooh!”, pick up the magazine, and flip to the page 2 table of contents to see who the fiction author will be. Sometimes I even read other parts of the magazine, and I have been delighted to come across surprises like personal essays from David Sedaris or Anthony Lane’s “The Intoxicating History of Gin,” which honest-to-god used the word “recharché.”
I also subscribed to a quarterly magazine called Offscreen. It’s beautifully designed, independent, and takes an unvarnished, thoughtful view of technology with the hopes of helping us steer it in humane directions. I enjoy quiet time away from a screen reading and thinking about the tech world we live and work in.
Those subscriptions are novelties in my reading life, and I enjoy their fresh differentness compared to my usual long-form reading. But by far the most significant reading I did in 2019 was to complete my Andrea Reads America project (with a few detours). Oh! And I read two Tolstoy novels! After six years of American literature, I now get to move into the wide open world of reading without rules. If my tracking in Goodreads is to be trusted, I read 60 books in 2019:
Thanks to Matt Mullenweg whose 29 Books in 2019 post inspired me to reflect on my reading life in 2019. I was particularly struck by his comment about how little books cost for how much they give. Looking through my list above, I think I purchased fewer than 5 of them; the rest I was able to borrow from the library.
I’ve never had a fountain pen. Prior to this Christmas, I used the Signo Uniball 207. You can buy the Uniball at the grocery store or Target or the drug store, and they are fast-writing, smooth, inky pens. They’re great, accessible pens for when you need an instrument that can write (almost) as quickly as you think. I used to buy Uniball ink refills from a local art supply store until the owners retired and closed up shop; I didn’t like throwing away perfectly good pens, but grocery stores and Target and drug stores don’t carry the ink, only the bodies.
Though the Uniballs are fast, they’re far from perfect. They’re not a pretty tool, for one thing. They look like you bought them from the school supplies section of Kroger or CVS, and that you had to rip them out of the same kind of packaging as a toothbrush. And because the tip is a perfect ball, which is part of what makes them so fast, they lack control. They don’t provide any aim, which makes it too easy for your handwriting to run off course.
Of all the pens from the school and office aisle, the Uniball was the best I’d tried. After several years of using it, I was pretty bored with the pen, though. The most exciting thing I did with the Uniball is switch between blue and black ink.
In early December as I was shopping for other people, I had a fleeting thought that I might want to buy someone a pen, and then I realized really, I wanted a pen. I didn’t feel justified in buying myself anything beyond the drugstore Uniball variety, though, seeing as how I’m just a hobby writer. I did have a secret wish, just for a moment, where I thought how special it would make me feel if someone gave me a pen. I daydreamed about nice pens, and how they might feel, before snapping out of it to get on with my shopping.
On Christmas morning, there was a gift for me under the tree the size and shape of a mascara box from a cosmetics counter. I thought, huh, that’s weird, Brian has never bought me cosmetics before. When I tore the paper off, it still looked like a fancy mascara box.
Then I opened up the box. Inside, there was a turquoise Lamy Safari fountain pen. I was floored. Did he read my mind that day when I was shopping, alone, and had my secret wish that I never expressed aloud? When it was my turn to open a gift again, I opened a larger box that contained a tangerine Pilot Metropolitan with tiny retro daisies on it.
My heart melted. I felt seen, and known, and loved.
Getting the ink flowing in my new fountain pens
I spent the morning getting the cartridges loaded properly. Then, when everyone else was occupied with their Christmas loot and I felt okay disappearing into my own little world, I sat down with my notebooks to feel the ink flowing through metal nibs onto paper. I wrote to feel the weight of the pens, to feel how their barrels dance in the webbed crook of my hand, to feel how the section nestles on the calloused pad of my ring finger where pens and pencils rest.
I had thought the Uniball wrote fast. It drags a brick compared to these fountain pens. They feel like liquid silk on paper. The nibs provide direction, helping me keep my words and my slant even, and helping me underline in straight lines instead of wobbles.
With these pens, I want to write and write and write, even though I have nothing to say. They draw me in simply because I want to feel the ball of their metal nib, wet with ink, flow across paper. They inspire me to think big. To live up to the pleasure they bring me when I write with them.
I started reading I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson, and it’s sucking me in so that the world around me goes black, and I have to claw my way out from the pages to not feel guilty for being absent from my family while I sit right here in the living room with them all around me.
It shouldn’t matter. I don’t know why I feel guilty. I think it’s because when I read that way, when I’m pulled into the vortex of a story where I’m walking alongside the characters and my real world disappears, I feel drugged, like I’m doing something wrong. It’s astonishing to me that humans can create experiences like this, that they can draw from the ether of imagination to string together words that, when combined with the gelatenous electric magic of the reader’s brain, makes us merge into something that doesn’t exist in this physical reality.
Speaking of physical reality, I finally gave up on my Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader. I tried to sideload a book from the library via my new laptop the other day — the same book I’m currently reading in physical form because I couldn’t ever get the blasted thing on my Nook and I had to drive to the library a day after I expected to be able to start the book — and I wasted three hours, THREE HOURS OF MY LIFE, trying unsuccessfully to to get access to the book on my Nook via the ridiculous Overdrive to Adobe Digital Editions to Android File Transfer to Nook gymnastics required for the Nook Glow. The process, on my day off, inspired sailor-level swearing until finally I rage-purchased a Kobo e-reader because it’s supposed to be the best non-tablet e-reader for connecting directly to your public library to borrow books.
I am in line for five digital books at my library. I hope my Kobo arrives in time for me to use it when my next hold is released. I’m trying to pace myself on my current book by writing this post and drinking a martini. It’s hard. I want to dive back in.
Butterfly Mind 