Life slump
Things will get better, won’t they????
Much feels fraught right now — this country, this weather, my writing — and I want to tell you it’s all going to get better and some day you’ll look back on this time and laugh and laugh and laugh and say “remember when?” and laugh some more. It’ll all seem so absurd that it has to be funny. It’ll feel pointless, cruel even, if it’s not funny — pointless if it doesn’t become a punchline. I want to tell you that you’ll wake up in the morning, some day soon, to the sound of birds chirping, next to someone you love, with nowhere to be and nothing to worry about. Every atrocity we’ve witnessed at some point — genocide, occupation, losers in ugly vests kidnapping people because their fathers never hugged them — has been abolished. I want to tell you the hydrangeas out front need watering and the tomatoes are falling off the vine out back. I want to tell you everything turned out okay.
Each day, I’m met with two realities, one in which the world is invariably ending and another where the greatest horror facing humanity is an epidemic of dry skin that only the Medicube Collagen Jelly can fix. Perhaps both are true. All I know is that I have to move through them each just the same. As such, and to falsify some feeling of momentum, I’m trying new things: ballet classes on Sundays, going to sleep around 2 a.m., taking the subway when I don’t feel like it, bricking my phone, cooking. None of these things mean much, in fact a few of them are adding unnecessary strife to an already strenuous time, but they remind me I’m alive I guess. That I do have the power of free will, even if I’m actively using it to make my life mildly more abrasive, and that there are discoveries to be made in the everyday.
To be frank, I don’t really trust you if you’re not feeling existential despair at this point in time, at this point in winter, particularly if you live in New York. If you’re not shoving your emotions deep into the crevasse of an empty soul or on a far stronger medicinal cocktail than I, every day should feel like army-crawling, naked, over shards of broken Budweiser bottles.
I can’t definitively tell you when this will all end, but what I do know is that spring’s arrival is imminent and that something is going to give. Eventually, whether within you or out in the world, the drama and the strife and the pessimism will subside and this winter, this year, will feel like something that happened a long time ago; something that happened to someone else.
—
Inspired by Marlowe Granados, if you reply to this email with a receipt of a donation over $10 to one of the orgs suggested by Stand With Minnesota, I’ll comp you a six month paid subscription.
—
What I…
… saw
Living with other women is the closest a girl can get to nirvana. Everyone and everything blends into one another. You are both irate and blissed out at any given moment. Your home is a citadel teeming with simultaneously angelic and demonic vibes. New words are invented that give way to new language, secret tongues and secret speech litter every bedroom, living room and bathroom. The television is sacred and the stand on which it sits a shrine. Everything has meaning.
For weeks now, I’ve been combing through the BBC Archive on YouTube, and though nearly every single video tickles my fancy, none so much as a mini-doc from 1965 on four women living in a “flat” together. All in their twenties and making their way in the world (the voiceover mocks them for being unmarried), there’s a tenderness and sense of benevolent mischief that a stuffy, British production still managed to capture. By the end, I was indeed crying.
… heard
Like a cat returning from a nighttime romp with a tiny and alive mouse in its mouth, I present to you a medley of noisy treats today of starkly disparate yet aesthetically congruous taste.
