Tit for Tat (Ain’t No Taking Back) - James Brown (mp3)

While listening to James Brown’s Funky Christmas earlier this week, I realized this song has been underappreciated, including by me. A Spotify search reveals zero covers of this song, and I tried with additional Christmas keywords, so I don’t think there are a ton of hidden covers being drowned out by Tate McRae remixes.

This song’s callouts to different age groups at what is presumably a family Christmas party are so fun: the baby section / teenagers / adults all at once ...  Everybody can have fun! As more of my friends start to have kids, my social life is becoming a bit more age-diverse, but the transition hasn't been entirely smooth. I want to get better at hosting kid-friendly events, and at accommodating parents at the events I host (maybe by getting better at offering collective childcare? I hope this will become easier as more friends have kids…). It feels sad to me that some of my friendships have faded because my life and theirs have too disparate a level of kid-friendliness. The masterful pandemic-era Octopus Pie comic captured this well:

Erik Hoel writes:

A little shot of wisdom I’ve repeated privately throughout the years: for a happy life you are allowed to pick two of three categories. You must choose two of career, family, or community. Implicitly, this comes with a warning—try to maximize all three and you will fail at all of them.

If this sounds a depressing maxim given its limitations, add in as much fuzziness as you like. Yet I doubt that you will be the exception. As with most simple wisdom, it’s hard to escape, and many of the common phases of life are really just a coming to terms with this limitation.

It does sound depressing to me. Yet I doubt that I will be the exception. The trend I more strongly want to be an exception to, a gravity of desire that is beginning to give form to new year’s resolutions, is time spent doing meaningful things with other people.

My own graph would show some dramatic changes. In 2010, I lived with my parents, then on a teenager-crewed tall ship, and then in a culturally foreign group house with four strangers who were all friends with each other. (The foreign culture, to be clear, was non-nerdy girly party culture; I was so confused when my roommates, who were third years, a more academically important year, skipped class to prepare trays of jello shots for homecoming.) In 2023, I moved from a 10-person group house to a 2-bedroom apartment shared with my boyfriend, which hasn’t increased how many hours I spend socializing, but has concentrated them more dramatically on a single pairwise connection.

The dramatic changes aren’t really because of who I live with, though. Obviously, it’s about work from home and stare at phone. In 2010, I went into class or work every weekday, and volunteered every Saturday. Now, I cowork at a friend’s home office once or twice a week and volunteer via Zoom calls. I got my first cellphone in 2010; it was a little pink plastic box with rounded corners and a sliding keyboard for full-sentence texting. I didn’t get a smartphone until 2015. In 2025 I’ve had a full decade to accumulate addiction to the bright pocket screen that is so rarely more than a few metres from my body. I want to have kids and I want to model less-fractured attention to them. Something to work on, perhaps just by making more plans for (checks graph) reading and socialising with friends. (On that note, for SF bay area friends: book club?)

Returning (as I usually attempt to) to the song, I love its spirit of abundance. It’s right there in the first lines: plenty of good food / and all the good joys / plenty of music / in the kiddie room, plenty of toys. I associate the phrase “tit for tat” with the game theory strategy that always opens with cooperation. If everyone feels like cooperating, then you just get the good outcome together; you can have a real lotta fun when it's tit for tat and no taking back.

Wishing you plenty,
Tessa