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Winter 2022
General News
Hello.
I apologize, but I am not going to be able to meet my usual standards of professionalism.
Today is my birthday, so I was trying to get this writing done yesterday. I had put together some notes and cleared my schedule for the day, but there were birds outside of my window squawking like you wouldn’t believe. These birds were so loud it made me worry that the laws of physics and biology were disintegrating around me. It would have been more pleasant to spend the morning cleaning my ears out with bitter gravel.
And I’m not a young woman. I’ve heard my fair share of loud birds. When I was much younger, I dated a youth choir director who owned a bird and a lizard. (The job and the lizard aren’t important to the story, but they paint a picture, don’t they?) His bird would throw a shitfit every night and then I would startle awake. My sleeping brain never fully caught up and instead continued to respond as if there was a screaming murderer in the living room. The choir director would then leave me to go comfort the bird. He would talk very sweetly and very kindly and very earnestly to the bird until it fell asleep; a service that was not offered to me. No, he’d come back to the bedroom and pass out. Then I’d spend the next forty minutes trying to meditate the fight or flight adrenaline out of my bloodstream while my boyfriend and his bird slumbered peacefully. The deepest tragedy of this story is that he broke up with me (although if you heard the whole story, you might think I had it coming).
The point is, I was trying to write, but the birds were being too loud. At first, I wondered if this was some sort of bird orgy, but as the incessant sound clattered on from the morning into the afternoon, it seemed less and less likely. I’ve had whole weekends of erotic bliss before, but they were never this constant. They had peaks and valleys, you know? I didn’t spend the whole time hooting and hollering and droning on like some cum-drunk vuvuzela. Everybody needs a break from time to time. Some food. Some music. A shower. A nap. Something.
I started to assume it was birds fighting. Given the volume and the length of the sound, it must have been bird D-Day.
I thought I would just clean up a little until the birds stopped. By the middle of the afternoon, I had the cleanest home I’ve ever had and my sanity was hanging by a thread. I realized that if I had to listen to those birds anymore, I was going to start rooting for the Holocene Extinction. So I decided to drive into town, see a movie, and wait a day to start writing.
Then this morning, my beautiful husband baked me a cake with buttercream frosting as a birthday breakfast treat. As a joke, he got candles from the store that say I’m turning 127, which--considering my drinking plans for tonight--will probably feel just about right tomorrow morning. I blew them out and wished for a day free of bird fracas. But, because I was swept up in birthday excitement and sugar cravings and deep love for my beautiful baking beau, I ate an entire quarter of that cake with two cups of coffee. All I have in my body is sugar and caffeine and I am buzzing so wildly I feel like I am going to fly out the window. So I am making the writing very easy on myself today and just writing down three things that happened without any other niceties.
Thank you for your patience.
News Number 1: I went with Johnson to an art fair in Omaha. It was inside a yoga studio, so we had to take off our shoes before entering. It gave the whole proceeding a lovely, intimate feeling. It also, admittedly, reminded me of a time when I had to go to a kids birthday party in a gymnasium. As a result, I spent the day craving some ice cream out of a tub. (The sock smell wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but that was a low bar to clear.)
Johnson promised me dinner if I helped load and unload his booth. The night before, he asked me what I wanted and I said Italian. To me, that meant “don’t worry too much about it, just go ahead and order us some pizza.” Instead, Johnson told me that he was bringing some gluten free pasta. Sounded fine to me. My husband is gaga for that chickpea substitute stuff. But Johnson lied. He didn’t bring gluten free pasta. He brought pesto on rice. And I’ll never forgive him for it. I just kept thinking, “this is exactly what your mom thought you’d be eating when you moved to a commune.” So I’m either mad at Johnson or my mom, but I’m definitely mad at someone.
News Number 2: Alex has made it their New Year’s resolution not to sleep with any cis men for a year. I asked Alex why, and they told me it was about changing habits to change your outcomes. I asked Alex’s best friend, and she told me that Alex had been through a couple hostile breakups with men in the past year and then they “got weirdly freaked after sleeping with some guy who made toast in a pan for breakfast. Like, they thought it was an omen or something; a ‘these guys with their dirty sheets and tacky dorm room posters can’t even get their lives together enough to get a toaster’ style of thing. I think it’s all a little much.”
I told this story to my husband and he said, “I make toast in a pan sometimes. If you have some good bread and a little olive oil, it’s absolutely lovely.” Maybe he’s part of the problem.
News Number 3: Elizabeth went to a party in Omaha with a few of the college kids who were back on winter break. She thought that she could make up for some of the big city partying she missed by going to college in a small town. Instead, she dressed up for a night on the town only to spend it in a suburban basement with a dozen twenty year olds playing board games and catching up. It’s always a tragedy when I hear about someone wearing a strapless bra in vain.
I have a lot of sympathy for Elizabeth’s mistake, mostly because I always have a lot of sympathy for Elizabeth and everything she does. Even though she is twenty-four, I see her as a compatriot who shares two of my great passions: new novels and wearing button up shirts with jeans. Often, those of us who are called to that book and boot cut lifestyle are led there by a certain indoorsy shyness. And there are times in the lives of the introverted and bookish where we feel a strong push to fight against our perfectly reasonable instincts and try to meet some new people. It’s always terrible. Meeting new people is just the worst. I’m very grateful that I have reached an age where my web of friends and friends’ friends is such that I probably never need to meet a new person. If I ever go to another “mixer” in my life, something has gone terribly and tragically wrong. But I recognize that my current introverted paradise is only possible because of some real efforts when I was *younger* to widen that circle of friends. Right now, Elizabeth is going through one of those periods. And while I applaud her for getting out of her comfort zone, I also pity her. Again, meeting new people is just absolutely dreadful.
Less than a week later, Elizabeth got a quilt from The Quilt Ladies. The Quilt Ladies come together a couple times a week and-- if you can believe it-- make quilts. Most go to members of our community as a demonstration of love in difficult times. As I write, I’m sitting on the quilt I was given when my mother died. It’s so nice to physically wrap yourself in the love people feel towards you. That said, going to a shitty party isn’t really on par with my mom dying, so I asked Shibon what the frigging hell was going on. She said, “Well, it’s nice to remind someone that they are loved, even if they don’t need to hear it. Elizabeth seemed really down and we had some extra quilts. We didn't think about it too much. It just made sense. We want to make sure that we have quilts on hand for when tragedies strike, but we almost always have a surplus. There are bad months and there are good months, but we are always making quilts. We outpace the worst things in life. I try not to say this too much-- because there are a lot of serious things happening in the world and I don’t want people to think that I’m not taking them seriously-- but I also try to be grateful for those few surplus quilts. Things could be so much worse, you know?”
I apologize, but I am not going to be able to meet my usual standards of professionalism.
Today is my birthday, so I was trying to get this writing done yesterday. I had put together some notes and cleared my schedule for the day, but there were birds outside of my window squawking like you wouldn’t believe. These birds were so loud it made me worry that the laws of physics and biology were disintegrating around me. It would have been more pleasant to spend the morning cleaning my ears out with bitter gravel.
And I’m not a young woman. I’ve heard my fair share of loud birds. When I was much younger, I dated a youth choir director who owned a bird and a lizard. (The job and the lizard aren’t important to the story, but they paint a picture, don’t they?) His bird would throw a shitfit every night and then I would startle awake. My sleeping brain never fully caught up and instead continued to respond as if there was a screaming murderer in the living room. The choir director would then leave me to go comfort the bird. He would talk very sweetly and very kindly and very earnestly to the bird until it fell asleep; a service that was not offered to me. No, he’d come back to the bedroom and pass out. Then I’d spend the next forty minutes trying to meditate the fight or flight adrenaline out of my bloodstream while my boyfriend and his bird slumbered peacefully. The deepest tragedy of this story is that he broke up with me (although if you heard the whole story, you might think I had it coming).
The point is, I was trying to write, but the birds were being too loud. At first, I wondered if this was some sort of bird orgy, but as the incessant sound clattered on from the morning into the afternoon, it seemed less and less likely. I’ve had whole weekends of erotic bliss before, but they were never this constant. They had peaks and valleys, you know? I didn’t spend the whole time hooting and hollering and droning on like some cum-drunk vuvuzela. Everybody needs a break from time to time. Some food. Some music. A shower. A nap. Something.
I started to assume it was birds fighting. Given the volume and the length of the sound, it must have been bird D-Day.
I thought I would just clean up a little until the birds stopped. By the middle of the afternoon, I had the cleanest home I’ve ever had and my sanity was hanging by a thread. I realized that if I had to listen to those birds anymore, I was going to start rooting for the Holocene Extinction. So I decided to drive into town, see a movie, and wait a day to start writing.
Then this morning, my beautiful husband baked me a cake with buttercream frosting as a birthday breakfast treat. As a joke, he got candles from the store that say I’m turning 127, which--considering my drinking plans for tonight--will probably feel just about right tomorrow morning. I blew them out and wished for a day free of bird fracas. But, because I was swept up in birthday excitement and sugar cravings and deep love for my beautiful baking beau, I ate an entire quarter of that cake with two cups of coffee. All I have in my body is sugar and caffeine and I am buzzing so wildly I feel like I am going to fly out the window. So I am making the writing very easy on myself today and just writing down three things that happened without any other niceties.
Thank you for your patience.
News Number 1: I went with Johnson to an art fair in Omaha. It was inside a yoga studio, so we had to take off our shoes before entering. It gave the whole proceeding a lovely, intimate feeling. It also, admittedly, reminded me of a time when I had to go to a kids birthday party in a gymnasium. As a result, I spent the day craving some ice cream out of a tub. (The sock smell wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but that was a low bar to clear.)
Johnson promised me dinner if I helped load and unload his booth. The night before, he asked me what I wanted and I said Italian. To me, that meant “don’t worry too much about it, just go ahead and order us some pizza.” Instead, Johnson told me that he was bringing some gluten free pasta. Sounded fine to me. My husband is gaga for that chickpea substitute stuff. But Johnson lied. He didn’t bring gluten free pasta. He brought pesto on rice. And I’ll never forgive him for it. I just kept thinking, “this is exactly what your mom thought you’d be eating when you moved to a commune.” So I’m either mad at Johnson or my mom, but I’m definitely mad at someone.
News Number 2: Alex has made it their New Year’s resolution not to sleep with any cis men for a year. I asked Alex why, and they told me it was about changing habits to change your outcomes. I asked Alex’s best friend, and she told me that Alex had been through a couple hostile breakups with men in the past year and then they “got weirdly freaked after sleeping with some guy who made toast in a pan for breakfast. Like, they thought it was an omen or something; a ‘these guys with their dirty sheets and tacky dorm room posters can’t even get their lives together enough to get a toaster’ style of thing. I think it’s all a little much.”
I told this story to my husband and he said, “I make toast in a pan sometimes. If you have some good bread and a little olive oil, it’s absolutely lovely.” Maybe he’s part of the problem.
News Number 3: Elizabeth went to a party in Omaha with a few of the college kids who were back on winter break. She thought that she could make up for some of the big city partying she missed by going to college in a small town. Instead, she dressed up for a night on the town only to spend it in a suburban basement with a dozen twenty year olds playing board games and catching up. It’s always a tragedy when I hear about someone wearing a strapless bra in vain.
I have a lot of sympathy for Elizabeth’s mistake, mostly because I always have a lot of sympathy for Elizabeth and everything she does. Even though she is twenty-four, I see her as a compatriot who shares two of my great passions: new novels and wearing button up shirts with jeans. Often, those of us who are called to that book and boot cut lifestyle are led there by a certain indoorsy shyness. And there are times in the lives of the introverted and bookish where we feel a strong push to fight against our perfectly reasonable instincts and try to meet some new people. It’s always terrible. Meeting new people is just the worst. I’m very grateful that I have reached an age where my web of friends and friends’ friends is such that I probably never need to meet a new person. If I ever go to another “mixer” in my life, something has gone terribly and tragically wrong. But I recognize that my current introverted paradise is only possible because of some real efforts when I was *younger* to widen that circle of friends. Right now, Elizabeth is going through one of those periods. And while I applaud her for getting out of her comfort zone, I also pity her. Again, meeting new people is just absolutely dreadful.
Less than a week later, Elizabeth got a quilt from The Quilt Ladies. The Quilt Ladies come together a couple times a week and-- if you can believe it-- make quilts. Most go to members of our community as a demonstration of love in difficult times. As I write, I’m sitting on the quilt I was given when my mother died. It’s so nice to physically wrap yourself in the love people feel towards you. That said, going to a shitty party isn’t really on par with my mom dying, so I asked Shibon what the frigging hell was going on. She said, “Well, it’s nice to remind someone that they are loved, even if they don’t need to hear it. Elizabeth seemed really down and we had some extra quilts. We didn't think about it too much. It just made sense. We want to make sure that we have quilts on hand for when tragedies strike, but we almost always have a surplus. There are bad months and there are good months, but we are always making quilts. We outpace the worst things in life. I try not to say this too much-- because there are a lot of serious things happening in the world and I don’t want people to think that I’m not taking them seriously-- but I also try to be grateful for those few surplus quilts. Things could be so much worse, you know?”
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