Everything I'm anxious about
The sun, the moon, being outside, having the wrong number of kids
This newsletter is a day late. I was waiting to see if I could work up the nerve to watch the eclipse yesterday, but alas, I did not.
Eclipses fill me with existential dread and anxiety. Scrolling through pictures of everyone watching rapturously — in DC it was perfectly timed to school dismissal and the playground was filled with children staring in awe — brought me incredible vicarious joy. But I just could not bring myself to watch something that reminds me of my cosmological insignificance and inspires nothing but terror, like I’m some sort of Mesopotamian farmer. This is, I know, deeply lame.
This week, I am (anxiously, apparently) reading inside instead of outside, nice weather be damned; having my personal choices attacked by Netflix; and definitely not shopping. Getting me through this anxious week: a delicious Easter basket from Mandy.
Last weekend, while I was waiting at the park for Jose to finish tennis, I started the first of my latest batch of Akutagawa winners, Hiromi Kawakami’s Dragon Palace. I haven’t read a ton of her work, so I went in without much in the way of expectations, but I was still surprised. I read Strange Weather in Tokyo a few years ago, and my memory was that it was, as advertised, a bit strange but a light and charming read (I will not be digging out my copy to verify that this is accurate, you get what you pay for here). Dragon Palace has some of the same elements of whimsy, with more magical realism, but also considerably more sexual violence and just weird shit. It’s good, her (and her translator’s) writing is lovely, but I’m not sure I would recommend it — the highs just weren’t worth the lows.
I don’t think I would’ve thought about the book again, but I was reminded of it, and of my effort to read it on a tennis court, a few days later when I read The Atlantic’s “Seven Books to Read in the Sunshine”, which opens with an ode to outdoor reading:
Reading outside also takes the particular pleasures of literature and heightens them. The proximity of trees or of other human beings, or the sight of a page illuminated by the sun, can make a character’s search for connection, or a writer’s emotion recollected in tranquility, feel more visceral and alive. And whether you’re reading on a front stoop or on a train station’s bench, being alone yet somehow with others creates a kind of openness to the world.
Listen, if you are a person who enjoys reading outdoors, I am not trying to talk you out of it. But, if you too got to the part about about how reading outside heightens anything good at all and thought “the fuck it does,” know you are not alone.
I do not find reading outside to be enjoyable in the slightest. I think I would’ve appreciated Dragon Palace at least 15 percent more if I hadn’t been fighting the wind, oscillating between slightly too hot and slightly too cold, keeping one eye on my kid and the other out for bugs — that just doesn’t leave much for the pleasures of literature, heightened or otherwise. Every spring, I forget this about myself and make a brief attempt to be the kind of person who appreciates the changing seasons by doing indoor things outdoors.
But I don’t like doing anything outside.
I spent the first 18 years of my life on a cattle ranch and did not enjoy it. I would do almost anything to avoid working outdoors (mostly hiding and reading indoors, as god intended), and went through a phase where, when made to go outside, I’d cover my hands and arms with socks to prevent incidental bug or dirt contact.1 Some things you have to do outside — like playing tennis, which is how I found myself in this position to begin with — but the amazing thing about reading is that it is extremely amenable to being indoors. Why is The Atlantic trying to ruin this for me?
Stay tuned for an update next week on my one exception to this rule: beach reading. We’re heading out on spring break Monday, which means I have just a few more days to narrow down my vacation reading or, more likely, depart with unnecessarily heavy bags.
A perennial source of anxiety for me is whether I’ve produced the correct number of children.2 For as long as I can remember, I’ve both known that I wanted to be a parent and that I wanted to be a parent to exactly one child. I love my siblings and obviously do not wish to deny their existence, but I really enjoyed my two-year stint as an only child and feel that I would have continued to do so had my parents made different life choices. And like most parents, my parenting philosophy is overly informed by a desire to correct the mistakes and injustices of my own childhood.
Despite feeling enormous gratitude that I was able to obtain, with relative easy, the exact number of children I’ve always wanted, I worry. My child and I are quite similar, but we are not the same person, and maybe he’ll really resent carrying this burden as he gets older. Maybe he’ll turn out weird, and not in the charming and delightful ways he is weird at age 9.
Over the weekend I started watching, at my friend Rachael’s recommendation, Girls5eva, which has been a great background show. I’m only a few episodes in but was stopped in my parent-of-an-only-child tracks by this number, as one of the character tries to decide whether she wants a second kid:
The song is funny, and embarrassingly accurate. But then she’s sent into a panic when she asks her son if he wants to have a dance party and in response he tells Alexa to play an episode of The Daily.
This was brutal. My DC Lonely Boy’s number one hobby is age-inappropriate podcasts, and I had been thus far unaware that his love for Mike Duncan and Rob Harvilla was anything other than a charming and totally unique interest. But no, this is apparently so cliche that it works as an only-child punchline! Devastating. But, I don’t often get to make even slightly current TV recommendations, so I’m happy to say, personal attacks aside, I think the show is funny and you should watch it (thanks, Rachael).
In keeping with this week’s theme, yet another thing I worry about is whether I shop too much. Am I spending too much money? Am I personally responsible for destroying the environment? For sustaining inhumane working conditions in shitty factories? For overworking our lovely UPS driver, who I truly believe to be the single best UPS employee in existence?
To make myself feel better, I try to do a lot of secondhand shopping and implement occasional shopping freezes. I’m not great at these breaks, but I’m objectively in good shape for the warm weather and am trying to slow, if not totally stop, the pace of my shopping for the next few months. But if I weren’t, I’d be buying this kind of weird Mara Hoffman set I can’t stop thinking about:
But I’m not (it wouldn’t even arrive before we left for vacation, I remind myself), so maybe you should?
If you’re starting to wonder whether I’m aware that I have an unusually large number of phobias, I assure you both that I am and that this post has barely scratched the surface —we’re mostly covering anxieties, will circle back to phobias in a future edition.
I had not actually intended to write a newsletter about all the things that stress me out or make me anxious, but here were are. I blame the eclipse.
Very well written - now I feel anxious too! 👍