“I mean, you can’t just be a wimp and call yourself a pacifist.”
— Carla
Carla: Oof, Sully’s YouTube video made me nauseated. Is that a thing? Can a YouTube video make you nauseated?
Scott: Carla, anything can make you nauseated.
“I just don’t picture myself as a secretary.”
— Carla, substitutes and budget secretary at Delta, to Heather, other secretary at Delta, standing in the Delta office considering a recent College Township job opening for a secretary
You bring the fog
In the fall a soft fog
And I follow a call
Saying, “Come” ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Mother Nature’s little sister
Taught me everything I know ✏️ 🎤 🎵
It’s fine, Babe
It’s fine.
I do it all the time, Babe.
Except I never know what to tell you when I’m done. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…
…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
🎨 I’m dithering writing to myself about Paul McCartney while wife is making this:
Carla: There’s a book I wanna read.
Éa: Me, too. But I finished it.
If something matters to Carla, then it matters to me.
Éa: You’re very good at putting buns in. But you’re not very good at sleeping in them.
Carla: Build me up and tear me down! Build me up and tear me down!
Éa: At least you’re even!
Family walks are the best.
Scott: You can’t touch my face. I’m in quarantine.
Carla: Well, I can punch your face!
Carla: [Saint] Paul totally bonked. He was a-bonkin!
Scott: Paul wasn’t bonking.
Carla: C’mon. You know he was bonking!
Scott: You are the strangest Christian wife I could have acquired.
My new motto in life is: If it’s not worth doing for free, it’s not worth doing!
— Carla, to Frank
Éa: What’s a placenta?
Sullivan: What!? You don’t know what a placenta is? Mom, we have failed.
Carla: Why can’t I be a ten-year-old boy? I’ve always wanted to dress like a ten-year-old boy!
Scott: You often do.
[overheard while Sullivan and Éa build a precarious fort]:
Éa: Sully, did you just swear!?
Sullivan: What!? No!
Éa: No really, Sully, did you say the S word?
Sullivan: No! Only Mom does that!
And then I wrapped my ankle brace around my uterus.
— Carla
Scott: Sometimes I wish I were the smaller one.
Carla: Why, so you could beat me up?
Oh my gosh. Jesus.
— Carla
“Emotional support feels terrible.”
— Carla
“Things getting worse isn’t always a bad thing.”
— Carla
If, when I’m old, you were to ask me to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I predict I’d tell you it was a day all four of us attended Clearwater Conservancy’s annual meeting at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Gray’s Woods. Pure Cane Sugar provided background music. We enjoyed grilled shrimp, baked squash, couscous, apple cider, and more. Betsy Whitman got to know me and vice versa a little after the business part of the meeting was done. But I pick this gathering as my thing to share from today because I came home feeling a shade lonely and jealous of Carla.
Why? Because our lives are structured in a way that facilitates her enjoying hours of leisure.
To be clear, I’m not saying she doesn’t pull her weight around the house. I’m really just saying she gets to be more social—both in a pure sense and in a project- or cause-oriented sense—than I, by a long shot. I’ve spent the whole week without having really touched or talked with anyone other than my three favorites.
If, when I’m old, you were to ask me to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I predict I’d tell you that Carla was reelected today. I’m glad for her and proud of her.