30 December 2024

Big Wow vs Little Wow

I was unemployed for a year and a half and got to experience a lot of big wow - a stellar, once-in-a-lifetime ski season and then moving to a new place and diving in, devouring it whole. I am guilty of overly romanticizing the free times now, conveniently forgetting the hours spent glazed-eyed looking at my phone, feeling restless, unfulfilled, and lonely. 

But there was so much big wow in getting to know a new community and a new landscape with the luxury of all the time in the world - long meandering runs and rides, trips to Canada, the ability to say yes to mid-week invitations, and the motivation to exercise constantly until I felt invincible. 

Now I'm mourning all that, kind of - the loss of spontaneity, the loss of fitness (I am really deeply sad about this one) - while acknowledging all the little wow at my fingertips: a standing coffee date with my coworkers who are so wicked smart and plugged in; riding to town unless it's raining, in which case the bus is lovely; the windows of time where I am free and thus value the outing so much more; being part of a company I'm proud of; still finding incremental improvements as a mountain biker; my weekly shift on the assembly line at the food bank, where I can be my parents' daughter and do manual labor with blunt force efficiency and anticipate the logistical needs of all the volunteers before they can even ask. Such a teacher's pet, I am. 

I have a lot more thoughts roiling around inside of me as the sun sets on 2024 but writing makes me tired because I do it constantly (happily) so instead here's some lighter fare. 

My year in culture 

Favorite album 

Short n' Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter - I could not stop listening to this impeccable pop gem. She's so GD funny and horny and she wears all of her influences on her sleeve. 

Favorite song 

Screamland, Father John Misty - Maybe it's recency bias because I just found this orchestral song but I am loving its massive crescendos and crashing soundscapes. 

Favorite nonfiction 

Number Go Up - One helluva yarn about crypto that includes some mighty fine reporting. 

Favorite fiction

Menewood - This didn't come out in 2024 but I don't care, this book (and Hild, the first in the series) rocked my world. It's astounding, powerful, lyrical, suspenseful, deeply human. It has every element of my favorite hero's journeys, from the scouring of the Shire to Lyra Belacqua plus Sabriel and the machinations of Game of Thrones, but with the nature writing of Ernest Thompson Seton in the landscape of Watership Down. I already want to read it again.

Runners-up in fiction

The Vaster Wilds - Beautiful and visceral. 

Good Material - A lovely and easy and funny book about the existential pain of break-ups.

Most overrated book 

James - This book has been showered with accolades and I just don't get it. I was never entranced by the Huck Finn extended universe but I think a reimagining could have been a lot more elegant and lot less anachronistic than this. 

Best long read 

The Penny Problem - "The United States has created for itself a logistical problem so stupendously stupid, one cannot help wondering if it is wise to continue to allow this nation to supervise the design of its own holiday postage stamps, let alone preside over the administration of an extensive interstate highway system or nuclear arsenal."

Best newsletter 

Little Fire Burning - My friend Amanda does beautiful things with words and I thought she absolutely nailed post-election sentiment with her piece "A Great and Difficult Transformation." 

Best TV show 

Industry, Season 4 - Messy riveting can't-look-away TV. 

Best movie 

Challengers - My pitch to everyone is that while this was advertised as a sexy romp (and it still is that) it's actually mostly a sports movie. I loved Challengers because I perceived it to be about how our culture doesn't allow elite female athletes to be driven, type-A assholes who only care about winning. 

18 April 2024

Maslow's Hierarchy

It wasn't until after our evening bike ride - me and five other girls romping around on the trails a mile from my house, the spring greens so sharp, Baker picturesque on the horizon, the temperature perfect, the dirt dry but grippy - that I realized yesterday was the one-year anniversary of us moving here. 

First trillium of spring

It felt like only days ago that I stood in a semi circle around our shitty pit fire with my wonderful friends in the backyard of my home in Idaho. I felt so much love welling up in my chest through the final weeks before our departure. Adult platonic love really is something and I'm grateful to have so much of it in my little chosen families. 

One last good sesh

After we moved, it was pretty darn good for awhile. I've written about that a lot, about all the new experiences and wild adventures and constant novelty. But nagging at me was this sense that I hadn't really begun to live yet. I didn't know until I didn't have a job how wrapped up in my self image work was, how even though I was comfortable financially I was super uncomfortable feeling untethered, imagining my friends and family thought I was an indolent wastrel, having a beer with lunch, going to barre class, surfing job descriptions but rarely applying because I was too picky, looking at my phone all the time.

Exactly a year ago

And life was really so great besides that, but then suddenly the door opened at the one place that I really wanted to work, and I stole into the foyer and set about making myself indispensable. Everything I've learned, from my parents at my first job up to the myriad often painful lessons of my chosen career, I poured into giving them the best impression possible. Wow, I wanted them to say, she's so communicative, so fast, so responsive to feedback, so professional, such a great writer. 

(She's also a weirdo who loves playing dress-up)

The first article and the second and the third were easy, and then I got an assignment that really played to my strengths, and I knocked it out of the park. And they kept pitching me stories because one of the reporters was on leave, and then this week they said, does it make more sense for you to be on staff? and I grinned like a crocodile. 

Life was good before - I have new friends that I am head over heels in love with, I survived the rainy season, I'm really fit, I volunteer at the food bank to feel less bad about the state of the world - and now I have a job. The job. The job that I wanted for a whole year. 

The people here...

11 April 2024

PNF

Brevard makes me a little angsty. I wrote about that almost ten years ago too - I'm starting to repeat myself. When I lived in California and Idaho I felt starved for constant canopy and wanted to drink it in every time I visited, but I'm getting plenty of that now. This visit, I felt less desperate to get out on the trails that I know so well. But I still went for a few runs, and the forest still grabbed me right in the same pleasure receptors that it always does. 


The forests of Washington are more beautiful and lush and primeval but Pisgah exists in my bones and flows in my blood. 

It's not even particularly lovely this time of year, just the mottled gray-brown of organic matter and the big bare tulip poplar stands casting their bar code shadows over the coves, the intermittent green of the rhodo and laurel. It's the only time of year that you get some hints of topography, ridges and subpeaks normally blocked by foliage. The smell of sun baked leaves is so strong it sits in your mouth and in your nose. It's quiet except for the punch of footfalls through disintegrating ground cover, the diverse bird call, the pugnacious chittering of tree vermin. 


For some reason running in Pisgah makes me want to write, maybe out of habit since I used to scribble something down after almost every run, before I was getting paid to do so. I just did it out of pleasure and necessity. 

I told Morgan that and she hypothesized that it's because the forest is so storied, so ancient. Yeah, I'd buy that.