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Good morning!
This week was the first time I sat down to write my newsletter and felt like I had absolutely nothing to say. I think I might be sick of myself, or my mind, or the way I write, like the fact that this is a run-on list, or maybe just the world in general. So this week I would like to submit, as evidence and verbatim, all 15 notes I took down for this newsletter that I could not manage to cohere into a single worthwhile idea. Let’s call it
“Make weekend plans”
I thought I might write about the fact that some time in 2019, at my most overworked and burned out, I set an alert on my phone to remind me every Wednesday to “make weekend plans,” since I was so busy I often forgot. I still haven’t decided whether this was evolved or pathetic, but it doesn’t really matter anymore except for the fact that it still goes off every week like my personal Ghost of Christmas Past. For some pathological reason I have yet to turn it off.
Palpitation diary
Last week, my doctor asked me to keep a journal of my heart palpitations, so for the last few days, every time I feel the slightest disturbance in my chest, I’ve fallen silent, pressed my index finger into my neck, and counted. The problem is I’m not exactly sure of what I’m counting. The other problem is I’m terrified of my own heartbeat—I don’t understand how it works or why I’m still alive, ever. I recently googled “fear of your own heartbeat” and learned about hypervigilance, “an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats,” which feels like a perfect description of my current resting existence. Maybe one day I’ll have more to say about this.
Period prediction (like when that doctor knew my bladder was full)...something kinda sweet about it?
My doctor also did a pelvic exam, and when she looked into my body she told me my period was about to come. I got it 24 hours later. This reminded me of when I once had my follicles checked for a story I was doing on infertility and the doctor laughed at how full my bladder was. She pointed at the ultrasound and there it was, all squishy and rotund, moving around her tool like a slow-motion water balloon. Suddenly I had to pee. I don’t know why these moments strike me as sweet. Maybe because of the way they reduced me to my most biological form, separating me from my ego and ethic and overcompensation, revealing me to be the grownup child I am. Or maybe I’m just a freak!
The idea that without getting dressed (like actually dressed) I’ve lost a small part of who I am, or a kind of confirmation I’ve come to rely on about who I am?
Boring/who cares.
Emily in Paris / The Vow > belonging?
I thought I might write about my perceived link between The Vow (an HBO docuseries about a cult) and Emily in Paris (an awful Netflix show starring Lily Collins that is driving the internet insane) which is that both the cult members and everyone on Twitter share an inevitable desire to belong to an in-group or an out-group, but that somehow feels both obvious and like a stretch.
“Hope you’re having an okay day”
This is the weird/sad way I’ve been signing off emails. Imagine if I wrote an essay about it!
Video-game voice
noun
1. the dull style and tone of voice employed by a person who is actively playing a video game but pretending to engage you in conversation.
Love Island 2020!!!!
Was very enthusiastic when I made this note, but all I have to say is that there is something deeply funny and dystopian about watching Love Island UK, Seasons 6, as I unfortunately am, and hearing the contestants cheers their glasses to 2020 and talk about what an amazing year it’s going to be (it was filmed in January and February), knowing that as soon as they emerge from their confinement, they will all be forced into lockdown due to a pandemic that they do not yet know about because they’re not allowed to have phones.
Does 10/10/2020 matter?
Seems like none of my business.
Saying hi to strangers
In July I was walking on the beach with my brother and boyfriend when my brother started challenging himself to say hello to everyone we passed with increasing enthusiasm. It was partially an exercise in denying his own social anxiety, but mostly about the kindness the strangers returned, which we were starved for. “Hi there, beautiful day!” he’d say to two middle-aged women walking past. “I know, isn’t it?!” they’d say back, and when the engagement was over he’d roll his eyes back in his head and let out a sharp exhale, as if he’d just shot up. It was a joke, but only kind of. We were so contact-deprived we started taking turns, like losers, acting as if greeting strangers was some incredible untapped resource rather than the most ordinary thing you could do. I thought maybe I could write about that.
Fall outfit ideas from animal crossing
I considered doing a fake fashion story about my favorite fall looks from Animal Crossing. If you’d like to make this happen call your senators!
When I said “have a nice day” to my bodega guy and Siri thought I was talking to her so she wished me a nice day back
I thought this might be some kind of metaphor but it’s probably just stupid.
The position
My new thing is raving about the only position my body now endures comfortably (while awake), as depicted below, which I’ve become convinced will somehow lead to my premature death.
The comfy lady in Chee’s class
I recently took a seminar by Alexander Chee on “How to Write an Essay Collection.” It was conducted over Zoom with something like 500 people, many of them recognizable from media Twitter. (I guess a lot of people want to write an essay collection?) It was fun to feel like I was in class again, notebook and pen in front of me, occasionally getting sleepy, studying the other students. One woman in particular caught my eye. She appeared to be in her 60s, sweatered and cocooned in a La-Z-Boy, a lamp peering over her shoulder. While most every one else sat erect, looking slightly self-conscious, she didn’t seem remotely aware of the camera. I only saw her weigh into the chaotic chat room once, to share that she preferred to write by hand, then dictate her words to her phone using speech-to-text. I loved that she was taking this class, that she seemed so comfortable and self-assured. I miss her!
I can’t keep talking about the passage of time.
I guess this was more of an anti-note, and I’m not even heeding it!
Now that we’ve accounted for my failures, moving along to some other people’s/creature’s successes.
1. This week’s Small Good Thing, literal edition, is this image of a baby alpaca which made me feel briefly hopeful.
2. “My Mustache, My Self,” a surprisingly poignant essay by Wesley Morris for The New York Times. I say “surprisingly” only because I didn’t expect to be so moved by an essay about a mustache. This endorsement I retweeted is better than mine:
3. The definition for hagiography, which is one of those words that floats around in my head and yet vaguely escapes me. Now confirmed: It is a biography or profile that idealizes its subject.
4. The photographer Noah Kalina’s newsletter about dahlias, in which he talks about taking the same photo of flowers on his dining room table every year and comparing them. Kalina’s newsletter is unlike any other I subscribe to. It’s very specific, small, and divorced from media in a way I appreciate/require.
5. The Twitter account of a senior vegetable gardener named Gerald Stratford, who posts necessary content such as checking in on his Christmas potatoes and “sweet candles.”
We love Gerald unconditionally!
6. “The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd,” an intimate and complicated behind-the-scenes look into the store that called 911 on George Floyd and the community that relies on it, by Aymann Ismail for Slate. An excellent snapshot of modern America.
7. DSA’s endorsements for the 2020 US General Election, by state.
8. “A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of ‘Sex Work,’” by Esperanza Fonseca for Medium. It’s not a short read (about 30 minutes), but it’s one of the most compelling cases I’ve read in favor of abolishing sex work. I’m still sorting out my beliefs on this topic, but I feel really grateful to have discovered Fonseca’s writing and gained a fuller understanding of the issue through her perspective.
“If the sex trade was truly a free choice then those who have the most freedom in society (the rich) would not be the least likely to engage in it. And those who have the least freedom in society (proletarians, indigenous women, colonized peoples, transgender women) would not be over-represented in the sex trade.”
9. Several 8-minute episodes of Looney Tunes from the 1950s and 60s on HBOMax, which was genuinely an incredible way to spend an evening. These shows are fucking genius and so funny. Particularly taken with Looney Tunes S21 E20 “To hare is human” (1956). Here’s a sneak peek, but it gets so much better, I wish YouTube had the whole ep!
(P.s. This documentary about Chuck Jones, the cartoonist behind Looney Tunes, is really good if you’re interested in learning about what made his style so revolutionary, and why modern mainstream animation isn’t nearly as charming.)
10. This tweet which makes me laugh every time I read it.
11. This Paris Review “Art of Fiction” interview with Guy Davenport by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Alexander Chee mentioned Davenport a lot during the seminar I took on “How to Write an Essay Collection,” and I remembered a reader once recommending one of Davenport’s books to me, Every Force Evolves a Form, a title I’m obsessed with without even having read it. (I’m saving it to buy next time I’m in a bookstore, which is more satisfying than purchasing online.) This interview is long and I had to look up a bunch of stuff to better understand it but I loved it. This is Sullivan on Davenport’s skill:
“He is a master of the idiomatic sentence that seems commonsensical until it is read with the concentration that went into shaping it, at which point it reveals its depths, as when he writes, in the postscript to his Twelve Stories, ‘Making things is so human that psychology and philosophy have gotten nowhere in trying to account for it.’ Another recurrent Davenport theme: that what is most essential to humanity lies at the point furthest from conventional scrutiny, where it remains inaccessible to minds bent on categorizing and, in the end, controlling it—safe, and sacred, in its unknowability.”
12. Related to the last one: I revisited this School of Life video on Jacques Derrida and “deconstruction” after Davenport mentioned the concept. It reminded me how much I appreciate School of Life, which is Alain de Botton’s educational company, especially its philosophy series (from Western to Eastern), which is so generously and accessibly made. When I first discovered these videos they opened something in me that felt neglected after having spent four years studying “business administration.”
13. This unhinged sign on a neighboring building’s door that says so much more about the author and America than its intended recipient and noted crime. Depressing.
14. “Be On Time for Things,” an essay by Albert Burneko for Defector that is utterly divorced from the collapse of society and truly just a rant about people who don’t value punctuality. Remember when this is what the internet was about?
15. 1 pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food which unfortunately still slaps.
That’s what I have for you this week. Hope you’re having an okay day,
Haley
p.s. On Tuesday I’m inviting Avi and Harling on the podcast to discuss Emily in Paris (lol!), and next week I’ll be answering five reader questions for my long-form advice column, Dear Baby. To receive these, become a paying subscriber here.
This month a portion of subscriber proceeds will be donated to Open Path Collective, a nationwide non-profit network dedicated to providing affordable therapy to those in need.
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I so appreciate this newsletter! As a writer myself, I often hyper-empathize and worry about the pressure you must feel writing this weekly. This week's edition was a shrug in honesty that still delivered the most delicious considerations and slices of humanity.
Tbh I *do* want a Substack on AC fall fashion 😂