everything can change in an instant, happy endings and trying to hold on loosely

a little life lesson and what I told a bff about some books that's maybe too honest

Saturday morning I got up and went to Inferno Yoga Sculpt, which combines things that maybe should not be combined at 65 mph and at the end of which our instructor (a guest) told us her nickname in her home studio was “Mere-death”, and then, sweaty and questioning my life choices but generally just wandering along having a day, I went to the grocery store while trading texts with a friend about a planned walk and noticing some texts between my husband and one of our kids about his recent strep that seemed to suggest he’d gone back to urgent care.

While I wandered the aisles, trying to get some things that could actually become dinner and not just the fruit I wanted for breakfast, those messages started to take a turn. Urgent care sent him to the ED, the word tetanus was tossed around, a CT scan was ordered. At first, I kept planning my walk, then those messages sunk in.

Turns out I can shower, dry my hair (it’s 20 degrees, not optional) and pack for a trip of indeterminate length, location and emotional experience in 1.5 hours while in a state of low grade panic, which I think is pretty impressive. I had to leave before we got any medical results or I wouldn’t have been able to get there, so I did, while a beloved local family member dropped everything and hopped in a cab to back the kid up during his hours at the hospital where said kid was born (and where they still had our address from 22 years ago on file).

This is a story with (so far) a happy ending, and I am already back home from what ended up being a nice visit with a kid hopped up on fluids and stronger antibiotics and a cousin I hadn’t seen since Thanksgiving. It was all good.

But that period of packing and panicking was intense. I was reminded—as everyone in LA has been reminded and as we are all reminded from time to time, and by reminded I mean whacked over the head with a 2x4—that life can turn on a dime, that most day-to-day problems are pretty good problems and that our plans are really optimistic mental investments in a future over which we have little or no control.

This begs for some sarcasm about how much I hate that. Except I don’t, not really. For one thing, it would be like hating the cold, or the wind, or my inability to fly. But even more, hating that uncertainty and lack of control—or rather, being able to change it so that I am in charge—would almost certainly leave me with a sad shell of a life in which everything plods along quietly and easily and I never feel anything much and no one ever hands me a pair of five pound weights and then issues barked orders combining yoga poses I only vaguely recognize with weightlifting terms that are just slightly better.

Listen, if my kid were really sick, or I’d just lost my house to the flames, or any of the other terrible possibilities (probabilities, inevitabilities) had landed in my lap of COURSE I would be struggling to feel some fucking gratitude for the fact that I’d loved and lost and it was better than never loving at all and all that. It’s only the fact that I got a happy ending (this time, for now, knock on wood) that allows me to step back and try to remember to savor this, the big cluttered house with the Christmas tree that didn’t get taken down this weekend and the other kids who need things and the lovely lovely plans for the week that I didn’t end up having to cancel.

And then—this is the reason I gave this post the title I did—I’m also trying to draw some kind of line between being more aware that all my plans at any time are subject to change without notice and being ridiculously, overwhelmingly worried about exactly that. My phone could ring right now and change everything and it is always thus and there is no point in not being okay with that. And yet—imagining those phone calls does nothing. I’ve been reading assorted philosophies lately, and one thing I’ve taken issue with is the Stoic admonition to practice losing people and things you love, so that it will hurt less when it inevitably happens.

This is ridiculous. Practicing grief and misery won’t make you better at it, it will only make you experience more of it, just as pretending you aren’t hoping for for something won’t make it hurt less if it doesn’t happen. We don’t need to pretend not to feel the things. The better strategy is to try to remember that we WANT to feel the things. Feeling things, even bad things, is the point and yes I know that’s easy for me to say in this moment, so maybe that is my take on the Stoic practice. I want to feel things, I say to myself. I want to be alive, I want my life to be messy, I want it all to happen and to be a part of it.

Because what else is there? Boring yoga where the weight doesn’t slide out of your hands and land on your foot, that’s what. Life permitting, I guess I’ll go back to Inferno Crazed High Speed Probably a Bad Idea Death Yoga next Saturday.

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BOOKS!

First off, here’s what I packed when I thought I might be reading in a hospital waiting room: Beg Borrow or Steal, Sarah Adams; Weyward, Emilia Hart and The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality by Hanno Sauer translated by Jo Heinrich. I came back just a chapter or 2 into the first and last of those, I’m sure you’ll hear about them at some point.

Ok, so I’m usually pretty judicious about what I say about books around here. Honest but not rushing to the negative, and I tell you that. It’s hard to write a book. I’m mostly just here to tell you what I love and sometimes what’s not for me.

But a friend asked me for some thoughts yesterday and I ended up replying with a gut take on recent reading (while on the way home from the above adventure). You’re here bc you want to know what I thought about what I read, so here you go:

For context, she’d just sent me this list of BEACH READS from Australia, where it is of course summer.

Most of that is a very Aus centric list. I’ve heard of all of the ones in the last category. I really disliked Long Island Compromise. Rob [my husband] finished it, I did not. We agreed it’s kind of an unnecessarily meanly cynical take on the story. I have it if you want it. I don’t like Sally Rooney, I find it pretentious but a LOT of people love. I’ve heard of Butter and that one interests me! I just read and liked Like Mother Like Mother and loved Margo’s Got Money Troubles. I already sent that one to [her husband who I often share books with], I think you would prefer the other one… or maybe Rental House by Weike Wang (which I already gave away but really liked) —of the three I think that one for you but MAYBE Long Island Compromise? It’s long tho.

So this is the way I talk about books to people in my real life. More detail—I called Rooney pretentious bc it irritates me that she doesn’t use quotation marks, tbh. This is probably a ridiculous reason not to read someone’s books but it’s my hill and I will die on it. I’ll read in Spanish without them because the Spanish don’t use them but English speakers do, and the experience of reading something where someone refuses to use standard punctuation messes with my in-head reading voice too much (It makes Spanish fiction that much harder, too, they italicize and I’m constantly having to remind myself that that’s dialogue, not internal dialogue. Non-fiction is easier for that reason.) I also have a thing about close 3rd person POV in present tense, which will be the subject of a future missive, welcome to the English class you did not know you signed up for.

And I love Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s profiles, when she writes them, so much in part because she is so brutal and blunt and unfiltered, but then when that translates to fictional characters… for 464 pages (Long Island Compromise)… I just couldn’t get past the first sex scene. When I said as much to my husband when he was half way through the book he didn’t even remember it, so it might have been an overreaction, but I was reading for fun not work and when that’s the case I DNF with abandon.

So now you know.

Ok, come on, what have you DNF’d that lots of people loved recently? Oh and Last week’s poll result: 72% of us reach for our stupid phones first and only 2% of us aren’t mad about it.

In closing:

1. don’t poke people who don’t reply to your email in 2-3 days, especially now. things happen

2. strawberries that are so big you need a cutting board probably won’t taste like strawberries

3. 50 years from now, the things we will be most shocked that we let happen are single use plastics and running out of water bc we want to eat more nuts and avocados than the planet can produce but i still eat nuts and avocados