ON POWERING DOWN, A NORMAL IDEA, AND BEING AWARE OF OUR BUNS
Friday May 3 2024
Dear Sarah!
It is the post-lunch hour and I am drinking some tea that is too powerful for me and am eating some messy chocolate from its wrapper from within a plastic bag — my approach to chocolate in general because I have a subtle fear of getting chocolate crumbs on myself which will then melt into mysterious brown spots on my clothing.
I just heard back from a fellowship I had applied to in December, and I did not get it! I applied to two fellowships in December and I did not get either! You know what they say — when two doors close, two other doors open. I am not overly concerned with not getting the fellowships — it was fun to apply; I will keep writing; I will keep applying to opportunities that seem interesting and like a good fit for me, and perhaps at some point some of them will come to pass. Applying to things is a little bit like playing the lottery but better, in that I am submitting my own actual work, I am competing as a representation of myself; it is not completely a game of luck and statistics; the odds would seem to indicate that if I keep working, keep growing and changing and writing, and simultaneously keep applying and submitting things, eventually something might work out. Whereas the odds of me winning the actual monetary lotto remain vanishingly slim no matter what, and I am not willing to do what it takes to shift the odds, which I think would just mean buying an extreme amount of tickets at once.
I liked your thoughts in last week’s letter about how you are perpetually in conversation with a delightful set of humans, including many I have never met. This is a lovely and perfect way to describe the way we are always pulling the world into our thoughts — and the way that other people’s words and ways of thinking become something we can tussle, argue, banter with in our minds. Sort of a form of mental exercise, building our mental muscles all the time. I am thinking about this further and I may loop back around to say more. However, I have also just doodled away some minutes while working on this letter because I felt like I had all the time in the world, and now I have less than all the time in the world!
One thing I love about the letters, and that I love about writing in general, is how the writing and conversation process is also a process of laying down the stones that form the path ahead. Once I get an idea down, I can see it more clearly for what it is. When an idea is inside my head, I can’t quite get a good look at it — it shifts and twists behind my eyes, seems sensible because it was born there, in my head, and it lives there, in my head. Once I get it down on paper, it looks different, exposed to the air. As I wrote those words earlier today I realized I was echoing a specific set of thoughts I wrote about in perhaps one of my favorite letters to you, if I may have such a thing — and interestingly, that letter is from early May of 2020, almost exactly four years ago. A long way of noting the fact that last week I wrote to you about sharing my written raw material docs with you when I die — and having written that idea down it became humorous to me — and then over the weekend I saw a friend and mentioned the humorous idea — and she asked the obvious question, why not share the writing while you are still alive? Ugh! What a normal idea. So then I did it! I shared some of my raw material with you this past week. I don’t even know what I think about it. I’ve basically shared with you a sample of the way I work, and the outputs of my way of working. I don’t think the thing I shared is a “thing” itself — but sharing it with you is at least a step in the direction of writing things and sharing them, working on figuring out what they are. I think some people write and know just what they’re writing. I don’t know precisely what I’m writing but boy do I have a lot of words for it.
On a related note — I have read before that you know you have reached the end of some particular piece of writing when you find that you are making your way back around to where you started, or are restating certain things — perhaps that means that the four-year period between now and May of 2020 is the time period I should be working with in what I’m writing. I don’t know! I’ll take it.
I have to tell you that I have been having some muscle issues in my glutes and hamstrings, my butt and the backs of my legs. I’ve been increasing my running mileage and now I’m generally running 4.5 to 5 miles every other day, give or take some transitions or extra recovery days. In late April I had a surprising accomplishment: I ran 7.5 miles, not *quite* without trying, but definitely without planning to run that distance before I got started. I found that I was still feeling pretty good as I approached 6 miles, and so I kept going! However, I have been skimping on my yoga practice of late, and I am now reaping what I have sown, which is that my legs and buns are tight as heck. I have never been so aware of having buns as I am right now, when I feel myself sitting on them constantly. You don’t usually think about sitting on your buns, or at least I don’t, but my body is making itself known, even in this seemingly low-maintenance state.
I have more miscellany in my notes from this morning — a generally failed attempt to salvage some part of a rotten apple; a discussion of how I once thought I might go to cooking school and become a food writer — and instead I think I will hold these notes for a future letter and wrap it up here! It’s Friday and you’ve got guests coming to town and I need to get off my buns! Seriously, they are angry at me for sitting, no matter where and how I sit.
Much love and excited to see you soon!
Until then! Yours,
Eva
May 3, 2024
Dear Eva,
I wonder if the snapshot of our lives represented in these letters is skewed by their saturation in Friday vibes? This is on my mind because today has a particularly strong Friday funk to it, in the best possible way. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. (Someone outside just started a leaf blower or other lawncare device making a racket, but I’ll ignore that.) Friends from Chicago are en route. Let the weekend begin!
The clock says 1:26 pm at this precise moment, and I am sitting down at my personal laptop to write to you in an empty house, with no anticipated distractions for at least one hour when my timer goes off reminding me of school pickup. (Learned the hard way that I can easily get consumed in what I am doing and forget to pick up my kid.) I relish the forced reflection time this letter project creates. As we have recounted before, the ritual changes the texture of time, or maybe just allows me to feel that texture in a different way. It also adds an extra flair to every Friday. I can’t recall how deeply we thought out our writing schedule way back when we started this, but we really nailed it with the Friday publication pattern. It feels like the perfect culmination of the week to sit down to write to you, a kind of powering-down of the workweek machine.
For no obvious reason, this workweek was decidedly more pleasant than most have been recently. I suppose it relates to having had enough to do at work that I was engaged, but not so much that I felt uncomfortable in any way. As a result, this weekend feels like it snuck up on me, a contrast to the “is it Friday yet?” way of being I have been used to having lately. I also feel like I successfully cracked out of a small container my brain was stuck in. I told you over text that my brain has been “itchy,” and I described it as being slightly irritated and unsettled. Upon reflection, I think it also has to do with overthinking. I called it a container because that is kind of what it feels like when my mind becomes consumed with solving a particular problem, like I am trapped there and can’t exit until it’s resolved. The problem is, there are many puzzles that can’t be solved in a single sitting – literal and metaphorical! I sometimes have to really coax myself away from a topic, repeating the “it’s not time to worry about that now” mantra until it sinks in. I really leaned into that this week and eventually it cracked open. I feel an expansiveness now that wasn’t there last week, like I have more space and time inside my own head. Sheesh, brains are weird. Or maybe I’m just weird. Either way, as S so often reminds me, “Weird is good!” (one of our family mottos)
Ah, that kid. His level of exuberance and unwavering belief in the goodness of everything! It is beautiful, and it regularly makes me want to fall to my knees and cry. I wonder if this is universal? For me, it is an overwhelming ache at the knowledge that this flavor of innocence is ephemeral. And of course this is how it should be. We would be disturbed if anecdotes like “Oh look, I finally have a six pack” when pointing to one’s ribcage were happening in adulthood. But knowing it is right and inevitable does not take away the pain. (I stopped typing just now to contemplate if pain was the right word here. It feels too dramatic, but yet that is the emotional experience for me.) I guess there is a way that watching a human grow up involves recurring loss. We are all changing all the time, but the gradual unlearning of child-like rapture and self-confidence is a particular kind of change. The evolution is, at once, both wondrous to witness as kids start to develop their own nuanced take on this confusing world, and sorrowful because they will never be as unburdened as right now. I am curious whether any of this resonates with you. In some ways, I can see that feeling sad in the face of a kid’s delightful way of being is probably a bit strange. I wonder if I have some lingering heartbreak from my own loss of child-like innocence that is coming into play?
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It is now 9:15 pm! I got myself in a bit of a pickle with timing today, running errands with our guests arriving before I even returned, let alone finished this letter. We also had a bit of unexpected dog drama. Marlowe ate the homemade pizza dough right off the counter while B was mowing the lawn and the kids were distracted. Three whole pies worth! What a butt. We made up for it with a small appetizer of the one remaining homemade pie, and then we supplemented with takeout Korean fried chicken and kimchi. My belly is now full and I’m ready to get this weekend officially started! It doesn’t count until this letter is complete.
Your letter has been sitting in my inbox for hours at this point, and I can’t wait to read it. Also, I get to see you next week!! Woohoo!!!
Have a wonderful weekend, my friend!
Yours,
Sarah