The slow and unyielding march of time, episode 40
David and I were talking the other day about taking lessons as adults. A thing I really admire about him is that when he starts doing a new thing, and wants to get better at it, he will do the smart thing immediately and take a class or hire a teacher. One of the hubrises of the modern age (maybe not just the modern age, I don’t know! I only live now) is that we all think we can learn stuff on our own. And we can, to a certain degree — some weirdo on youtube will happily trade you your attention for a lesson, but there’s always going to be a limit to how good you can get at something on your own because you don’t know how to be good at it yet, and you don’t know what good feels like.
But there’s a vulnerability to taking a lesson, to admitting to another person, “I am bad at this and want to get better.” And plenty of instructors don’t take that vulnerability seriously, or are so far away from being bad at the skill that they’re dismissive or disdainful of your attempts to get better. I can come up with a half dozen of those instances off the top of my head — the artist who was supposed to teach pottery throwing, but whose instructions to “watch his hands” was impossible because the clay was in the way, or the snow boarding instructor who kept wandering off because he didn’t want to spend his time helping a clumsy dork figure out how to stay upright on the board.
Some instructors don’t listen to what you’re asking for — early in the pandemic, when it was too dangerous to go anywhere, but I was going stir-crazy in my apartment, I decided to try to learn an instrument, just to have something to do on my own. I bought a cheap, cute ukulele, downloaded an app for tuning, and bought a book to learn chords. And I made some progress; it helped that David is an expert in all string instruments, and could give me some good tips when I got stuck.
But I hit that wall, so I found an online ukulele instructor. And he was helpful -- I got better, I tried new things -- but he would not stop suggesting that we meet up at a farmer’s market so I could get some “live playing experience.” Sir! I am not interested in meeting up with you, and inflicting the dulcet tones of a beginner ukulele-player onto any innocent farmer’s market-goer! They just want some kale.
I didn’t want to start a band, or make money. I just wanted to strum my little ukulele in my own home and sing “I Just Can’t Wait to be King.” I got tired of the pressure, and stopped learning.
Trying to get good at something takes time and energy, and we all have such a limited amount of both! I work 40 hours a week. I go to therapy. If I want to have the energy and mental capacity for doing anything, I have to go to the gym at least twice a week, plus go on walks. I have to feed myself, which, if I don’t set aside for planning, ends up being very sad meals made up of whatever is in the pantry. I also really value and need a significant amount of “doing-nothing” time! And even though the pandemic exacerbated my worst hermit tendencies, I occasionally want to see my friends!
(Have all the parents have closed out this tab in disgust at my time-management skills?!?)
No wonder it’s hard to learn things as a grownup. There are so many obstacles in my way; my dislike of vulnerability, the lack of time, my desire to lay flat and do nothing, the pressure to “do something” with your new skills, if you manage to build them.
Anyways, I think I have a solution; a three day work week. That’ll give me all the time I need to decompress from work, meal plan, lift heavy things, and also learn how to play my ukulele better.
Debris
A lot has happened since I last wrote, like:
• My second favorite video game of all time, Dragon Age, finally released a new game. It’s been a decade! I bought a whole new console to play it on, meaning I now have a Nintendo Switch, a PS4, and a steam deck. Am I the biggest gamer I know???
• The fall of democracy in the US. (hahahahah just kidding, don’t fire me, government.) Things will be bad in the next 4 years! But I am doing my best to focus on what I know, and not spin out thinking about what terrible things might happen. We’ll see how long I’m able to do that!-
• Paul had a spare digital typewriter that he sent me. I love it so much. I don’t write every day, but it helps me get closer to that goal. Who says a tool can’t fix you!
• I tried to buy a drink at the Margaritaville in the Mall of America, but I was rejected because my license had expired three days before. MA'AM. I AM IN MY FORTIES.
What I’ve been reading
Occasionally I’ll read a book that makes me ache with recognition, that pierces me straight through the chest in a way that feels so physical it’s hard to believe that it’s all happening in my head. Dad, can you get broken heart syndrome from reading a book? (This isn’t rhetorical, my dad’s a doctor).
Anyways, despite being generally exhausted from staying awake past midnight (!!!!) two nights in a row (one night playing video games with a pal in Seattle, another going to a holiday party at a nearby restaurant), I stayed up too late finishing [The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-rachel-incident/18868621?ean=9780593535707), a book that hit me so hard in the chest that I barely slept.
It’s not just that the writing is so good, which it is — enviably good. It’s well-paced, and filled with surprising, interesting turns of phrases, with people who are smart but in a stupid place in their lives. The bulk of the story happens in Cork, Ireland, in the late 2000s, and bad things happen but it’s framed through the main character’s current life in the present.
I read an interview with O’Donoghue this morning. and that framing was very specific to what she was trying to do — she says, “doing it in the past tense, she looks back on herself, and it's - the attitude throughout the book is, you know, God, I was an idiot, but what a great pair of legs.”
When I read that quote, I started to cry a little, because that — that’s how I think about my own past, my own haphazard 20s. I’m a little bit older than Rachel, and my family was more financially secure during the Great Recession, but I identified with her so hard, as someone trying to figure out the way forward amidst the ravages of the economy, at an age where I was supposed to be self-sufficient but honestly, could barely feed myself. (Real talk! I can barely feed myself now!) Trying to figure out who I wanted to be and also who I was. Making mistakes that loomed so large over me it was hard to believe I’d ever manage to walk out away from them, back into the sunlight.
Once, I was looking back with a friend-who-is-no-longer-a-friend, remembering, say: the night I drank 4 Loko and left my apartment to go to a party in Bushwhack at midnight. The edges of the faces of people I drunkenly kissed, or that I shoved in bars because their bag kept digging into my side.
“I was SO miserable,” I told him — I was, some days I couldn’t get out of bed, I lost so much weight from depression that I fit into a size 0. “But c’mon!” he said, “It was so much fun!” And he’s right. There were nights when we danced until 4 am, sweating in tight shirts, when I drank myself into a sparkling effervescence that couldn’t last. I was such a mess — but a beautiful mess.
I still feel some of those mistakes, those hurts in my body. The worst of them I’m still gently loosening in therapy! But most of them are softer now, more of a curiosity — I wonder what happened to that person that hurt me, or that I hurt? I can’t ever really know, even with the panopticon of social media that we have now. Occasionally, like Rachel I’ve gotten some closure on some of it — an apology, a reminder that just because I was young and clumsy doesn’t mean anyone else knew what they were doing any better, even if they were a little bit older and wiser.
Other stuff I've read:
I’m not going to list everything, because it’s been a long time since I wrote last, but! Here are some fun ones:
I've restarted reading Marcie Rendon's mystery series. I've written about them before; set in the 1970s, the protagonist is a young Native woman who helps solve crimes on the North Dakota/Minnesota border that would be overlooked if not for her insistence that they matter. I love reading historical fiction that is situated so deeply into a place and time I know very little about, centering perspectives that are usually ignored. Similarly, The Downstairs Girl: by Stacey Lee was great; set in 1890s Atlanta, Jo, a young Chinese-American women who has learned to be as invisible as possible in a segregated and racist society, starts writing an anonymous, and very popular, column for the local newspaper.
I’ve been very into romance lately. My kingdom for some low-stakes drama and a happy ending! Jodi McAlster, an Australian academic who researches the Bachelor, wrote a romance trilogy set in a fake dating world universe -- my favorite one centered on a manufactured villain named Lily Fireball. (But I'd recommend reading the other two first, as it's technically the third one, and while they can standalone, they're better together.) I also read this cute YA romance by Talia Hibbert where two ex-friends have to work together. (Hmmmmmmm, I think I might like the "enemies to lovers" trope???)
I read two books that sort of centered around translation. The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi was a deeply weird book about translation and appropriation. Meanwhile, the Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nadler is about octopi (my favorite animal!!!), the nature of language and what it means to be a conscious, sentient being. (I met a German woman recently who used to translate erotica, and she told me that it was really difficult because the German language is much more sterile than English. This has nothing to do with these books, but I thought it was super interesting!)
I also read some weird, dystopic SciFi mysteries! Notably the Body Scout by Lincoln Michel which is a murder mystery in a even later-stages capitalistic world where corporations can trade your life away.
For YA book club, we read Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas, which was great. I am just going to steal the bookshop.org description here, which is: "A trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave."
I've also been reading a middle-reader series called The Keeper of the Lost Cities, written by Shannon Messenger. This series was recommended to me by an 11 year old that I sat next to at David's dad's birthday party. It's full of annoying 13-year-olds, but honestly, it's really imaginative and fun, so if you have a middle-reader in your life, maybe give it a go!
I missed you all, quite a lot, and thought about writing often, but sometimes it’s a struggle to really formulate something that feels cohesive and worth sending out into the world. Not sure if I’ve really achieved that, but it’s been long enough since my last newsletter, I figured you all wouldn’t mind. (And if you do, you can always quit! I won’t take it personally!)
much love,
Davida