Riddles upon riddles
Hello, friend.
One of my favorite things about traveling is figuring out all the small things. Where do you get coffee, and how do you order it? What common food or condiment is less available or just unknown? How and where do you do laundry, what’s it like to buy cheese, how do you get postcard stamps? What need or preference that I find ordinary will get me a weird look?
I live for this stuff. I love knowing how things work, and discovering what other people take for granted as normal is fascinating. Imagine having a brain built upon a completely different set of assumptions and norms. Or, more wonderfully and weirder still, where you share a lot of common assumptions, but one large and largely unspoken thing is different. One of my favorites (for familiarity and importance) is comparing baseline public stress in people in countries with guaranteed healthcare versus my own baseline here in the US. With it, every day is at least somewhat less scary, and I find that lets people be (or at least seem) calmer. But it’s also fascinating figuring things out in countries where people have high expectations of trains and postal clerks compared to places where they can’t. What color is the sky when you can believe in institutions? I love figuring these things out.
Moving is a higher-intensity version of this. Even if you only move four or five miles, as was the case with my last move before the big one that happened at the end of 2023, you still have to relearn. Where are the good groceries? Where are the mailboxes? Where can you go if you need eggs after 11 pm? Do highways, exits, and public transit give the place a different feel than you would expect? Some things stay the same—perhaps you’re on the same train line, only a few stops up or down—but there’s always relearning. When I moved from Oakland to Berkeley in 2018, I had to be told that recycling went into two bins, and I was wrecking their system with my one-bin Oakland ways.
Moving across the country, changing states and time zones as I did a month ago, is all of that times a thousand. My brain wants to figure it all out immediately, which means being tired constantly for a while. Where do I get food, and what can I reasonably fit in the mini fridge in my temporary apartment? Trains run all night, but when does the line of safety and comfort change enough that it's better to take a car? How do I get a temp mailbox, and what’s my legal address until I move into my permanent apartment? Which way is west???
This last one plagued me for a couple weeks; my tired brain not only didn’t know some things innately, but also told me the exact wrong answer every time. I turned the wrong way out of my building so many times, immediately after turning the key the wrong way in both my apartment and front door locks. And it wasn't as simple a matter as turning it the opposite way my instinct told me to; no, this was more of a "have to try the two-sided USB three different ways to get it to fit" situation. The wrong way, the right way, but also the way where the lock is making fun of me.
The only way to deal with this, alas, is good humor, because to greet it with anger or despair means feeling needlessly shitty for weeks. I’ve had to view my brain as a fuzzy duckling, new to all this. I’d never get mad at a duckling! Instead, I’d gently correct it and marvel at the soft, cool feeling of its webbed feet against my palm as I sent it in the right direction with all the sweetness I possessed.
I moved to New York after planning it for three years. Seems like it’d be awfully silly to struggle with the known hard thing and then lash out at myself.
I’ve been bringing the same feeling to my writing. I always try to, but it’s more lately, because with the sweet fatigue of constant exploration comes a loss of deftly handling complexity. I write every day, but this isn’t the time for complex refinement of themes, perfect sentences, or (god forbid) revisions. This is the time to lean toward what feels good like my stalwart houseplant does even after being hauled across the country in a carry-on bag. The plant seeks sun, my beautiful grey cat still gets excited for food and looking out the window, and I’m doing my first outline-first novel work. I’m returning to old familiar things to reread, nudge, and see if anything new awaits me with my newly scrubbed brain. Where’s the joy? I learn again every day, but surely that is where I’m going. Life is hard, in ways I’ve chosen and ways I didn’t and never would have, and I will lean toward sweetness.
I know my love of more challenging flavors and projects will come back in time.
Here are some things I've written or liked.
- I had the pleasure of getting rejected from Taco Bell Quarterly in their last round of submissions. If you don't know what that sentence means, get familiar with TBQ's founder here.
- I loved this roundup of benefits from writing a newsletter. While, in the end, I didn't like being an editorial professional, the lessons in just getting it done that come with needing to publish still benefit me.
- I not rarely feel like I, child-free person, end up feeling like I'm waving to my parent friends from across the English Channel. We're on the same planet but different continents. I liked this examination of how these two populations, with very different practices and pulls, can show up for each other.
- While beautiful, full representations of people and sensible, knowledgeable explorations of death and the time leading up to it have always meant a lot to me, they mean more right now. This preservation of a writer's dying therapist and their frank conversations makes me cry anytime I read it. Good crying, though. Good crying is better.
An excerpt I’ve written that I liked: "I learned to feel it as contempt for most things around me, and fairly enough, but it also came from a deep, aching mystery: all this stuff, the inane activities and social strata, seems to work for everyone else. Why does it make me wish I were dead? Or, later, make me want to run away forever to one coast or another?"