ON FLYING PAST THAT HORIZON, META MISCALCULATIONS, AND WANTING TO FLAP IN THE WIND
Saturday June 28 and Sunday June 29 2025
Dear Sarah,
I started reading the essay you shared about prototyping. I love the quote you shared, and prototyping is so satisfying. To have a place in the process — and to have a name for the place in the process — where the thing is just beginning to take shape. Making something from nothing. Maybe it will be wrong or ugly — only wrong in that it is not the thing yet — wrong is the wrong word —. An idea, a cartoon; I am thinking of an animation, a character being stretched out from a round ball of color, like putty, long and tall or squished fat and wide, a potential end shape moving first through every possible shape. Or maybe something like a sketch — a police sketch? — where a person might supply characteristics and an artist would put together an illustration: is this pencil drawing the human who you saw?
Reading your words and the design researcher’s words made me recall my own experience of design school, and something I’ve been thinking about lately, which is how all my experiences of work, school, and hobbies have initially seemed to be born of a need or desire like earning income to support myself, or building a skill in which I am interested — but as time passes I am finding that for me, all these things are also about people. These structures are, for me, just forms of hanging out. Yes, the structures build on top of other needs; it’s not pure recreational hanging out; we’re getting something done, individually and-or collectively. I loved school, getting together in classrooms every day, seeing people in a predictable way. I loved orchestra and our concerts and our rehearsals where we all came bearing our instruments and showed each other how we had practiced (or not). College and our walks across campus, back and forth with all the other students at the university, all of us there together even though we didn’t all know each other, the collective feeling that we were there with some commonly held values. College and our dorms, the places we lived as we tried out being adults, lived in apartments with each other, down the halls from each other. Working at the indie movie theater with friends, melting butter and bagging popcorn and catching up behind the counter. Finding jobs in the arts and making friends who also cared about art. Taking woodworking classes and joining the board of the woodshop in Minneapolis and making a nonprofit with friends. Now, getting into clown, making new friends and playing with a whole new group of people.
I realized recently that moving here to LA and getting involved with the clown community is one of the first times I’ve made friends through a group of people who aren’t in some way connected to work, to my professional skills, to my choices about how to plug into capitalism. I don’t need to talk about work with these folks, although occasionally it comes up, because we wonder who people are and what they do when they are not in the spaces where we typically see them. But while I worked in the arts in the Bay Area I felt like it meant something to be working at a certain kind of organization, and it meant something to be working at all, to be on some kind of career trajectory. But I just don’t care about professional work in the way I used to.
If I care now it is because I care about the fact that I am required to support myself financially, and I need to figure out how; I care about artists and arts and culture simply existing, and we have made the arts in our country into something that must be supported by the nonprofit sector, by rich individuals and foundations built on wealth hoarded over the years, often from businesses that somehow tapped the earth’s shared resources for personal and familial gain.
I care about seeing the people I’ve found meaningful connections with, and I care about supporting them or collaborating with them. I find lately that I can only get work done if I feel that I am doing it with and for someone who I trust and whose perspective I value. I no longer have any internal drive to get work done, to work hard as if working hard is a value all on its own. I have a lingering desire to do generally good work; I know how to put words together into good sentences, I know how to articulate a strategy, I know how to arrange visual images and other content into a compelling storytelling package for a group or an organization or a project. But if I don’t have a meaningful connection to the people I do this work with, I’m not able to sustain an interest in continuing. A friend suggested to me that perhaps part of this is because I work remotely, that perhaps it would be easier or better if I got a job again in an office, where the people I worked with would be right there with me. But I feel like I have flown past that horizon. To get a job in an office would be to step back into the pretense that I think work matters for other reasons than the hang out. To get a job in an office would also be to step back into the pretense that I think any single group or organization deserves to commandeer substantial amounts of my time every day for someone else’s idea of what we should be doing while we are alive on this earth, things that often point back to some form of capitalism. Even in the nonprofit world where the greatest mission and vision can be one of service and creativity and culture, the daily requirements of maintaining the structures that have been built in service to the work require so much institutional busywork and management of the functioning of the organization itself that I am simply not interested anymore. I cannot plug in again! I may be forced to go back on my words here over the next few years, but I am going to try hard to make something else of myself, and also to figure out how to sustain myself financially.
Between the time I wrote this letter and am now reading it over, I have considered the possibility of taking accounting classes at the local city college and transitioning into a different area of work, one that doesn’t demand my words-brain, and one where I could continue working freelance or fractionally. Stay tuned!
We made it through our deadlines! I miss you too! Let’s continue our leisurely phone conversations soon, please! As always, I feel like I had more I wanted to write here, but I also feel like it’s time to let this one fly to you. So — I look forward to reading your words soon!
Much love,
Eva
P.S.: As I re-read and thought about my words here about service, I looked back in our letters for what I thought I had written about a motto I saw in Oakland, Service Above Self, and I found it in April of last year, and then your response the following week, in which I see I was also writing about pretirement, and in fact last week I gave our letter the pretirement / pre-tirement co-title without realizing we’d already used it another time (obviously, the topic continues to be on my mind!). (Am I a broken record about all these topics? Work just won’t die!) Forgive the repetitive oopsie!
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Dear Eva,
It is just after 9 pm on Sunday evening. I just sat down to create a new doc and start this letter. I saw your letter in my inbox, and I had a funny emotion in response – envy!
Envy: A feeling of discontent and resentment aroused by and in conjunction with desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
I desire to have finished my letter.
I desire to have had the kind of week where Sunday evening at 9 pm would not be my first real chance at quiet reflection.
You seem to have managed both of those feats, so I feel the slightest bit of discontent (not resentment!) in comparison.
I had hoped that by now, I would have turned the corner and gone full summer. I have not.
I met the deadline that I wrote about last week. Like most deadlines, it brought with it a crescendo of energy that defused abruptly. There was no real wave of relief that came with it, instead just a jarring realization that it was just a regular old Wednesday evening for pretty much every other human. The world was not going to pause to slow clap for me. If anything, the world seemed ready to remind me of the growing stack of obligations I had been neglecting and could now turn to. Then, weekend plans changed. And then those newly minted plans changed as other unexpected events reminded me/us that we never really know what a day will bring.
The fact that tomorrow is Monday makes me feel a little heart racey. I feel an urge to vanish. Poof, suddenly the lists of todos and unanswered emails and calendered calls would be obsolete! I am seeking a kind of purge, a clearing of the deck.
I only want to ghost the working world. I want to do the opposite in my home world. There, I want to be fully present, probably in a way that I really haven’t for more time than I would like to acknowledge. I want to doodle with S. I want to go on a bike ride with J like I did today, but this time I want to say yes when he asks if we can stop at a brewery for a root beer. I want to make their school year scrapbooks. I want to hand write in my notebook a whole bunch of ideas that I will never be able to fit into next week’s letter. I want to lay in a hammock and read a book. I want to memorize a poem and recite it to Marlowe. I want to catch and release fireflies with S after dusk. I want to stay up and watch a movie cuddling with B on the couch on a school night, fingers greasy and salty from popcorn.
Last week you wrote about miscalculation. Yes! This.
I, too, miscalculated. Again and again.
There are the discrete, specific miscalculations, the kinds that involve making too many promises in ways that will not add up given the number of hours in the days and weeks. I have done that. And there is also a broader kind of miscalculation that is less about math and more about who I want to be in different facets of my life and whether those align. I think I have done one of those more meta miscalculations lately, too.
A downside to having such clarity about what matters to me is that disequilibrium when it comes to those priorities puts me into a kind of visceral distress that might look like an overreaction to some. It may even objectively be an overreaction, however that might be judged. But I know I am going to die. (My Senator reminded me of that recently, just in case I had forgotten.) And the fact that I am mortal means I cannot fuck around and find out on this. Your pretirement shows that you know exactly what I mean by this. The time is now. I cannot exactly pretire like you, but I can do things differently.
Good god, I love the line in your letter, that you can feel your brain flapping in the wind. I want to feel my brain flapping! It’s been too constricted, too vigilantly on task, too agitated to flap.
It is time for me to let go. Very curious how this mood will play out when Monday rolls around! Here’s hoping I can find my way to flapping without too much collateral damage!
Looking forward to reading your words!
Much love,
S.