Your Valuable Hours
How many of them do you spend playing phone games? Whatever your answer, I think that's fine.
A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Dear Friend,
Taking inventory of how you spend your hours, auditing and editing, etc., is a lifelong task, at least for most of us. You get a new job with a longer commute, and you have to let go of some of the hours you set aside for gardening. A new relationship blossoms and you start saying no to more group hangs with your friends. You notice you feel unsatisfied or unhappy, and you try to decide what you can add (an hour of exercise?) or subtract (eleven hours of “Grey’s Anatomy”?) to feel better.
Having a baby magnifies this evaluation, because the baby is all day every day, every week, every month, every year, for the rest of your life. (At some point it stops being “the baby” and starts being “my 28-year-old daughter who won’t leave the house,” but you get it.) I have let go of drawing cartoons as consistently, leaving especially thoughtful notes on graded assignments, and reading basically altogether.
But I have not let go of playing “Through The Ages.”
I stopped playing “Candy Crush” seven or eight months ago, which was a big accomplishment, because I was incredibly addicted to it. I liked how it soothed me, and kept me from eating entire boxes of Oreos, and how I could play it while watching TV or listening to a podcast and feel like I was multitasking. But when my daughter was born, it was the first thing to go. There simply wasn’t time for it, and there was no real benefit I could discern. I liked to tell myself that it helped me to unwind. (“Candy Crush” knows that its players believe that it helps them to unwind. When you open the game, the load screen says “time to unwind,” trigging the part of your brain that is like, “This is healthy for me” and turning the reward circuit on overdrive.) But I knew in the depths of my brain that ultimately this “healthy unwinding” story wasn’t true, and it was much more relaxing to put on lotion or look out the window or paint a blob than it was to play “Candy Crush” and watch TV.
“Through The Ages,” however, is a different story.
For the unfamiliar (which is probably most of you, since most of you are women who aren’t into competitive colonial games with war elements in them), “Through The Ages” is an app-based version of a popular engine-building board game called “Civilization.” The object of the game is to have the most Culture Points by the end of the fourth age, which is also the shortest. You build a civilization that balances technology (Alchemy! Computers!), physical resources (Iron! Oil!), military strength (Cavalry! Tactics!), agriculture (Farms! Selective Breeding!), and a slew of cultural features (Arenas! Wonders! Journalism! Colonies! Leaders!), and try to make it objectively better than the other players’ civilizations. Like “Settlers of Catan” and “Dominion” and other games that found popularity alongside “Civilization,” this game is problematic and makes light of, or entirely erases, a lot of terrible things about humanity.
And yet, it remains something I make time for every day, and it is never on the list of things I am willing to cut back on. This is because “Through The Ages” is an online game. My sister Alexis introduced it to me at the start of the pandemic, and I got my husband and my boyfriend on board pretty quickly. As the pandemic stretches into its second summer, I am reflecting back on easily the most difficult year of my life. (TBH, 2020 was pretty sweet for me; but 2021 and into 2022 have been really hard, for pandemic- and non-pandemic-related reasons.) Alexis and I had to cancel trips to see each other; we got in arguments with each other; we had long stretches of sisterly tension. But nevertheless, basically every day — including days each of us respectively gave birth to our daughters — we played "Through The Ages” with each other. Every time I get a message that it’s my turn in a game with her, it’s like she is saying, “Hey. I’m alive. I’m OK. I love you.”
One of the things that’s most difficult about living far away from the people you love is that you want to know they’re surviving, without needing to make a whole big thing of it. Like when you look to see if someone’s car has moved, because that would mean they’d left the house. Or, in modern terms, when you check someone’s Instagram to see if there’s any activity, because that would mean they are at least partially functional. It’s so uncomplicated to play a turn in “Through The Ages.” The math of the game is fairly easy. And yeah, I’m trying to win (I like winning!), but that doesn’t really feel like what it’s about.
My husband and I play “Through The Ages,” too. It’s felt like sort of a godsend since T was born, because we used to play a lot of board games in real life, but that’s suddenly a lot more difficult, logistically. Being able to lie next to each other silently while she sleeps between us, interacting and having fun while also being totally quiet makes me feel connected to him. It’s nice to not always be having a conversation with someone; it’s nice to say, “I want to give my time to you, but I don’t want to do any emotional labor right now.” And this game has given that to me.
In the past year, we added “Wingspan” to the repertoire, which is NOT a problematic game, and is BEAUTIFUL on the phone. (The birds MOVE!) It is, however, a little harder to drop into and out of; I think the logic of it is a little more difficult. On the OTHER hand, it feels less competitive than “Through The Ages” (you can play “Wingspan” alone, without an opponent), so it’s easier (pride-wise) for me to play with my boyfriend Bob, who is so much better than me at winning games.
And then in the past WEEK, my mom started sending her Wordle score to a group chat with my sister and me. I am the worst of the three of us at Wordle, but I love seeing Mom’s little stack of yellow-and-green squares. I love knowing Mom is OK enough to do the Wordle and tell her daughters about it. It is something I have missed, not living in the same house with her. Just feeling her energy; her aliveness; her being.
Do you have ways of staying in touch with the people you love who are far away, that are easy, like being in the same kitchen making different breakfasts in real life? I’d love to know about them. It’s so hard to love so many people (from so many places!), when there is finite time and access to travel. But the last two and a half years, I think (?!), have made us creative in how we keep in touch.
And if you’re using Candy Crush to unwind, GOOD ON YOU. What a harmless, easy way to decompress from the rhetorical trash-compactor of the world. I’m proud of you. You’re doing a good job.
Love,
Sophie
Add this to your to-do list.
Rock back and forth. You could do this on a rocking chair, while lying in bed, on the ground holding your knees… just give yourself a nice little rock. Babies get tons of them. Why shouldn’t you?
A drawing.
In honor of Monty, who died two weeks ago of a fungal infection (😔), here are a few plover watercolors.
Speaking of watercolors of birds.
I’m offering two new features for the lowest paid tier of this newsletter.
Video drawing tutorials, using a variety of supplies, mostly of birds. The first one is of a wren, and it truly took four minutes to watercolor, and so shall it take you. Next, I think I’m going to use crayon and we’ll do a shore bird.
Audio newsletters! If you’d rather hear my voice read this newsletter to you while you scrub your bathroom or walk in the sun, great news! I am offering that now! But (gasp) it is behind a paywall.
And first packages of prints and stickers went out to the highest-tier subscribers recently! That’s the founding member subscription, and you can pay anything between $51 and $250 to get IN PERSON MAIL from me! (You can edit the cost when you select that option.)
Have I convinced you? Great! Subscribe to a higher tier here.
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about new parenthood. Skip it if you don’t want to read about new parenthood.)
T has a flat head. It’s flat on one side, which is the kind of flat you especially don’t want a baby’s head to be. She got her flat head from lying on her back and turning her head to one side too much in the first six months of her life, which no one really warned me about. They warned me about letting her sleep in my bed with me, and about letting her sleep on her belly, because those things could, apparently, cause her to die. But here was another thing to worry about, and I neglected to worry about it. This is just another thing on a long list of things that make me feel like a bad mom. The pediatrician wrote her a referral to go see a person who specializes in flat heads, and that person would probably like for T to get a helmet that will help her skull round itself out; but the helmet (I’ve read) is going to cost $2,000, and we just got on the insurance that doesn’t cover superfluous things like helmets that will correct your child’s flat head in the narrow two-month window before her skull hardens like that. And I get that this is just the kind of thing you put savings away for when you have a baby — in case there is a flat-head emergency and you need a $2,000 helmet. But I have not kept a very robust savings account (another way in which I am a bad mom), and so I am the monster going into the specialist saying, “Is there any other way to deal with this? I mean, is a flat head SUCH a big deal, anyway?” I can just see T in 20 years, flat-headed and resentful that her mother couldn’t get it together enough to (1) buy her a special helmet; or (2) not make her head flat in the first place. Does anyone out there know anyone else who has gone through this flat head business? The internet is cruel and unforgiving in this category, and I feel quite lonely and sad about it all.
Extras.
The reason to plant heirloom tomatoes is that it is actually kind of easy to grow tomatoes (at least, this is true in Chicago). I had a lot of high quality seeds for many-a-plant this year, and the tomatoes all survived, while most of the other things didn’t. I don’t really like tomatoes as a food. I like salsa. But I think a pile of tomatoes from a summer garden is really pretty, so I am thrilled.
I really love this New York Times newsletter called “Read Like The Wind.” I have a crush on it. I’m not a huge books newsletter person, because I don’t have a lot of time for books. But I love this newsletter and feel giddy whenever it arrives.
I also really love Jami Attenberg’s Substack, and am considering participating in her “1,000 words of summer” project, which begins this week!
Ben Savage has the best Instagram, the end.
Thanks to Jen for this video of Fiona Apple observing slugs having sex.
There are a lot of snakes in my neighborhood, and I really love them. As a child, I used to catch snakes and befriend them. As an adult, that seems kind of mean (the snakes are just going about their business!), but I enjoy admiring them. I guess fear of snakes is something you are born with. I was not born with it.
There’s so much that is so great about spinach. One of the great things about it is that it doesn’t go bad very quickly. Even when it’s kind of slimy, it doesn’t TASTE bad. Thanks, spinach.
I really like having the notifications turned on from The Weather Channel app. It feels like getting a gentle nudge from a friend that a little rain is about to start. Just the amount of news I need, frankly.
All the hours I play games on my imac are the best hours of my day; will not quit. And sorry but your baby's head is perfect. OMG!