ON BEING A GENIUS, THE FOREVER CROSSROADS, AND SEEING HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE
Friday October 29 2021
Dear Sarah,
I finished a project! A big one that’s been hanging over me for a while! I AM A GENIUS is what I just yelled in my house this Friday afternoon! Maybe not a genius per se, but boy, did I ever finish that project!
I am looking back at our letters from last week, and chuckling over the idea of RogRinch. I went to the library today to drop off some overdue library books — I think somewhat recently (maybe during the pandemic? maybe before?) my library nixed overdue fees, and while I have still been generally rigorous with my return schedule, I am perhaps *slightly* less rigorous than I used to be — and while I was driving around I thought, who am I kidding, am I really going to keep writing letters to no one after this year ends? The odds are no, but I do want to find ways to maintain some sort of weekly reflection, and/or some form of weekly creative production: included in and alongside everything that has come out of these letters, it is a treat to make something every week, and to send it over to you, and then for the two of us to put them up online. We did a thing, and it exists, and we do it every week! It won’t be the same after the letters but I wonder what next thing will emerge, both in our solo practices and in what we might make together.
Thinking about your letter from last week: perhaps it is the Death Drive at work; I love the feeling of settling out of your head and into your body; I completely agree that there have been times that the faintest facial expression of disappointment from a colleague is the consequence I am working feverishly to avoid. This is a forever crossroads: it doesn’t matter what colleagues think of us, and yet it matters what colleagues think of us. Each week these days I think I am stretching a little further toward living a life that is less about others and more about myself and what I am drawn to. It seems like the kind of thing about which people say I wish I had done X sooner, but you can only get to things in your own time. I am somehow a different person today than I was 15 or 20 years ago (and amazingly, I was already an adult 15 or 20 years ago). A year contains so much, a month, a week, a day!
I had a genuine laugh last week reading your account of S’s perusal of the Target catalog and his attempt to exchange his 1 billion Zimbabwean dollars for all the goodies that Target has to offer. I relayed this story to M and he, too, enjoyed the story thoroughly! I am sorry, S, that those billion dollars are not convertible into equivalent U.S. coinage… if they were, we would all be in good shape!
I have enjoyed as my early evening cocktail a powerful White Russian (this may just be how White Russians are always made, and so I will tell you that they are powerful) and a large portion of a large pizza that M and I have deemed Minnesota style, a thin crust pizza that would nevertheless not be what you were expecting if you ordered thin crust: a thin circular pizza cut not into triangles but rather cut into a grid over the shape of the pizza circle, so that you have some nibbies at the four “corners” of the circle, some good edge pieces, and a fair amount of interior pieces. This pizza had sausage, pepperoni, and shrimp on it! So, if you can imagine, I am on the edge of my capacity to pluck words from my brain before slouching toward the couch to watch some evening cartoonage (Disenchantment) to be followed by one of the few remaining episodes of the whole Star Trek: The Next Generation series. I have some loose plans to watch some Tim Burton x Danny Elfman movies this weekend, and otherwise I am looking forward to settling in with a fresh library book, Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin (following my very delightful experience during my recent weekend out of town in Wisconsin on the screened-in porch with Colwin’s book The Lone Pilgrim). I hope you have a fun and peaceful Halloween weekend ahead! Talk soon, my friend!
Yours,
Eva
October 29, 2021
Dear Eva,
Tonight I am rereading your letter from last week, pondering your words anew. Which things do I care about, what do I turn to, what are my interests, what feels good and necessary? These strike me as such essential and healthy questions to be asking ourselves regularly. There are times when we do not know the answers, and there are times that we do know the answers but find ourselves living in ways that do not reflect them. Both situations are troubling, in different ways. But when we find ourselves sitting in a pool of incongruity there is something nice about the simplicity of the solution. We know what we need to do. This brings me around to an aphorism I stumbled upon through Austin Kleon’s newsletter and misquoted to you earlier today. I will give you the full proper citation now: You are free to do whatever you want. You need only face the consequences. This aphorism buoys me—the consequences we fear so often shape our behavior (even mild frowns); what if we just took contrary action and faced the consequences? This goes for all of it, and by “it” I mean life.
After we talked earlier, I spent the bulk of my day readying my online Law & Ethics course for the Tippie School of Business. As I created grading rubrics and developed discussion questions, it struck me what a profound experience it is to be the shaper rather than the shapee. We have discussed before what a sucker I am for a syllabus, and I think part of what sits behind that is my subconscious belief that all of the choices that went into that syllabus and course design matter, that there is some grand design behind all of it that ensures that following the path and excelling imbues some real significance. To be clear, I have certainly put a lot of thought into my teaching choices. But I also can see that there is no magic behind it all. Seeing how the sausage is made is quite eye-opening! What matters when nothing matters?
I am sitting here in the TV room with my laptop on my lap while B and his lifelong buddy J watch the World Series, and we all sip beer and chitchat. I have a letter in my inbox from you, and it is making it extra hard for me knowing that it is there waiting for me to open it! (The left shift key on my keyboard has just stopped working, so I am now attempting to use the right shift key, which feels unnatural and clunky.)
I would hereby like to apologize for this shorty of a letter, but I am afraid that I have run out of steam. I will write a long rambler next week to make up for it. Here’s to both of us coming out of the dark as we lighten our loads (shedding some coats like it’s January 2020!).
Until soon,
Your friend,
Sarah