This is what I do on Friday nights
The thing I like most about Philadelphia is the way people greet each other on the street. There’s never any question—you make eye contact and say hi. In New York I was never sure when to say hello or not—on the crowded sidewalks in Manhattan, no, but in my old neighborhoods, in Park Slope and Williamsburg? Sometimes? If I knew the person? If I didn’t want to make them feel offended? What I always felt was awkward, and there were periods of time when I just looked down at the sidewalk whenever I was out because at least that way I didn’t have to deal with it. I wasn’t being rude—I was just depressed and antisocial! It ended up being self-fulfilling. By the time we left, I routinely went for days and days without going outside.
In DC, it was different. We were lonely. I left the house in search of social interaction and experienced the awkwardness of not being greeted in return (which, for those of you who have similar issues with social anxiety, is actually way less awkward than ignoring people), and occasionally I met a crazy person—aka a normal person who had gone for so long without a conversation that they seized any opportunity to volunteer a lot of information. Which was fine. I was usually not very busy. The norm there was to greet other people’s dogs and children and not interact with anybody else.
In other news
I start my new job on Monday. I hope this doesn’t mean I won’t have time to write to you again. I’m expecting a few weeks of dealing with the learning curve before I come up with a routine. What time I’ll log in every day. How much work I’ll need to do on nights and weekends. In my old career, in publishing, the expectation was that you were working every minute that you could—reading manuscripts at night, making your entire social life the industry—and I struggled with what turned out to be a pretty normal desire to also be involved in other things. I went to rock shows. I went to Dharma Punx. I wrote. Which is not to make excuses in advance for not writing future newsletters, but—I’m getting to this as I type—to set an aspiration. To do well at this job and to reserve a space for writing.
And, oh, also—the family. The meal-planning and grocery runs and the nightly ordeal of feeding everybody while the baby drops her cup a thousand times and the three-year-old makes increasingly irrational demands (tonight he wanted jam on the tortilla chips we gave him because the fish was taking too long to defrost) and then the next ordeal of bedtime, which lately involves trying to convince our three-year-old to take a bath (he went on strike) and when that's done we're doing things like mailing New Year’s cards before it’s technically not January anymore and getting the laundry done and—anyway—it’s fine. It’s going to be fine. I’ll find the time.
Speaking of the kids
Our three-year-old wrote his own name by himself the other day, and now the baby is saying her first word, which is cat, or “kek,” as she pronounces it. Yesterday she brought us a toy triceratops (which does look kind of like a cat) and kept saying “kek” over and over. She likes books these days because she’s looking for the cat pictures.
This is her and me over the summer.
Update: the three-year-old is bathing as I write this. I gave him hand soap and told him polar bears like making bubbles. It’s snowing now. He did a whole unit on polar bears this week at school.
Matt news
Matt has a new story on Insider this week about Putin and Ukraine in which he’s being uncharacteristically semi-hawkish. It’s paywalled, so I’ll give you what he’s arguing in miniature: Among the many disastrous effects of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is our reluctance, now, to defend a democracy that wants our help. I don’t know if I’m convinced—I want all of our defense budget to be spent on the VA and on medical care in general and also on humanitarian efforts, education, childcare, and fountains of kombucha flowing in the squares of every town—but Matt and I do not always agree.
One thing we can’t seem to agree on is a mattress. I can’t even get into this right now because it’s still an ongoing disaster, but, in summary: We sold our cheap Ikea bed before we moved. We put the nine-year-old foam mattress we’d been sleeping on in our new basement. We bought a new mattress. It was not good. We returned it and bought another mattress. It was worse. Now we’re on mattress #3. How much I hate the mattress industry cannot be summed up in the kind of language that I feel is appropriate for mass email, so I’ll leave it to your imagination. I won’t say that we’ve considered “sleep divorce” to be an option, but we now know that such a term exists.
Read, read, read
But anyway. We do still read. As a follow-up to Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener’s memoir of the startup world in San Francisco, I’m reading Kathy Wang’s Impostor Syndrome now, which is also set in SF and also grapples with online privacy and being a woman working in tech, only it’s a spy novel and not a memoir. It’s a fast read and I’m really enjoying it.
Here are some other books set in San Francisco, in case you want to join me in my literary substitutes for travel:
Jennifer Egan’s first novel, The Invisible Circus, about growing up in the shadow of the late 1960s. Egan seems to be embarrassed by this book whenever someone asks her about it, but it’s convincing (I think) in its portrayal of that era, and of what it was like to be a few years too young to have been on the scene when everything was happening. (It’s also a little bit about Steve Jobs, whom she dated in college.)
Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room and her essays in The Hard Crowd about growing up in San Francisco are so, so good. The essays made me hate her for how cool she is—everything she writes just leaves me stunned with awe at her talent. Read The Flamethrowers. Read the first thirty pages of Telex From Cuba.
The only thing more gritty than The Mars Room might be Don Carpenter’s A Hard Rain Falling, which I’ve recommended in this newsletter before, for fans of Denis Johnson, though he doesn’t end up in San Francisco until later in the story.
If you want time travel without the grit, read Suzanne Rindell’s The Two Mrs. Carlyles, a suspenseful dive into the city right after the 1906 earthquake. She is a dear friend of mine and I want to go to San Francisco mainly because it’s been—!!!—almost six years since I’ve seen her.
More to read
Three years a story making fun of Robert Mueller got pulled down from The Onion because it made fun of Robert Mueller. Thanks to the Wayback Machine—and to Matt for bringing this to my attention—you can still read it. In retrospect, it’s pretty tame. As much as I hope New York’s AG finally gets him, reading comedy about a farce is handy way to remind ourselves to not get too excited about the revelations of our time.