somehow it's april
catching up / embracing seasons
I haven’t been able to write a substack post for three months because all my thoughts have been feeling trite or evil, because since entering talk-about-reading-and-writing school I have developed a severe allergy to talking about reading and writing, and because I have maybe possibly been under the shroud of a seasonal depression.
Before this year, winter was something I understood mostly as a metaphor. In Orange County, winter meant jeans instead of shorts, a light windbreaker over a t-shirt instead of a sleeveless top. In the Bay Area, winter meant a patagonia jacket, wool socks, maybe long underwear beneath baggy pants on a particularly chilly day, maybe a space heater for your feet at the office. Living with true seasons for the first time means coming upon a series of revelations clear to literally anyone who grew up outside California. I am learning that there are seasons for rest and rejuvenation; that hats and scarves are functional, non-optional accessories; that sometimes it is too cold to do anything except make tea and bed rot; that Spring and Summer are really that special. I think it’s good (maybe even virtuous? still deciding) to be in touch with the world, to feel a season begin to overstay its welcome and to gratefully welcome the next one. I’ve found that getting older in general is endlessly discovering anew information people have been telling you forever, like: it’s good to move your body, swimming is easy on the joints, making your bed each morning somehow makes the whole day better, the Phone is evil, the sun heals all.
All that being said, my first snow was magical. I felt like a kid walking around the streets, my feet sinking 20 inches into the sidewalk with every step. I made a snow angel in front of a daycare building. I wanted to fill my pockets with the magic. I wanted to walk all across Brooklyn and see everything shut down, covered in a beautiful blanket of white. Of course, this beauty only lasted a few hours and then for the next month I walked by calcified dog shit and black slush on every block.
I also haven’t written a substack post because lately I have been trying focus all my creative energy towards one, ill-fated goal: writing a novel, which I am trying to tell lots of people about so that I feel an ever-growing psychic burden to finish it. It’s nice to work on something longer, to have some freedom to meander and edit and change the living document however I see fit. I read an excerpt of it at my friend’s open mic reading on Thursday for the first time, and it felt exhilarating and stomach churning.
In the past few months, I stopped substitute teaching, at least for the foreseeable future. My last straw came when I half-heartedly scolded a student for throwing paper across the room. “Alright, I don’t want to see you throwing things,” I said. A second student with a standard gen-alpha broccoli haircut said to me, “Wow, you really showed them.” There were only twelve minutes left in the period and I really didn’t want to call the front office, so I sort of stared the kid down in lieu of making any disciplinary decision. He then said, “What are you looking at?” I decided that I needed to quit substitute teaching, and I haven’t been back since. I simply do not have the disposition. Every time I subbed, at the end of the day I craved a large sweet iced boba milk tea like water. I told Chelsea about this, and she theorized that the experience made me revert to childhood and that the middle school craving was a self-soothing measure.
I went to Baltimore in March, though I am not certain I saw any of the city beyond the incredibly designed aquarium. The highlight of the trip was watching Glee with my friends in an AirBnB for six hours. We started with some classic episodes but eventually moved to YouTube to watch the best musical performances, like having candy for dinner. The next morning, at a diner in Delaware, I really felt that I was waking up from a Glee hangover.
I survive every winter by latching onto a prestige drama about a complicated man, or maybe what I am trying to say is, last winter I was watching The Sopranos, and this winter I was watching Mad Men. I’m almost finished, which must mean I am ready for the warmer weather to stay. I think I am ready to feel a bit more in touch with my body, to read for pleasure outdoors, to swim in the Atlantic for the first time.
I must be living life these days, even though there is less and less documentation of it. I used to fill journals in painstaking detail with everything I did each day, direct quotes of what people said. Reading it back is horribly boring. Instead of holding onto everything defensively, I am trying to get more in touch with what sticks, what feelings and memories and sound bites grow in resonance and have staying power.
One such anecdote: Over spring break I went to France, and while I was paying the bill for a solo dinner, the server asked me, “Japonais?” I corrected him, in that stupid sheepish way, “American.” He gave me a big smile and asked, “Japonais American?” and I was like, “Actually, yeah.”
Recommended reading:
I’ve been exposed to a lot of fantastic stuff from one of my classes this semester: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group
“The legacy of Obama’s drone wars” from The Drift