Hey there.
Is it just me or has remembering to celebrate the good things felt increasingly more exhausting? Because there are good things, but often they either go unsaid or immediately vanish under the weight of everything else. Every time I decide to point out something cheerful, I immediately come across fifteen deeply bad events that make my cherry pie/funny coat/passing fox/new snow feel as wrong to mention as it is to toss peanuts into an open coffin during a funeral.
(You know, I recently had a therapy appointment in which I told a story about a situation where someone was unexpectedly away and I kept changing the date I promised everyone they’d return. I’m pretty sure they’re going to assume I murdered the person and am trying to cover it up, I told my therapist. She laughed and said she was surprised I went there. And I was surprised that after so many years she didn’t know that I not only went there, I lived there. Small One and I still giggle about the time we drove around with a tarp, a box of latex gloves, an old rug, an set of battered license plates, and a bag of zip ties in the trunk. Every item had its own separate reason for being there–art students and experimenters travel with odd baggage–but it made for a sketchy still life.
Or there was the time the gutter people were out to fix the gutters, and they were going up and down a ladder in front of the kitchen window, and there on the kitchen counter was a sizable quantity of white powder, a scale, and a ten inch serrated knife. Confectioner’s sugar, my friends, for the icing on a cake, a scale to accurately measure the cake’s ingredients, and a knife for the bread I had yet to cut, but. Yes, I wondered whether the gutter people were thinking she’s a respectable gray-haired lady cleaning the oven and drinking a cup of tea, but also, is she going to kill us now that we’ve looked in the window? Of course I was not going to kill them. It was broad daylight and there were two of them and the solar installation folks were going to be arriving shortly.
All of which is to say, I apologize if throwing peanuts in an open coffin during a funeral is in bad taste. It’s just the first thing that sprang to mind.)
In case it isn’t already painfully clear, I do have a bit of good news. I’m going to tell it to you, regardless of the despair in the air, because if a book has a good thing happen and the author never mentions it anywhere, that good thing reverts to the equivalent of a blank stretch of wall where a picture was meant to go, only no one bothered to drive the nail in and hang it up.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is not exactly how the list looks. It’s just hard to take a picture of eleven books that is neither huge nor so small it might as well be a map inside a toy car. I can promise you that it is a list of brilliant and beautiful books and I’m thrilled Holi’s story is among them. You can check it out here.
That’s all I have to offer today. If you’ve stumbled onto this post and wonder why there aren’t many more, subscribe here! It’s free, it’s painless, and it will give me a welcome break from denying membership to bots. Also, the majority of the posts are behind the not-paywall. There, I occasionally talk about things I’m working on, like Jen’s Big Book of Apocalyptic Nightmares. Trust me, it’s more disturbing than it sounds. Though Sometimes the Girl was once The Encyclopedia of Trauma and people don’t tend to come away from it scarred. Perhaps all my working titles should just be Another Volume of Hyperbole.
Until we meet again, Dear Ones.