Peak middle age
Learning to do crosswords, choosing vacation reads, being tired at the gym, and shopping for loafers
This week, I want to make the case for doing the crossword.
I’ve had conversations about doing crossword puzzles with four different friends recently, and each one of these very smart people told me they didn’t think of themselves as the kind of person who’s good at crosswords. Which is not actually a kind of person at all, they’re just a thing you have to learn how to do!1 They’re great for when you’re bored and want to do something a little mindless on your phone and know you shouldn’t really be scrolling through social media and also don’t really have the bandwidth to sit down and read (you can finish one in as little as 5 minutes).
So, if you’re someone who likes to occasionally waste time on your phone, I think you should consider becoming a crossword person. Maybe it’ll help stave off the dementia we’re apparently hurtling toward!
If you haven’t done them before, here’s my advice:
Pick one publication and stick with it. Each publication has a different style, so you’ll make much faster progress if you’re just learning one. I like the New York Times. This was an arbitrary decision, but now I play the other games in their app, so I’m pretty locked in.
Cheat! And don’t let anyone make you feel bad about it! My suggestion is to start by finding the clues that have factual answers. I can only really speak to the Times’ puzzles, but the clues that have proper names or movies or books as answers are typically not so much clues as trivia — you either know them or you don’t, and they’re not going to help you learn to reason through a puzzle. So fill out all of those you know, and then fire up IMDB or Google and look up the ones you don’t. This will give you a larger base to work from.
Answers have to match the clues grammatically, so find the plurals. Go through and see if adding an “S” at the end of answers that have to be plural helps you not with those answers, but with the one that intersects that final square. Oftentimes you end up with a square that houses an S at the end of two plural clues, but sometimes the end of one word will yield a first or middle S that will actually help.
Sundays are easier than you think! Generally speaking, the puzzles get harder over the course of the week, with Monday being the easiest. But the Sunday puzzle (again, this is for NYT) is not necessarily the most difficult, it’s often just quite long. But lots of clues means lots of practice, so even if you don’t yet feel up to a Friday or Saturday puzzle, you should give Sunday a try.
This week was, technically, the start of spring, but it was also cold and rainy, and so I spent a lot of my spare time thinking about things I would do once the weather finally shifts for good: the books I wanted to bring on upcoming trips, where I could find a matching linen shorts set with a cool-mom-not-a-regular-mom vibe. I briefly considered taking up running again after a fellow 40-something mom friend finished a half-marathon (congrats, Kay), but you can probably guess how long that lasted.
I’m looking forward to a brisk walk to the gym in no coat, though!
I’m happy to report that my efforts to rein in the reading chaos this week were successful! I finished the first Rivers of London book, and started the second (would not particularly recommend, but it’s a good insomnia read for me). And while I did ultimately decide to throw in the towel on Chip War, I did so before the 100-page mark and made it through a different non-fiction book (Kerry Howley’s Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs) in its place.
I also realized that if I keep using this space to write about whatever I’m reading that week, it’s going to devolve, in the same way Goodreads did, into a task that is more competitive and performative than I am comfortable with. So instead I want to talk about vacation books.
We have a spring break beach trip coming up, and I’m making my book list. While I wish I were the kind of chill person who can just bring whatever is at the top of the to-read pile, I know for me that’s a recipe for procrastination and too much time scrolling on my phone in scenic locales (much better to miss the views in favor of a book). I’m a Goldilocks vacation reader, and I’ll end up reading nothing at all if I don’t get it just right.
The frustrating thing is that I find it incredibly difficult to predict what will feel right in a new place — right doesn’t always mean good, or even enjoyable.
One of my most visceral memories from 2020 (a year full of them) is from our trip to Maine that winter, sitting by the windows overlooking the ocean, watching it storm and tearing through Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, which I hated and found utterly revolting but could not put down.2 It was a grueling winter, rounding off a grueling year, and reading something horrific was, in that moment, exactly what I needed. But sometimes it needs to be light — I am an extremely anxious flyer and struggle to focus long enough to read on planes, but I read the second Molly the Maid mystery on a flight to visit family this Christmas. It was the first time in years I’d managed to read an entire book on a flight, and I’m not sure exactly what it was that got me through, but it felt perfect.
Other times it needs to be moody, like the day I spent under the covers in a Lyon hotel room on a semi-disastrous summer vacation, reading A Long Time Dead as I suffered through my turn with the stomach bug that took out the whole family, one by one.
I’m hoping to avoid last year’s mistake of thinking poolside quietude would lend itself to finishing Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden. It’s a beautiful book, but like many lapsed physicists I know, pop science treatments of quantum mechanics just end up frustrating… not enough math to answer your questions, but sufficient to remind you that your brain no longer has full access to the math you’d need to make it through the real stuff.
This indecision all came to a head during our summer vacation two years ago when, because my child inherited both my love of reading and my fussiness about reading a book that feels just right, we had to check a separate (small!) suitcase containing only books. We are both now proud owners of Kindles, but unfortunately no more reasonable when it comes to the quantity of books it takes to make us feel prepared for a trip.
So, what am I bringing this year?
Good question. I’ll probably still be making my way through this Rivers of London Series. I recently bought Kelly Link’s novel, The Book of Love, and am considering that one. Her stories are hit and miss for me, so this feels like a bit of a gamble, going all in on one story. But the hits are so good! I ordered another round of Akutagawa winners, most of which are short, and will probably throw in some of those. And I may round it out with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos? Recommendations welcome!
This was a rough week at the gym, but I’m trying to sell my brain on the idea that we made a kind of mental progress this week, if not physical.
I had a cold this week, and 45 minutes into a kind of sad push day on Monday, I felt too shaky to bench my normal working weight and decided to call it. I skipped Wednesday’s workout because I was still not 100% and had a work event that evening I needed to feel up for. But Friday was okay! I did a combination leg/pull day and it was fine! I did just a single set of my heaviest weight on each lift, but still felt like I put in a solid day’s work. On Saturday, I went to a good Pilates class at the climbing gym that, surprisingly, left me tired enough that I didn’t feel like climbing afterward.
And writing this all out here, it does seem fine. It seems pretty good actually, for a week in which I was a little sick and a little busy! But at the time it felt deeply irresponsible to skip a day less than a month into this “lifting on my own” experiment, especially since I wasn’t that sick. I found myself spiraling, worried that skipping one day meant I was on the path to never going back to the gym. But I did, and it was okay, and now maybe I’ll be slightly less worried next time I take a day off. Maybe…
This month I’m shopping for linen and for loafers, neither particularly successfully.
I got it into my head last week that I would feel extremely cool during the summer wearing a matching natural linen set with short shorts and a long-sleeve button down. I found two reasonably priced options, one on J. Crew (I got the version with the shorter shorts) and one on Old Navy. The former was awful; the shirt was tailored and it gave office-beach-party vibes. The latter was good, but the color wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for (though it’s an amazing deal and if you’re in the market for something similar, I would recommend). I realized after spending too long thinking about it that these both needed to go back, and that what I want instead is perhaps something oversized and white. We’ll see!
On the loafers front, I have a saved search on The RealReal for brown loafers and while there are so many that are so good, I haven’t found mine yet. These are my current favorites:
I almost talked myself into believing that the Gucci pair (middle) would be a reasonable purchase last time they were available, but not quite. I’m not sure I could actually talk myself into that price for a new pair of shoes, much less well used. I think the other two are probably both a half-size too small for me, but if I were more confident in the sizing, I’d grab the lighter ones from Dries van Noten in a heartbeat. I have the Rag & Bone pair on the right in black from a Black Friday sale, and they’ve been a dream — I’ve worn them almost every day the weather permitted and have walked miles in them.
Someone give these a good home!
I’m also willing to concede this may have been a polite way of saying they have more interesting lives than I do and aren’t in the market for word game hobbies.
In this case, conventional wisdom is correct, her more popular Convenience Store Woman is great.