What Activities Are Worth Your Time?

Lynda Barry, Oliver Burkeman, a bumblebee, bubbles

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

Dear Friend,

I learned a lot about teaching from Lynda Barry, as I’m realizing while I re-read her books (because I’ teaching a class for middle schoolers about comics and cartooning¹). I learned from her:

• How much I believe in writing by hand, on paper.

• How much I like working with cheap materials, like copy paper, Flair pens, crayons, composition notebooks, and index cards.

• About making silly art — art that isn’t for a “bigger purpose,” collaborative art, art that makes fun of itself, art that isn’t really about anything.

• The value of never throwing away a sheet of paper, because something can always turn into something else.

• That yes, you know how to draw a car, a burning house, and Batman (without looking any of those things up!).

• Where do memories live?

• Is a dream fiction or nonfiction?

• In this class, it is OK to fictionalize a memory a little bit, because memories exist on a strange plane that isn’t entirely of this world. (This is not how she would put it. This is how I am putting it.)

• All of those things have something to do with teaching any subject — not just drawing or writing — because they have to do with bravery, and showing up, and letting your brain be awake.

A question she asks a lot (because I think her students ask her a lot) is: What makes an activity worth your time? And then she makes the argument that a thing that is worth your time is folding a sheet of paper into sixteenths, unfolding it, and drawing individual squares inside each of the boxes formed by the creases. It teaches you about space, about how strong paper is, about your own hand, and about patience. I have now done this particular task about three hundred times, and my verdict is that maybe it’s worth doing. I think if you want to make comics it’s probably definitely worth doing.

Lynda Barry says it’s worth your time to, every day, write down seven things you did and seven things you saw over the past twenty-four hours. When I’m in this practice (sometimes I am), I notice that I notice more things. Like the leopard print ballet flats a woman carrying cupcakes across the street is wearing. These would not occur to me to be of note when I’m not in a noticing habit.

From April 9, 2016, a time when I was in this practice.

Everyone with an Instagram presence or podcast has an idea about the things that are worth your time. Push-ups, for instance; or some hipper exercise, like something with huge rubber bands you put around your ankles. Spend an hour a week on your day planner, and the rest of your week will magically become lines of dominos to tap over and watch as they turn into TikTok videos of tidy productivity. Just forty five minutes of meal prep and —! Thirty seconds of meditation is all it takes to —! The comprehensive Akira Kurosawa film catalog should be watched with undivided attention; listen to Miles Davis’ discography chronologically with the lights off, in one sitting on an empty stomach; certain New Yorker articles about whole books are worth your time, even if the whole books are not. 

My own time lately is different than it’s been before. An hour used to be one thing (sort of a huge, boundless thing, with which a lot could be done; with which, maybe, a universe could be created, if I focused), and now it’s something totally different (a fleck of dust on fire). I’m thinking about times I’ve heard aphorisms like, “Everyone has twenty minutes a day.” Does everyone have twenty minutes a day? Surely this is not true. If I have twenty minutes a day, they don’t look the way they used to; they don’t look like spaces where I could do squats or chop a pile of cucumbers. The hours are filled with crises. Individually, the crises are mundane — the doctor no longer takes the insurance, the mortgage is $1,000 higher per month, the basement has flooded, the writing has been rejected, the flight is delayed, no wait it is canceled, the hotel will not provide a refund, the student has vomited chicken and the TA has a mortal fear of vomit, the passport is lost, the ID is lost, the child must stay home from daycare again, and again, and again, the job has fallen through, the hard drive with the manuscript was destroyed — but as they accumulate, they require time. Each crisis is a ferret covered in wet paint placed among the dominos that are supposed to be set up to be knocked down. Although, that makes the crises out to be more adorable than they are.

I meant to not complain to you like this. And actually, this exact type of complaint — the “I AM WASTING ALL OF MY TIME” type of complaint — triggered a voice in the back of my head that told me that I needed to re-read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks the moment everything in my life was not immediately on fire. Which was five minutes ago, when it was Saturday and my daughter fell asleep for a nap. I was looking for this particular passage:

Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterwards, once “time" and “life" had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used – and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer — as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution — instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. 

I think Lynda Barry also sort of secretly laughs when people ask, “Is this activity worth my time?” What is “my” “time”? Is there such a thing as time that “belongs” to you? Isn’t time just a dimension that we’re all kind of swimming in? It’s not, inherently, a resource. We invented capitalism, and then we invented the idea that time was a resource. That’s kind of funny to Lynda, I think. She’s happy to fold paper into sixteenths and then draw little guys into every square, and she wants you to know that you won’t know what it’s like to do that activity unless you do it. 

Here’s an essay I wrote about Lynda Barry seven-plus years ago, after I had the enormous pleasure of taking a single class from her.

Anyway, currently, my hours are flecks of dust on fire and my twenty minute intervals are filled with paint-covered ferrets, and the newsletters don’t come out when I’ve promised them, and other things also fall through cracks.

But SOMETIMES I’m letting my daughter sit in a grimy inflatable pool filled with live insects and plastic beads she pulled out of a literal dumpster, where one of the inflatable rings has a hole in it now and is flat, and I’m blowing sub-par bubbles at the back of her head and playing tinny Indigo De Souza from my phone, and this is a thing I have to be doing, because it is my job in that moment to keep her alive, and I realize that I have the opportunity to also enjoy it. Even if it’s just for eleven seconds — to have my foot on her back, and she’s cool and I’m cool, and we’re together, in the midst of everything else in my life feeling really bad, I can just stop ruminating and fretting and worrying about how I’m going to make everything work out (because maybe I'm not!), and be with her for a pocket of moments. This is an activity that is worth my time.

Appreciating that Kat has Read 25 straight complaining text messages in a row from me, each of which has been more than 100 words long. Noticing how warm Luke’s hands are in bed before we fall asleep. Taking the time it takes to pet both my cats long enough for them to close their eyes and for me to celebrate that they get to nap a lot and that I’m glad there’s napping energy in my house. Smelling my mom’s very specific back-of-her-ears smell that is distinctly spicy-floral like my house growing up, while she visits for too short a visit. All of these activities: worth my time. And, crucially, they are available to me even in the midst of the fire and the paint and the ferret pee and the crying in the bathroom and the other parts I’m not telling you about.

My love, I hope there are longer stretches for you. Take what you can. 

Love,

Sophie

Parenting Paragraph(s)

The single most joyful thing in my life right now — and I am just selfishly telling you about this, like I think I’m just bragging about it!? because I don’t really think there’s any point here, except I want to write it down and tell a person I love, and that’s you — is this fucking piece of cardboard Luke disassembled and put on the floor a calendar month ago and let T color on.

First I felt shocked that she could focus on coloring on it for as long as should could (45 minutes at a time?), and then I moved on to falling in love with the way that it looked — I think I get why people love other contemporary artists who try to capture what it looks like to be moving through time, attracted to whims or guided by the universe or subconsciousness or whatever — I’m not smart enough to fully understand my daughter’s art, and it’s not that kind of art anyway. It’s art that you feel, and she is a baby, so she has literally zero investment in whether or not a person likes it or doesn’t. She is just making it to make it. For some reason, she is making it.

My shapes are also on this cardboard.

The next thing I started loving about it was that the cardboard was big enough that I could color with her on it, and that she will color on top of whatever thing I color, which makes me feel like we are having a specific type of conversation I only have with people who also like to make art. I’m aware that this particular piece of cardboard is an art project that will never exist again, so sometimes when I work on it with her I quietly but openly weep. She definitely does not notice, because she is just So. Into. Coloring. This. Cardboard. Why do humans feel attracted to making marks? I love this about us. I love so few things about us, so it’s nice to have one thing.

(A shoutout to newsletter readers Carol and Rachel, who are behind our having the Stablio Woody 3-in-1 pencils, which are what we are using on the cardboard. We are officially obessed with them.)

Maybe Now Is The Time?

This would be a particularly meaningful moment for you to subscribe to this newsletter. I have finally put 27 packages in the mail for the people who have subscribed to the “Get Mail” tier (thank you for your patience, those people), and you can be among them next month! You needn’t by the exorbitant $250/year price; you can change that dollar amount to anything over $50 and enjoy the benefits (but do keep in mind that I will be printing and shipping you ten things per year, which keeps getting more expensive, I’m afraid). Are there two brand new stickers in that pile? Yes. Is there a SECRET LETTER in that pile? Yes. If you’re able to support financially without receiving mail, that’s even better! And so let’s have a little sale, shall we? 20% off all subscriptions for the whole month of July. (But you have to click that very particular link.) If you want to subscribe without getting anything on sale, well, that’s BIZARRE. But here’s the link for that! Know that even subscribing for free (that link will take you there) makes a big difference to me. When I’m trying to do things like publish Bigger Things, I have to tell editors, “Hey! I have This Number of Subscribers to my newsletter!” So just by allowing me to send you a little missive every week, you help me do things that it is very much my dream to do. In this way, it helps a lot when you forward emails that mean something to you to people who mean something to you. So thank you for doing that for me. Thank you for being here at all. Thank you for being.

1. Middle schoolers are an interesting, kind of heartbreaking age to teach cartooning to, because they are in the midst of unlearning how to draw. I mean, they are learning that drawing is a thing you can be “bad at,” and that’s probably a phase you have to go through; honestly, many of us get stuck there. So they’ll make the most amazing horse, or cat, or house on fire, or girl trapped under a lobster [?!?!], and it will get scribbled out, and nobly tossed into the trash, no matter how much I protest. I might say, “Would it be OK if I kept that and took it home, just for me?” And they will say, “Oh my god, NO, absolutely not, it is HORRIBLE.” This breaks my heart. I do make them read essays about this phase; about how we “forget” that we all know how to draw, but it has not seemed to have stuck yet.