Oops, we skipped a week. I hope you invoked the 15-minute rule and bounced on out of here last week when you realized your maestra wasn't coming. Last Sunday I was busy plodding through the snow to a train station in Philly, riding the train to the airport, and then wondering if I would just live in the airport forever as I watched our flight get delayed, and delayed again. We eventually boarded, broke a tow bar pushing back from the gate, got the tow bar fixed, sat on the tarmac for so long I fell asleep and thought we had already landed in Nashville, de-iced, and flew on home.
The pilot was all, 'Sorry for the wait, we're going to make up for some of that lost time in the air.' And it's like, if you can fly faster, why don't you just do that all the time? Shut up about your carbon footprint, the planet is dying no matter what, so I'm in a hurry. You gonna get a speeding ticket? It's literally the sky. The autobahn of the troposphere. Luftbahn? Point is, pedal to the metal, homes, we got places to be.
By Monday morning, I was so tired from a weekend packed with more non-family socialization than I can recall in over two years that I had to take a rapid test. I tested positive for extreme introversion.
I've been doing the Wordle, and the Worldle, and the Spanish wordle every day. It's why I get out of bed every morning. I mean, the lure of the Wordle, or you know, the sound of a cat vomiting, or the imperative to shower, dress, and exit the house to procure a paycheck. But mostly the Wordle. But the Spanish wordle is somehow my jam. Maybe there are more predictable and regular patterns in the way letters appear in Spanish words, but I don't care, it makes me feel smart. Sometimes, though, I guess the correct word and I have no idea what it means, so I look it up. The other day, the correct answer was albur, which was unfamiliar, so I went over to ye olde Google Translate. And now I know albur is Spanish for dace. Of course, of course, dace, right. Can't wait to use that totally real word in a sentence, I thought. Except then I realized I had no earthly idea WTF 'dace' means.
If you care, it's a small freshwater fish related to the minnow.
Your mileage may vary with childhood therapy. At least the way therapy was done back in the day. Going to the "divorce group" with the guidance counselor in elementary school wasn't officially therapy, I suppose, but I think it warped me more than it helped me. It never occurred to me to feel ashamed or othered by that situation until I was pulled out of class with the kids who were always in trouble or getting pulled out for remedial classes. I thought I must have done something wrong, and then I found myself sitting in a trailer, like we weren't even good enough to congregate inside the school building, being encouraged to bitch about how awful it was to have divorced parents when, in reality, I was like, AYFKM? Now I get to hang out with my grandmom every day and she always has a bowl full of good chocolate candy (miss me with those butterscotches), she lets me unload her pantry and play 'store,' and nobody passes out drunk on the floor in front of a giant wooden box TV with a sleeve of Ritz and a gallon of milk so it's sour by the time I'm tryna have my Rice Krispies in the morning. Sounds like a win to me, Mrs. Halscheid. Thank you for making me an unwitting participant in the trauma porn, but I'd like to return to class to make sure my deskmate hasn't vomited all over my things from crying so hard because Mrs. Summerill was a terrifying ice demon who shouldn't have been allowed to teach death row inmates let alone 1st graders. So what I'm trying to say is, botched amateur group therapy made me need real therapy.
I don't know, man. Changing your personality sounds like it requires effort. Can't we just like, speak to a manager and demand an exchange? Isn't there a pill for that? I'm sure a lot more agreeable and extroverted, and less neurotic, after 3/4 of a glass of wine. Can we just make it socially acceptable to microdose the sauce? Because any more than that for me and things start to get weird. Not to mention how delightful I am the next day when I'm Linda Blair-ing it, crawling down the stairs with my head on backwards and projectile vomiting everywhere. On second thought, why would I ever want to change that winning personality?
Analog Reading:
Finished The Every by Dave Eggers. I loved The Circle and this follow-up novel, even though both made me feel deeply uncomfortable about my own use of technology. They made me think more critically about what I willingly give up in exchange for convenience or entertainment purposes.
Read You, Too, Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman. 1 out of 5 stars, do not recommend. It was painful. It was inventive and I appreciate what she was trying to do with a sort of surreal meditation on the impact of media on female body image, but it just felt awful to push through it. The extended sequences of describing bizarre TV commercials in detail made me feel the same level of fury I feel when I'm trying to read or have a conversation and a TV that no one is actively watching is droning on in the background. Ugh. I should have bailed on this one. What a waste of my reading life.
Now reading Louise Erdrich's The Sentence and I'm enjoying it so far. I haven't read any of her previous novels and I've seen some chatter that this one isn't her best, but I'm along for the ride at this point. She gets bonus points for writing herself into the story as a peripheral character. It's whimsical. Don't we need a little more whimsy in the world? Especially in a book that starts out with the main character stealing a dead body in the name of unrequited love?
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