[Seth Says] Frogs Are Friends!
FROG: Hello Snake! I am also a reptile.
SNAKE: Are you telling the truth?
FROG: No, I amphibian.
I was about to start this newsletter with the library chicken joke ("book book book!") until I realized I already shared that one recently, so I had to make up this much less good joke. (I mean, I didn't have to, but I felt like everyone deserved a joke to start the newsletter today.)(Also I feel like everyone deserves pad thai but that's more difficult and expensive for me to accomplish.)(Although that being said, if someone wants to come join me for pad thai let me know.)
Anyway, let's get right to the main point of this newsletter: Frogs are great! (It's these nuanced and politically-relevant insights that keep people coming back to this newsletter.)(Well, it's sure not the centerfolds.)(Actually, having said that, maybe you deserve a centerfold. Because I normally don't include them but check out this beauty...)
This is a friendly frog that came to visit my window earlier this week, and hung around for, like, an hour at least. And then he was briefly back today. (toady? today.)(frog is not toad. Frog and toad are friends.)
There's just something a little life-affirming about a friendly nature creature hanging around right outside my window, whether it's the friendly frog, or our favorite cardinal (not richelieu), or the woodchucks I haven't seen in years. I spend a lot of time at my desk trying to think of better words (defenestrate! perfidiousness! quasimetaphysical!) and staring out the window to support that is much more effective when nature friends are there.
ALLOT OF TIME
("Don't you mean a lot of time?" "I know what allotment.") To start off this week, I had to do something exhausting which I rarely have to do: work 8 hours in a single day.
I suspect many of you with regular-type day jobs are thinking, "Fetch my tiniest violion (this was a typo, but I'm leaving it in as a matter of pride)(manely), you had a whole day where you worked almost as much as I do every single day!" And some of you who are also artists might think, "Oh yeah, 8 hours of creative work in a day can be sort of a lot actually."
And of course, everyone's right. 8 hours of creative work in a day IS a bit exhausting and my brain was a little bit soup by 2am when I finally finished the massive article I was working on. But also whole bunches of people have to work 8+ hour days five days a week so I have things relatively quite easy!
I think it's important to be able to recognize both things as being simultaneously true. So many people don't recognize their own privilege because they can honestly say, "Hey, my life's not easy!", and on the flipside there are some people who have a failure of empathy because their only response to people struggling is, "Well, I had it worse." (Not that I am suggesting anyone should give me sympathy for working a single 8-hour day or that it was some big struggle for me, I am trying to make a larger point here)(POINT)
Working hard is hard work, and I think the world would be better off if more people could recognize that other people are also working hard. (except me, I'm looking at a frog.)
WORKERS OF THE WORLD, RELAX
One of the advantages of my privileged free-time-laden (Osama bin laden's unemployed brother) lifestyle is that I have enough time and mental space to reflect on that sort of thing with appreciation as a default. It is, of course, much harder to do that when your every waking hour is filled with work, or stress, or pain. (Actually, this itself is something I was reflecting on this week as I have been not 100% well, making everything more difficult, and how much harder is that for people who are chronically unwell?)(Very harder, to be imprecise.)
But these days my automatic reaction when I have a taste of imperfection tends to be appreciation for the fact that the serving size is a lot smaller than it could be. (exception being any disruption to my Internet, because all of my work and recreation and communication lives there, so I tend to get fairly grumpy when it goes out for swathes of time)(and who's even going out for swathes these days with swathe prices so high?)
That's what spurred this week's column:
Which I know is a link many of you can't read so I'm going to try to remember to start excerpting my column every newsletter, if I can remember that excerpting is a verb. ("was the column any good?" "it was excerptional!")
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Most work is underappreciated, which is something you've probably noticed if you're someone who does work. I try to avoid doing work whenever possible, but I often have to do work so that I can eat.
Since food costs money (and even more money lately), I have to hire myself out to do writing work for money. And since food doesn't cook itself, I also have to do prep work in my kitchen. I am fortunate enough to have a partner who is a great cook, and our arrangement is that she does the shopping, I do the chopping, and she cooks everything into delicious food I want to eat without stopping.
Occasionally my partner will not feel like cooking, and I will take care of the entire dinner myself, which is more work. And it reminds me to appreciate her for doing the cooking most of the time. The most underappreciated work is done regularly to the point where it can become taken for granted or even invisible. I realized that in some ways, my partner is like a pen. (No cap!)
Putting my philosophy degree to good use here with Heidegger’s pen. And here's last column’s rerun in a Vermont newspaper:
FROGETABOUTIT
That about wraps up this week's newsletter, but I wanted to put in another good word for frogs. (Frogtastic?) A quarter-century ago I used to walk a swampy-adjacent path on Williams college campus late at night (one or two of you may even have joined me a few times), and was always cheered (cheer-up!) by the bevy of bullfrog noises. I'm not really an animal person in that I don't care for cats and dogs and whatnot, but I think frogs are one of those animals that most people are generally happy to see (biblical plague recipients notwithstanding).
Anyway, as always I thank you for reading, will be back in two weeks with another column, and if you are blessed by a visit from a frog please remember that frogs are our friends -- doubly so if they have a top hat and cane.
Goodbye My Baby, Goodbye My Honey, Goodbye My Ragtime Gal,
Seth