Archive

I’ve been invited to join a poetry collective! It’s called Poems While You Wait¹—the group sets up shop at event spaces and writes poems for people on demand, with great speed, on any topic of their choice, in exchange for a donation to a small not-for-profit literary press. It’s yet another situation that feels like it can only exist in a place like Chicago, in which I am once again and forever thankful to be living.

This all happened in a blur. A new friend heard me read one of my poems² at a Pesach seder. He was really excited to tell me about this poetry group that he’s part of. I didn’t learn much else up front, except that, in order to participate, you have to own a typewriter. Consider me intrigued.

He put me in touch with one of the co-founders, to whom I submitted a short introduction and a selection of my work. This person turned out to be Kathleen Rooney, the novelist³, and the author of the piece at Poetry Foundation (also a Chicago concern, I learned!) about Poems While You Wait that I’ve linked in the Notes below.

I’m very glad I found this out after sending my email—otherwise I might have intimidated myself out of the whole thing entirely.

It is finally springtime in Chicago—more or less. It's warm out most days, but only if you're walking in the sun. My mom was recently in town and we visited the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, which is currently home to hordes of migrating birds—Chicago sits on one of the most highly-trafficked flyways in the hemisphere. I'll share some photos at the end of this!

Imani the piping plover¹ has also returned to Montrose Beach to try to mate up, or maybe just to have his own Hot Bird Summer. He was hatched at Montrose by Monty and Rose, who created a sensation when they became the first Great Lakes piping plovers (a highly at-risk species) to nest in Chicago in decades. So it's incredibly cool that Imani keeps coming back to his original home—apparently that's unusual behavior. (And these birds winter in places like Galveston and the Florida Keys, so it's amazing that they make it all the way up here at all.)

Writing

I recently submitted a short humor piece to a popular online journal. A few of you have read it and provided feedback; I am eternally grateful to you, for sharing your wisdom and, just as importantly, for your tender care with me and my work. What's more, I'm feeling thankful to every single person who's reading this right now, for supporting me and encouraging me, which you have been doing, in many cases, for an astoundingly long time.

I have to admit that I’m feeling desensitized to tragedies in the news—not simply the events themselves, but their “news-ification.” Hearing about the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, one of my first reactions was to gird myself against the inundation of stories from it.

I feel a little ashamed of this, especially now that I know more about the tragic, epic scale of the disaster. I go through this every time: the emotional battle between “I should care more” and “there’s nothing I can do.” If you’re reading this, I’m sure you understand that it’s not that I don’t wish for the suffering to end (but look at that, I said it anyway). I feel slightly inhuman learning that so many people are in pain and then carrying on about my day. At the same time, there’s no new actions I can take to help them by reading news articles which are designed to rattle my emotions for the purposes of delivering ad revenue.

[The exception that proves the rule: I read one article about how to help the earthquake victims, because I needed to figure out the best place to send money. Just tossing money and walking away also contributes to my sense of disengagement, but that’s really the best way to help. I chose to give to the Syrian American Medical Society, in part because the people of Syria are in such rough shape already thanks to the interminable civil war there.]

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with reading about the many inspirational stories that have come out during the earthquake’s aftermath, especially of the heroic rescues. Nor is there anything wrong with following the ins and the outs of the international effort to sneak needed aid past the grasping reach of the dreadful Erdogan and Assad regimes. (If you’re wondering how I know about these things: I may not read many articles but I read a lot of headlines.)

I’m experiencing a frustrating problem with the carrier network on my new phone. For several days it would lose service at random times and for random durations. Now this morning, it seems to be permanently off, or as close as makes no matter.

There is a possible solution that involves “resetting network settings.” I am thankful that this might allow me to fix the issue without fully resetting my phone. However, it does require me to wipe out the data for all the WiFi networks my phone knows about.

Since Android migrates this data to my new phone when I upgrade, and since I’ve been on Android for over a decade now, that means I’ve got hundreds of credentials in there. I’m feeling unexpectedly emotional about the idea of losing so many of them. (I’m taking QR-code screenshots for the ones I really need to keep: I wouldn’t want to suffer the indignity of re-asking someone for a WiFi password.)

Many of them are either unimportant (“FanXP,” “Chase,” “Guest”) or inscrutable (“D1CE70,” “HCL_Public,” “hoaruint”). These I can stand to trim. Some, on the other hand, instantly bring back memories.

The problem when I don’t write for a while is that life just keeps happening. And the more things there are to write about, the less likely I am to write, because it all feels like too much to cover. However, if I may abandon my trademark humility for a moment: I suspect you’d rather hear from me about a small portion of the things than none of the things.

A lot of life has happened. We did both get Covid, finally. Nobody knows exactly how, which is the way of it these days. We each had mild cases and quarantined for ten days; it sucked, then we moved on. Lucky.

I didn’t test positive until a few days after Ashley did, despite our best efforts to stay apart. Just when I was starting to think I might be some kind of superdodger (a real thing¹)—and the day after I got my Omicron booster—I did test positive. For the sake of keeping my ego in check, this was probably a good thing; I could have become an insufferable braggart.

Oh well. I admit I had at times imagined myself 30 years in the future, being asked, “So did you get Covid back in the ’20s?” (That’s what they’re going to call it. Ick.) I would reply, “No, I never did!” Then whatever kid had asked me would walk away muttering, “You lying old man.” Maybe I dodged a bullet there.

Our caterpillars are back for Year 3! Officially, the pillars are our Pandemic Project™️. We've learned a lot from our experience thus far, and our operation is now more streamlined and efficient. I'm especially proud of the fact that we are able to take natural-born caterpillars from outside and finish raising them indoors.

Our first year, in 2020, it was a complete surprise when we discovered an Eastern swallowtail butterfly laying eggs on our parsley. We went with it, learning the whole way, and this impromptu project provided unexpected joy in the midst of some dark times. We were not prepared for how quickly five caterpillars could consume even a large and thriving herb. And we didn't realize how many dangers lurked outdoors that might prevent a caterpillar from making it all the way through its lifecycle to the emergence from the chrysalis: wasps and other predators, wind and rain, disease. It's a complete miracle that any of them make it, let alone that this has been happening for millions of years. (Between 1-2% of eggs eventually become butterflies.)

Last year we bought plenty of extra parsley, dill and fennel, and we carefully noted the first appearance of the butterflies, and their tiny yellow eggs clinging to the leaves. It was midway through the summer when we noticed that the baby caterpillars and eggs both tended to disappear within a few days, and that this was correlated with increased wasp activity. We ordered some mesh enclosures online, stuck some fresh parsley plants in there, and moved a couple of the remaining caterpillars inside to their new home. This was a big success, because in addition to keeping them safe indoors, we were able to watch and enjoy them much more closely. And most importantly, we actually hatched a butterfly!

Spring was late to take hold this year, so it wasn't until a few weeks ago that we finally planted our herb garden on the back deck. (I have photos from this time last year of nearly full-grown caterpillars.) The butterflies found it almost immediately, and within days we had at least a dozen eggs; that was thanks in part to our monstrous fennel, which is already the size of a small bush. A lot of the eggs don't make it, for whatever reason, and even though we've had some caterpillars survive all the way to make their chrysalis outdoors, we got pretty nervous as soon as the first couple of babies appeared last week. We've had to accept the fact that most of them will not make it, and it's hard not to get attached, because they are so simple and lovable.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there! And to everyone.

I’ve just learned from the historian Heather Cox Richardson that the original version of the holiday was called Mothers’ Day, with the apostrophe on the end. A subtle yet important alteration. It had a very different purpose than today’s iteration, and both are worth keeping in mind.

Conceived by writer and activist Julia Ward Howe amidst the early women’s suffrage movement, the first Mothers’ Day in the 1870s was designed around the political empowerment of women. Her ultimate aim? An end to all war.

This was after a decade which had seen two of the most destructive conflicts ever, the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war, both of which ushered in horrors at a scale nobody could previously imagine, and put an end to that era's fantastical notions of heroic and dignified battle. (Although the Civil War at least was fought for a noble cause on the Union side, the fighting itself was hardly anything to celebrate.)

I sent this last week, and several people reported that it went into their spam folders. I apologize if you've already read this—if so, please proceed with your day, with which I wish you all the best! I have configured my newsletter software to send these emails via my custom domain, which is said to improve deliverability. (Firefox tells me "deliverability" is not a word. Get with the times, Firefox.)

​Spring is starting, and it's been too long since I've last written to you. Let's ease back in with a photo and video essay recounting one of our recent recreational outings.

They were the second-best seats¹ I've ever had at a sporting event: a few weeks ago we attended the Chicago Fire Football Club's home opener—that's our local Major League Soccer team—downtown at Soldier Field.

Until recently—okay, until this morning—I thought Boxing Day had something to do with the sport in which people pummel each other inside a ring. And I further thought that perhaps this holiday had something to do with the Boxer Rebellion.

(It doesn’t, although it turns out the latter is related to boxing, via a typically crude Western misrepresentation of Chinese culture. Yeah, they literally called martial arts—like, all of them, together—"Chinese boxing." Way to not bother noticing that there is more than one martial art in China, British dudes!)

Boxing Day today is primarily regarded as a bank holiday—a chance to take off work—and a day for shopping and watching soccer. As delighted as I am about Arsenal’s demolition of Norwich City F.C. to continue their recent resurgence, my interest in the holiday lies more in its origins than in how, like most other contemporary holidays, it came to serve as a fulcrum for retail economics.

Many people promote different ideas about the origins of the term Boxing Day, but everyone seems to agree that it had something to do with giving money to the poor.

I saw Rembrandt walking down the street.

I was sitting on my porch, watching the wind blow leaves down from the trees across the way. He was heading up to Clark St. He strolled right through the growing pile without slowing his step.

He came back the other way about half an hour later with a bag of groceries.

Let me back up a minute.

Welcome to a special mid-week edition of the newsletter! It’s been a busy couple weeks of traveling and hosting family and friends, and we’ve got another trip coming up this weekend, to Door County in Wisconsin, so I thought I’d sneak this into your inbox a little early.

A couple weeks ago we flew to Seattle for my cousin Noah’s bar mitzvah. On our first visit, for one of Ashley’s pharmacy conferences a few years ago, we fell in love with the city, and we go back every chance we get. (It’s great to have family all up and down the West Coast—I highly recommend it!)

Seattle is an aquatic city, and accordingly, the weekend’s three events all took place beside different bodies of water. The weather did us a solid and allowed us to enjoy them free from any serious bouts of cold or rain (the San Diego folks’ mileage may vary).

Friday: Lake Union

This is the first year I can remember where the first day of fall actually felt like the first day of fall. The temperature dropped ten degrees and it was overcast and only a little rainy. We opened up the doors in the front and back of our place and let the breeze chase away the remaining humidity (this also let in two wasps who had moseyed through the hole in the screen, but that’s another story).

Ashley set up our traditional fall living room display, with a few new additions, including the birding bird couple and the witchy broom that wafts cinnamon smells throughout the house, a gift from my parents.

I took the “L” train to my dermatologist appointment in downtown Chicago this week, and I took the bus back. This is remarkable only because I’m finally returning to the point at which public transit is my default choice to get around the city. Until I became fully vaccinated, it was absolutely not a safe activity, and we do have a car. So I stayed away.

Now I’m vaxxed, but it’s been so long that I’ve gotten addicted to the shorter trips. If time is the only variable, most situations will call for driving. However, there are lots of other reasons I’d rather use transit: it’s less stressful, it’s more fun, there’s no parking worries, it’s environmentally superior. We also live in a neighborhood with convenient options: the bus ride back took an hour, but it was basically door to door.

It’s a weird situation in which it’s public transit that feels like a luxury for me, and the car is what I’ll use only if I absolutely have to. Maybe it's usually the reverse. There are people who can’t afford to have a car and must rely on transit, and there are people who need to get where they’re going as quickly as possible (because they’re working multiple jobs and raising a family, say).

For me, the extra time is the point. I don’t want a life in which I feel like I absolutely can’t spare half an hour to do something I love. It reminds me of what Russell Simmons said about meditation: “If you feel like you can’t meditate for 30 minutes, you need to meditate for three hours.”

We got home late last night from a quick trip to Omaha for Yom Kippur, thus the email lateness. The first thing we did when we came into the house was to check up on the butterfly in our living room.

Yes, as it turns out, we raised caterpillars again this year. I apologize for neglecting to write about this as it happened, but after last year's difficulties, I've been continually tamping down my hopes. We weren't necessarily planning to give this project another go, but we did plant parsley on our deck again, and we knew that for the black swallowtails it would be an attractive egg-laying target.

Sure enough, after a few weeks, several eggs appeared, and one of them hatched into a caterpillar. Since the herbs are rather exposed, and one of the biggest problems last year was wasps picking our little guys off the leaves, we bought a second parsley plant and potted it in a more hidden corner spot. At the garden shop, I noticed that one of the plants already had a little caterpillar hiding within the leaves, so naturally that's the one I brought home, and we now had two pets.

This morning we returned to Hollywood Beach to participate in a tashlich ceremony for LGBTQ+ and interfaith couples. Tashlich is a Jewish custom that you perform during the week of reflection that separates Rosh Hashanah (the New Year’s holiday) and Yom Kippur (the day of atonement or repentance).

I remember participating in this ritual as a kid at Beth El synagogue in Omaha. We’d go to a small body of water in the city (Ashley, a good Minnesotan, has always insisted that these were ponds, not lakes) and toss bits of bread into the water, symbolically casting off our sins of the previous year and signaling our intention to better ourselves during the year to come.

Today’s ritual was different in a number of ways. Our body of water was Lake Michigan, which definitely qualifies as a real lake. And instead of throwing bread, which isn’t great for the birds, we picked small stones out of the sand.

The biggest change was in the interpretation of the “sins” we cast away. Sin in American culture usually connotes an immoral act, committed with malign intent. The rabbi at the beach explained that, as expressed in the Hebrew of the Bible, there is much more nuance to the concept of a sin. There are three different Hebrew words that are all often translated as sin, but which in fact mean:

Despite living near the lake and despite our growing fascination with birds, we've never visited Montrose Point Beach and Bird Sanctuary. The middle day of a three-day holiday weekend offered a great opportunity to make up for this, so off we went this morning.

It's a 20-minute walk east to the lake. Just beyond the end of our neighborhood are the "L" Red Line tracks, which are currently undergoing a complete renovation. This is a view looking back at the tracks from the opening of the adjoining alley: just about the most quintessential city view I can imagine.

This weekend we did our first Beach Day in Chicago. We’ve been to the beach, and sat on benches at the lakefront, and all that stuff, but we never actually brought towels and swim gear and sunscreen and made a day of it. This, even though the renowned Hollywood Beach is a 20-minute walk from our place. Maybe we didn’t think to prioritize it since Ashley and I both grew up in cities where beaches aren’t a thing?

It was glorious and I am looking forward to doing it again soon. We went with several friends from Ashley’s clinic and hung around drinking cider, beer, and seltzer, and trying to stay cool. Despite the 90-degree temps and significant humidity, the water was still chilly, and you really had to brace yourself if you wanted to sink in up to your shoulders. It’s awful for a solid minute—but after that, totally worth it.

We’d brought our phones, just in case, and they stayed in the bag. We actually lost track of time. I’m not sure how long it’s been since that happened. It felt refreshing, momentous, and triumphant, as if time was a pesky underclassman who tags along with us after school every day and we’d finally ditched them. I’d like to do this kind of thing on a more regular basis. The temptation is to schedule it on my calendar, but I don’t think you can time to time.

I’m working on a long writing project. I’ve been reluctant to mention this here, because it’s longer and more difficult than anything I’ve attempted before. Part of the point of these emails, though, is to share things that are difficult to share—things that the world doesn’t encourage us to reveal, yet which we all experience. My feelings about this project are one of those things: it’s something I both know I’m capable of doing and also harbor many different kinds of uncertainty about.

And I realized that last week, in writing about my morning routine, I was probably also writing about this project:

This is where that long-term thinking is key, as well as having low expectations. I went into this knowing that it would take much longer than a month or two to build the kind of routine I wanted. Once I do, though, I expect it to last for many years. The effort spent to get there, and the false starts, will more than pay for themselves. Low expectations are the essential companion to ambition.

With this project, I have a vision of what it could be. Tied up with that vision are lots of feelings and beliefs and narratives related to other big projects I’ve tried, and to people I know who have (to my eye) successfully done similar things. This all creates expectations for how this project could and should go, expectations that aren’t inherent—or even necessarily relevant—to what it will take to execute it. They mostly just get in the way.

Last week I told a story about my journey to morning person-ness. The end of one journey is often the beginning of another.

It’s one thing to admit to myself and you that I now feel myself to be a morning person. It’s another thing to integrate that idea into my behaviors and habits, and into my thoughts and the stories I tell about myself. That’s all still to do.

There’s a risk that I will be too doctrinaire or dogmatic about it. A “morning person” (I could still enjoy staying up late some nights. They could experience plenty of mornings on which they’re unable to hop out of bed. There are natural and seasonal changes to our daily rhythms; right now, the sun is still out deep into the evening, and sometimes this makes it difficult to wind down. There’s little sense in fighting what the body wants to do.

My friend Renée sent me this cheeky “ode to non-morning people” by The Atlantic’s James Parker. It’s a really clever and delightful bit of writing, and it concludes with the important cultural point that, like introverts, non-morning people are, through no fault of their own, swimming against the current in contemporary American society. They are—unfairly—often maligned and taken less seriously.

I am using the word “they” and not “we” because, over many years, I have been navigating a transition, at first unbeknownst to me, and now nearly complete, from non-morning person to morning person.

In college I proudly identified as a night owl, which, at least among my circle of friends, was pretty much the only option. Any sophomore with half a clue who was bouncing out of bed more than 20 minutes before their first class of the day didn’t dare divulge such a scandalous secret. Sleeping late was a skill to be mastered, a competition in which to triumph.

It wasn’t just about avoiding mornings. Nighttime is the best time to indulge one’s freedom to be themselves, and when one is in college, this freedom is their most valuable currency by far. When else but after 2 a.m. would I have conceived and drafted music videos for every song on the White Stripes’ Elephant?

Hey everyone,

Visiting some friends last weekend and deciding on a movie to watch, we were leaning toward Twister. Scanning through Netflix, however, we ran across another mid-90s classic: Dante’s Peak. It turned out that multiple people had not seen this. I hadn’t seen it since it was in theaters in 1997. I wasn’t sure why, but something was telling me that we really ought to watch it. It wasn’t just that I wanted to see how it held up, or that I wanted to share the experience; there was something else involved. So I advocated for ​​​​​​and won the day.

Hey everyone,

Ever since I read Richard Brautigan’s poem, “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace,” I’ve been smitten with the man. This month I finally picked up the only book of Brautigan’s that I own, an omnibus containing two of his novellas, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar, and a poetry collection, . It has certainly been a singular reading experience.

Hey everyone,

Today is the one-month anniversary of my eye surgery! What a strange month it has been. It took a couple weeks before I felt confident enough in my sight to return to my normal level of activity. And as soon as I did, it was time to prepare for our week and a half-long vacation. Both the surgery and the vacation were great things, so it’s not like I’m complaining. But I also rely heavily on my daily routines to keep me grounded. In that sense, by the time we drove back into town on Monday, I’d become rather unsettled, as if I wasn’t sure whether the foundations of my life had shifted around on me, or whether everything would be right where I’d left it.

This unsettled feeling is not entirely based in reality. Things are generally less shifty than they appear to be. Nothing exploded, figuratively or literally. A few of our plants were droopy, and I had trouble resuming my early-morning writing practice (more on that next week). That was the worst of it.

I escaped the month, not only unscathed, but with quite a few more happy memories made, and with drastically improved natural vision. It was just a bit of a different kind of month than I’m used to. It’s good to dig a little and discover that those foundations are pretty strong after all. It's instructive to be confronted by my own resilience.

Hi everyone,

It has been a great vacation, and busy-in-a-good-way. So I'm going to save the details for next week. In the meantime, here is a visual sneak peak/caption contest:

(Seriously, if you send me the best caption for this photo, I will share it.)

Hey everyone,

I am on vacation this week, and as such, for the first time, I am not producing a "real" issue. But I figured I'd at least drop you a line to say so. I will share plenty of details next time. Enjoy your weekend!!

Hey everyone,

Well, I am recovered from my laser eye surgery last week, but my vision is still going to take time to reach its ultimate quality. Which means my actual eyesight is way better than it was before the surgery, but not as good as it was with my glasses. That’s exactly as expected, but it’s still kind of weird.

Up to Thursday, I couldn’t see well enough to work. Other than that, I felt great; it was a nearly pain-free convalescence. So I had time off, and I wasn’t sick, but it wasn’t vacation, either, since there wasn’t a whole lot I could do without being to see. Even though it’s expected, the waiting is tough. Luckily, I stumbled across a great that shifted my perspective (it somehow blends Tarkovsky films, the band Yo La Tengo, the pandemic, and the Jewish messiah).

Hey everyone,

Hello from the past! I am writing this on Thursday, because on Friday I will be undergoing a PRK procedure (Update: It went well!). If you’re not familiar with that (and I wasn’t until recently) it’s very similar to LASIK. Basically, a computer will reshape my eyeballs so that I can see normally.

You already know this, if you’ve ever met me, but I am close to helpless without my glasses, which I have worn since I was 8 years old. It’s strange, come to think of it, that my eyes worked just fine up to that point. Eight years of, from what I can remember, essentially pristine function. Then it all went to hell. When someone says, “he looks at the world with eyes of a child,” maybe it’s not a metaphorical statement about the person’s carefree spirit or their non-judgmental-ness. Maybe they are just saying, “He can make out street signs from a reasonable distance. He doesn’t have to squint at a clock face from five feet away.”

Yes, my vision somehow went from passable at the least to very, very bad, in a span of a year or two. I think my prescription continued to worsen until it finally bottomed out when I got to high school, but most of the damage was done in those earlier years. How does that happen so fast? I don’t believe there are any ophthalmologists reading this, but if anyone is actually a secret eye doctor and can fill me in, I’m curious to know.

Hey everyone,

This was quite a week of since-the-pandemic-began firsts!

• First ride on the “L”

Hey everyone,

Over the first half of 2021, I’ve been enrolled in an introductory online course in Jungian analytical psychology, through the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. Today was the final day of the program. We met one weekend a month for six months, with a lecture on Saturday and a small group discussion on Sunday. Students also met weekly in pairs, to review the classes and the readings, and also to put some of the concepts into practice.

I feel a little strange writing about this, because in some people’s eyes, it’s a subject that’s too esoteric to spend this much time studying. Jung’s is a famous name, but his work isn’t well known. I completed an entire undergraduate major in psychology, and we hardly talked about him. What mainstream success Jung’s ideas have seen, like the inferiority complex and the theoretical basis of the Meyers-Briggs typology test, aren’t generally attributed to him.

Hey everyone,

Every Sunday, I write out some of the tasks I want or need to accomplish during the week. The first thing I do is inspect my list from the previous Sunday and carry over anything that didn’t get done. And there are always a few items that sound like they should have been easy. Yet sometimes, these items stay on my list for weeks, or even months. Why don’t I just Do The Thing and be done with it?

What’s happening is that the task triggers a “negative” emotional response. And that response, those feelings, are easier to avoid than to deal with. I put the word “negative” in quotes because it’s not that the feelings are bad or unhealthy—they are just feelings—it’s that they are uncomfortable or painful.

These feelings are generated from previous times we’ve tried to do a similar task and failed, or they are associated with a person or place or event that the task reminds us of. For me, what sits on my list are calls, texts, and emails. I’ve got a couple on there right now. This goes back to my middle school and high school days, when I had a rather severe case of social anxiety. Almost any personal interaction that had anything at stake freaked me out and overwhelmed me with physical discomfort.

Hey everyone,

I can’t tell you how nice it feels to start doing normal-life things again.

The pandemic is not over, and I really hope that countries like ours with a vaccine surplus will step up efforts to distribute doses to areas that are still battling high case counts. All the same, we’re fortunate that things are looking good here. Back in the early days of writing these emails, we were preparing for what we thought would be a two-week quarantine; it felt as though those two weeks would last ages. And then… the quarantine never really ended.

Finally, this was a week with some big milestones. Our downstairs neighbors moved in sometime during 2020—I couldn’t even tell you which month—and we managed to become friends without actually spending any time in the same room. Last weekend, now that we are all fully vaccinated, we visited their place for the first time for dinner and a game night. I had forgotten the simple pleasure of having a night in with friends and just hanging out.

Heads up: this is slightly longer than what I normally write here, and it’s also pretty heavy. Neither of those statements should be read as an apology; just a friendly note to let you know what you’re getting into as you read on.

Hi everyone,

Hey y’all,

We just arrived home after a ten-hour drive back from northern Minnesota, so this will be brief.

Ashley’s grandmother, Ann, passed away at her home in December. Her final wish was for us to bury her ashes there, and with the weather finally warm enough and the ground unfrozen, this was the perfect weekend to conduct our sacred task.

We gathered at Ann’s house on Saturday morning, Ashley and me and her siblings and a few neighbors, for the final time before the house is sold to new owners—a freshly retired couple who are eager to live out their wilderness dream, just like Ann and her husband Larry did.

Hey everyone,

When it comes to how I invest my time, there’s this pattern I engage in. I have a lot of different interests, a lot of groups I’d like to be involved with, a lot of classes I’d like to take and books I’d like to read, and a lot of places I’d like to go (now that I can go places again). I’d like to be involved in the world; I’d like to help make my community a better place, where I can. There are a lot of people and places that need help.

My pattern is to steadily increase my commitments until I reach a point where it feels like my days and weeks are full, and I don’t have much room in my life for anything new that comes along, or for any surprises that pop up during the day. I write out my list of tasks and events in the morning, in my Bullet Journal, and I say to myself, “That’s all day, right there. You’re spoken for.”

It’s hard for me to say no. I’m a people pleaser. Even when I recognize that I’m approaching my limit—and the more times I’ve approached it, the sooner I see it coming—even when I tell myself, “Alright, we’re not signing up for any new stuff for a while”—my resolve still slips sometimes, and I will catch myself registering for another weekend seminar, or RSVPing for another Zoom call.

Hey everyone,

I drove home safely from Omaha on Friday, and I listened to several more episodes of the History of English podcast along the way. One of my favorite things about listening to this show, and learning about history in general, is the feeling I get when I learn a new fact that suddenly resolves a mystery. It could be something I’ve wondered about for a long time, or it could be a question that I didn’t even know I had. Either way, the effect is magical. My brain must be wired to dose me with a massive amount of dopamine any time this happens, because it feels addicting. Is this what extraverted people feel when they enter a crowded party, or what thrill-seekers feel when they jump out of an airplane?

While driving, I also reflected on what makes this particular podcast so enthralling for me, and what that might say about the creative projects I choose to pursue. Before discovering this show, I already knew that I enjoyed writing and manipulating language and that I loved learning about history. So it makes sense that learning about the history of language would be an exciting way to tie these things together.

I want to go deeper, though. What is it about language that I love, and what is it about history, and what is it about the particular combination of them? It’s true that I have definitely speculated about and explored these questions before. Still, these are clearly questions that I could spend my entire life working on in different ways—primarily, I hope, through doing projects. Because it’s more important and fulfilling to express one’s nature than to understand it. However, they’re both nice, and both very human, and trying to understand oneself seems to be a pretty compulsive activity for an introvert like me. On that note, here’s some more speculation!

Hello and greetings from Omaha,

I am in town to visit my family for the first time in 17 months, and it is nice to be back. The drive in from Chicago was long and peaceful, with a lot of good birds. A great blue heron flew across the highway right in front of me. When I stopped for lunch in Iowa City, it was 60 and sunny and there were students and families everywhere. Probably it’s a little too crowded, a little too soon, though I admit it’s comforting to see a college town bustling again.

During most of the trip I listened to the wonderful , which I can’t listen to when Ashley’s in the car because it’s too boring. “Boring” is in the eye of the beholder, of course, or in this case, in the ear. This is a history of the English language starting from its very beginnings in the Proto-Indo-European language in the third or fourth millennium B.C.E. It’s a very well-researched and thorough show. How thorough? The host has been producing episodes for eight years, and he has just now reached the year 1492. Meanwhile, I just made it out of B.C.E. after cranking through six episodes yesterday, so I’ve got a long way to go.

Hey y’all,

My second vaccine shot is in the books! As I understand it, this now makes me invincible against all disease, and also impervious to ice falling from the tops of tall buildings.

This allows me to travel to Omaha next week to visit my family for the first time since November 2019. They’ve all been vaccinated as well, thank goodness. Since the trip is about family, and since I won’t be fully protected yet—and since I still have to work—I’m going to play it safe and avoid going anywhere besides my parents’ house and my office. My apologies in advance to everyone in town who I would otherwise make an effort to see! Ashley and I plan to visit again later in the summer, and we hope that by then, we’ll be able to do most of what we want.

A lot of times, when figuring out what to write in this space, I sit and ponder until something interesting or unexpected (or thinkpiece-y) comes up. This does not feel like one of those times—for one thing, it’s been a couple hours since I wrote the bubbly-sounding paragraphs above, and all of a sudden that vaccine is starting to hit me.

Hey everyone,

I was listening to the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime this week when I realized I had never seen a picture of Mike Watt before.

Watt—certainly the most famous Watt in America prior to J.J.—was the bassist in the Minutemen, and D. Boon was the guitarist. Both wrote songs and “sang” lead—mostly spoke or shouted it, really—but D. Boon was the main frontman and the wilder personality. They quickly developed a reputation for short, punchy songs with countercultural themes, and for a D.I.Y. aesthetic to making and distributing their music. They wanted to put their work in front of people in as efficient a manner as possible while remaining true to themselves, an attitude they summed up by coining a phrase: “We Jam Econo.”

Hi everyone,

Today is my birthday! It has been a very nice birthday, even though none of the basketball games are going the way I want them to go. I got cake; I am easy to please.

I have seen lots of family and friends today, all virtually, of course. Last year for my birthday, the Covid lockdown was just about to start in Chicago. When we were planning my virtual party, it felt weird and unique, and people thought it was unlucky for me that I was the one who couldn’t celebrate his birthday in the usual way. We figured that by summer, things would be back to normal. We had no idea that this would drag on for a year, and that everyone was going to experience a Covid birthday.

The nice thing about having written these emails for over a year now is that I can look back and see what I said about it! , and that it was nice not to feel to feel pressure to make an event of it. That’s one of the biggest changes for me: I always identified so strongly as an introvert and wanted to spend as much time as possible at home, and now I have a far better appreciation of being with people and being in the world.

Hey y’all,

To be honest, I was reluctant to write about this, because I didn’t want to feel like I was bragging. But I also want to set a good example, and it’s important, so I’ll just come out and say it: I’m getting my first vaccine dose tomorrow!

At some point recently, Chicago and/or Cook County moved to Phase 1B-Plus—why they can’t call it Phase 3, I don’t know—which I qualified for thanks to my Crohn’s disease. On Friday my friend Brett helped me by sharing a bunch of resources and telling me about a batch of appointments that the county was releasing. At noon we both sat on the web page and pounded the refresh key combination, and I clicked fast enough to get an appointment. I guess all that time spent playing computer game as a kid paid off.

We’ve been living with the reality of the vaccines long enough now that it’s yet another thing that seems normal; it’s really not, though. The idea that we created a vaccine for a virus that we didn’t even know existed 12 months prior is totally wild. That said, we got bailed out; I wish we had taken better care of each other in the early days of the pandemic and not had to rely on the vaccines to save us. All of these Covid anniversaries have reminded me that when we first started quarantining in late March and early April, we thought we just had to get through two weeks. But I’ve been more or less in quarantine for a year now.

Hey all,

Considering the college basketball season was cancelled last year and we never got a March Madness, which is one of my favorite things in life, I have probably been in low-key bracket withdrawal ever since. Now that we are so close—the conference tournaments took place this week, and the Big Dance begins next week—I have been watching more games than normal.

On Thursday, I felt like staying up late, and after the last game of the night, I decided to watch SportsCenter on ESPN. It’s been a while since I watched it regularly, in part because over the years the show has declined a ton in quality. So I wasn’t expecting much, but they had a couple of their veteran anchors behind the desk who were channeling the spirit of the old days, when I watched Sportscenter during sleepovers at my Bubbe and Zayde’s apartment—a rare treat, since we didn’t have cable at home. The networks had much less original programming at that time, and after midnight ESPN would start replaying the final edition of Sportscenter over and over until morning. Sometimes I would keep watching the repeats, and I can still vividly remember this one segment about the 1996 Chicago Bulls chasing the all-time NBA wins record.

Thursday was March 11, which marked exactly one year since the NBA shut down its season when one of its players tested positive for the coronavirus. That was the moment that everything got real for me, and I will never forget it. March 11 was also the day the WHO declared Covid a pandemic. We’re about to hit a lot of these anniversaries. I hadn’t totally realized the gravity of all this, but then SportsCenter rolled a 10-minute documentary segment revisiting the NBA’s decision to go on “hiatus.” (I can’t find the clip, but is like a more in-depth written version.)

Hey everyone,

Last spring I mentioned a workshop I was enrolled in, where the idea was to bring together a bunch of people working in different creative fields, in order to learn about strategy and process together, and to practice confronting many of the common fears around publishing artistic work. It was a four-month program, which would have been a sizable commitment any time, but we also got hit with a pandemic right in the middle of it. Everything changed, and also, nothing changed—the program itself was still the same, and some of us found that we could use it as a refuge from the uncertainty that was consuming the rest of the world.

Many of us who stuck it out, shipping little bits of work every day and sharing insights and questions about our personal creative styles and aspirations, developed a strong bond by the end. I met some great new friends, including Nick, who was the main inspiration for this newsletter when I started it one year ago this week (!).

One larger group of several dozen of us even formed our own spin-off community, where we could keep sharing work with each other and learning from each other. We have writers, both in fiction and non-fiction, and in poetry, and we have photographers, and visual artists, and storytellers, and musicians, and people who do all of the above and more. It’s an inspiring and wholehearted place.

Hey y’all,

So many people I’ve talked to over the last few weeks have reported that February’s been a slog. I have felt this, too. It seems to take extra energy just to maintain my regular rhythms of life, meaning that I can forget about attempting to do anything “extra” or ambitious. I strongly suspect that this phenomenon is not limited to my social circles, and is in fact extremely widespread.

And that’s okay. It’s not unheard of for things to get dreary during the last days of winter, especially in the upper Midwest. What’s different this year is that the weather has been drearier and much more full of snow than usual. Another difference is that we’re still recovering from the traumatic political events of the past few months, which were never really resolved (and the debate over what it would take to resolve them is ongoing).

Oh, and there’s still a pandemic. When I started writing these emails 51 weeks ago, I never imagined we would essentially still be in lockdown. It’s true that we’re turning the corner on vaccine distribution, and that’s amazing, but we’re also at the point where both of these things are true: 1) the pandemic is at its most normalized, and 2) the pandemic’s cumulative effects are at their highest. And, at least until we hit a much higher vaccination rate, those things will get more true every day.

Hey everyone,

We are traveling in the Minnesota Northwoods this weekend, so this will be a shorter edition. It is surprisingly warm, if you consider 30 degrees to be warm—and for a place that recorded 40-below last week, I do. It’s still snowing, of course, and driving along the country roads is desolate and grey. Here is a picture Ashley took that sums it up.

Hi all,

I attended a Zoom funeral service this week. It was as beautiful as is possible for a service on Zoom to be.

My aunt Ruth (Paperny) Luttbeg died at the age of 96. She was my Bubbe’s (grandma’s) older sister, which would technically make her my great aunt, but she never felt so removed as to have the qualifier. I called all three of Bubbe’s sisters my aunts. The four Paperny sisters were so close that they essentially raised their children together. My uncle Bob said it best by calling it a kibbutz-like atmosphere. He also describes the environment as having been like a first-generation immigrant family, although it was his grandparents (Louis and Ida Paperny) who emigrated from Minsk, in what is today Belarus, and who came to Omaha where they built a home, started a family, and created a business in their adopted city (the Nebraska-famous Louis Market). The children of the Paperny girls grew up together and came to be known as the Cousins Club, although they saw themselves as more like brothers and sisters.

I don’t care for Paris.

That sounds ungodly pretentious, I know. Paris is a fine place–I was lucky enough to visit it for a couple days, when I was gallivanting around continental Europe during Easter break from my study-abroad semester in England. I enjoyed Paris—I’ll date myself, it was 2005—and I’m sure I’d appreciate it much more if I returned.

Sometimes, though, I develop an emotional connection to a place that I can only explain much later. A couple days may not be much time for a lot of things—it is enough time, however, to not feel something.

Hey everyone,

What do Hasidic swordfighters and Thurgood Marshall have in common? They're both in my newsletter this week.

I’m coming to you this week from under about 10 inches of snow—the first real big snowstorm that we’ve experienced since moving to Chicago. It’s been going for about 24 hours now; it started when the trailing edge of the storm was still over my family’s house in Omaha, and it will probably not be over until the leading edge has reached my extended family in north and central New Jersey. It’s not quite the same profundity as the “we’re all looking at the same moon” thing, but in Covid times I’ll take what I can get.

Articles

Hey y’all,

Did this feel like a very long week to anyone else? I was even lucky enough to have the day off work on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, and it still felt like I had worked a full week by the end.

Obviously there was a notable political transition ceremony, which I decided not to watch live, although I made sure to check out the videos of Lady Gaga singing the national anthem, and Amanda Gorman reading her poem, both of which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen them. (By the way, if you are a poet looking for a mainstream opportunity to read your work, it’s pretty much the inauguration or nothing.)

I’m just a little tired of high-flown rhetoric at this point. I’m more interested in what the new administration is going to actually do.

Hey everyone,

Sports!!!

Hi everyone,

I don’t have a whole lot to add to what you’ve probably already read about this week’s insurrection (what a strange thing to type). It also feels weird not to recognize it, because it was, both logistically and emotionally, the center of my week. Others have spoken of being “shocked, but not surprised,” which is how I felt, too. It doesn’t matter how long Trump has been whipping up his supporters to commit these very acts, or how long Republicans have been working to subvert the results of a free and fair election (and democracy more generally); I’m Jewish, and I just saw Nazi flags parading through my country’s legislative halls—that’s gonna sting.

It was also yet another event from the past year where I felt like I was watching history in real time. What I was seeing was the same thing I always try to imagine seeing when I’m reading about something from the distant past, like the assassination of Caesar. It has been a year in which time was at first drawn out and stretched thin, and now it has been compressed and pulled inside out. I’ve said it before: we’re not living as far in the future as we think we are, and the past isn’t past.