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!
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
No, no, no, your ridicule is quite powerful. I appreciate it, actually.
— Scott, to Carla
Scott: Oh, Carla, you don’t get cranky.
Carla: No, but I do get honest.
**Donna: ** Sullivan’s mom would volunteer [in the library] for a Tuesday, but would need to bring Sullivan’s sister. Is that okay?
Mardi: Yep! If she’s anything like Sullivan, she could probably help out too!
Donna: We are a go!
He’s such a dick! No offense, Scott.
— Carla, c. 2005, while watching The Last of the Mohicans, presumably referring to Magua
Scott [after Carla suffers a seemingly neverending sneeze attack]: What is your body trying to get rid of?
Carla [sniffling]: My face.