falling asleep with a book on your chest - lullatone
It is only in the past month that I learned that “falling asleep with a book on your chest” is not a universal human experience. I mentioned to a partner that the previous night I'd read until my novel fell out of my hands. “Aw, that's cute,” he said, which baffled me, since this happens to me maybe half of all nights. How do other people know it's time to stop reading and go to sleep?
What universal human experiences are you missing without realizing it?
My mum told me that what shocked her the most, when she first spent a holiday with my dad’s family, was the quiet. After presents had been unwrapped, and dinner eaten, and dishes done, she looked around and saw that everyone was reading. Quietly. She’d never had such a moment of stillness with her family before. She felt so at home.
There’s a kind of ease I feel, being around My Kind Of People, that I don’t notice until it’s absent. This band seem like my kind, twee and unafraid of appearing pretentious. Writing about their EP of songs for winter, they say:
We think they might make a nice soundtrack for:
• watching your breath come out like little clouds
• catching a cold
• revisiting a book you've already read (or were supposed to have read at school)
• warming your hands on coffee mugs
• pulling a scarf all the way up to your nose
• soup
• "old people hobbies"
• hibernating
I don’t think I was ever afraid of appearing pretentious, but some of my friends were. I recall proposing, in high school, that we could host a sort of salon once a month, where one or two of us would research a topic and present it. (There was so much I wanted to know about than I could possibly research by myself!)
One of my friends glanced sideways at me, eyelids lowered and head tilted slightly. “Tessa,” she said, “don’t you think that’s a little pretentious?”
The salon was not to be.
Well… I hadn’t thought about that particular teenage disappointment in years, but it came to mind while writing this newsletter, and I realized: I do that now. Short talks every month on everything from black holes to arabic grammar to seasteading. There’s a kind of ease I feel there in that living room, my friends on couches all circled around a whiteboard.
Many different Kinds Of People feel like mine; I seem to just accumulate more and more of them to care about as I move through life.
I’m lucky that way.
I wish you luck, too, and ease, and quiet if you want it, and a boisterous rowdy crowd if you don’t, and falling asleep oh so gentle when the day is done, and all the rest. Merry Christmas.
- Tessa