10 Things: Secret Drawers, Secret Tricks, Seasons
What to do, look at, read, buy, listen to, and consider this week.
BOY OH BOY do we have a good crop of things this time around. The first three are free, but a lot of the good stuff (TV show recommendations, cookie baking tricks, and meal-prep recipes) are behind the paywall. What a great time to become a paid subscriber!
There are a number of things I wanted to do if I ever became a mother, and they are almost all holiday-related. I love celebrations, and I regret that more children don’t get to have more OF them. Mostly, I’ve invented many new holidays. But in adding to what’s already there: an advent calendar containing something more interesting than soapy tabs of milk chocolate has been on my list since I was small. What’s better than a present a day? So I bought a wooden one during the Black Friday sales, and it came, and it’s BEAUTIFUL.
But T won’t appreciate this until she’s older, and so instead of putting things in it, Luke and I wrote down a bunch of little activities we could do together on 25 slips of paper, shook them up in a bag, and randomly placed them in the wooden drawers. Yesterday’s activity was “sing a song”:
Earlier in the week we played a game. The playing of the game was the biggest revelation for me, because we had to do it after T had gone to bed. We always — ALWAYS — either watch TV or read books or also go to bed after T has gone down. There wasn’t a possibility in my mind that anything else could happen. Sitting on the floor playing Carcassonne (the best two-player game?) and drinking wacky blue butterfly blossom tea was a revelation. I maybe feel this way because I WON, which never happens. But anyway, I think putting activities in the advent calendar is here to stay. As T gets older, we’ll put things in there that she can do with us. (One of our slips of paper this year says “make out,” which is not something we will be sharing with T.)
I can’t overstate this: in my gloomy winter mood, the advent calendar is the best thing of my whole life.
This article came out a long time ago (well, it came out in 2020, but literally RIGHT before the pandemic was THE PANDEMIC, so it might as well have been in another lifetime), and it definitely has that David-Brooks-white-cis-het-male slant (because it is written by David Brooks), but his thesis — that the nuclear family is a failure and we need (and ARE BUILDING) new models — is exactly the thesis of the book I am currently trying to write. (Mine is much queerer, duh.) The thing about being David Brooks is that you have a lot of experience as a journalist and have a lot of resources, and you do your research, and your research is actually really great! He interviewed one of my personal heroes, Mia Birdsong (“How We Show Up”) for this article. Bonus: you can listen to it if you don’t have time to read it!
Spending time with pigeons.
I had a professor in grad school who gave us the assignment of, “spend time with some pigeons” (see: art school). Then I think (I think) we were supposed to make art about it. But what I remember most is that I already loved pigeons, for reasons I have written about extensively, but I hadn’t spent a whole lot of TIME with them. There are a lot of them downtown. If you find some that you can just look at, I recommend it. It’s such a relaxing, interesting activity.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to You Are Doing A Good Enough Job to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.