Dead Letter Department #45

weather report

For the past week, I’ve had one half of my apartment disassembled & shoved into the other half, kitchen & office tetrised into the bedroom, leaving me a narrow path to actually get into the bed without knocking anything over. My upper kitchen cabinets decided to slowly start parting ways with the walls they were wedded to a couple of years ago, a process that began as gaslighting, when I discovered that my mixer would no longer fit under them. “I must have been mistaken about where I kept this,” I said, as I futilely tried to slide the mixer back, and the cabinets presumably chortled to themselves. They descended gradually, untethering themselves from the wall a tiny fraction of an inch at time until I could actually see a strip of the previous paint color above them, an unpleasantly buttery yellow, and realized what was happening.

The pace, fortunately, was glacial, but so was my ability to organize anyone to come & look at them, especially once the pandemic started, so the cabinets crept slowly downward until they began to appear quite precarious, tilted forward at enough of an angle that I was constantly expecting things to slide out, reaching out instinctively to catch my spicy ramen, even though it wasn’t moving. I stopped keeping heavy things in them in the hopes of stretching their lifespan a little longer, and urged them silently to cling to life. One of those strategies worked long enough for them to limp through the entire excruciating process of finding, hiring & scheduling the work, & now their suffering is blessedly ended.

Today is meant to be the last day of construction in my apartment, which hopefully means I will return tonight to doing things I previously had insufficient appreciation for, such as drinking water that flows out of my own sink*, & putting literally anything I own away where it belongs. I’ve been working in my mom’s art studio all week, so in addition to staring out the front window at my innocent neighbors going about their business, I’ve spent the entire work day confronted with an enormous photo of myself as a baby, wearing a frilled garment & in possession of an unbelievably large head. It’s one thing to know, as an adult with a proper amount of hair & shoulders & such, that my head is very large, & another thing entirely to see photographic evidence that it has literally always been the case: as long as I have had breath, I have had a positively colossal skull.

It hasn’t been, as you can imagine, the most productive environment. I am a very phone off when working type of person, usually leaving it face down & silent someplace where I have to get up and walk a few steps to get to it so I don’t get distracted by wanting to text my friends all day, or gaze into the howling maw (increasing in decibel level, I think, with twitter’s implosion) of social media. This is obviously impossible when there is a pleasant & hugely competent man using power tools where you usually thwack your hard boiled eggs against the counter who occasionally needs to ask a question about configuration or insulation, so I decided reasonably early on in the process that getting literally anything done was a win.

Catch up on emails? Win! Notes from what I’ve been reading? Even better! I did get a few slivers of proper work done, & the part time transcription gig went rather better than that, largely because it takes focus but not the full press of trying depart this world for the one I’m imagining. It’s been a scattered & interrupted week. I optimistically made a whole pile of books & magazines, thinking that since I wouldn’t be able to watch TV or really use my computer in the evenings, surely I’d get some good reading in instead—but it turns out after eight hours of  wall-rattling construction directly above my head & multiple meals a day with my mom, a little light Elizabeth Hardwick/Robert Lowell was not exactly the thing. Instead, I started a brand new game of Stardew Valley, which I’ll probably write you a whole letter about sometime soon, & redownloaded Reddit to immerse myself in other people’s drama, always so much more soothing than my own. I’m hoping for a renewal of productivity once I’ve got an actual desk again—I miss my view of trees & clouds, & the ability to go take breaks at the water when I’ve got itchy feet from sitting for too long.

reading room

I did read this article—Faultlines, from the Atavist, although I discovered it through Riese’s infrequent but invaluable Things I Read That I Love column at Autostraddle. Autostraddle is one of those things that has slipped out of feeling relevant enough to be a daily read for me as my compass needle has swung away from womanhood, but they do excellent queer pop culture coverage, & Riese has a incredible way of surfacing long form reads on a huge variety of subjects. This one is about a famous magnet school in LA, run largely by the sort of charismatic, idealistic liberal teachers who figured highly in my own education, who, in this case, were using their own high school students as an ever-fresh pool for grooming & dating.

I didn’t date any of my teachers, but I did, as a young person, run into a number of smart, passionate adults with extremely porous emotional boundaries & establish a few relationships that were in retrospect pretty questionable, so there was a lot in the article that made me think back & reconsider how I’d viewed things at the time. I’ve been glad to see that there’s a counter-narrative rounding the corner, culturally, one that is determined to tell kids that the people who are so happy to praise them for being ‘mature’ are often seeing a conveniently pre-adulthood blank slate to act their own dramas out. Kids aren’t supposed to be mature. That’s counter to the whole business they’re engaged in. Kids are supposed to be kids, wholeheartedly wrapped up in their own experiences & interests, not wedged into whatever load-bearing configuration happens to be convenient for the adults around them.

one good thing

I’ve been thinking about this TikTok whenever the moon is big enough for me to see the rabbit.

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*(nb for peanut: soon i shall be a two sink king again)