Dead Letter Department #9

(did you miss dead letter department #8? catch up here!)

T-minus two days to immunity and I have an actual social plan, you guys. I am going to get to see my friend, and also pet a dog! I did warn her that I have certainly lost the plot on how to hang out, but fortunately I am going to be seeing one of my most understanding friends. Her expectations are extremely reasonable & she has cleverly included a tract of wilderness as our destination, so if I do suddenly totally power down and forget how to behave the witnesses will be severely limited: trees, a noisy, running stream, maybe a stray squirrel or two.

tell a stranger what to do

During these pain de mie times I’ve gotten increasingly obsessed with advice columns. There’s Danny Lavery’s Dear Prudence at Slate, the old gold standard of Captain Awkward, but also Ask a Manager, Ask Polly & Molly, Ask Bear (probably the most generous-hearted—not currently running regularly but we can hope he’ll be back) & when those archives begin to wear thin, the infamous Am I the Asshole subreddit, which provides the twin delights of a constant scroll and stone cold judgement. There are only three rulings in the world of Am I the Asshole: YTA, you are the asshole; NAH, no assholes here (rare, there is usually an offender); and ESH, everyone sucks here. How perfectly clear it is, I think to myself, reading another long screed about stepfamilies. You are definitely the asshole.

This fascination is relatively new, and like most weird deep dives, I was almost to the bottom before I really started thinking about what I was doing down there. I think it’s filling the hole where gossip should be, and small talk, and weekend updates from all the people I normally talk to lightly, just a social brushing of shoulders. All of those places are empty right now. I got a mocha from the drive-through place in my neighborhood a few days ago & while I was waiting for the barista there was one of those little gaps in conversation where you’re supposed to keep things gliding smoothly forward by asking a question or saying something innocuous. The crumbling, splintered wheels in my brain creaked into life at the last moment with ask her what kind of dog she has, and I did, but it was a genuine effort to remember how to do it, how to say something small and friendly. I realized as I drove away it’s not the least bit instinctual anymore, talking to strangers, even being in proximity to them.

I saw a social media post floating around about how this is the moment to change how we interact, this is when polite conversation should be thrown over the side of the ship completely. No more talking about the weather, whoever it was said. I want to hear about your hopes and dreams, your darkest secrets! I truly hope they have a wonderful time with this social re-engineering project, but I am here to tell you that if someone tries to ask me about my closest-held dreams and most embarrassing secrets in line at the bank the only thing they’re going to get from me is a balled-up receipt delivered with extreme prejudice. Small talk isn’t small because people are boring; it’s small-scale because that’s the weight most casual conversation can bear; it’s the weight most of us can handle as we’re going about our days, carrying our various responsibilities and burdens.

Sometimes you stumble into a deep place unexpectedly with a stranger and find yourselves both ready to be there. I’ve felt very lucky when it’s happened to me—sometime I’ll tell you guys about the most life-changing conversation I’ve ever had on a plane, with a man I never saw again—but I’m not sure it’s something you can engineer, and I do think trying to extract it from people is an unkindness.

reading room

I just started Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong, on the recommendation of Arabelle Sicardi, one of my favorite writers on beauty, terror and fashion. Their recommendations are always gold, as is S.E. Smith’s recent essay in Catapult, On Disability & Cure Evangelism, but the bulk of my reading hours have been spent on Wolf Hall. I read it for the first time a couple years after it came out, when a lot of the bookish people I followed were still determinedly talking it up, still trying to get the rest of us into it. I came back to it when the sequel arrived, because my poor sieve-like memory does not allow for multi-year gaps between books if I want to have the least recollection of where or even who everyone was when we saw them last. Like many people, I’ve been buying myself little things to arrive at hopefully cheerful intervals, and the third in the series got to my house a few weeks ago, so I took Wolf Hall back off the shelf again to start the whole cycle over.

Sometimes you have to hitch yourself to a story rather optimistically, rather pointedly. You choose to trust the writer, deliberately suspend your disbelief using whatever mechanisms you’ve got for that, hoping that it’ll be worth it, or at least diverting enough to make you glad you managed to put down your phone. With Hilary Mantel I never have to try at all, never have to consciously shove myself into the pages, because Thomas Cromwell is perfectly real, completely inhabited, more alive than plenty of people I’ve actually met. I would know him instantly if I saw him walking down the street; his devotions and his griefs are, temporarily, my own. It’s the kind of reading I was a little bit afraid, during the long dry spell I had this past winter, that I was never going to have again. I thought I had somehow completely lost the knack, the facility, for that kind of devotion. It turns out I needed an ugly, quasi-fictional fifteenth century Englishman and a long-ago plague to bring me back.

one good thing

Buttercups and blackberries are the invasive bane of my garden. I foolishly did not attend to their incursions in early spring so now I’m spending ages yanking them out, piling them high in the compost bin, carefully grasping the smoothest part of a thorned vine only to have it hook right through my gardening glove & into the meat of my palm. I was weeding the bed by the lavender, rustling through the dead grass, when I overturned a little soft bundle of something: fur, I realized, after a second, and I couldn’t figure out why so much swept-out dog fur would have accumulated in one place.

But it wasn’t dog hair: far too thick and soft, wrapped in dead grass, almost like a tiny sleeping bag. It took me a minute to realize I’d uncovered an empty rabbit nest. My backyard is part of their territory: the rabbits have various ways in and out despite it being completely fenced, & I spent some quality time last winter steadfastly ignoring an absolutely huge specimen so she’d think I didn’t see her & would stay longer. It never occurred to me that they might try to have babies in here, & it’s nice to imagine her hopping along the unweeded beds & deciding it would be a pleasant place to raise children.

I don’t know enough to be able to tell if the nest is abandoned or yet to be used so I just covered it back up again with the lavender branches in case she decides to move back in.

write back

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