Being Stuck and Getting Un-Stuck

Hi, Friends! I almost went with a period after Friends just now. That’s where we’re at: I, a person whose default setting is mild enthusiasm, at a place mentally where I reconsider using exclamation points. And to be clear, I’m fine. I have access to everything I need and most of what I want, and by that measure I’m considerably better than fine. By and large, everyone in my orbit is fine, too, thank goodness. At the same time, none of us is actually fine, are we?

Live footage of me????

We can’t possibly be fine when our neighbors – whether they live in our actual neighborhood or are living anywhere on this spinning blue dot of ours – are so deeply not fine. Our neighbors who perhaps weren’t born in the US are under attack here, struck with fear when they do something they formerly thought was sensible, such as attend an event at their child’s school, or show up for work, or report as instructed for a check-in in court or to attend a meeting with a local immigration service office.

Our neighbors in Palestine are not fine, as their children starve and as people trying to furnish desperately needed aid and assistance are prevented from providing that live-saving aid and nourishment. I could go on and on. Human beings being what we are guarantees that every moment of every day, we’re filtering out the knowledge of how not-fine things are. Close to home, miles away, people we know, people we’ll never even hear of, not-fine-ness is everywhere.

I’ve felt so stuck about it, and every time I’m conscious of that stuck-ness, I’m also thinking about how pointless feeling stuck is, how it’s always threatening to multiply itself into despair. So many people I know feel stuck, too, and we can intellectualize this all day long – goodness knows that’s been my favorite coping mechanism for decades now – but the only ones who benefit from us feeling how stuck we are, are the people inflicting the damage that’s making us stuck. Not to put too fine or vulgar a point on it, but those people don’t deserve shit.

For example, the hateful, rage-filled walking pencil eraser¹ who seems to be the one actually running the country lately just had to go and scream at the ICE agents to encourage them to whisk people off the streets randomly, didn’t he? That guy doesn’t deserve our existential angst, he deserves our derision. He deserves to be booed loudly and remorselessly everywhere he goes, to be shunned forever, and to know that he’s earned every bit of it. He doesn’t deserve the peace and quiet he gets when we feel too stuck to shame and annoy him.

And per usual when I write these kinds of issues, I’m writing to myself just as much to you. I don’t have a singular, ultra-effective fix to offer here. I’m just a person. I have to keep putting one foot in front of another, because what’s the alternative? You’re just a person, too, which, when I stop to think about it, is a comfort to me, and I hope it is to you, too. That’s all we are, and that means that we should be able to shore each other up enough to help us all keep going. These feet – rhetorical, political, non-metaphorical – have to keep walking.

If you’re walking in any of tomorrow’s No Kings marches and rallies, make sure you take steps to keep yourself safe, both bodily (primer on dealing with pepper spray and other threats to skin health from the A+ skincare brand Dieux) and digitally (thank you, Wired, for taking this out from behind the paywall!)

Swimming, walking, they’re basically the same thing, right?

I’ll close out with a little round-up of things that have been helping me keep walking over the last month or so:

Dame Margaret wrote in a recent issue that knitting has been a powerful emotion regulator for her, and all I can say is SAME. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned previously that i’m working on a very cute pullover called Evenfall. After casting on in January, it took me a while to get past the challenges of counting and re-counting (and re-re-counting) stitches as I worked the yoke increases, and have since made a lot of progress on the body. I love that the cute little puppytooth effect from the slipped stitch rows is so pronounced the more I knit. I’ve long since learned to stop predicting when I might be able to wear a completed project, so I’ll just say that this one is chugging along nicely.

Art, generally, is helping, too. The actual genius Greedy Peasant is erudite and generous and fun, what a treasure. Thomas Flight’s video essays about film are must-watches and help me see things in movies that would otherwise be invisible to me. I recently watched The Zone of Interest (because I know how to have fun!!!) and Flight’s work has been crucial to my understanding of it. Seb and I have been waiting very impatiently for new episodes of Crash Course: Native American History to drop each week. And two small, no-ticket-required exhibits at the Philadelphia Museum of Art reminded me of how important it is to take a moment to fill my entire field of vision with beautiful things people are capable of when we’re not being ungenerous, murderous monsters towards each other. A retrospective of work by Wanda Gág (probably most well-known as the writer-illustrator of Millions of Cats) and Firing The Imagination: Japanese Influence on French Ceramics, 1860-1910 were exactly what I needed to see on my last museum visit. They were witty, full of warmth, and it was genuinely soul-nourishing to get to see so clearly the creative work of fellow human’s hands and commitment to beauty and experimentation.

I’ll close out with some recent writing I’m particularly happy with. I’ve had some writers’ block around the newsletter of late, and I tend not to link to my work here, probably out of a little misplaced guilt blended with unnamed reasons I can’t make logical, but which add up to a bashfulness that serves nothing and no one. I mean! You’re reading this newsletter, which suggests you like what I write at least enough to take a peek at these emails, so why wouldn’t I share that stuff with you? Friends, she’s a neurotic weirdo rolling her eyes at herself!

For The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, I wrote about Steven Fletcher, a striker whose super-clutch goals over the course of last season helped Wrexham AFC snag their third consecutive promotion up the football leagues to play in the Championship league next year. Unfortunately, he got released by the team just a couple of days after I spoke with him about their magical season and what he was looking forward to for next season. It made a couple of mid-season episodes of Welcome to Wrexham in which he features prominently more bittersweet than they were likely intended.

For now, Finn Wolfhard is most famous for playing Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things, but he’s also a musician, and most importantly, a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable music nerd. We had a great chat over at grammy.com in the run-up to his first solo album, Happy Birthday, being released last week.

And finally, I’ve been relishing the very silly and very fun French series Carême, and wrote a full-season recap of it for Vulture. The show asserts that this young bad boy chef invented vol-au-vents and rifled through Mme de Staël’s papers during a party he catered at her house. That his patisserie (temporarily) saved the relationship between France and Great Britain. That he made cakes horny. Truly sublime cooking is magical, but I didn’t know that France’s first bad boy chef was also a literal wizard! I really can’t say enough about it – if you have AppleTV+, I encourage you to treat yourself to Carême’s shameless and utterly sincere goofiness (complimentary).

1. My apologies to pencil erasers, who are blameless angels in this situation, it’s not their fault that the resemblance between them and this bozo is so uncanny.