Aww, I loved this so much. I've been looking for someone to tell me what to do instead of think about the world burning or the state of Texas generally.
My best friend is coming to visit me next weekend and I've been dreaming up the perfect itinerary. This is inspiring me to instead leave room for mindless gallivanting and deep talks fueled by wine and ice cream cones and silliness and lightness and other small glorious things.
Yesterday, while filling out a form on the internet, I was notified in big scary letters “birthdate is not valid” WTF. I saved it because of its absurdity and it made me smile
I needed this so badly today. Thank you. Trying to take deep breaths as I savour each bite of my cold-pizza lunch and admire the way my cat’s mustache looks so different when I see him in a mirror.
Lately, I've been reaching for small joys, or as I call them now, ordinary delights. I realized that I missed feeling delighted in my life. My outlook remained strong for the first year of the pandemic. I was taking the time in quarantine as a personal retreat to reevaluate my life. As the summer of vaccinated reunions came and quickly went, I'm finding it harder to access the optimism that I saw as inherently part of me in past years. Perhaps I am also missing the spaces and faces that make me feel like it's okay to be my quirkiest authentic self. No small thing at all.
As someone who's navigated unprecedented pessimism this year (well unprecedented in the way it didn't seem to come from the outside, but sprang up from inside me), I feel you! Sometimes when I get the impression that all of my weird shots at being my weird self are being blocked, I have to just sit by the sidelines and observe people somewhere busy, then write all of my weird thoughts down and savor them and celebrate my own ideas and opinions and takes in a vacuum. I think that process actually became part of my survival during the first part of the pandemic, but I didn't feel that grounded. Now the writing itself seems to ground me and it prevents me from, you know, putting everything I have onto a little hot dog stand and rolling it around town shouting THESE HOT DOGS ARE AMAZING YOU GOTTA HAVE ONE!
But you're right that it's not a small thing. I hope you can seek out some new interesting people who can appreciate you. For me it's about ideas: if someone is into talking about ideas, or talking about stuff just to find a concept or idea underneath the chaos, or to piece together and compare different places and people and things (without leaping to conclusions about what it means to play with observations and words and fleeting notions of the world), then I feel good and can have the kind of fun I want to have. It's not necessarily intellectual in the traditional sense of the word, it's just conversationally experimental. And it's not that someone needs to start out on that foot, they just have to be curious and not a shot blocker (a common type, the shot blocker!). Anyway, too many words here. Bottom line is this: The only sure way I know to relocate my optimism is through hard physical labor or exercise. If that's not an option, waking up early and drinking caffeine outside or near a little view of nature is a close second. But most of all, I understand and I'm sorry that things are so hard! xoxo
Aww thanks. I love her. I did a search on someone else who worked at the Awl to see where they were and that article popped up! I couldn't believe I'd never seen it before, it's so perfect.
And this weird hyper-specific piece is brilliant evidence of its own thesis! ✨ It’s definitely the brightest little sparkle in the sand viewed from the nicest resting angle in my beach chair, today. ✨
Which puts the whole narrative of your “Destined for Great Things Writing Day” in one of the best story-shapes ever: “Success, but not at what was originally aimed for, and after a fakeout-failure at the initial goal.” Why is that the best story in the whole world?? I just want to hear it over and over again sometimes...
Love, love, love this: "But when you step away from the darkness online and greet the weird and perfect artifacts you encounter on any given day with focused curiosity, you turn the high-rise mall back into a seaside cottage."
"It’s a Joseph Cornell box that you want to walk straight into, even though you don’t understand why there’s a big old key and some dice and a shell in there."
I was writing this morning about my ongoing contempt for The CMS, the way Course Management Systems (Canvas, Blackboard, and even the best I've used, Brightspace) all routinize education, even WRITING pedagogy, so that so much of the striving involved in learning is just dusty old man radio noise.
Your posts always arrive *just in time*, and I'm so grateful for your apt description of internet affects: "Instead of spending the day watching seagulls diving and falling in the fog, or opening a small door and discovering an empty jam jar filled with costume jewelry, you dash around a neon-lit mall, shouting at strangers, until you can’t remember how it feels to know a lot less and wonder a lot more." Correct. Insanely correct, tyvm.
i love this, and so needed to hear this today. i'm the kind of person that deplores how everything and everyone looks and behaves the same way online, like they were all spat out by the same algorithm... at the same time i approach everything i write with an attitude of, "how do i get the algorithm to love ME??" i worry that the things i write about are too niche, and then i worry that they're not niche enough. and that worry extends to everything else too: it feels like i'm rating every aspect of myself -- my appearance, my resume, the things i say -- against all the people that i admire in those respective categories at all times, on a sliding scale that always winds up tipping to "never enough" (what a profoundly female experience). i worry that this panopticon in which i watch myself relentlessly will stifle whatever words are in me. i'm old enough and have produced little enough that i know that my dreams of a book deal or even a sustained list of publications are NOT inevitable... they won't just "happen," the way i imagined they would if i just gave it enough time!
anyways... want to reiterate the goodness of your advice here. it takes so much bravery to know and explore and commit to one's idiosyncrasy. i admire it in you.
Thank you! But to be clear, I also go through stages of wanting love from the void and trying to matter by being TASTIER, even though everything great I ever wrote was a pure blast of honesty and weirdness from within that happened to jacket itself in the right words so that it wouldn't get turned away from the good restaurant. Sometimes I'm honest and it's just dirty naked nothingness that no one can understand. Other times I dress up too much and it's all overexertion, lipstick on pigs, awkward and unpalatable.
Sometimes I think it's just like being a little bit of a hermit who's a tiny bit anxious about unknown hassles: You just have to commit to leaving the house. You put the lipstick on the pig and you go. If you're naked, you grab a fucking scarf and hope for the best. Sometimes it's so easy and other times it's nothing but work that doesn't add up. I produce a lot of words, but I have a lot of other words that just sit on my desktop and I think: This is not good enough. And it's really not.
But back to the smallness idea: When I burrow into something small and really look closely at it and then play with ideas and images and emotions from there, it tends to work. A tiny shred of an idea, something I read somewhere, something someone said, something that happened. The smaller the starting notion or image, the easier it can be to play and expand and have fun with it. I wrote a whole essay once that started from my husband snoring in the middle of the night and expanded from there into the concept of professional swagger and presenting yourself as important vs. being extremely capable at practical shit.
The smaller the launch pad, the better things tend to go - for me, anyway. So it sort of makes sense that if you marinate in the approval/ disapproval matrix of the entire globe, and bounce around with a bunch of repeating sentiments about the same things for too long, you wind up trying to sort of... ADDRESS THE GLOBE? I do this a lot, and it almost always leads to bad thoughts and opinions. It's confusing because in the olden days, the internet was smaller and you could do this and it felt fun -- kind of what Jia says at the end there, but dated back to 1996 when I started writing online and there were just some IT guys in a break room and that was pretty much it. (My husband read my shit back then and was kind of an IT guy ha ha.)
Anyway, so much of writing is believing in your weird fucked up sensibilities and charms. Nurturing that takes some self-delusion, truly, and I want to encourage you to take that path and get a little deluded. If you love something enough, no matter how small it is, you can convince someone else to love it, too. That's the kind of writing that's infectious and exciting by accident. Your passionate weirdness spreads like a wildfire. Exercise, caffeine, self-delusion: the artist's most basic requirements. Thanks for posting and write Polly a letter, I'm sure it would be great! askpolly at protonmail.com. xo
thank you so so much for this! i tend to self-reject out of panic and self-hatred quite a lot. my gut instinct is that an idea has to spring to my mind, fully formed like athena from zeus' head, otherwise it sucks and i am terrible. thank you for giving me those images of putting the lipstick on the pig and grabbing a scarf and leaving the house. i DO have anxious hermit syndrome when it comes to putting the damn words on the page and sending them out, and i need to get over it <3
after reading your comment again, esp the part about necessary self-delusion and "believing in your weird fucked up sensibilities and charms," i finally sent out an email to my advisor about all fellowships i'm applying to this academic year and their deadlines for recommendations. i'd been procrastinating for days because i felt myself so deeply unworthy and hated the thought of even allowing my advisor to know i was planning to apply. but i thought to myself, self-delusion is necessary! so i sent, and i'm glad i did
Aww, I loved this so much. I've been looking for someone to tell me what to do instead of think about the world burning or the state of Texas generally.
My best friend is coming to visit me next weekend and I've been dreaming up the perfect itinerary. This is inspiring me to instead leave room for mindless gallivanting and deep talks fueled by wine and ice cream cones and silliness and lightness and other small glorious things.
I really hate perfect itineraries and feel much more at home with the ice-cream-and-wine-fueled deep-talkers
YESsssss! Have a great time!
Yesterday, while filling out a form on the internet, I was notified in big scary letters “birthdate is not valid” WTF. I saved it because of its absurdity and it made me smile
I needed this so badly today. Thank you. Trying to take deep breaths as I savour each bite of my cold-pizza lunch and admire the way my cat’s mustache looks so different when I see him in a mirror.
Thank you for mentioning the image of a cat with a mustache! makes my day thinking of a mustachioed cat
Lately, I've been reaching for small joys, or as I call them now, ordinary delights. I realized that I missed feeling delighted in my life. My outlook remained strong for the first year of the pandemic. I was taking the time in quarantine as a personal retreat to reevaluate my life. As the summer of vaccinated reunions came and quickly went, I'm finding it harder to access the optimism that I saw as inherently part of me in past years. Perhaps I am also missing the spaces and faces that make me feel like it's okay to be my quirkiest authentic self. No small thing at all.
As someone who's navigated unprecedented pessimism this year (well unprecedented in the way it didn't seem to come from the outside, but sprang up from inside me), I feel you! Sometimes when I get the impression that all of my weird shots at being my weird self are being blocked, I have to just sit by the sidelines and observe people somewhere busy, then write all of my weird thoughts down and savor them and celebrate my own ideas and opinions and takes in a vacuum. I think that process actually became part of my survival during the first part of the pandemic, but I didn't feel that grounded. Now the writing itself seems to ground me and it prevents me from, you know, putting everything I have onto a little hot dog stand and rolling it around town shouting THESE HOT DOGS ARE AMAZING YOU GOTTA HAVE ONE!
But you're right that it's not a small thing. I hope you can seek out some new interesting people who can appreciate you. For me it's about ideas: if someone is into talking about ideas, or talking about stuff just to find a concept or idea underneath the chaos, or to piece together and compare different places and people and things (without leaping to conclusions about what it means to play with observations and words and fleeting notions of the world), then I feel good and can have the kind of fun I want to have. It's not necessarily intellectual in the traditional sense of the word, it's just conversationally experimental. And it's not that someone needs to start out on that foot, they just have to be curious and not a shot blocker (a common type, the shot blocker!). Anyway, too many words here. Bottom line is this: The only sure way I know to relocate my optimism is through hard physical labor or exercise. If that's not an option, waking up early and drinking caffeine outside or near a little view of nature is a close second. But most of all, I understand and I'm sorry that things are so hard! xoxo
You and Jia T are two of my favorite geniuses. And you’re cited in the article!
Aww thanks. I love her. I did a search on someone else who worked at the Awl to see where they were and that article popped up! I couldn't believe I'd never seen it before, it's so perfect.
This, as with many many many of your newsletters, is exactly what I needed to read today. Thank you 😊
This inspired me to write some weird shit instead of finishing what I was working on. so...thanks?
And this weird hyper-specific piece is brilliant evidence of its own thesis! ✨ It’s definitely the brightest little sparkle in the sand viewed from the nicest resting angle in my beach chair, today. ✨
Which puts the whole narrative of your “Destined for Great Things Writing Day” in one of the best story-shapes ever: “Success, but not at what was originally aimed for, and after a fakeout-failure at the initial goal.” Why is that the best story in the whole world?? I just want to hear it over and over again sometimes...
I loved this, thank you.
Love, love, love this: "But when you step away from the darkness online and greet the weird and perfect artifacts you encounter on any given day with focused curiosity, you turn the high-rise mall back into a seaside cottage."
"It’s a Joseph Cornell box that you want to walk straight into, even though you don’t understand why there’s a big old key and some dice and a shell in there."
I was writing this morning about my ongoing contempt for The CMS, the way Course Management Systems (Canvas, Blackboard, and even the best I've used, Brightspace) all routinize education, even WRITING pedagogy, so that so much of the striving involved in learning is just dusty old man radio noise.
Your posts always arrive *just in time*, and I'm so grateful for your apt description of internet affects: "Instead of spending the day watching seagulls diving and falling in the fog, or opening a small door and discovering an empty jam jar filled with costume jewelry, you dash around a neon-lit mall, shouting at strangers, until you can’t remember how it feels to know a lot less and wonder a lot more." Correct. Insanely correct, tyvm.
i love this, and so needed to hear this today. i'm the kind of person that deplores how everything and everyone looks and behaves the same way online, like they were all spat out by the same algorithm... at the same time i approach everything i write with an attitude of, "how do i get the algorithm to love ME??" i worry that the things i write about are too niche, and then i worry that they're not niche enough. and that worry extends to everything else too: it feels like i'm rating every aspect of myself -- my appearance, my resume, the things i say -- against all the people that i admire in those respective categories at all times, on a sliding scale that always winds up tipping to "never enough" (what a profoundly female experience). i worry that this panopticon in which i watch myself relentlessly will stifle whatever words are in me. i'm old enough and have produced little enough that i know that my dreams of a book deal or even a sustained list of publications are NOT inevitable... they won't just "happen," the way i imagined they would if i just gave it enough time!
anyways... want to reiterate the goodness of your advice here. it takes so much bravery to know and explore and commit to one's idiosyncrasy. i admire it in you.
Thank you! But to be clear, I also go through stages of wanting love from the void and trying to matter by being TASTIER, even though everything great I ever wrote was a pure blast of honesty and weirdness from within that happened to jacket itself in the right words so that it wouldn't get turned away from the good restaurant. Sometimes I'm honest and it's just dirty naked nothingness that no one can understand. Other times I dress up too much and it's all overexertion, lipstick on pigs, awkward and unpalatable.
Sometimes I think it's just like being a little bit of a hermit who's a tiny bit anxious about unknown hassles: You just have to commit to leaving the house. You put the lipstick on the pig and you go. If you're naked, you grab a fucking scarf and hope for the best. Sometimes it's so easy and other times it's nothing but work that doesn't add up. I produce a lot of words, but I have a lot of other words that just sit on my desktop and I think: This is not good enough. And it's really not.
But back to the smallness idea: When I burrow into something small and really look closely at it and then play with ideas and images and emotions from there, it tends to work. A tiny shred of an idea, something I read somewhere, something someone said, something that happened. The smaller the starting notion or image, the easier it can be to play and expand and have fun with it. I wrote a whole essay once that started from my husband snoring in the middle of the night and expanded from there into the concept of professional swagger and presenting yourself as important vs. being extremely capable at practical shit.
The smaller the launch pad, the better things tend to go - for me, anyway. So it sort of makes sense that if you marinate in the approval/ disapproval matrix of the entire globe, and bounce around with a bunch of repeating sentiments about the same things for too long, you wind up trying to sort of... ADDRESS THE GLOBE? I do this a lot, and it almost always leads to bad thoughts and opinions. It's confusing because in the olden days, the internet was smaller and you could do this and it felt fun -- kind of what Jia says at the end there, but dated back to 1996 when I started writing online and there were just some IT guys in a break room and that was pretty much it. (My husband read my shit back then and was kind of an IT guy ha ha.)
Anyway, so much of writing is believing in your weird fucked up sensibilities and charms. Nurturing that takes some self-delusion, truly, and I want to encourage you to take that path and get a little deluded. If you love something enough, no matter how small it is, you can convince someone else to love it, too. That's the kind of writing that's infectious and exciting by accident. Your passionate weirdness spreads like a wildfire. Exercise, caffeine, self-delusion: the artist's most basic requirements. Thanks for posting and write Polly a letter, I'm sure it would be great! askpolly at protonmail.com. xo
thank you so so much for this! i tend to self-reject out of panic and self-hatred quite a lot. my gut instinct is that an idea has to spring to my mind, fully formed like athena from zeus' head, otherwise it sucks and i am terrible. thank you for giving me those images of putting the lipstick on the pig and grabbing a scarf and leaving the house. i DO have anxious hermit syndrome when it comes to putting the damn words on the page and sending them out, and i need to get over it <3
after reading your comment again, esp the part about necessary self-delusion and "believing in your weird fucked up sensibilities and charms," i finally sent out an email to my advisor about all fellowships i'm applying to this academic year and their deadlines for recommendations. i'd been procrastinating for days because i felt myself so deeply unworthy and hated the thought of even allowing my advisor to know i was planning to apply. but i thought to myself, self-delusion is necessary! so i sent, and i'm glad i did