Sludgy Calendar Email

PLUS: An early look at some holiday gift ideas in my shop

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Dear Friend,

This marks the two-year anniversary of when I invented this “new way of living in the world,” as basically a human-shaped wood nymph who followed the rhythms of the seasons, etc. If you’re new here, read this post from last year, or this one from the year before to get a better sense of what I mean.

In theory, the calendar was designed to include a weeklong celebratory break every six-or-so weeks, to kinda worship whatever the seasonal year had to brag about. Leaves in late October. Sun in mid-June. I meant to stop, rest, do less work, go outside more. Look out windows.

But last year, I failed. Not all the way: the weeks were on the calendar, I looked at them and noted that they were there. During leaves week, for example, I saw that there were leaves. 

A life has its own seasons, and it’s difficult to know when you’re in one, and then when you’re in a new one all of a sudden. My sister Alexis leaves me a video message almost every day, which is difficult because she has three small children (one of whom is a literal baby) and an extremely full-time job. When she’s overwhelmed, she says something like, “I keep reminding myself that this is just this season of my life.” She talked about, once, how the days didn’t feel like days so much as one long day, sometimes interrupted by fits of sleep, but not in any sort of predictable pattern. This resonated.

This season of my life: where once I looked to see what plays there were or for a pottery class, now I am parenting. Where once I remembered to send a card on someone’s birthday, painted a wren for fun, made salad, rode my bike, volunteered, had a yoga practice, replaced light bulbs, walked new places, went out to eat, saw movies, stayed out late to see someone talented play guitar, now I am parenting. And you understand: where there used to be anything else, now I am parenting. 

(In 2008, in a typical post-collegiate depressive spell, I started a Blogspot blog to “track the amount of fun I was having.” I just learned, in trying to revisit it, that Blogspot is gone and now if you try to go to this old blog you are ushered-via-widget to a site that can help you find a personal trainer. In a heartbreaking twist, The Wayback Machine didn’t archive that blog until 2013, a full five years after its inception. The earliest post I can access is from 2009,¹ where I reported on taking high school students on a camping trip — an activity I ranked as being “72 percent fun!” with an exclamation point.)

Besides parenting, I am also working. In the pros column is that I’ve been teaching for 16 years and I am good at it. I’ve been teaching this same college course for seven of those years, and when you get to teach the same thing year after year, you really really get good at it. Something nice about teaching: you leave yourself when you’re doing it. In certain life seasons, this is a kind of vacation.

I’m writing to you now in the early morning. Everyone in my house is fast asleep. My three-year-old daughter, T, is sick. Yesterday she was about as sick as a kid can be, and while she’s big and hearty enough that it wasn’t scary, it was sad. Wednesday is a major work day for me, typically; instead, I parented. I made sick-kid food (Rice?! Bananas?! IDK, she didn’t eat any of it), held iced Pedialyte near her chapped lips, watched Sesame Street, sang songs about rainbows. Work emails kept coming; during the sacred hour that she napped, I took a meeting. 

Sometimes, I feel guilty for all this parenting. I read in The New York Times that millennials don’t ignore their children enough. My friends who have two kids talk about how the two kids can entertain each other, and this is how it is supposed to be; a kid is not supposed to spend all their time with a parent. But when I think about the alternatives, they’re too much to bear, and so I keep doing the thing I’ve been doing. You know that saying about “insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results?” I think more often it’s not that we expect different results, but that we don’t have the capacity to come up with an alternative.

I miss my friends who don’t have children. As I worked on my book about kinship, a lot of unpleasant truths came into focus. Among them: when one friend has children and another friend does not, a part of the friendship will die. There is no cultural space to grieve the loss. Instead, both parties feel a terrible mixture of guilt and resentment. Why isn’t she showing up for me more? Why can’t I show up for her more? On good days, I hold out hope that this is not the way it has to be for all human beings forever. On other days, hope is a scarce resource, and I don’t have enough of it to go around to all the terrifying puzzles that plague our collective future. 

In college, before I could conceive of the idea of parenting, there were Official Campus Things To Do every night. I loved this; I love a calendar! Within the first month of my freshman year I discovered this weekly gathering called Writer’s Colony, which took place at the Writing House. (HOW WERE THESE BOTH REAL THINGS!?) This is now 20 full years in my past, but I have a visceral memory of the tea I sipped and the living room filled with typewriters; something cardamom-y baking in the kitchen. Writer’s Colony involved sitting around in silence and writing to prompts, and then maybe reading out loud what you wrote. Most people (all the people?) hand-wrote to the prompts while sitting on couches, loveseats, the floor. The first week, I read out loud a fictional piece about a woman who has sexual encounters with her own shoes. It went over well. I gathered admirers.

Soon, the admiration was mutual, and I had actual factual friendships with the sophomores who lived in The Writing House. Most notable was a friendship with Alex Falcone, an unapologetically whimsical man with a fairly dark and pointy sense of humor. Alex went out of his way to be nice to me, but mostly I envied him and everyone else who lived in The Writing House that year. They seemed to be inseparably close friends. I wanted to have inseparably close friends. Even when I got older and moved into The Writing House myself, I never had anything like what Alex had. 

I wasn’t a part of this fairytale-seeming friendship circle, but from the outside, they appeared to stay close after college. Romantic couplings sprouted. Alex Falcone fell in love with and married Megan “The Fist” Niermeyer. (I don’t know where she got that nickname, but she was beautiful, tiny, and soft-voiced; it had something to do with that, I think.) I don’t know enough about their relationship to tell you very much about it, except that they are still married, and still in love. And Alex is still whimsical — although he is now famous, too, in no small part because of his whimsy. My favorite of his clips is about how he built a to-scale replica of his own apartment in the empty cabinet of his TV stand.

@alex_falconeA project from a couple years ago that got me back into building with Lego. We've moved apartments so I'm starting work on the new model. I'll keep you posted!

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Alex became a person who felt too famous for me to reach out to, because what famous person wants someone who was never a great friend to begin with to suddenly reach out? There was a not-insignificant time where I tried to make it in comedy, and so Alex and I do have some overlapping friends and acquaintances, but mostly I’ve admired from afar.

Then, this year, I got a surprising email. It came on a day that felt particularly sludgy. This email was like a lemon bar. 

It started like this:

Hi Sophie!

My name is Megan, and we went to Whitman together. We didn't really know each other, but you know my husband, Alex.

IT WAS MEGAN THE FIST! It was strange to read the part about “we didn’t really know each other,” because that was true — but I also felt like I knew Megan so well, because I’d been interested in everyone who lived in The Writing House during that era. They were sort of like a famous cast of a high-rated reality show for whom I felt parasocial affection, but I was well aware that I was a creep.

This is from the year *I* lived at the writing house. From left, this is Leslie, Kyle, Anna, Sarah, Erin, me, and Dan. Leslie and I are still sometimes in touch; she reads this newsletter on occasion, and she is sparkling and brilliant. Sarah and I were briefly in touch a few years ago when her book ,

It turned out, she was emailing me because it was World Gratitude Day — a thing she knew because I’d put it on the calendar I made and sold last year. Megan did something I didn’t realize anyone would do: she observed all the holidays highlighted on the calendar — weeklong celebrations and day-specific ones alike. She also kept a journal about what she did. The first one, she said, was Bird Day, on January 5. (Which, I maintain, is SUCH A WEIRD DAY FOR BIRD DAY. Light Googling did not reveal to me why, in 2002, the Avian Welfare Coalition and Born Free USA established National Bird Day to be in the deadest elbow of winter, but OK. Why not?)

Megan’s email was seriously moving. A lemon bar in a sea of sludge: I WEPT OPENLY IN PUBLIC WHEN I GOT IT. It was a gift she didn’t realize she was giving, because I hadn’t been able to celebrate my holidays all year. (I was parenting.) But Megan celebrated the holidays. Celebration happened. I’ve done a lot of celebrating in my life, so I know that stopping and celebrating softens some edges for everyone in the vicinity of the celebration.

Pretend this is a lemon.

I mean, calendars are funny. They’re pictures of the most ridiculous of human inventions: time as a commodity. Usually, the pictures are about how we are going to maximize our time (time — a boundless thing that can’t be maximized, because it just exists and is never really saved or spent or managed). Day planners are there to sort the hours of the day into neat little stacks so the most stuff can get done. They turn time into something finite that must be treated frugally. I’m not immune: my Passion Planner is sacred, and I chop my days into chunks and fill the chunks up with tasks, too. 

But this is not the point of a celebration calendar. A celebration calendar is there to remember to take breaks, laugh, enjoy, marvel. Though I am not in a season of my life right now where I can take advantage of that kind of thing, its value system is still in my bones. Today, in Chicago, it has been snowing, and my daughter is home sick from school. I started writing this post early in the morning, and didn’t finish it before she woke up. I got to the part about Megan. I thought about Megan.

It snowed, and I’d been thinking about Megan, so the thing to do with this day was to make a pot of hot chocolate with marshmallows, and a fort in our front room, put on a Christmas record, and sit in front of the biggest window of the house and wait for birds. (They came. Including a cardinal! So maybe January 5 isn’t crazy.) My daughter and I sat quietly like that for four snowy songs. Then I opened the window wide and made a tiny snowman on our roof. Mostly, we looked out the window. Thank you, Megan.

So of course I made a celebration calendar this year, whether or not I’ll use it. Maybe you will! I made a downloadable DIY version for people who live in countries where it’s super-expensive to ship it. I have had it printed and hand-bound at a small operation, and it’s still in process of coming into being, so I don’t have a physical copy to show you, but I do have a link where you can order them right now. Last year, they sold out rather quickly, so consider jumping on board! I just found out that they might be a good gift for a person who has space for some celebrations. 

A little sample page in lieu of photos.

Anyway, though this year has been really hard, I think often about how I close these newsletters. Parenting is harder for all that breaks one’s heart about it — which is always in the peripheral; the various ends of the worlds. And still, we wake up, we love each other. We try. We move through the seasons.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

Housekeeping

• I have other holidays-y things in my shop right now, which I’m soft-launching for this newsletter before a full Instagram announcement takes place.

  • I’ve re-stocked this t-shirt:

    

  • And a new t-shirt has arrived! This one:

    

    Modeled by Diana, who MAKES IT LOOK GOOD.

  • I will do 5 (AND JUST 5!) pet portrait commissions this year:

    

  • Bird painting classes are back for January (one at noon, one in the evening):

  • I’ll have a little discount on all this stuff and for paid subscribers that I’ll pull out next week, so this is a good time to subscribe to the paid tier! It comes with videos of all the bird painting lessons as they go live.

• I had another New Yorker cartoon come out a few weeks ago that slipped under the radar. My friend Joe said it was “cinematic!”

  

  Loose Thoughts:

• Did you do the thing where you took a bowl full of snow and put maple syrup on top of it and ate it with a spoon? That now seems like it could have been toxic? But it was so good?

• A thing that irritates me about being a full grown monster-sized adult is that I don’t bite my fingernails anymore, and so they grow, and so I have to cut them, or typing is difficult. The fact that people walk around with long nails regardless of the implications for typing is bonkers to me, and low-key deeply impressive.

• I learned, too, that this kind of keyboard exists for people with nails. I’ve never seen one in real life, though, and I have seen people with long nails in real life.

• Speaking of keyboard-related stuff: on an airplane a year ago I spilled ginger ale on my brand new laptop (read: the laptop I am borrowing from work, which was brand new), and it made the “delete” key nearly unusable. I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but that’s CERTAINLY the key I used the most. Last week, I decided to try to buy a replacement key and spring, to see if I could solve the problem by re-installing it. AND IT WORKED. IT ONE THOUSAND PERCENT WORKED. It’s like nothing bad has ever happened to this keyboard. I didn’t know this was possible in my past life, but the more you know. Adulting.

• You know what those books for kids about pooping don’t talk about enough? Everyone poops DIFFERENTLY. While we are bonded, on an animal level, around our universal pooping, the poops are never the same species-to-species, or even person-to-person. Thus, pooping can feel… hard and lonely.

• If you are also a parent: DO NOT FORGET THAT EVERY CHILD HAS EVERY ILLNESS ALL AT ONCE ALL WINTER AND IT WILL BE THIS WAY UNTIL MAY AND SO YOU DON’T GET TO APOLOGIZE OR ACCEPT APOLOGIES FOR YOUR CHILD’S ILLNESS BECAUSE EVERY CHILD IS ALWAYS HAVING ALL THE ILLNESSES AT ONCE FOR THE WHOLE TIME SO WE ARE ALL DIVORCED FROM BLAME.

1. A paragraph from this post: “But in some ways it was hard. December 13 this year marks one of those personal anniversaries for me, and I didn't want to be alone. The wilderness is a place where it's difficult to not be alone, even when you're with exuberant teenagers. Probably good, though. I did get to see a really old cemetery, and you all know how deeply thrilled I become over really old cemeteries.” I have no idea — truly none — what this “personal anniversary” is. It makes it sound like someone very close to me DIED? But I don’t think that’s it. What’s likeliest is that maybe that was the date that my ex-boyfriend dumped me?! I JUST DON’T KNOW. I do maintain a lifelong love of really old cemeteries.