November 20, 2024
Gleanings
- I’m enamoured with the language of small repair and I think that there’s instruction embedded in it from the “how-to” and right-to-repair world in how to live a life. I think of all the tiny repairs to my household just in the last year. I think of the still lifes I’ve made and used scotch tape and sticky tack to hold them in place. I think of the ways things fall into disrepair, that language, too: things fray, give up the ghost, they buckle, collapse, blow, crack, are torn, lose surface tension, become weathered, they fold, sour, unravel. They might fall (a cake, a bridge, a gate). There are kinds of repair: alterations, mending, rebuilding, filling, patching, re-wiring, re-jigging. We overhaul, darn, stitch, refurbish, fix, freshen. We can repair, and repair again.
- Because your house is the home of a quiltmaker and woodcutter, there are warm quilts for the bed and a woodshed full of dry fir and cedar for the fire. You keep replenishing both.
- Window display is still very much advent calendars because we’ll be selling those until the end of the month at which point we’ll fashion all the leftovers into a giant advent paper man and ceremonially burn him with a mince pie inside as an offering to the festive god (Santa) in exchange for good trade throughout December.
- It’s all real—the depravity and the life-affirmation, the distrust and the ride-or-die-ness, the shallowness and the deepness. Don’t let the Internet and all its tentacles (headlines, polls, social media, streaming, algorithms etc.) pull you out of your real, beautiful life and make you feel homeless. You are home among your people and your dreams, no matter what the “state of the world.” And the only way I know to make the “state of the world” less heinous is to trust what deserves trust, to ground on solid, relational ground, to start from there and then move outward.
- It’s when two swimmers move in tandem, like a choreographed dance that I am most amazed. Stroke on stroke, breath on breath; two perfectly synced flip turns. I leave feeling a small bit awestruck by what the human body can do.
- No amount of moving to the country and ignoring the news is going to make any of this change, so it’s everyone’s responsibility to work towards the world we want.
- A short book gives me the chance to travel to another place, be inside the mind of another person, or to learn about something new, but all from the comfort of my couch.
- There are dozens of fucked up things happening globally right now and this issue is not the most pressing, I know—not even close. But if I see another ChatCPT prompt presented as art, news or media, I will probably snap.
- You know that thing, when people ask if you were an animal, which animal would you be? Well, after much strenuous, existential, and deep thought (aka not that much thought at all), I decided if I were an animal, I would be a penguin. An Emperor penguin, to be specific. You wanna know how I came to that conclusion?
- When she opened the door to the fridge repairman, she didn’t foresee all the doors on the other side.
- I eventually decided that I just wasn’t cut out to be a novelist and focused on writing non-fiction pieces, usually about music. But then during the early lockdown days of 2020 I found myself daydreaming all the time, telling myself stories that I ended up thinking I could turn into a romance novel. I’d been reading romance novels for years; I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to try to write one. It took being stuck at home with my two young kids in that stressful, uncertain situation for weeks on end for me to think, ‘What’s the opposite of this?” And the answer to that question turned out to be a romance story about young cute people living in New York. I ended up kind of desperately throwing myself into writing a book and sending out one chapter per week to a group of friends. That was the book that eventually got me my agent, but it didn’t get picked up by any publishers.
- In this world where mostly what I’ve been thinking and wondering and feeling lately is, pardon me, but “what the hell is going on?” again and again, I’m always so surprised when I remember … it’s always just the moments, isn’t it?
