ON A BOONDOGGLE DAY, RELAXING OUR TIGHT LITTLE GRIPS, AND LETTING THE PAINT DRY
Saturday July 12 – Monday July 21 2025
Dear Sarah!
Thanks for bearing with me for another flex-week schedule on our letters! This past week I was in Michigan visiting family and friends, and also doing some work around the edges, and also doing some writing around the edges for an essay class I am taking, and also navigating the west coast to east coast time zone shift, and my brain was gooey. I made it through and I am glad to be back in LA and back on the page writing to you!
I am taking an essay class, as I mentioned. I am trying to figure out what I think is going to be a longer work that is about performance, the body, the desire or pressure to be practiced and-or prepared for what lies ahead, and how there is joy to be had in being unprepared, or rather, going into situations unworried because we all bring our past body of knowledge to every situation we encounter. We are not going to do things perfectly and that is ok, and exactly as it should be; perhaps part of this writing will be about the origins of perfectionism, in myself and in the culture at large. Is perfectionism about competitiveness under capitalism? Is perfectionism about ways to exclude people, in all the ways people are excluded in this country? If this brief paragraph gives you any taste for what is going on with me in this essay writing class — basically I am, as always, trying to bite off a part of the larger project so that I can write it up, tighten it up, share it with a group. The essay draft I currently have going doesn’t even exactly get to these ideas yet; what’s on the page are words about running track, and playing cello, and learning to clown.
I’m also finding that after sharing a first draft of my essay with the writer-teacher of the class, I have no interest right now in looking at it and revising it further. I’ve reviewed her edits and suggestions and they make sense and sound good, I’m just not that interested. I don’t know if this means I need a longer cycle of time before I pick it up again and revise it, or if I am less interested at this moment in the things I’ve already put down on the page there. I think part of the dilemma is that I’ve pulled in some past writing and my mind isn’t in that specific place at the moment; or also just that my mind moves fast and something that was interesting to me even yesterday might be less interesting today. I think I need to have multiple projects or sections of a larger project going at any given time, so that I can move among them to keep myself interested. For better or worse, my interest is my chief interest! It feels to me like the beginning watercolor class I took, where I learned that it can be a good idea to have multiple paintings going at one time. Once you apply a layer of paint to a work, unless you specifically want your colors to run together, you need to let that layer of paint dry completely before you continue working. It is an interesting medium, and a useful metaphor. Instead of just waiting for one painting to dry, you get multiple paintings going in parallel, and move among them, adding to dried pieces while the damp ones dry out. In my essay draft, I was adding to some previously dried pieces, and maybe it now needs to dry out a bit more; I’m working on some other pieces and ideas in parallel.
In the draft of the essay I prepared and shared with the writing teacher last week, I found myself coming around to some words I’d written here to you in the letters, about sight reading. Then the teacher selected sections of each of our essays for us to read aloud and talk about, and she selected a piece from the sight-reading section. Then I had to confess to the group that I hadn’t actually written this very recently, but had pulled it from prior writing, and I briefly described the letter project — we in the class were talking about audience and how we figure out who we are writing to, and how the presence of an audience drives what we are writing or the impulse to write at all. I told the group that even in putting together my essay draft it helped me to know of a single person out there — you, Sarah! — to whom I could direct my words and get myself into a space where I could write more freely and with the kind of tone I think is “me.”
As I return from Michigan and resettle into my life and patterns and future patterns here in LA, I find myself thinking again about miscalculation. I had a specific moment or two while I was in Michigan where I thought, simply, Oops, there are too many things in this time period and I am not going to be able to do them all, because my brain is goo, and it cannot be forced to perform for me. So some things were left by the wayside: an extra exercise as part of the essay class went un-done, and some of my paid work went untouched, and other parts of my paid work moved a little more slowly than others might have hoped, and that is just the exact reality of how things are. I think we often assume that each one of us is the one that has to bend in those kinds of scenarios — if time is short, we will squeeze more into the day, we will stay up late and make it all happen — and my gooey brain alongside my broader shift in perspective lately told me that no, in this situation, I was not going to be the one to bend; the timelines and the situations outside of me were going to have to bend. Sometimes you simply cannot ask a gooey and exhausted brain to form sentences. It was like asking a dog to write something for me. It looked at me cheerfully, and wanted to show up for me and my needs, but it simply did not have the capacity I needed to get things done. I patted it on its soft head and told it to get comfortable on the bed and we’d figure it out later, either when the dog learned to write or when my brain had recovered enough to form sentences on its own again.
I wrote this in my notes almost a year ago, on August 24 2024:
Having secured an apartment — and having also made plans for much of September and October — I feel like a large boat making a change in direction — we are turning the boat around — it doesn't happen quickly — we have burned extra energy — we are not a model of efficiency at this time — and yet we are moving in the direction we want to be moving — and some sacrifices have been made — some losses have occurred — water splashing and shearing off the sides of the boat as we change direction — pressure of the water causing us to move slowly — flow of water we created with our momentum is now pushing against us as we turn, and turn, and turn — slow turn, coming right — but amid the splashing and the pressure and the water coming on at right angles to our new direction of movement — we are smiling into the sunshine — we are pleased to be heading in this direction now —.
I started this letter to you on an odd day, this past Saturday (it’s Thursday now) (and now it’s Monday, and I’m letting the days blend together) — I drove out to Venice, which I do not usually do, or have not done since I’ve lived in this city. It’s an hour away from where I live (and it’s still a part of Los Angeles). I did some out-of-the-ordinary activities; it was a little bit of a boondoggle day; I drank free soup out of a carry-out coffee cup. I thought again about miscalculation, the frame of calculation being the day level, perhaps, rather than the hourly level — had I made an oops choice for how I spent the whole day? And yet it was fun, and unusual for me, and I saw people and things I don’t usually see, and I was seen by someone else who I saw yesterday and who said they’d seen me at a distance walking in Venice because they recognized my shoes, a pair of brightly colored Keds. There was nothing wrong with the day; it simply felt fully different than my usual days. Good to have a day like that from time to time, like drawing every part of the day outside the lines of every other day.
I miss you and am excited to hear how you’re doing! I feel like a lot has transpired with you since we last wrote. Looking forward to reading your words soon!
Much love,
Eva
July 21, 2025, July 22, 2025
Dear Eva,
It has been intriguing to me how resistant I have been to beginning this particular letter to you. It has been as if I cannot access the looseness I need to find my way into my letter-writing brain. The door has been jammed shut, and it’s been a beast to lift it open the past couple of weeks! Thank you for your graceful patience with me as we continuously pushed out our self-imposed deadlines.
It has been eye-opening to experience our flowy, no-rules approach to the letter exchange this time around. As you wrote via text, “We are creating the pressure-free zone we want to live in!” Whoa. It is so simple and true, yet so mind-blowing. There is definitely a part of me that still thinks that doing things this loose and free means they will evaporate into the air. How profound to see we can be kind to ourselves, relax our tight little grips, and then still be there when the time comes when a letter finally pours out of us. A schedule provides a kind of certainty, but it also imposes obligation. Removing the schedule eliminates the certainty, but it brings freedom. Another layer of life experimentation in what we originally thought was just a little writing project.
Since our last letter exchange, I spent another couple of weeks curling further into a human stressball and then have been gradually unfurling during this work break. It has not been a quick fix! The early stage was catatonic. Lately, as things began firing again, it has felt like my brain is a shaken-up jar of glitter, sparkles flying everywhere. Even as recently as yesterday, I wasn’t sure I could muster a reasonably coherent letter, even as the glitter dumped out in hand-written heaps into my notebook.
It is disorienting to sit in the silent space of my house while the kids are at camp. Yesterday I found myself repeatedly reaching for my phone, desperate for a dose of distraction. The quiet was stirring things inside me, maybe even scaring me a little. I am trying not to look away from the emptiness, and I can feel the impulse to escape gradually dying down as the hours go by. I am sinking down into the stillness, settling into it like a small pig in good, soft mud.
–
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
That was all I was able to string together in letter form yesterday. In the afternoon, B and I went on a long bike ride in the thick heat. We stopped for a beer halfway through it and made dreamy plans for our 20th wedding anniversary in two years. (Morocco) My parents came over for a dinner of summer pasta made from the hilariously gigantic zucchinis from our garden. We watched a WNBA game, took a late evening stroll with Marlowe after a brief rainstorm ended, watched the final episode of Dying for Sex, and then we played with Pancake (S’s adorable hamster). Speaking of which, as Pancake played in his little hamster playpen (yes, it’s a thing), B peered into the hamster food bag and noticed….a mouse! A mouse in the hamster food bag in S’s bedroom! We have so many questions, but mainly I have gratitude – that I didn’t discover the little critter when I scooped the food bowl into the bag like I was just about to do!
Anyhoo, I tell you all these little anecdotes about my Big Tues because together, they paint a picture of what my retirement could look like and let me tell you, I like what I’m seeing. (minus the mouse)
I had the realization this week that one of my fondest time periods in recent memory is the early pandemic. I loved how small and slow our lives were. All of the noisy constructs that are typically built around our daily lives – work, school, even much of popular culture – had melted away pretty abruptly. We were left alone. With all of that extra space, we went on scavenger hunts with plastic magnifying glasses. J did research about self-chosen topics (dinosaurs! gravity!) and gave verbal reports to my extended family on my parents’ front porch. I wrote a book for my college-aged niece. Inspired by Ed Emberley, the kids drew a wall-sized world with colored pencils that still hangs above our bed. We had a hand-written daily schedule clipped to a red easel sitting in our family room. I know we were filled with terror at the time, but there was so much beauty. I am pondering what I could draw from these memories and bring to my present life. Do you think it is problematic to want to shut out the world in this way again? This is not a rhetorical question; I am genuinely curious about the ethics of wanting the rest of the world to fade into the background so I can relish my quiet time with people I love.
I just found a Rebecca Solnit quote that speaks to why disasters can have this kind of effect:
[P]eople sometimes find themselves in the circumstances they had yearned for – they are deeply connected to the time and place and people around them, they have a meaningful role, and the stuff (that is mostly located everywhere but the here and now) we fret about has been swept away.
Maybe it is just full presence that I am yearning? We spend so much brain time in places where we are not. When the world temporarily seemed to stop during the pandemic, it was so much easier to be where we were. We still had devices to take us to places we were not, and I know that was a salve to many, including me, too. But there were fewer personal distractions, more clarity.
In Dying for Sex, there is a scene in the last episode where the main character, her mom, and her best friend are dancing with euphoric abandon in her hospice room. It was such a joyful display of the power of pure presence, even in the face of imminent loss. We are all facing imminent loss, just on varying timelines. How to find more pockets of pure presence in the meantime?
It is Wednesday, and it appears I have, at long last, written a full letter! This letter required what Mason Currey calls “worm work,” progressing by slowly squirming and inching around rather than waiting for it to flow out like water. I love the visual of a little worm making its meandering way to construct a creative whole. In fact, a worm may be my official new mascot. T-shirts forthcoming.
I can’t wait to finally get to open your letter!
With love,
S.