On cocktail innovations, murky transparency, and never knowing where joy might appear
June 11, 2021
Dear Eva,
It is officially feeling like summer in these parts, and it is divine! As I think I mentioned when we spoke some time recently, I have determined that this early side of summer is my new favorite time of year. It just feels so full of possibility, so spacious, so relaxed. My mindset is appropriately matched to this just lately, and I am riding a wave where everything that sometimes feels difficult or murky feels simple and clear. Maybe instead of things being hard, they could be easy? My son, J, on the other hand, seems to be having a little bit of a challenge adjusting to his newfound summer freedom. My mom often reminds me that I used to wander around a little lost and untethered at the beginning of each summer break myself as a young one. J seems to have inherited this tendency. I can’t recall if I have mentioned it before, but when the very first summer break began after his kindergarten year, J just completely melted. At that age, it manifested with abundant tears and tantrums at the drop of a hat. This age, it is just revealing itself with a little bit of melancholy and far more sleepiness than usual. Each summer, he has reacclimated within a week or two, and I have no doubt that will happen again this year. It is fascinating, though, to annually observe this rocky transition from structured time to unstructured time. Further evidence of the anchoring effect of constraints. (This reminds me of the hypothetical you posed last week about retiring in exchange for the commitment of a short daily run. How is this even a question? I do not even have to ponder my options; I am in!)
I feel obliged to fess up that I completely misjudged last weekend’s parenting obligations in my letter last week. I complained extensively about our upcoming weekend-long soccer tournament in the blazing sun—both in the letter, and in real life later that night. Then, when Saturday rolled around and I took my morning shift as the watchful parent at the first soccer game, I found myself having a grand time huddled in the shade under a small tree with two delightful women drinking canned margaritas and cheering on our kids. (I did not partake in the margaritas, but I am very curious about this new-to-me concept of various liquor drinks in canned form. Cocktail innovation!) I had so much fun that I told B to just stay home so I could stay all day, and then on Sunday morning for their championship game, we both decided to go. And thank goodness we did, because J ended up scoring his first goal all season in a last second game-winning play! It was so exciting that I cried a few jubilant, proud-mom tears. Quite the turn of events, so take that, cranky Week-140-Letter Sarah! You just never know where joy might appear.
Have you dabbled with any early morning writing time like you mentioned last week? I am pleased and amused that I am representing the dawn with enough enthusiasm to inspire you, and to continue to inspire me to get myself out of bed each day! I have steadily continued the practice, and most days my body now awakens before the 6 AM alarm. This is remarkable for someone who is very well-known in our house as the one who will not get out of bed in the mornings. Is it wrapped up in my early-summer mindset, or will this stick? Time will tell! I will embrace it while it lasts.
I was astounded to hear that you, too, know precisely what I am talking about with reading Runner’s World to become a runner, not to sustain being one. Is this actually their target audience? And if so, how fascinating is that about human behavior that a magazine about a hobby is mostly aspirational?
Your allergic reaction to Getting Things Done™ amused me to no end. I will state for the record that I have no shame about reading that book, though it was indeed a little boring. I would certainly love to read your zine on the simple now | later | done methodology, but I will note that just this week, someone at work mentioned something quite similar associated with the Kanban framework of project planning and management. This should not stop you, however. It is not like one can trademark or “own” getting things done. Oh wait… On theme, yesterday I spent my morning at a webinar called Doing More by Doing Less. My sense is this topic is one you would not have such an aversion to, because I am guessing you are reacting more to the title than to the idea of learning better ways of planning and organizing the shit one has to do. (While both of these titles emphasize productivity, Doing More by Doing Less entices you with the reward of more time, though of course that is one of the implicit goals of the GTD method™, too.) One of the things they talked about in this webinar was being just “good enough” at whatever you do, which of course felt like quite the validation of my new naughty mantra! In the session though, everyone panicked at this idea. Here again, why can’t more people be like us?
Speaking of people being frustratingly un-like us in all the wrong ways (there are many ways in which I enjoy being around people who are not like me), I was really feeling your sentiment recently about the different tiers of people in your life and how there are some you want to be there, and some not so much. This is something that is remarkably simple, yet very difficult to get clarity on. Or perhaps I was just a slow learner in this regard. In recent years, I have actually taken to having a written list of the few humans who I consider to be people that I want to make a point to put energy toward sustaining a connection. I then look at this list regularly and it helps remind me to shoot a note to someone, or reach out for a walk, and so on. I guess this is the flipside of the annoying people problem, but it’s all tied up in the same stew of trying to parse who deserves energy and attention in our lives and who does not. We cannot please and relate to and connect with everyone, as you and I chatted about in a different context in our call this morning.
On that note, I will wrap this letter to a friend who I am delighted to continue to invest in! I hope you have a fantastic birthday celebration weekend with M, including a tasty sushi meal out on the town. I am counting down the weeks until I get to see you and enjoy some cocktail innovation (or plain old-fashioned cocktails for that matter) with you and yours.
I look forward to reading your letter!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday June 11 2021
Dear Sarah,
It’s Friday, and I’m looking back at notes I took over the last weekend or possibly on Monday for my letter to you this week. Our letters have laid much groundwork to back up the fact that that span of time — a handful of days ago — now leaves me feeling a bit like a different person altogether than the one I was when I jotted those notes! While it was a fine week, it took a bit of the wind out of my sails between Monday and Friday, and the notes seem to have been made by someone who was then in a shimmering sort of creative space. It was me! Just a different me than Friday-morning Eva whose mental sparkle has been dulled by a combination of the extraordinary heat we’re experiencing here in the Twin Cities, and a regular week with my attentions divided (by choice, of course) among a handful of organizations and their priorities. Still, I’ll bring my notes off the penciled page and into my letter draft here and see if I can wrap the spirit of earlier in the week around me like one of your pre-summer early-morning blankets!
I have been wrapped up in a new book (now finished) which I learned of because it was adjacent to a different new book I’d been meaning to acquire for some time. This book that I’d been meaning to acquire, called Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai, was drifting in and out of my mind and I finally decided to get myself a copy. I was ordering through Amazon and it suggested another book: Ordinary Affects by Kathleen Stewart. Ordinary Affects sounded very interesting. When the two books arrived I set aside the original impetus like the peel of an orange and got to work on Ordinary Affects. (I am sure the time will come again for Ugly Feelings.) This second book set me on a path toward acquiring a third book, The Hundreds, which caused me to feel positively tingly as I started reading it.
As I read Ordinary Affects I was trying to figure out what it was about. In some ways it is completely transparent about what it is, in other ways it is murky to me even in all its transparency. I am going to try quoting a passage, a lazy way of sharing it with you here because my Friday head is looking at it from a bit of a distance rather than from the inside.
Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.
There is more I want to say about these new books, Ordinary Affects and The Hundreds, and new feelings I felt this week, but now it’s the end of the day on Friday and the origin of those feelings is like a distant glow on the horizon, and I think I’ll wait to say more until the rays of those feelings are shining strong on (or from?) my face again! Perhaps I’ll weave these texts through the next few letters like I did with John McPhee’s Draft No. 4.
In response to a question in your letter of last week: I did go to camp as a kid! I went to Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp from the summer after my seventh grade year until the summer after eleventh grade. (I don’t think I went after graduating from high school, though I can’t exactly recall!) It was a really wonderful experience. I met great friends there every year, practiced so much cello my fingers were extra sore and callused, had crushes, and simply enjoyed doing music stuff for two weeks straight. In the summer before my senior year I also went on an international tour with the Blue Lake Orchestra to Germany and Belgium, and started “dating” (or whatever one calls youthful relationships) another Ledgie, the pianist on our tour who performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2, still one of my favorite pieces of music. (I just turned it on and those introductory notes give me chills!) My stand partner AK and I had a whole cinematic narrative that we imagined alongside the concerto. So! I didn’t go to what I think of as “traditional” summer camp, where people of all types might go to while away the summer doing summery things (I’m picturing swimming and basket-weaving). Blue Lake was a niche kind of camp but if it was your niche, it was just right!
M and I have kicked off his birthday weekend with a slice of pizza, a beer, and a generous Midwestern sushi feast in a packed suburban restaurant, which nonetheless received our seal of approval. Now we’re on to three days of celebration that will carry us through his forty-first birthday! I hope you have a lovely weekend and I’m looking forward to talking again soon!
Until then,
Yours,
Eva