Would you like to see something that is horrifying or hilarious or both? YOU KNOW I KNOW YOU WOULD:

(If you can’t see it for one reason or another, it’s a padded mailing envelope on which someone has written, in what appears to be childlike printing: “I saw the condoms. I know your secret.”)

This is a mailing envelope that contains, yes, condoms. Some things to know:

1. This envelope is addressed to me. I don’t remember ordering condoms by mail, and in fact I actively remember routinely buying them in a store and NOT ordering them by mail, so I suspect this is an envelope fished long ago from the recycling in order to delicately conceal the condoms I bought from the store.

2. This envelope was at the bottom of Paul’s socks-and-underwear drawer.

3. Paul got a vasectomy in 2011, as I know you know, so these condoms are in no way recent, and they have expiration dates compatible with that.

4. It has apparently been a long time since Paul did a tidying of his socks-and-underwear drawer.

5. We actually found this envelope in 2018 when we moved, but I forgot to mention it until finding it again today.

We have NO IDEA when the writing appeared, else we might be better able to narrow down who wrote it. My instinctive initial suspects are Rob and Henry (though I want to investigate this “starting the letter O from the bottom” clue, too). Rob is a bit of a black-and-white thinker, an idealist who doesn’t get along well with his dad and tends to think the worst; he would have been 12 in 2011, which is the last time there was need for condoms; I think if it had been written earlier than that, we would have seen it, though perhaps not. Henry is the prankster who once drew “scorch lines” over an electrical outlet with a Sharpie marker and then lay on the floor nearby with a fork in his hand pretending to be unconscious/dead. The main reason I didn’t freak out is that he had TOLD ME about this prank idea a week earlier, at which point I had told him seriously-and-no-kidding that he should never, ever do it and it would not be even slightly funny and it would truly scare and upset me, as well as making me very angry about Sharpie marker on the wall. He would have been 5 in 2011, but I think it’s more likely to have been written AFTER that; he was 11 in 2018 when we found it. It seems like an EARLY MIDDLE SCHOOL thing to do, but I’m just guessing.

But also: what secret did this child think they had discovered? Do we even want to turn our minds to it? Did the child think the secret was that their parents were having sex? That their parents were attempting to prevent pregnancy? Did the child have a faulty idea of what condoms were for? Did the child think that Paul was…having an affair, and that condoms were an indication of that, considering how many children we had at our house, indicating that WE apparently weren’t using them? But what would the child conclude about the fact that the envelope was addressed to me? And why was the child rummaging in Paul’s socks-and-underwear drawer to begin with? THE MIND BOGGLES.

I woke up this morning with a song in my heart, and that song was, relentlessly: “MARY MAC’S MOTHER’S MAKING MARY MAC MARRY ME / MY MOTHER’S MAKING ME MARRY MARY MAC!!!” (If your heart does not already know this song, you can hear it here.)

Then, on my walk, I invented long sleeves and gloves. Normally I wear French terry joggers (sounds nicer than SWEATPANTS) and a t-shirt, but this morning it was chilly so I put on a zip-up fleece layer, the kind with holes in the wrists for your thumbs, so you get partial hand-coverage. Pretty soon I was thinking, “I like how my arms are less chilly, and I like that I can tuck my fingers into the long cuffs and keep them warm—but I don’t need an extra layer on my back, and it’s making me too hot. What I really want is just the sleeves and long cuffs, but I want the cuffs even longer so they cover my fingers too.”

Music on the walks is always an issue. I basically want to listen to the radio (i.e., not have to do the work of choosing my own songs, and have the fun of surprise/variety), but with no lengthy ad/DJ breaks that would make me switch stations if I were in the car, and I want the songs to be ones I would have chosen. What I’ve been doing is listening to Spotify, because it will play one short ad and then let me listen without ads for 30 minutes; and because if I give it a song to start with, it will play Suggested Songs based on that song, which is fun. Sometimes they’re all misses, and I have to pick a different song: I started with Mine by Phoebe Ryan, which I love and which I find good for walking, but then all the Suggested Songs were sad/heartbreak/slow, which is no good for walking. I had better luck with Sledgehammer by Fifth Harmony, which has given me mostly upbeat / girl-power / girl-anthem / best-friend songs for the last two days. If you do this same thing with Spotify, I would love to know what song you start with.

When I wrote yesterday about everyone constantly talking to me, I was overstating the situation—not only because people aren’t literally constantly talking to me, but also because it isn’t everyone: I hear from Rob and William so little, it’s possible to occasionally forget they’re living here, as I sort of did when I was writing yesterday’s post.

I find this distressing. I would probably be more distressed if they were constantly hanging around near me and talking to me about everything, since they are supposed to be semi-independent college students at this point—but just as it is possible to be too hot at one temperature and too cold at another, and just as it is possible to be overly hungry before eating and overly full afterward, it is possible to worry about too much interaction and also about too little.

Well, they have each other, and I do like that. They could be talking to each other a LOT, as college roommates might. They could be managing their lives exactly right: simulating as much as possible the living-away-from-home experience they’d be having if there weren’t a pandemic. Managing their own meals, managing their own schedules, NOT being constantly in contact with parents/siblings. But sometimes they seem to actively avoid us, to the point where it does hurt my feelings. William in particular seems annoyed whenever we approach him to ask him something—and it isn’t as if we approach him many times a day, it’s like once or twice a day, to ask things he seems to WANT to be asked, such as does he want me to make him some dinner when I make dinner for everyone else (usually no, but sometimes yes). And they don’t have the REPLACEMENT things they’d have if they didn’t have us: the roommates, the friends, the classmates, the professors, the other people at the dining hall tables, etc. So I do worry. (But at least they are not two more people constantly talking to me.)

It turns out I am VERY MOTIVATED by putting check-marks on a chart. Elizabeth made herself a summer checklist chart for June/July/August, and she made me a copy before she filled in her chosen tasks, and I have filled in SO MANY CHECK-MARKS this summer! Even for exercise, because I keep thinking that then I can check it off! …And yesterday was September 1st, and I didn’t have a chart to make check-marks in (we failed to make FURTHER copies of her chart to use in the future, because we were thinking only of summer), and I have lost my motivation almost entirely. I need a new chart.

I finally cut my hair. I was doing my boring blog project on posts from November 2010, and found this post where I was in the exact same situation: it was pleasing to be able to put my hair into such a nice bun, but it was too long for a ponytail and too long to wear in a messy French twist, and it was dragging me down and giving me headaches, and so I cut it, and it was reasonably successful and I was happy with it. All right then, I thought to myself; I don’t know how I did it before, but presumably I can do it again. And so I did, and I could:

(Notice my poor phone case, which was so cute before it was repeatedly cleaned with disinfecting wipes.)

Please forgive the self-conscious selfie. I was NEVER able to take a good picture of myself, but I completely lost the ability after reading two things: one, that everyone has a Particular Expression they do over and over and over again in their selfies (either always tilting their face to a particular side, or always squinching their mouth ironically, or whatever); and two, that when you see someone’s selfie, you see how they look at themselves in the mirror. Now I try so hard to counteract those two things, I end up with nothing I like. Of course I want a chin-minimizing angle, of course I do, but I can’t accomplish it without “tilting my chin down and looking up at the viewer through my lashes,” which I can never do again. And I always Do My Lips That Way, apparently.

Also, I have no Before picture: I seized on a moment of motivation right after getting out of the shower, and did not think of pictures. I see I did the exact same thing back in 2010. Well. Before I cut it, my hair was about halfway down my back, and it was frankly glorious (I have thick hair that does nice waves), but it was also long enough that I had to divide it in half and pull it in front of my shoulders to brush out the tangles, and it made me feel tired and oppressed me when it was wet and I had to deal with it, and the length didn’t flatter my face, and I hate wearing it down so it was always in a bun, and it was heavy enough to give me a faint headache. Now it is much, much better, though also frankly less glorious.

When it dried (it’s still wet in the photo), it floofed out into something a little more triangular than my stylist usually does, so now I have to decide what to do about that. I could leave it: it doesn’t look bad at all, it’s just different. Or I could attempt layers: recently I watched some videos and then cut some layers into Elizabeth’s hair and they turned out well (it’s basically just like doing a classic boy haircut where you pull the hair perpendicular to the head and then cut perpendicular to the floor; the only difference is you’re doing it much further away from the head); I just don’t know if I could do that at the back of my head. Still, I did cut it in a straight line at the back of my own head, so there is some hope!

In the meantime, I have joined Elizabeth in a Fun Hair Project. She was researching what to do about her “frizzy hair” (it doesn’t look particularly frizzy to me), and she found that whole part of the internet that is like “I thought my hair was frizzy and not-shiny but actually it was SECRETLY VERY CURLY!!!” and so she spent some time trying various things with rhyming names like “scrunch the crunch” and “squish the condish” and so forth. After a few oily-looking failures, she has determined that her hair is NOT secretly curly, and now she is in an adjacent part of the internet that is more like “The Top Ten Differences Between Handling WAVY vs. CURLY Hair!” and “How to Bring Out Your Beachy Waves!” It is super fun. I absolutely remember this stage of being a teenager. The main difference is that I was using magazines instead of the internet. Teen! Seventeen! Sassy! Also Cosmopolitan, which gave me a very skewed view of what my 20s were going to be like. It made a lot more sense later on when I read somewhere that teen magazines pretend to be aimed at teenagers but are actually aimed at pre-teens, and Cosmo pretends to be aimed at 20-something women but is actually aimed at high-schoolers. (Similarly, I felt some relief when I learned that Playgirl pretends to be aimed at straight women but is actually aimed at gay men. I had acquired a copy in high school, and was alarmed to find it extremely unappealing.)

Anyway, now that my hair is short enough that I can tolerate wearing it down, Elizabeth is instructing me on how to Accentuate the Waviness. This morning I tried what she has been trying, which is to comb my hair in the shower while it still had conditioner in it; then, after the shower, wrap it in a Turbie Twist for awhile (mine are all solid-color; I think I am going to order that flower-print one for my Christmas stocking); then, after getting dressed, take the hair out of the towel, arrange it as little as possible (like, you can approximate your preferred parting, and you can move that big piece out of your eyes, but otherwise don’t brush it or finger-comb it or anything), and leave it alone to completely air-dry. Do not touch it! Elizabeth says this is the most important part. She says there are pictures people have taken, showing the difference between The Side They Touched and The Side They Didn’t Touch, and the side they touched “is, like, VOOM” (here she made puffy/fluffy/frizzy motions with her hands). Once it dries, I am supposed to use the Turbie Twist to “scrunch the crunch”: i.e., lightly squeeze large sections of hair. BUT I MUST WAIT UNTIL IT’S DRY.

The next stage of experimentation, according to Elizabeth, involves mousse; I didn’t try that today because (1) I wanted to go through the stages the same way she was, and (2) I asked her how the mousse was supposed to be put in if we were touching our hair as little as possible, and she said “I have no idea.” So I’ll let her figure that out, and then she can tell me. This is a fun enough project to me that I did Target Drive-Up again yesterday just to get the mousse sooner than if I’d had it shipped. I also got cat food, cat litter, and bags of coffee, because those all had coupon deals (buy three bags of coffee, get them for $5.99 each instead of $8.49 ((and they had the Fall Blend Starbucks!)) ((it tastes no different to me than regular Starbucks but I always joyfully buy it anyway; same with the Thanksgiving Blend and the Christmas Blend)); buy $25 or more of cat food/litter get a $5 coupon; and 10% off Iams, which could be stacked with the other deal) that I couldn’t get if I got them shipped, so that was pleasing: I saved like $16. And THANK YOU to all of you who said what you do is add the things to your online cart for in-store pick-up, and then go into the app and switch them all to Drive-Up: that made a HUGE difference to the shopping experience. I only had to use the app long enough for it to crash three times instead of dozens! It was marvelous.

My great-aunt died recently and not unexpectedly, after a nice long life. She was one of the very few people I still exchange written letters with. I was so happy that I had written to her just a week before she died: what perfect, perfect timing. But the letter was just returned to me, several weeks later, unopened.

I can’t find the post where I mention that I wrote a letter to the head of the pediatric GI department about our experience in a shared room (oh, here it is, but it’s just a super-brief mention of it, no description), but anyway the next time we went in, it turned out the department head had SHOWED THE LETTER TO THE NURSES, WITH MY NAME. SIR. It seems reasonable to share a feedback letter with staff, but NOT INCLUDING THE IDENTIFYING INFORMATION. So that then a nurse SPOKE TO ME ABOUT IT. It was mortifying, even though the nurse in question was very supportive, said she thought a lot of other people probably felt the same way, and described my letter as “advocating for a lot of people”; I knew that the nurse who rolled her eyes and said the new policies were “borderline neurotic” and that this was “really no different than flu season” must ALSO have seen my letter.

The upshot is that they are going to give us our own room every time, but they are not going to be making any policy changes overall, and the department head sent me a letter telling me that they “had been assured” (nice use of passive tense) that it was perfectly safe to have two patients and two parents sharing a smallish room for hours. I guess if the only thing on offer is “Squeaky Wheel Gets Her Own Room Because She Is Weird and Paranoid,” I’ll take it; but that wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was for ALL patients to get their own rooms.

I was about to write a post asking if by any chance anyone knew why I had ordered a certain book, but then I tried one more idea and that was the one that let me figure it out.

Here is what happened. A book arrived for me in the mail; I wasn’t expecting a book but I wasn’t NOT expecting a book, either: I’ve ordered a few used books from eBay and Amazon recently, and sometimes they take a long time to arrive because of media mail being slower and also because of the current administration sabotaging the United States Postal Service. So I opened the package, interested to see what it was, and it was this:

(image from Amazon.com)

A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw, by Christie Hodgen. I didn’t recognize it at all. No bells ringing. “Maybe someone sent it to you?,” suggested Paul, and I thought that was possible, but there was no gift information on the receipt. I looked in my email inbox for the name of the company and the name of the book—no match. I looked in my Amazon orders—and there it was, an used copy purchased from a third-party seller. So I’d ordered it. BUT WHY.

The order had been placed just over two weeks ago, so I thought it MUST have been as a result of the book recommendations post. But I searched the comments for the name of the book and the name of the author: no matches. I checked on Twitter, because sometimes people comment there instead of on the post: nothing.

Maybe my sister-in-law recommended it? I don’t remember her recommending a book lately, but on the other hand I’ve been pretty distracted with all the news about schools putting a bunch of people together in closed rooms during a huge outbreak of a virus that appears to spread primarily via shared air. I searched my OTHER email inbox, the one I use for family: nothing.

Well, who ELSE might have said something about a book that made me immediately order a copy? Maybe I saw it on Shelf Love? No. Maybe Nicole recommended it? (HI NICOLE.) No.

Could I have read about it in a news article? Maybe there was recently a story about it? Feeling like it was a real long shot, I searched online for the title of the book, but just got a bunch of hits for sites that would sell it to me and/or sites that had reviewed it; nothing looked familiar. Then, just in case, I searched the name of the book again but added the word “Swistle.” And there it was, the person who had recommended it to me: ME.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was writing that recent post looking for book recommendations, I went through my blog archives looking for any mentions of books I’d read, to see if I could add more to my “Books I’ve Liked” list. I found my old review of Christie Hodgen’s other book, Elegies for the Brokenhearted, which apparently I’d loved, and I’d said in that post that I was going to get her second book from the library and, if I liked it, order the third book, which our library system didn’t have a copy of. I have no idea how that whole thing turned out! I wrote the review in 2012, and never wrote anything about how I liked the second book; and I looked up the second book just now, and I have no memory of reading it. (To be fair, I don’t remember the first one, either.) But I thought, “Oh, that seems like the perfect kind of book to order during a pandemic, since our library doesn’t have it so I’d have to buy it ANYWAY,” so then I impulsively found a cheap used copy and ordered it and went back to writing the post and forgot all about the order! Perhaps now I will read it and remember I already did this same thing back in 2012, didn’t like the book, and got rid of it!

I had to clean out my sock and underwear drawer. Again. Last time I did this, I said that I was not someone who rotated clothing seasonally. I am still not. But this drawer is so frustratingly full, and it’s so hard to find things, but I still like and wear pretty much everything, so I am willing to ATTEMPT seasonal rotation. We will see if I can maintain it. My money is on Perhaps.

Here is the drawer as we begin our journey, too full to close:

And here it is after I took everything out and put it on the bed, except for the back-up bottles of L’Artisan, which have expanded since the last time we peeked:

Here is everything sorted on the bed (it’s a little misleading, because the D pile actually came from a different, smaller drawer, which didn’t seem interesting enough to mention except then I added a list to the end of the post that means the clarification is necessary), with a map key below the picture:

A: Underwear I dislike and wear only one week a month
B: Underwear I like
C: Underwear I like, but it’s a little too big
D: Nylons, dressy socks, shapewear, cartwheel shorts
E. White cotton crew socks, worn year-round
F: Socks without twins
G: Fleecey and wool socks of the kind I wear over other socks for extra warmth
H: Ankle socks, worn only in hot weather
I: Crew/boot socks, worn only in cold weather
J: Wool socks I can wear without another layer underneath
K: Holiday/theme socks

I had more pairs than I needed of Group A underwear, so I got rid of a few, and I put Group C up in storage with my other too-big clothing. I set aside Group F (single socks) in a bag that hangs from my closet door handle and serves as a last-chance area before I throw the socks out. I evaluated Group G (fleece and wool), realized I’d bought too many when we moved to this chilly house, calculated that I could get rid of half and still have plenty, and did so. I looked through Group K (holiday and themed) and got rid of a couple pairs.

But things were still pretty good from the last time I did this, and these minor edits weren’t enough for the kind of significant results I wanted to see. Systemic change needed to occur.

The nylons, dressy socks, shapewear, cartwheel shorts—I wear such things HARDLY EVER. Like, once or twice a year. But when I DO need one or more of them, I don’t want to have to go BUY them. This was the perfect use for a Hello Kitty shoebox I’ve been saving:

I put it up in my closet next to the shoe boxes of dress shoes I wear hardly ever (but don’t want to go out and buy when I DO need them).

Next, finally, a reluctant and tentative commitment to seasonal rotation:

I almost accidentally labeled the box “cold-weather socks” but then realized “out-of-season socks” means I can use the same box for whatever socks I’m not currently wearing. (If I’d accidentally written “cold-weather socks,” I would have written “warm-weather socks” on the other end of the box, and then I could have just put it facing a different way in my closet.)

After:

This is the best it’ll ever look, since the hot-weather socks take up less space than the cold-weather socks.

And the trash can:

And a list of things found in the different, smaller drawer that contained the nylons and shapewear and so forth (which I apparently didn’t go through the last time I did this project):

• An iron-on Jeep logo, apparently torn out of a magazine.

• An old packing list that included “powder.” It’s been so long since I’ve worn powder, I couldn’t even think what the word referred to at first, and only figured it out because it was in the same list as lipstick and under-eye pencil. Matte skin used to be very In, which was difficult because I am naturally rather dewy. Happily, trends change.

• A 2005 packing receipt for nursing bras, which I saved because they were hard to find and I didn’t want to forget which ones they were if I needed to order them again later on.

I wanted to redo my Archer Farms Monster Trail Mix Recipe experiment with a second bag, not only because that seems like good science (individual bags will vary somewhat, and we wouldn’t want to make lifelong recipe decisions based on what could have been a flukey bag) but also because I was unhappy about the bowl colors and forgetting the slips of paper. Look how much better this is!

All six bowl colors! A bowl for taring, so that I don’t have to dump out one bowl first! Darkest ingredients no longer in darkest bowl colors! Pieces of paper put into bowls, instead of lined up forgotten on the counter!

Notice that THIS bag had regular-size M&Ms rather than minis. We have seen all three variations in recent mixes: all regular-size, all mini, and some regular / some mini within the same bag.

Anyway! Here are the numbers this time:

• unsalted peanuts: 4.3 ounces / 122 grams
• chocolate chips: 1.7 ounces / 47 grams
• raisins: 3.7 ounces / 104 grams
• peanut butter chips: 2.0 ounces / 55 grams
• M&Ms: 2.2 ounces / 62 grams

For comparison, here are the numbers from last time:

• unsalted peanuts: 3.6 ounces / 101 grams
• chocolate chips: 2.5 ounces / 69 grams
• raisins: 3.5 ounces / 99 grams
• peanut butter chips: 2.0 ounces / 56 grams
• mini M&Ms: 2.7 ounces / 77 grams

Well, now I have to test a third bag. The peanut butter chips are the only measurement that was the same. Some of the others are quite a bit off: last time I concluded the recipe should have about equal weights of peanuts and raisins, but this time they were less similar; last time I concluded the recipe could have about equal weights of chocolate chips and M&Ms, but this time they were less similar and there was also less chocolate in the mix overall.

But I do feel like we’re narrowing in on the GIST of Monster trail mix: papa bear raisins and peanuts, mama bear chocolate chips and M&Ms, and baby bear peanut butter chips.

I have an old high school boyfriend I’m still in touch with once a year or so: a few emails go back and forth with newsy updates, and then that’s it for another year or so. I’m glad we’re in touch: for a few years after we broke up we couldn’t talk without fighting, and so we stopped talking, and I liked that a lot less. He was my first serious boyfriend and we dated for almost two years, and I’m interested in the occasional updates on his life/wife/kids, and I like feeling like the kind of person who can be friendly with an old boyfriend. Plus, occasional contact with him reminds me how extremely not sorry I am that we broke up (he’s a little dumb).

If you’re in touch with an ex, and they make a negative remark about their marriage, how do you react? My rule of thumb OVERALL for emails to an ex (even with no remarks about the spouse) is to make my entire email completely readable by the ex’s spouse AND by Paul: like, I do a final proof-read thinking to myself “Would it be okay if his wife read this? if Paul read this?” and making sure the answer is a definite, obvious YES. (I do make exceptions to this overall policy at times, but I want them to be exceptions I’ve thought about, not oblivious ones.) So if my old high school boyfriend makes some small complaint about his wife, I’m inclined to answer something like “Oh, I am DEFINITELY with your wife on this one,” or something jokey.

But if an ex says, as part of a newsy update, that he thinks his 20-year marriage is probably ending, my usual light/jokey approach doesn’t work. Also, just for further information, this is an ex who called me the day I was getting married to ask me to not get married, saying he’d send me a plane ticket to come be with him, which is the sort of thing that can seem romantic in movies but truly stupid in real life. [Kerry had a good question for clarification: this was my FIRST wedding, the one where I was 20 years old. It was a long, long, long time ago.] This is also an ex who long ago used to periodically float stuff about how wouldn’t it be crazy if we ended up together when we were old and widowed. He hasn’t done much of that kind of talk recently, and it didn’t seem like he was serious even at the time (he’s the kind of guy who loves silly romantic pop ballads and Oprah specials about high school sweethearts reuniting), but I still felt it was better to err on the side of fully squashing it each time by saying very direct things such as “Even if we were both available, I wouldn’t want us to date; it is enormously clear to me that we were not a good match.” And when he would say things like “Imagine if we’d gotten married!,” I would say “We would have had two kids and then a very messy divorce, and we’d still be fighting now.” Anyway. Just so you see why I want to be extra careful about stuff like this with him, even though it might not still be an issue.

Possible reactions I’ve considered:

1. No reaction. Just answer everything else, leave that part alone. He  said it very casually, and it was hard to tell how serious it was, and he didn’t give much to go on.

2. Saying I’m sorry to hear that, paired with a hope that things will work out. (I go with “things will work out” because it sounds like a hope for the marriage to continue, but still applies if the marriage ends: I do hope things work out, one way or another. I didn’t like when I was getting a divorce and some people acted as if it were a giant tragedy and that the only positive outcome was staying married.) Maybe add on something nice about the wife and their relationship? Like, “I’m sorry to hear about you and Steph, and I hope things work out. From what you’ve told me, it’s always seemed like you were good together.”

Hm. I like the last sentence of the second option from the “imagining the wife reading the email” point of view, and from the “it’s CLEAR I am not hoping they split up, or in any way encouraging it” point of view—but it seems like saying more than I know; and also, if they’re not good together, who cares if I wrongly thought they were? Still, if I imagine being the wife reading that response, I like the way it makes it seem as if he’s been telling me good stories about her over the years. And I really HAVE thought they sounded good together: even his occasional complaints about her made it sound to me as if she was well able to deal with his nonsense in a way that could only be good for him. But maybe it’s better to stick with sorry/hope, to avoid seeming like I’m pressuring him to stay in a bad marriage. Or maybe this is all kind of complicated and it’s better to go with nothing.

I have been feeling as if I shouldn’t write unless I was writing about what’s happening right now with the ongoing protests against racial injustice and police violence. And so I have been working instead on my summer project which, if you recall, is going through my old blog posts (I’ve finished 2008 and am now in 2009) and fixing all the links and photos that broke when I moved the blog from Blogspot to WordPress. It is tedious, satisfying, cringey work. How many times back then did I say “OMG”/”ZOMG”/”teh”/etc.? SO MANY. It is tempting to fix all that while I’m at it. But no: that all belonged to 2009, and 2009 can keep it. In another ten years I can look back and see what cringey things I’m saying all the time in 2020. (If you already know, don’t tell me: let’s keep it a fun surprise for later!)

And I DO think it was better to shut up for a few minutes while the protests were everywhere in the news, and a post about something else could seem oblivious/dismissive. But here is what I realized, going through months and months of old posts: this is not a current events blog. This is not a news blog. This is not a politics blog. This is not a blog about systemic racism/sexism, or about necessary governmental reform. It’s not a blog where we DON’T talk about such things, either—but if someone is looking for daily, up-to-the-minute deep-dives into what the issues are and why, and what should be done about them and why and how, this blog would not be the resource anyone would recommend. And there are SO MANY OTHER qualified, interested writers handling that, day in and day out—real experts, and interested amateurs, and just so many choices for ALLLLLL of that. You can’t turn around without bumping into a huge array of choices.

Whereas THIS, as it becomes clear to me while editing post after post from 2008 and 2009 on the same topics I’m writing about in 2020, is a blog about sick babies (2009/2020), and Target shopping trips (2009/2020), and hair (2009/2020), and gift ideas (2008/2020), and cats (2009/2020), and irritating spouses (2009/2020), and bad days (2009/2020), and asking for advice (2009/2020), and so forth. And there is room for that, too: we wouldn’t want NOTHING BUT political/reform/corruption/news blogs, however important they are. I can tell you what I think about current events (racial injustice in the U.S. is horrifying and systemic, and there is hard work and big change ahead; our police force has become corrupted by racism and violence, and there is hard work and big change ahead; everyone should vote for affable, disappointing, yet-another-old-white-man Biden in 2020 because the alternative is literally one of the worst and stupidest people alive spending another four years steering what’s left of our country after the pandemic even further into fascism and white nationalism), but I’m not interested in writing eight paragraphs trying to get you to think the same way I do. I don’t have the education or the experience or the knowledge or, perhaps most importantly, the drive.

I’m going to continue to do what I’ve done since the very beginning of this blog, when I’d spent a fair amount of time feeling like I couldn’t start a blog until I knew what it would be ABOUT, and then finally I decided that what it was going to be about was “Whatever I feel like writing about that day.” Does that mean we get rather too many posts about grocery-shopping in a pandemic? POSSIBLY. Does that mean we are rather light on the big topics of the day, and rather heavy on what is desirable to purchase at Target? POSSIBLY. Does that mean there is rather a lot of small-picture whining, and not much big-picture perspective? OH INDEED. But thinking we can write only if we’re writing about The Very Most Important Things is like thinking people can’t complain if anyone else is worse off than they are—and you know, I hope, how I feel about that (#tagline) (it’s the hashtags, isn’t it; that’s what I’ll cringe about in ten years).