2 women,
1 friendship,
2 letters per week


An exploration of writing, conversation, collaboration, and curation.

Week 202: Hateful Laundry & Crushing Discontent

ON A CLASSIC LETTER, THE EXPECTATION OF CALM, AND PANTS FOR THE DAY OF YOUR DEATH

Sunday October 5 and Wednesday October 8 2025

Dear Sarah,

I’ve been having a quiet if also eventful day today. I am mulling over that phrase and I think it is true: the day can be both quiet and eventful. I will tell you more when next we speak. I am in the mood to come to the page today and write you a Classic Letter ™, in which I simply correspond with you. I am going to re-read your last letter but my letter might not be so aggressively responsive as I feel it was last time. 

As each day’s evening approaches, I like to acknowledge that what the day has included thus far is simply enough. Every day does not have to be about solving every single problem, and could never be. We get more than one day to live this life. It’s nice to just settle into an evening and to say to myself, “That’s enough substance for this day.” Sometimes additional bits of substance, i.e. thoughts, sneak in after I’ve already drawn the line, but those are bonus bits. I am relaxing and writing to you. 

My throat is a little sore today but in a localized way, which makes me wonder if an environmental allergen is irritating me. I could be sick but I don’t feel sick otherwise. I shall report back tomorrow. 

— 

Now it’s Wednesday and it’s been an odd few days that have somehow also been both eventful and uneventful. What marks something as an event? The sore throat I mentioned above and in my formal consultations with Dr. P seems to have been a mango allergy. I ate a mango Saturday and Sunday (one-third of one mango Saturday, two-thirds of the same mango Sunday), and I don’t think it was perfectly ripe, and I also may not have peeled it as well as I should have, or perhaps I interacted with the peel too much. It seems like some of what causes an allergic reaction to mango is in the peel. After a swollen-throat Monday and a visit to see a nurse, I felt increasingly better on Tuesday, and today I am feeling regular. I did some salt-water gargles on Monday and Tuesday, recommended by the nurse. Medical professionals are out there prescribing the basics!

I am feeling a little gloomy today. I think it’s a combination of low-level anxiety that I should slip back into the regular working world sooner rather than later, alongside a recognition that writing projects are harder and take longer than I want them to take. I had told myself I’d give myself this fall to focus on writing — this is financially available to me at this time — and still I feel the urge to find a job, to turn away from the hard work of patience and quiet and writing and thinking. It would be giving up too soon (far too soon! I am impatient) to turn away from the writing right now, and yet it pulls at me, the idea of any old job, whatever anyone might ask of me. It’s tiring to have someone tell me what to do, and it is differently tiring to have no one tell me what to do. I remind myself that if jobs are there now, they will be there in a few months (maybe?), etcetera. Nothing is fixed; to have a job now does not guarantee future permanence. I continue to feel grumpy that we only receive health insurance in this country if we can pay for it or if we commit ourselves to a work environment that offers it. That’s not the kind of ethos I want to live under.

Your letter last week tapped into topics and feelings that feel woven into the same big picture — the ways our lives can be, or are sometimes (often?) forced to be fixed into the form of data and-or labor units and consumed by capitalism. We’ve been forced to think of everything as property as a default mode, because if we don’t think that way ourselves someone else will be thinking that way, getting one up on us, taking from us. The words that kept coming to mind as I read your letter were good faith, and the lack thereof — it feels rare that businesses, organizations, and sometimes even individuals are operating in good faith these days, with a sense of shared values and shared humanity at the core of their (our) decision-making. I’m feeling like a broken record lately but it is depressing to think about being born into the world only to be funneled into the capitalist machine, as if the actual purpose of being born a human is to make money, accumulate objects, commit one’s time to someone else’s money-making endeavor, pay for the maintenance of one’s body in old age after giving one’s full life away, and then to die. This is how we are expected to utilize our evolved human consciousnesses! And we see so clearly how this country also does not care for or about people who slip through the cracks of the machine in various ways; there is pressure in the knowledge that if we do not focus on money ourselves, nothing is there to catch us if we fall through or take on any kind of risk. 

I started two loads of laundry while I am working on this letter. I hate doing laundry — I think it is my least favorite of all the household maintenance tasks — but at least doing it means that I am accomplishing something tangible and necessary in my life. No one is going to appear and do my laundry for me. This occasionally comes as a surprise; occasionally it feels sad that no one will do my laundry, and occasionally it feels refreshing that only I am responsible for the tasks inside my home, and I am welcome to leave them undone. Once I do laundry, anyway, I am blessedly free of the need to do it again for seven to ten days. Today I put on socks to wear around my apartment for the first time this season; yesterday I pulled on a sweatshirt; the seasons are shifting, even here. Update: one of the washers stopped working with my clothes in it, so I had to switch them over into the other washer (there are two in my building) half-soaked, and now the laundry will take longer, though it would still appear I will be able to complete this task. Update #2: somehow the washing machine was not actually broken because now the building manager is washing a load of laundry in it. I do not have The Touch with the washer today. However, she did give me back the quarters I lost in the machine to my earlier failed effort, so not much is lost; everything took about 45 minutes longer but I am here and working on my letter so that time isn’t a loss. No time is a loss and I am not in a hurry! Update #3: the hateful laundry is done. But not folded

I started a wheel-throwing pottery class this week with a friend, a four-week class that also offers unlimited studio access for practice time in between classes. I went to the studio yesterday afternoon to try my hand again at slapping my block of clay into a ball, centering it on the wheel, forming it into something like a vessel. I made one slightly lopsided “bowl” and something else that is evidence of a failure or a learning in my process, something that might culminate in a vessel but is technically funky because I made the bottom walls of the vessel too thin too soon and then the heavier top part folded over on itself, sort of like how a sleeve might look if you pushed it up to your elbow. It is visually a little bit interesting and I’ll be curious to see if it can make it through the firing process or if it will break or explode. Or if my teacher will see it and tell me it’s better not to fire it because it will break or explode. I think throwing pottery on the wheel is interesting but I think more than that, I enjoy spending time in a studio environment. I worked in the open air at the student wheel-throwing area out back, while inside others spent time around tables working on hand-built projects. There were shelves of ceramics drying, pieces in various states of progress toward finished, some glazed, some to be glazed. There were big stainless steel sinks for cleaning up. The studio has big front windows that look out onto Sunset Boulevard, turning the studio into a kind of jewelbox of people and practice and materials and objects to be observed by the outside world. Mostly I’d just like to hang out in the studio and read a book or work on my writing, but that’s not quite what they’re after. The studio environment feels like home to me, with its supplies and its order and its projects in process. My own home is a studio apartment in name but also has a studio feel, with my books stacked all around and pages of writing here and there on my various surfaces. But the lighting leaves me wanting! I’d like to live in the daylit pottery studio on Sunset (minus the clay dust)

It can be hard to spend time quietly with oneself. Sometimes, most of the time really, I feel great about it. Other times I feel gloomy! It might be hormonal. I need a dash of outside air and outside voices. Maybe this afternoon I will go to a nearby-ish coffee shop that is also a plant greenhouse. I just like to be in different places. New places help slough the gloom away. 

I have been wearing some stupid old loose but comfortable pants while I do laundry and a question just popped into my head: What pants would you want to be wearing on your last day on earth? To which I asked the follow-up question, Am I asking / being asked which pants I would want to wear throughout my whole last day on earth, or am I asking / being asked which pants I want to be found (?) dead in? I’m not sure any of my pants are special enough to be found in on the day of my death (though it absolutely does not matter, because if it ever mattered at all, it will instantly stop mattering as soon as I am dead), but I have a few pairs I’d be comfortable wearing on my last day. The questions are now yours to contemplate. 

Thanks for your patience with my timing around this letter! Looking forward to reading your words soon!

Much love, 

Eva


Wednesday, October 1, 2025, Thursday, October 2, 2025, Monday, October 6 2025

Dear Eva, 

I am thinking this morning about a quote I wrote down this summer from the novel, Martyr!. It reads, "Underneath being startled is the expectation of calm. I mean, a person gasps because the ease they were expecting was interrupted.” 

On Friday afternoon last week, I gasped when I read an emergency email from the Des Moines Public Schools. Our very well-known, quite beloved superintendent had reportedly been detained by ICE that morning. There was no further information available at that time. No one even knew where he was. Per district protocols, they designated an interim superintendent to take the helm in his absence. 

Are we wrong to expect calm? There are two ways to interpret that question. One is whether it is objectively wrong, as in the chances of disruption are high enough that an overall sense of security is false. The other is whether it is morally wrong, whether constant vigilance is righteous and we were never entitled to ease in the first place. After all, it is only the privileged among us who ever felt it.

Using masks and unmarked cars to chase people down, issuing hasty press releases about the capture of “criminal aliens” endangering our communities – the federal government is actively seeking to ensure we no longer expect ease or calm. They want us to be fearful, both of so-called dangerous people living among us and of the government.

The days that followed the initial news have been a blur of screaming op-eds, protests, school walk-outs, daily emergency school board meetings, and an endless cycle of regularly changing facts and circumstances. Things we thought we knew, we did not. And we still know very little.  

I feel change brewing inside me. I do not yet know exactly what form it will take, but I can recognize the process at work. I used to think this unsettled feeling, this crushing discontent, was a sign that something was wrong. I have learned it is my body’s way of holding me accountable to my own values and priorities. When I feel off-kilter in this way, I know it is a smoke signal – something is off with the way I am using my meager time alive. 

In a timely coincidence, my narrative nonfiction class begins next week. Early this week, I realized I had not heard anything about the class since I first signed up. I began to worry that it wasn’t going to happen, perhaps attendance was too low and they would cancel. (My worst case scenario generator went into full effect!) It made me realize how much I am using this structure as an anchor, even before it begins. I am ready to pour myself into this class and emerge with an artifact that represents that outpour in some concrete way. Perhaps it will help me determine how to answer my body’s smoke signal. Perhaps it will just be an outlet for grappling with it, which would be more than enough. 

It is now Monday, and I am pleased to confirm that the class is going to begin this afternoon as scheduled! I heard from the instructor late last week, and I now have a large stack of library books on my desk based on the syllabus she gave us. I feel almost comically excited and nervous. It is a tiny class, only a dozen spots and apparently not even full. We will spend 90 minutes together each week on Zoom. I am not sure whether I am more anxious about my own participation or about whether the class will meet my hopes and expectations. It is surely both. In terms of my own nerves, this feels like it fits neatly into the category we discussed recently, where a familiar worry is almost a relief to feel. It would be unsettling not to have some imposter syndrome in a moment like this! 

Speaking of butterflies, yesterday I went to an event at a local church celebrating banned books week. It was a panel with a mix of current and former elected officials, the ACLU of Iowa, and another nonprofit. I had no role to play, except to show up and make small talk with friendly strangers at the walk-through lunch before it began. That lean role was enough to provoke butterflies! Sheesh, I apparently need to get into the community more than I do. I am happy to report that I left feeling nourished, not in belly but in spirit. No one really had answers, but it is a comfort to be surrounded by people earnestly grappling with the same terrifying trends, looking for ways to support.  

I think this is what I mean when I say that change is brewing in me. I want to live differently, more connected to the human beings in the place where I live. This feels urgent now that so much of what is important to me is under attack. Being physically here but emotionally there feels inadequate now, maybe it always was. 

I must say goodbye for now so I can turn my attention to the work that pays me! I hope you have had a wonderful weekend, and I look forward to reading your words whenever they come my way. 

Sending all of my love,

Sarah

Week 201: Hollow & In It