About Damn Time
On counting and measuring life in the middle. Plus, MySpace's Tom!
Do you ever wonder how long it takes for your nails to truly grow? Or to finish a whole tube of toothpaste? What about how many days ’til your garbage bin becomes full? The ink in your printer! Didn’t you just change it? (Yup, still have one.)
Maybe you have an app that tells you when you last watered your fern or a reminder on your phone that ensures you change your contact lenses every two weeks. But then maybe you ignore them both and your plant (and your eyes) become super dry and thirsty leaving you no choice but to Do The Thing anyway—water the plant, change the contacts—no matter the time that’s gone by.
For lack of sounding cliché, where does it actually go anyway? How do you measure it? In love, as playwright Jonathan Larson once wrote? Or do you just…not. Measure time, that is. Variables shift after all. Maybe you brush your teeth less so the paste lasts longer. (Gross, but it could happen!) Or maybe you’re not cooking at home as much, so the garbage is void of carrot peels, apple cores, and cheese rinds. How do you count the days or the hours or the minutes then? More importantly, why bother?
For someone who hated math as a kid, and still occasionally uses her fingers to add and subtract, I am constantly calculating life. Countdowns to this. Spreadsheets for that. I can only guess it’s because I find comfort and calm in order and structure. It’s any wonder that I’m a month away from the 10-year anniversary since I went freelance. (See? Counting again!) It was then that I relinquished any semblance of form, any framework for a stable, conventional, countable life. Because without a 9-5, what constitutes work? Without two weeks off, what is a vacation?
These are some of the things one asks themselves at a certain point in life. One being me, and the certain point being the middle, aka some decades after the before, but (hopefully) decades before the after. One also might ask, “Well, what’s next then?” or “Now what?” And, inevitably, “Is there still time?”
Time for what, though?
Well, everything and anything.
So maybe you’re better off buying another tube of toothpaste just to have. Watering the plant when it looks like it needs it. Not watching the clock. Just steering the wheel, pedal on the gas, eyes straight ahead, rolling with the ticks and the tocks. Who knows what the new lining in the bin will bring until it needs to be refreshed again? A whiff of possibility, perhaps.
Bon weekend, friends. xx — Sara
Clickable
Life without food: skinny, but at what cost? | The Cut
We should all be down to hang. | Slate
How old are you in your head? | The Atlantic
Behind the scenes with Daisy Jones & The Six. | NY Times
When authors try to explain their proposed book. | McSweeney’s
How much of the real Aubrey Plaza is an act? | The New Yorker
Rihanna’s half-time performance was yoga. | Yoga Journal
The hostility of hospitality. | T Magazine
Seven hours on a chairlift: skiing, a love story. | Outside
Mall food courts are still happening places to be. | Eater
Watchable
How to handle telling politically incorrect jokes as a white man? Get your Black female and lesbian writers to tell them! I thought this was a clever way to address the precarious nature of living in a woke world.
I saw clips of this SNL segment on TikTok before finally watching the whole skit, and the way actor Pedro Pascal (who I’m LOVING in “The Last of Us,” by the way) speaks in a so-called “LA mush mouth thing” is really hilarious.
Oooo! A new musical series about things I’m familiar with: writing, NYC, and OVERTHINKING. The HULU show, Up Here, stars people playing people, but also people playing the voices in our heads! So that’s fun. (Or not?)
Currently overthinking…
…whether I have Covid (again) or just a cold [editor’s note: I tested and it’s just another cold]…speaking of…whether I should cold-email the COO of a company I admire and propose a position for myself…
Souvenir: MySpace’s Tom
Remember MySpace? If so, then you no doubt remember your “first friend, Tom.” The founder of the social media platform of the early aughts automatically showed up in your friends list when you created a profile. That over-the-shoulder smile! The whiteboard behind him! The wink in his eye! Who would’ve thought this mug would become so iconic? So telling of…a time.