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The last month has… certainly been about thirty days and though I have been chugging along through it all, I have very little to say about anything, which sucks because I love saying stuff. I, in fact, live for saying stuff. And yet!
Books I’ve read lately: Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball (Fine to good), Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (Bad to embarrasingly bad), Natalie Sue’s I Hope This Finds You Well (Great). Yaffa As’ Blood Orange (Desperately wanted this to not be Good but it was Bad), Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (Almost Very Good, but disappointing instead), Lexi LaFleur Brown’s Shoot Your Shot (So Bad I DNFed at 25%).
I watched What’s Up, Doc? and reviewd it glowingly but truly, my god what a movie! Movies used to be fun! We used to believe in laughs! Shirtless men used to have chest hair and not look like they were dying of dehydration! We used to get to fall in love with Barbra Streisand!
This month’s donation went to the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance which is a North Dakota based charity working to close the news gap for Indigenous communities in the Great Plains.
Okay, spring is here! We’ve had snow and rain and sunshine and (already) too warm weather all in a couple weeks but the world is still turning and there are buds on the trees and though things may be no less fraught, I have felt a cool breeze on my face and the sun will rise again, etc etc. We must keep on truckin’.
September 2024 will not be going down in the books as one of the best I have ever lived, but it hath brought me FALLOWEEN as it always does and some pretty alright stuff, so let’s talk about that and forget that I am Mentally Unwell.
I made a kind of middle of the night unhinged Amazon order because I was out of flossers and every single different kind of flosser I tried is just absolutely garbage? I grew up using Plackers because my dad always had them in the car for tooth emergencies and they were the go-to for years, but now they’re awful? The quality is so bad and if I am going to do something I hate for the environment I would at least like them to successfully floss my teeth. All the Oral-B ones are bad too? Like either they shred or they have that weird plastic tape floss that I promise your hygienest does not want you to be using because it’s useless. But! A year or two ago, we were in the Cities and Crystal placed a Target delivery order for drinks etc, and I was like, “oh I forgot flossers, can you grab some?” and she bought me these baby child infant flossers and while initially I didn’t like them, I now love them because the floss is thick and makes it easy to work between my teeth without shredding but then after like two years of being able to get them reliably they’ve been discontinued or something? ANYWAY, I found a seller on Amazon who had four 90 packs for what was actually what I paid at Target per flosser and I ordered five four packs. Which is basically five years worth of flossers so I guess I have to stay alive that long now? Which is a little stressful but not the worst reason I guess.
We bought some expensive fans earlier this year that we’ve now been using long enough to have an opinion about. This one is great, suuuuuper quiet but also really moves air around a space, and this one is also great though not better enough that I would buy it instead of the slightly cheaper again. This one is my biggest disappointment — the fan itself is quiet and it moves air great and it’s not the ugliest thing in the world, but just long enough after buying it that we couldn’t return it it started making a real weird noise when it oscillates and I know I should reach out to the company but like… Do you know how hard that stuff is? Like, man. I’ll probably stop being a lazy piece of shit about it eventually, but sheesh. ANYWAY, they’re some of the nicest looking fans I’ve seen in a while and the remotes are nice and I’m sure it would be great to use the wifi also actually, but since the app’s TOS is basically like, “We will give your information to cops no questions asked :)
” I will simply not ever be learning anything about that.
We also, finally, after eight years of suffering our old, poorly hung, drafty, shitty front and back doors, bit the bullet and bought new ones and had a professional hang them and they’re incredible. Not only are they not drafty! They also open and close without me having to push, pull, or bang my arm into them (depending on the season)! And also they’re very beautiful because I have great taste! I feel bad because our back door used to have a full length window and Bruno would spend his days standing there trying to see out (which he could not as we put light refracting film AND a dark curtain on it as soon as we moved in because the sun was UNBEARABLE in the afternoons) and now it only has a half window because I am cheap and also because I didn’t actually want him to spend his whole day there barking, but that’s not going to stop me from feeling bad, babey! We were also finally able to get a storm door with a retractable screen put in and I cannot wait to actually open it and have air moving around the back of the house for the first time since we moved in! What a time to be alive!
Alright, I guess that’s it? What a weird old person list of things I liked… I also watched Stop Making Sense which I have not seen recently enough to have a strong feeling about whether the restoration/transfer is good, but GOSH what a fucking movie. What a concert! What a band! What an experience! Also the tribute album is pretty good! Or at least has a few bangers!
Oh and I also liked Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves! What a fun movie! What a great bunch of characters! What an incredible bunch of creatures! Everyone in this was so charming and so fun to watch, I wish I’d been able to see it in theaters which I don’t often think anymore even though we used to go to the movies like twice a week but can’t because our theater here isn’t usable for fat people and also because I think if someone whipped their phone out during a movie I would rip it out of their hand and throw it all the way to hell. What the fuck happened to the world, man?
Okay, that’s it! I’m old! Happy Falloween! Better days are coming! Unless you’re a summer person and then well I guess I am very sorry and I hope you find peace anyway.
my aunt died a year ago and this is something i wrote immediately after that i still feel acutely now, we love you, sisi, happy birthday
grief is so ugly and stupid
the way you can feel so normal and divert your thoughts from it without even trying, how you can even talk about it or the person without it hitting you and then how it will come out of nowhere anyway and hit you so hard you can’t breathe, and you’re crying in your car when you didn’t even feel sad ten minutes ago
i don’t want my aunt sisi to be dead. that’s what grief is. i don’t want this, i don’t know how to accept this, i don’t know how to be in a world where she’s gone and there’s no option but to
she was my closest relative for a long time, i had my family and then my aunt and cousin and uncle and then all the other ones were on a ring outside of that, and she was smart and weird and opinionated and i don’t have any of those awful lingering memories of her that i do of other relatives, times they made me feel stupid or small, because she didn’t do that, she wasn’t like that
we moved away and i wasn’t good at keeping up, it got worse when i left facebook for my own sanity, i’m not good at phones or texts, i don’t reach out, i have a weird sense of humiliation around first contact even when i want to connect with people, a bad friend, a bad family member
but i texted her on her birthday and she was already gone, even though we didn’t know, and she died alone, and it was just one of those things, she’d just turned 69 and some combination of the things that made her body go simply stopped, she was too young, but that’s how it goes sometimes, i think she’d be sad but she’d say that too, that sometimes life is unfair and short but she got to have people who loved her and grandkids who adored her and she helped make me and my sister who we are, she was vital to us, and she was proud of us, and i already missed her, living so far away, but she was in the world and now she isn’t and it’s unfair and it hurts and it sucks, it’s a worse world without her in it
she was really curious as a person and she had lots of spiritual beliefs that seemed goofy to me because i’m not a spiritual person, but i think she’s facing this next part with curiosity, with interest in what’s next, and i hope those things are true for her, i hope there are mountains and pit bulls and art glass where she is, i hope she knows how much i loved her, how much i love her, how special she was, and how i wouldn’t be who i am without her, and how grateful i am for that
Okay, this is where I have to be like, uhhhhh I didn’t actually consume jack shit in September? I watched the NHL Playoffs (and am so proud of my lil underdog Dallas Stars for going all the way to game six of the Stanley Cup Final! My boys! ;_; My babies! ;_;) and I spent a lot of time on Twitter screaming about nonsense, but I did not watch or read a single thing because apparently six-ish months is where I hit the maxcap on my ability to continue blasting-ass through this year without finally feeling it.
I’ve kept up with the news. I’ve done my best to help however I can and continue to try to maintain perspective on how lucky I have been through all of this comparatively. My job has never been in danger, the people I love have been well, I’ve been safe and largely comfortable. I have been lucky. (Hey! Isn’t that a whole other fucked-up issue?! Sure is!)
But even knowing that, at some point you have to crack, right? I’m emotionally exhausted. I’m isolated and I’m fucking sad. I am a person that thrives on random human interaction. I love small talk! I live to make a cashier laugh! I try to bring kindness and goofiness around with me wherever I go! And I feed off that energy. And I haven’t had any since March.
I am a husk of the person I was at the beginning of 2020 and it is basically impossible to sit down and do any of the things I love when I feel like this. So I don’t have anything to share with you right now and I worry that I won’t next month either and that really stresses me out! I worry that I’ll never be able to just sit and enjoy something again because my brain has been fundamentally broken by the experience of this year. I hope you don’t feel the same. I worry you do. I hope we both find a way through.
In the meantime, I’m thinking about you. I’m sending good energy your way. Please donate to mutual aid funds if you’re able. I love you and I hope I’ll see you soon.
Here’s some pictures of Bruno with his last dumb haircut of the year to maybe make you smile. He’s technically always in my Totally Top Three of like, everything. 💜
 
ETA: I scheduled this post this morning and then this afternoon this post crossed my dash and really relieved some of my anxiety about this experience. Maybe it will do the same for you.
I’m 34. I’ve been 34 for a little while and I’ll be 35 fairly soon. I’m an adult. I own a house. I get oil changes when my car tells me to. I get up and go to my job five days a week and work 40 to 50 hours. I help keep two animals and two adult people alive. I pay my bills on time. I successfully use most of the fresh food I buy. I get a flu shot every year. I have a skincare routine. I usually have clean clothes when I need them. I’m never late to things.
I will never, ever, as long as I am alive, make my fucking bed every morning.
First of all, I’m not doing anything because a fucking Navy Admiral tells me to. Second of all, making your bed prevents your sweaty sheets from drying out adequately enough to kill the bacteria and microbes that thrive in them. Third, and most importantly, I. Don’t. Want. To.
And, like always, I am here, not to shame the bed-makers (Do your thing, whatever makes you happy, etc.) but to tell you that you also do not have to make your fucking bed every fucking morning, especially not just because a whole bunch of people say you should.
I do all those ‘adult’ things up there without making my bed in the morning or, actually, ever unless I just changed the sheets and am feeling fussy/fancy/froggy. I do all of those ‘adult’ things despite and in the face of my sometimes debilitating depression and anxiety. I do all those ‘adult’ things to keep myself alive even though sometimes I’d rather not be alive at all.
So many of our conceptual notions of adulthood are based on some Baby Boomer’s idea of what you should be doing at 25 and 30 and 35, but 2019 isn’t 1979 and I have zero desire to base my lifestyle habits on the opinions of people who believe in bootstrap ideology and think c+ping a block of incoherent text somehow protects the intellectual property rights for the Minion memes they share on Facebook.
Life is so, so short. Please stop beating yourself up because you can’t or don’t want to do things that other people say are necessary for success. If you woke up this morning, you’re already ahead. Figure out what feels like success to you, what feels like achievement, like progress, like action, like functioning and define yourself. Everyone’s normal looks different and there is such a good chance that you’re doing just fine in life, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
You ultimately have so little control over the way life plays out, decide what adds value to yours whenever you can and ignore what other people have to say about it. You don’t have to make your bed. You don’t have to define success with other people’s words. You’re doing just fine.
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