Oak Wilt
Just saw this tweet —
“There is NO KNOWN CURE for an oak wilt infection,” is as far as my brain got before skipping straight to the photo of the disembodied hand.
…
MY BRAIN
Oh no. Something I’ve never heard of that human beings can definitely get and it’s INCURABLE.
MY BRAIN
Oak wilt sounds scary.
MY BRAIN
I bet it looks gross.
MY BRAIN
What is oak wilt anyway? Like a fungal thing that develops on your hands, feet and elbows and then quickly spreads to the rest of your body like chickenpox?
MY BRAIN
or what
MY BRAIN
I wonder, is it more scaly, or more bulbous?
MY BRAIN
How quickly does oak wilt progress from extremities to attacking internal organs?
MY BRAIN
Hey wait, I had that hangnail last week. I wonder if it’s actually the start of an oak wilt infection OH GOD OH GOD oh god oh my god I’ve got it don’t I, I’ve got the oak wilt.
MY BRAIN
I can’t believe I survived the Trump years and started a new editorial business only to be struck down by oak wilt at the height of my prime.
MY BRAIN
Jeeze, look at this hangnail, I mean it’s mostly healed but it’s obviously The Wilt. Grant just didn’t want to tell me I had oak wilt because he’s too sad for me.
MY BRAIN, IMAGINING GRANT AT MY FUNERAL
”My fiancée was so beautiful and such a nice person. She was the light of my life until she contracted oak wilt on her fingernail AND DIED”
OUR FRIENDS ATTEMPTING TO CONSOLE GRANT IN HIS GRIEF
Isn’t there a Macklemore song that will help him in this trying time
Anyway, so it turns out oak wilt infection actually affects, uh, oak trees — and oak trees only — so hey, bullet dodged, in case you, too, were starting to worry you might have oak wilt.
And a hearty hello from March 2021 to you too, friends.
SELF DOUBT IS SO PRE-2020
I’m feeling a strange sense of optimism lately that has nothing much to do with external circumstances, because how could it? It’s still the pandemic, it’s March once again, time has become meaningless and nothing matters. But it’s also… the pandemic. March again. Time is meaningless and nothing matters, so I might as well be in a good mood, seems to be my brain’s angle.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how many truly fabulous people there are out there who are plagued by self-doubt. But then I look over at my dog and think what a marvelous little miracle of floppy fur and paws he is. And he, like all the other floppy-furs out there, seems to have an utter absence of self-doubt. It’s glorious.
Yet — he doesn’t *do* much.
I mean, he greets us with a big waggy tail when we come in the door, every single time, and he is patient and bears it well if we leave the house without him, and if he meets a new human (or one he already knows) he loses his mind with doggy joy. He humps his giant bone, he demands to go out, he demands to come back in, then out, then in again, then he just wants you to please open the door so he can stand there and look out, he nudges his toys against moveable plant pots and then barks at them when the plant pots respond to the nudging by scootching a few millimeters, he chases crows, he cries if you give him a really good treat, he wangles cheese, he accosts strangers in the elevator, he jumps on our bed and digs himself a little nest between the pillow shams, he barks at the ironing board and the paper shredder.
Yet, he is adored for absolutely all of it. Every facet of him is loved. Sometimes I look at him and just think, “How are you real, and how are you this glorious?”
No one wants him to be any different than exactly who and what he is. He’s perfect.
This is true of all of us, I suspect more and more.
So I guess what I’m saying is: Find the people who will validate you for barking at the ironing board and cut out all the rest.
EVERYBODY POUNCE NOW
I have mentioned before about my new-ish post-grieving morning ritual where I get up and do lathering-on of nice-smelling face creams and toners and such for the first 20 minutes of my day. This happens before I look at my phone or email or computer, and it happens before Grant wakes up, too, because I’ve discovered that my body naturally wakes itself right around 6 a.m. no matter what, so every day I have this quiet few moments to myself, which I used to spend meditating and then immediately getting to work, and now I’ve inserted this half-hour of lathering and repeating happy mantras at my reflection in the mirror.
(This all may have something to do with the aforementioned good mood, actually.)
One other thing that happens during this morning time is Woodrow wakes up and follows me into the bathroom, where as soon as I look at him, he starts dancing all over the place and doing little pouncy circles of joy, because he knows he’s about to be fed.
The dancing behavior is, presumably, from an evolutionary standpoint, to encourage me to give him food quicker.
It works the absolute, polar opposite, though.
I’m totally disincentivized to go feed him, because then he’ll stop doing the pounce-dancing.
So instead I just blather at him to get him more excited: “Are you a good dog? Are we gonna go get some kibble? Is it a brand-new day and you’re in a super good mood because you’re the happiest dog in the whole universe?” over and over while he dances and jumps all around me, and this is our relationship and it works for us.
WELCOME TO THE CARNIVAL, MAY I TAKE YOUR SOCKS
It may shock and alarm you to learn I actually have even more to say about my dog.
During post-kibble morning meditations, Woodrow gets free and unrestricted access to lick himself as much as he wants (spoiler alert: HE WANTS TO LICK HIMSELF A WHOLE LOT). I believe in free will and want to let my dog to do whatever he wants, which is why I toss him my socks as soon as I take them off because he has trained us to hand him socks constantly even though all he does with them is carry them outside to the garden and leave them strange places where we find them, soaking wet, days later.
Still. I love our dog, and if self-actualizing for him involves leaving socks out in the rain, drinking shower water, barking at crows, and licking himself, so be it.
But then, the licking is often too much for me. I usually stop him from licking after about 45 seconds, because the noises are crazy-making.
During meditations, though, he gets carte blanche to lick all he wants (again: A REAL LOT). Grant and I sit on our cushions, helplessly listening to honey-voiced mediation experts going on for exactly ten minutes about, you know, equanimity, and staying with your breath, and expanding your human awareness, and noticing if you’re fighting with things in your environment SUCH AS ANNOYING SOUNDS, then just notice the part that notices the sounds and let it all go, and so on.
The whole time I’m hearing Woodrow over there like
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
GHHHHLORRRP
GHHLIP
GHHLIP
I breathe.
I attempt to allow the sounds, not ignoring them and not changing them.
It is maddening, but it is also the kind of thing that I took up meditation precisely to practice not getting mad about.
After meditation was over yesterday, I said something to Grant about the licking, and he, who is either not as bothered by this as I am or is BEATING ME AT MEDITATION, said, “Yeah, but you know. He eventually settles down.”
ME
Yes, but only after a solid ten minutes of throwing himself an entire Lick Carnival on our couch.
* (n.b. I had spent the entire meditation debating whether it was a Lick Carnival or Lick Circus.)
GRANT
Well, he loves to lick in the morning.
ME
And in the evening.
GRANT
All day long, really.
ANGELA
Lick All Day Long. The carnival motto.
Anyway so now “Lick Carnival” is part of our household’s personal glossary, so yeah don’t say meditation doesn’t accomplish anything.
THE SCORPUMVIRATE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
I have a long-running group chat with two of my university besties, wherein the content consists almost exclusively of:
dramatic photos of aspirational interior decor
interesting cocktail recipes
selfies so we can be encouraging about how great everyone looks that day (n.b. they both always look flawless. it’s gross)
Anyway recently one of them started talking about astrology and how they were a Scorpio rising, and I was like “hey, I TOO am a Scorpio rising!” and we discussed what that is alleged to mean, and then the third person got curious and went and figured out his birth time and sent us a screenshot of his birth chart, and anyway turns out all three of us are Scorpio risings.
This isn’t all that likely, since rising signs change every 20 minutes. So that’s fun. And the upshot is that even though neither of them sets any stock in astrology, the chat has been renamed “The Scorpumvirate” and is filled with the aforementioned dramatic-decor thirst, fiddly cocktail recipes, selfies, encouragement, and now, also, Scorpio memes.
It’s a good time.
SO I STARTED A NEW BUSINESS THING
I have been percolating on a new editorial business for a little over a year, and in the past two weeks, I suddenly find myself balancing a full plate of clients, which is very exciting because I have not yet launched a website (working on it!) or created a brand (working on it!) or done any outbound client-gathering work. So far it’s all people I know, and word-of-mouth referrals.
I’ve averred to a few pals lately that I’m happy to be finally turning my attention to writing full-time, more than a decade after I went to grad school for this, and that 2021 is going to be the first year of my life where I earn a full-time living wage just from writing and editing. It’s exciting, but it also feels like I’m out on a very scary cliff edge. Part of me wants to push vehemently back from it, because it’s scary, but a larger and more insistent part keeps reminding me that I am good for it, I’ve got an amazing team of people telling me to keep going, I’m supported, and also what the hell, you gotta shoot for things that are just out of your reach sometimes, or life is meaningless.
I feel it all coming together, me saying yes and the universe saying yes back, and I wanted to be witnessed in feeling that. Because it’s always easy to think, “I knew it would work out” in retrospect. I’d rather bravely declare upfront: “It’s all gonna keep working out!”
It is a nice (new!) feeling, choosing to trust in that stuff, even though it’s scary to say out loud.
Anyway, next up: I’ve finished another book (storytelling advice for entrepreneurs) and I’m revamping a website. I’ll keep you posted on when the book’s available and when there’s a site to look at. In the meantime: eeeeeeeee and thank you for listening to this little moment of electricity. 😊 ⚡️
WAY TO GET THROUGH IT, EVERYBODY
The Year of Covid has been, to say the least, grueling as an overall experience, but the one and perhaps only silver lining is, that, in general, in this space of pause, I’m witnessing people in my circle taking up some pretty inspiring new projects or modes of being in the world or even just inspiring ways of showing up for themselves.
So many people I know have started new ventures or done awesome new things in the past year. TV shows sold. Shops opened. Virtual shows produced. Businesses sold. New businesses founded. Non-profits created. Classes taken. Books written. Puppies adopted. Houses purchased. Babies had. Blogs started.
All around me, tiny beautiful seeds are starting to unfurl in friends’ lives.
What a gorgeous, needed counterbalance to all the gravity and sadness.
Maybe there’s even causation. This process of having everything that we usually surround ourselves with — you know, all the busy-ness and plans and dinners and travel and friends and parties and events and shows — stripped away, it’s left us with something else.
Something quieter and more intense, and maybe realer.
This is an uncomfortable process but not wholly a bad one, since removing everything, both wanted and un-, allows us to see more clearly what was a distraction and what was actually a Very Important Thing To Us.
And we’re free to focus only on the Very Important things.
I’ve thought a lot about how this traumatic year of loss and colossal grief has affected us all and will continue to. We still don’t know how that will look long-term. It feels so heavy, like there’s no way we’ll ever rise fully.
But I bet our capacities for joy have expanded.
We might not know how yet.
But imagine yourself out there in the year 2024, in a post office line where everyone’s mask-free and it’s a sunny day where thousands of people haven’t died of the same tragic illness. Imagine whether you will be able to get all that mad about the line taking long.
I suspect we’ll all be able to joyfully access gratitude for a general happy baseline that is “not Covid,” and I’m looking forward to that part.
Maybe even rote tasks will feel, if not magical and uplifting, at least not annoying and maddening. This is my hope, anyway, for the world we’re barreling toward.
RANDOM LINKS AT THE LAST MOMENT
Let ‘em know about the trombone fish, y’all.
You ought to let Virginia Woolf teach you how you should read.
Who we are all becoming: Better. Better than we were.
I hope you are all already following R. Eric Thomas’ perfect newsletter by now, but in case not: “Robin Roberts was like ‘Lemme find out!’ and then Daniel Kaluuya was like ‘Let ME find out!’ and then I was like ‘LEMME FIND OUT!’ and I threw my computer across the room.”
Isaac Newton had this thing called a Commonplace Book, and maybe you could have one, too?
Toward a grand and unified theory of snowflakes.
This very wild podcast on a guy attempting to find a song he heard a lot once but which has since disappeared, is really worth your time.
Would you appreciate learning the history of the garden folly? You almost would, right?
The ol’ SNL Chopping Broccoli video was sent to me by a friend recently after I mentioned a possible need to chop broccoli throughout an upcoming business meeting (multitasking, friends!) and then Grant wanted to know what was so funny and I actually got to chop broccoli while watching the chopping broccoli video and then I incepted.
From the New Things I Probably Hate But Might Not Actually Understand Well Enough to Justify Hating Department (a.k.a., You Kids Get Off My Virtual Lawn): this excellent story about the NFT technology… thing.
Things that have been helping me keep my focus lately are Clubhouse’s room “AllDayDreamingRadio” and, by the same guy, another room called “ADHD Creative Co-working & Accountability.” I probably do not have ADHD — actually, Grant tells me I definitely do not — but I appreciate the Pomodoro Technique, and I like the overall vibe of checking in with people. If you are a year or more in on having no coworkers IRL anymore, these rooms might help.
Finally, and most crunchy-hippie-ly, I spend February investigating reiki. If you are local and into it, I recommend the sound baths at Zen Den. It is… not inexpensive to go, but it is lovely and healing and centering and calming.
I used to rely on Jon Stewart’s Moments of Zen.
Now I’ve got these two — Grant sleeping on top of me, and Woodrow sleeping on top of him, which works a similar happy magic.
