Stupid animals
The dumbest animal I’ve ever encountered was an armadillo in a scrub forest outside of Ocala, Florida. It heard my footsteps and dundered away from me, running head-first into a palmetto bush. It paused, possibly stunned, then continued what it had been doing before, which was snuffling noisily through a pile of leaves.
Pediatric occupational therapist Rachel Coley is devoted to helping parents keep their newborns from getting a flat head, a condition known as plagiocephaly. Her main concern isn't cosmetic, but what plagiocephaly means for a baby’s motor development. Heads get flat because babies get stuck in car seats and swings for too many hours, limiting their freedom to move. Lack of movement can lead to motor delays, which are linked to cognitive delays. Reading Coley’s blog makes you want to take this issue as seriously as she does. Free the babies! And unless your use of internet is limited to looking at pictures of rocks, you’ve probably read a thing or two, here and there, extolling all the ways that movement and exercise makes you smart.
All of which is a long way of saying that I am still trying to motivate myself to look forward to going back to the gym. I am not looking forward. I do not miss the gym. I might feel good after a six-minute workout, which is about all the exercise I’d like to do, but I still don’t miss working out in a group. I don't like watching my 12-week-old struggle through tummy time, either, as important as it is to help her with her motor skills, and her future intelligence. I hope she'll be able to pass the marshmallow test someday, which cuttlefish are now known to be able to do.
Twice in the past two weeks I’ve run into people in the park who have mistaken for someone they know. They look at me, I look at them, I assume the eye contact is about to lead to acknowledgement, I wave and say hi. They say hi back. My husband, walking next to me, assumes I must know these people. I assume he does. We engage in some chitchat, compliment each other’s children or pets, and make up an excuse to keep walking (“Welp, it’s time for somebody’s lunch”). Then we ask one another: Do you know those people? Did they think we were someone else? Then my husband makes me some lunch.
Maybe that armadillo wasn’t so stupid. Armadillos are covered in armor, after all. They probably taste like the footballs that they so resemble. It probably guessed correctly that I wasn’t going to eat it. When it heard me start walking toward it again, it scurried away again, though it didn’t move very quickly, or go very far.
Listening update
I had a social interaction last weekend! I went to brunch! Outside! Once again I mostly blabbed about myself. I remember almost nothing that the other person said to me, only how cute her baby was. I do remember, however, that she recommended a newsletter: Delighter. And now you know about it too.
Read, read, read
I want to tell you about some cool books that I've recently read, but I feel like half of you will have already heard of everything I really like, which makes me feel obligated to come up with something you may never have heard of, which is exactly how so much weird and bad crap ends up on end-of-year “best” lists, which are as much about the recommender as they are about the books. (That was a free bonus rant.)
So. In an attempt to be all things to everyone, I’m going to recommend one thing and then follow it with another thing in case you’ve already read the first thing. Actually, two things.
Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, by Lily King. Euphoria was a big bestseller and prize winner in 2014. Inspired by the life of Margaret Mead, it's about anthropologists in the South Pacific in the years before the Second World War, rich with the detail of what practicing anthropology must have been like back then, among people whose interaction with the outside world was preciously small. And there's a love triangle! It's so good I read it twice.
If you've already read it and want more anthropological stuff, check out Paul Radin’s classic from the 1920s, Primitive Man as Philosopher, reissued by NYRB in 2017. Radin was among the first to regard so-called “primitive” people as every bit as rational as us victims of civilization, and his arguments hold.
Last year’s Writers & Lovers is the reason everyone is rereading Lily King. Clearly autobiographical, and clearly the kind of book you're allowed to write only after you've published something as dazzling and brilliant as Euphoria, Writers & Lovers is the best and most realistic thing I’ve ever read about what it’s like to be a writer, specifically one who’s been trying (and mostly failing) to write a novel for years. About half of it is set in a restaurant—read it for the pleasure of what it was like to dine inside!
If you’ve already read Writers & Lovers and want to read more about being a writer, you’re in luck, because there are hundreds of novels in that particular category. My two favorites are Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, about a writer trying to take a vacation (to put it mildly), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, about a writer of a blog (to vastly oversimplify the premise). Sadly for me, you’ve probably already read both of those too. So join me in reading Writers & Lovers one more time.
Complaints
I was going to complain about how stupid everyone is on TikTok for promoting a made-up word like “cheugy” when there’s already the word “reg,” but there really isn’t that much to say. Cheugy means reg. It’s regs on the internet. I don’t understand why the New York Times is trying so hard to be hip.
Instead I’m going to complain with a picture. What am I supposed to do about a police car that keeps blocking the curb cut on the sidewalk? Citizen’s arrest? You tell me.
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More from me in another two weeks.