It’s an incredibly bizarre feeling to touch objects that you remember so clearly but haven’t seen or thought about in years. And it’s odd how hit-or-miss the memories are. I have a whole bin full of old Barbies that don’t generate much of an emotional response, but then I came across tiny plastic accessories for those Barbies that made me squeal happily in remembrance. A picnic set with individual pieces to make tiny cheeseburgers, complete with a box of individual slices of Land-o-Lakes cheese. Tiny potato chips. A pretzel machine with miniature pretzels. (I guess it kind of tracks that the items I remember are food.) I don’t have any discrete memories of times that I played with them, or who gave them to me, or what I specifically did with them, but the miniatures themselves elicit a kind of response that suggests a deeply lodged-in connection. I have always loved tiny things, after all.

I’m an only child, and my parents were relatively “old” when they had me. (Now that I’m six years younger than my mom was when I was born, I hesitate to write that word without quotation marks.) It follows, therefore, that I was incredibly privileged, celebrated, and loved. You might call it spoiled. I had a lot of toys, and I played with all of them merrily. My mom recalls how entertaining it was to play with me and to watch me entertain myself. I had no siblings around, obviously, and I always seemed out of step with the ages of kids in my neighborhood and my small extended family, but I don’t remember this ever bothering me. I was always just fine on my own. I set up elaborate scenes with my Fashion Polly and American Girl dolls, creating detailed backstories and playing them out for hours. I used to make little “books” complete with illustrated covers and stapled bindings, writing cover to cover inside them and pretending that I had published them. You could have put me in a windowless room with blank walls and given me nothing but a piece of paper and a pencil and I would have been happy letting my imagination unspool until you let me out eight hours later. The same is probably still true today.

When I got a little older, maybe around fourth or fifth grade, I started my own “business.” I’d make little beaded bracelets and earrings, and my mom helped me make braided yarn belts. I took them to school and sold them during free time, and I set up a “shop” in the sunroom of our house. I can remember my parents having friends over and proudly leading those friends out into my little store so they could shop, even in the winter when it was freezing out there. Yesterday I came across a business card I’d made for this business: “Sarah Marie’s Quality Beading and Braiding.” (That was when my name still technically had a space in the middle of it.) It had my address and phone number on the card, with tasteful doodles in the corners and at the bottom for decoration. I laughed aloud, my gaze drifting towards the table in the room: on it, an in-progress crochet doll that I’m making for an online order. I just got back from following Gizz around in Colorado and New York, where I had set up shop selling handmade bootleg King Gizzard and Angine de Poitrine items. I’m literally still exactly the same as I was all those years ago.

If my younger self could see me now, I think she’d have a huge grin on her face. When I tell her that people all over the world pay us money for the things we’ve made. When she sees how skilled we’ve become at crocheting. When she learns that we’ve won a writing award and been published in literary magazines. When she learns how many miles we’ve hiked and how many places we’ve traveled to.

I love my life, and I’m grateful for everything I’ve been able to do. There isn’t a single moment when I wish I was someone else. But there are times when I feel incredibly silly, or maybe childish, or immature, for doing some of the things I do instead of settling down and having a standard, simple life. Whether real or imagined, I perceive that there are entities (society? my parents?) who wish I’d just stop this wandering and get a real job and be normal. Get married, have kids. Follow the script. Shut up.

If you’d asked me when I was a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d say, like most kids, a different thing every week. I wanted to be a vet, a doctor, a marine biologist (of course), a writer, a speech therapist. (Never a teacher. I stumbled into that later.) I’d say I wanted to live in Germany one week and California the next. I’d be super into fashion, and then super into animals. No one questions this. Kids thrash around between interests; they aren’t expected to fit into a box or follow a straight path like adults are. Little me wouldn’t balk at my lack of linear progression. She wouldn’t judge me for not knowing what the hell I was doing. She couldn’t give less of a fuck about what I did for a living. She’d just look up and say “I really like your mushroom sweater,” and she’d show me the latest bracelet she’d made. Maybe we’d to an art trade. She would love the Han-Tyumi dolls I crochet now, and that they have removable green boots and blue overalls with pockets. She would love me. She would be proud of me. I love her and I’m proud of her, too.

Sometimes when I’m going through my old toys I get sad, nostalgic, melancholic. I think about the relentlessness of time and how I wish I could be a kid again. But this time, I don’t feel that way. I just feel happy for those times and grateful for the flourishing I’ve been allowed to experience from childhood until now. I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around how far from home I’m about to travel and how little I can picture in terms of what’s next. But younger me wouldn’t let fear stop her from going, so I won’t either.

The name Skye is believed to have come from two Norse words: “ski,” meaning cloud, and “ey,” meaning island. As I read this fact on a plaque in the Skye Museum of Island Life, my heart leaps. Another land I’m heading to soon is also named, in its indigenous tongue, after the clouds: Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud. The clouds must be just as evocative there as they are here. They move so quickly. Blink, and the landscape changes completely. One day, even one hour, reveals a completely different land than the last.

Evening at Rubha Hunish, on the northern tip of the Trotternish Peninsula, and the land is dappled in warm golden light, then clouds, then light again. It’s cold. Late July and I’m shivering the moment I stop moving. We find a camp spot on a grassy ledge and Ben shows me all the lighthouses you can see from here. Modern automated ones on islands dotting the waters. What must be a massive one across the Minch on either Lewis or Harris, bright white even this far away. Blink. Dark. Blink. Dark.

Earlier in this trip, on the Greek island of Santorini, my friend Allie and I went to see the sunset at the Akrotiri Lighthouse. People had gathered on the rocks before we got there, and more came as we picked a spot and waited. Despite the crowd, everyone was reverent. No one played music, no one talked loudly. We watched in steady awe as the liquid gold melted into the horizon, and when no more of the sun could be seen, the crowd broke out in an applause. Later, after dinner, when it was dark, we went back to the lighthouse. Looking up, we could see that stripes of light erupted in a silent and continuously rotating circle from its beehive-like Fresnel lens and swept far out to the Aegean sea. When we stopped and looked back as we drove away, even on the other end of the island, we could still see it. Blinking safety into the darkness.

When the sun comes out on Skye, you stop what you’re doing and greet it. You lift your arms to the warmth and utter thanks before you can clock the decision consciously. After two weeks in extremely warm and sunny places—Greece, Istanbul—this island’s chill and rain took some getting used to. Wet feet on a hike are a given, and the shelter of a backcountry bothy is all the more welcome for it. But when those fast-moving clouds shift and a little slash of light warms your face, it’s like all of eternity boring into your retinas at once. It’s like salvation.

This past Monday I went to a yoga session at the Staffin community hall led by Simon, who also runs the local yarn shop Shilasdair along with his wife Kirsty. They dye their wool with locally foraged plants, and the shop feels like a hug. They are extremely kind and interesting people. Simon takes no payment for his yoga classes except donations, as participants are able, and all proceeds go to a Palestinian aid organization. In the class on Monday, after we did breathwork in sitting and standing poses and sun salutations, we lay on the ground, eyes beneath lavender-scented eye pillows, and relaxed as Simon recited “The Sun” by Mary Oliver:

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

No one could see because of the eye pillows, and no one would judge anyway, but a few tears escaped the corners of my eyes. I thought of the sun at Akrotiri. I thought of the way we applauded it, tucked it into bed. I thought of the way that a beam of light through the sky on this cloudy island could be the best feeling in the world. And I thought of the concept of lighthouses: answering darkness with light. Building beacons to say “here is the land,” and “watch out,” and “your life is precious.” The liberal expense for the sake of preserving human life.

It’s not warm on Skye today, but it is uncommonly sunny. I’ve been able to see blue sky for hours. I sat outside on a bench writing a long and detailed trip report post and then deleted it, letting myself be guided instead by an unclear idea of something else that needed to be said. I’m not sure if I nailed it. But I can still see the Storr, all its ridges and angles, gleaming in the distance. I can see the clouds sweep across the summit and to the east. Earlier today, I took the long bus back to Staffin, clockwise through Uig and past Rubha Hunish. I tried not to waste time wishing it was still that night last week with Ben and the bothy and the lighthouses, wishing I could turn back time. I tried not to linger on the thought that I would do anything not to have to leave Skye.

An enormous rainbow appeared then, as the bus rounded the curve. Massive, perfect, arcing all the way across the sky, complete bands of every color, broad and wondrous. Bright, steady sun behind me, and dark clouds ahead. The bus driver, having forgotten that anyone was on board, pulled over and took a photo. I joined her and it became a moment shared. I sat down and cried for a few minutes as we drove south. I don’t want to leave this land of clouds and rainbows, rare sun and blustery sea.

But then, the other land of clouds awaits. More adventures and stories. And anyway, the sun and the clouds don’t care what I want, frankly. From Rubha Hunish to Akrotiri the lighthouses will keep blinking, and the wind will keep blowing. A rainbow will appear just when you need it most. The sun will float, relaxed and easy, every night toward the horizon. You will feel a sense of calm and okayness. Just as it has always been. Just as it will be.

June Gloom, my ex-boyfriend’s mother called it. Told me it was called June Gloom when I expressed surprise at the clouds and coolness. Something about June in the greater Los Angeles area: the pressure, the clouds, the water. Marine layer. It’s always a thing, these gloomy mornings that are cooler than you would expect in such an arid place. She would have been awake for hours by the time I smelled the whatever-it-was wafting through the screen door. She’d be humming along to Joni Mitchell. California, I’m coming home. She’d have all the windows open in that airy white Santa Clarita house, out to the back where the patio led into the garden, that southwestern succulent collection. Lizards, when it was sunny, would scamper up onto the wall and do push-ups in the light.

It’s funny how a place you objectively didn’t even spend that much time in can occupy such a big shelf in your memory. That was the first place I tasted Trader Joe’s Greek yogurt with honey. Still, to this day, when I have a nostalgic spoonful of that stuff, I see the overcast early summer sky in southern California. That was the first time, but not the last, that I smelled what was probably sagebrush. That was the first time, but far from the last, that the desert defied all my expectations.

June in the Ohio River Valley is about as opposite to June in Santa Clarita as you can get. Here, the trees drip green and oxygenated in the languid evening light—hazy, because the sun has to cast its rays through at least eight separate layers of humidity hanging in the space above the pavement. Time stills, even as it moves. No wind parts the branches; insects meander and harass. Fireflies blink tentatively at dusk and confidently in the full dark. Blink. Blink. Seeing, as if for the first time, the complete picture.

Saturday, post-rain, in the summer, late June, everything kind of glows on the streets in Cincinnati. Sort of cloudy, sort of light. I round the corner and there are orange lilies dotted with water droplets tilted skyward across the sidewalk from a mossy tree. I’ve just finished swimming at the pool in Ziegler Park with my friends Kathryn and Kody. We’ve parted now, returning to our respective lives, but I can still hear kids shouting and splashing behind me (“Over here!” “Watch!”) and the afternoon takes on the sleepy haze that I only love in these heavy months whose four o’clocks hang ripe from the branches like fruit over the first hints of unhurried evening. As a kid, I loved my hometown’s summer rains. The droplets on the emerald maple leaves. The way they danced in the humidity. I loved reading books by the pool. Goggles askew. Ears a little wonky. Ordering food.

After his shift ends, Kody brings us lunch. For me, a box of three huge tacos I have to tilt my head to eat so I don’t lose my cheese. For the two of them, something called a “turtle.” They agree that one is enough for two people, and I can’t finish my tacos, which—and let me emphasize this again—are enormous. That’s plenty. I’m satiated. Full up. So we swim again, in defiance of the old proverb. Kids in goggles throw floating footballs. Kathryn tells me about her most recent read. Kody jumps off the diving board. It is overcast, but I am warm.

All the while, a little fish swims inside my friend. Not so little now, really. Eggplant sized. Suspended. Rather big fish, really. I won’t be here by the time she makes landfall. I will be far away, across another sea.

Something about the term June Gloom didn’t sit right with me. Gloom implies a kind of misery. Gloom is dark, foreboding, but the smell—clouds and rocks and soil and sagebrush, or whatever it was—that smell, I tell you, was made of magic dust. Those clouds that rolled in and shielded the edge of California, for more or less one month of mornings, from the relentless unblinking eye of the sun—miraculous. Give me your heat wave; I raise you a kind-of rainy day. Let’s stop the cloud-shaming. Clouds, as it turns out, make amazing pool days.

June Gloom might conjure emotions that are difficult to describe, though, I’ll grant you that. What do you feel when you sit beneath a crowded sky and consider the light? When you can hear airplanes, but not see them? Knowing that there are infinite people taking flight in ways you will never comprehend? I’ve pondered this for at least one entire business day, and the best modifier I can come up with for the way I feel on this lush afternoon walking away from the pool is wistful.

Wistful is not gloomy. It’s not sad. It’s not depression. But it’s adjacent to all those, in a way. A cousin, or a wise old wizard. To be wistful is to sit beneath Sylvia Plath’s green fig tree made of branching decisions and understand that you will never arrive. Never make the right choice. Because the right one doesn’t exist; it’s a myth. And yet wistful also implies a grief over the choice not made. Wistful is wise: I choose this fruit, and in the choosing, I accept the loss of all the others. But if you choose, at least in the end you have your very own fig. Fail to choose, and all the paths rot and plop to the ground at your feet.

There is that proverbial notion about how you can’t swim in the same river twice. Does the same apply to the Ziegler Pool? Or to June? Or to the clear blue of the Aegean, where I’m headed soon?

I can’t be certain that this is true, but I remember hearing a few years back that climate change was changing June Gloom. Breaking up the clouds sooner, shortening the season of overcast pondering. I hope it’s not true, that it’s just one of those internet things that gets passed along. I don’t want to imagine southern California sunny all the time. Can’t picture that place without its overcast Junes.

If you so choose, Cincinnati is a beautiful stream to swim in. A very juicy fruit. I imagine the little fish at the pool. At the zoo. Findlay Market. Walking with her parents down this sticky summer street in this late afternoon light. Orange lilies studded with water droplets. Mossy trees. Red-brick buildings. It’s kind of cloudy. Not in the gloom, or rather, not in the gloom as in sad, but in the gloom as in June Gloom, as in wistful, as in rain is necessary. As in, all fruits on this tree are sacred. As in, all paths lead to the ocean. Shall we water it, and see?

Despite the fact that the words had been hanging up at the front of the room for the past four months, I forgot about them—it’s remarkable how the obvious slips away from you, isn’t it?—until a few weeks ago, when I began disassembling my carefully curated classroom. Down came the multicolor paper bunting from my 29th birthday on the PCT in 2022. (I finally recycled it.) Down came the motivational posters: Be the author of your own life! and I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. (They’ll be given to a colleague to continue inspiring.) Down came the Scotland garland with its thistles, bagpipers, bothies, and Highland cows. (I had no idea when I put it up in August how newly relevant it was about to become.) So down, too, came the motivational words of the year.

I smiled to myself as I reviewed each of them. I remembered pretty much all of the words and who they’d belonged to. Some were silly, some were serious. Ain’t that just the way. Ten years of teaching and it never stops amazing me how different humans are from each other. It’s easy to collapse classes under one descriptor, but peer beneath the grouping and you recall how each soul’s set of particular genes and circumstances forms and informs their worldview.

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My word was “audacity,” and my defense on the back was thus: I am tired of feeling squeamish and timid about my actions. I want to own my wild life and not apologize for following a different path. I want to be confident and to have the audacity to stand up for myself and for others. “Audacity” not as in shocking just to shock, but “audacity” as in confidence, unrelenting boldness, not backing down.

I’ve been thinking recently about how American capitalism works because we’re addicted to comfort and predictability. Our system preys on our deepest fears, which often come back to the unknown. If we leave our jobs, we don’t have health insurance, and if we don’t have health insurance and we have an accident, then we will go into debt and lose all our money. If we speak up against injustices that most people would rather just ignore, then we will make conversation awkward and not be pleasant dinner company at best, or end up on some list at worst. If we don’t have kids, then we’ll be alone when we’re old and the birth rate will decline. If we don’t follow a societally approved path, a traditional and prosperous and normal path, then we will be outcasts and losers and earn no respect in the eyes of society.

I exaggerate, of course; I’m a stubborn childfree-by-choice feminist who just quit her job so she could do a long hike in New Zealand. Of course I’m annoyed by the persistent sense that people (read: women) are supposed to just shut up and follow the script. But really, I’m more annoyed by the ways in which I continue to internalize this sentiment. Despite feeling, most of the time, like a reasonably confident person who puts a reasonable amount of planning and financial responsibility into big decisions like this one, I still have moments of doubt. Looking around my now-empty classroom and wondering, Do I really know what I’m getting into? and Do I really understand what I’m leaving? and What the fuck am I doing with my life?

Those moments are shrinking moments; those are moments when audacity is needed. If I pause and reflect on the facts—how I’ve been saving for this for four years, how I will have an income all the way up until departure, how I’ve done my research and can handle uncertainties—then the feeling disappears. But for the moment when it rears its head, that’s when the audacity needs to roll in. Audacity is the antidote to the little death of fear that creeps in when a script is about to be ripped to pieces.

Fear. It’s so stupid. The mind-killer. I wonder how many people have held themselves back in one way or another because of a fear that didn’t even really pan out in the end.

A student recently asked me about my upcoming travels and my thru hike. “That’s amazing,” she said after I explained Te Araroa. “But I could never do that.”

I shook my head vehemently, as though to shove the very idea away. “Yeah you could,” I countered. “Anyone can.”

Traveling and hiking take money and time that most people just don’t have, and I’m not negating the very real fact that I can do what I’m about to do because I am incredibly privileged, both financially and physically. What I mean, when I say that anyone can do it, is that anyone who has the physical ability, the means, the desire, and the right proportions of stubbornness, insanity, and willingness to be uncomfortable can do a thru hike. It’s just walking, sleeping outside, and pooping in holes for a really long time.

But what I think people mean when they say “I could never do that,” more than the walking or sleeping outside or pooping in holes, is the uprooting of a settled life. Everything in our society is designed to keep people exactly where they are and to make moving or changing so unappealing that we all just say “to hell with it” and stay in the same place. Consider how annoying it is to go through a name change, or a job change, or a change of address, or getting a professional license in a different state than the one you originally earned it in. Consider how deeply rooted and settled even renting a place makes you. Consider how easy it is to accumulate objects, and how difficult movement becomes as a result of those objects. Maybe that’s normal; maybe more people want to be rooted than I’m giving them credit for. I’m not trying to go picking a bone with folks who are happy where they are—I love my hometown too. I know what it is to love a place. My contention is that we are all subject to a system that rewards sitting pretty and being happy with our lot instead of doing something insane, if we want to.

I think what I’m saying is: I want to have the audacity to be unafraid to exercise my free will. I want to outwardly embody the weird little freak I have always felt I was deep down. I want to wage war against fear—of judgment, of failure—and win. Not merely to shock or stick it to the man, but to evolve into myself. To be the mountain of which I dream.

I felt no sadness standing in my empty classroom once I finally cleared everything out. All the posters, the knickknacks, the furniture. I didn’t cry at graduation like I normally do. I don’t feel conflicted about leaving. Even so, there is always a wistfulness during times of transitions, like the feeling of walking into a room you could have sworn was occupied but turns out to be deserted. Days feel so long but they pass and you’re left standing there in the dusty, echoing shell where so many words were exchanged and so many ideas were made, on the precipice of whatever comes next. I have been here before, and I will be here again. I’m not afraid. I’m ready.

Whoa.

That’s it. That’s all I can say at first. Mesmerized, not quite sure how to process what I’m seeing. Papier-mâché masks and a long bouncy nose and painted polka-dotted skin? Good stuff. But that doesn’t pull me in nearly as much as the music itself. These microtones and complicated time signature shifts that have my out-of-practice musical mind spinning. Those loops and all the pedals! The absolute dexterity of the bassist-slash-guitarist’s polka-dotted toes!

Alright, alright. Fine. I’ve watched three clips and I’m already obsessed with Angine de Poitrine. There is, I immediately understand, no going back.

I can’t stop watching them. I keep that KEXP set rolling one time after another after another. I suddenly understand all those memes and reels where people are like “When you try to do anything when watching Angine de Poitrine” and it’s a person overfilling a glass or vacuuming the same spot over and over while their eyes are locked on these two dudes on their screen. You just cannot help but stare at them and try to work out everything that’s going on, to grasp, even just for a moment, what it is you’re seeing.

But Angine de Poitrine isn’t easily graspable, especially if you are deficient in whimsy. They’re really, really weird. In a recent interview, which consists mainly of the band themselves making high-pitched squealing whines and gutteral non-linguistic grunts with an onscreen French translation, they insist that they’re from another planet where every surface is covered in polka dots. Meanwhile, the music video for “Sahardnieh” begins with their arrival in golden pyramid UFOs and appears to circle around the worship of tinned sardines. The drummer is Klek, and the guitarist-slash-bassist (it’s one instrument, a double-necked guitar and bass) is Khn, which people varyingly pronounce as either “Ken,” “Kahn,” or the sound of a throat being cleared.

Almost the same moment that Angine de Poitrine started blowing up, explainer reels followed that expounded upon one repeated idea: that Angine de Poitrine is catching on not just because of the costumes, the polka dots, or the unusual microtonal music, but because their entire vibe reflects a deep-seated cultural desire in the zeitgeist for actual, genuine human weirdness. Generative AI and its attendant slop are everywhere now. You can’t toss a pebble two feet in front of you without landing on an AI slop image on Etsy or Pinterest. You can’t play a YouTube video anymore without an AI slop commercial rolling first. And you can’t walk into a public space without hearing music that is, if not AI generated, at least the same flat-sounding, generic, unremarkable pop that’s become the soundtrack to our commercial existence. Angine de Poitrine is decidedly not slop, and decidedly not unremarkable. Their style may not be for everyone, but it’s impossible to deny the hypnotic genius of those looped riffs, the fascination of their appearance, or the playfulness of their demeanor. Angine de Poitrine might be from another planet, but they’re the most human music for this most decidedly non-human moment.

So yeah. I got obsessed. And what do I do when I get obsessed with something? I crochet it.

I looked up reference photos and watched videos of the band on repeat to the point that I felt reasonably confident that I could replicate them into crocheted dolls. I started the shape of Khn’s hat with a magic ring turned into a square and then worked downwards, decreasing on the corners. I pulled from the depths of my memory a pattern I’d written once for Christmas elves, starting with the feet, joining the legs together, and then working up the torso. The arms were easy; Klek’s sheet was not. Working well into the night for three nights on my spring break, with King Gizz and Wolf Alice videos playing when I tapped out on Angine, I went from a vague idea to physical objects, handmade completely from scratch.

I was giddy with pride in my work. It felt so good to have a vision, commit to executing it, be willing to rip out stitches and start over when it wasn’t going exactly as I planned, and work in a flow state until 2 in the morning like I hadn’t since last summer at least. This is the joy of creation: labor, grit, struggle, but joyfully struggling in the name of making something that didn’t exist before. AI can’t do that. AI “art” isn’t art because it doesn’t take time, effort, persistence, or vision, just as AI-generated “writing” isn’t writing because it has no soul, no vision, no understanding. The effort is what leads to satisfaction. The labor is what leads to a result to be proud of. The late nights, that joy of unhinged devotion to realizing a dream.

I made a silly little stop-motion reel of my creations and posted it to my Instagram for my Gizz bootlegger shop, Float Along Studio. Within two days it was catching on in the weird corners of Instagram. (How many likes before I can call it “viral”? As of this writing, it’s over 23K.) It’s so fun to see that something I’ve made is resonating with others who are also newly obsessed—especially when I think about how it was made by my human hands and my human mind because I needed to celebrate this alien but ultimately very human band.

This was the April of Angine de Poitrine. Avril de Poitrine. It’s been such a treat to see how other people respond to the polka dot boys, too. People are learning the riffs and playing them on their guitars with modified zip tie microtonal frets. People are making paintings and dressing up. People get obsessed with things and share those things and we continue the creation together. It always feels so good and exciting to experience a phenomenon, but it feels especially good to experience it right now alongside other humans who are craving real, genuine weirdness in a homogenizing world. We’ve found that weirdness in Angine de Poitrine. Merci beaucoup, Québec.

All these years later and the Catholic obsession with the Virgin Mother still strikes me as odd sometimes. I suppose you can take the girl out of the Protestantism, but you can’t take the Protestantism out of the girl. Still, all those rote rituals and routines have their merit. The way the body gets involved in a Catholic mass: stand, sit, stand, kneel, repeat. The syllables of the seven or eight standard songs permanently tattooed onto the vocal cords. “Gather Us In.” “One Bread, One Body.” Praying in a circle while plastic beads slide across your sweaty skin. Mumbling the words that rise to the surface easier than breathing.

I’m not Catholic, obviously. I’m not into organized religion at all anymore. But there is something about the Hail Mary. It will pop into mind every once in a while, and before I’m aware of what I’m doing, I’m running through the entire thing under my breath while I’m washing my hands or looking out the window. Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death, amen. It’s not really even a period between “death” and “amen,” just a small little pause. As though the prayer knows it’s not alone: it’s about to launch right into the next one. Into whatever comes next.

I cried at least five times while watching Project Hail Mary in the movie theater. I’d heard rave reviews and knew it was going to be good, but I wasn’t ready for it to be that good. It’s rare that a book gets adapted for screen and makes all the right choices about what to change and what to keep. This was that rare movie. I loved Andy Weir’s book. So much. But I think I might like the film even more.

Spoilers ahead.

I love that there were no green screens. Rocky was a puppet. The inside of the Hail Mary was an actual physical set. Everything felt real and fresh and genuine because it genuinely was. It’s so obvious that everyone involved in the making of this film loves the story and its characters. Weir’s original was carried out on the screen with such beauty and tenderness and grace.

I think what I love about the book, but what’s made even more obvious in the film, is that it has almost nothing to do with scientific fact and almost everything to do with redemption and friendship. One cowardly man, who wasn’t even brave enough to willingly go to space to save his planet, ends up so close with an alien that he sacrifices his shot at getting back to Earth to save his friend. And what’s more, neither Rocky nor Grace ever expresses doubt that they can save their people. Once they’re together, there’s nothing they can’t work through. For them, everything is figureoutable. And everything is worth saving.

Project Hail Mary is important because it is hopeful. Even with all its problems, even with Stratt admitting that the countries of the world would never work together to ration food even if it meant fewer people would die, even with the horrific climate catastrophe Earth was facing, the story never for one moment sinks into despair. Grace never questions whether his home planet is worth saving, because of course it is. It has the oceans and the mist he loves so much. It has his students. It has hope.

I’ve lost my appetite for dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. I’m just not interested in those kinds of worlds anymore. I’ve seen photos of Gaza. I’ve watched those videos of the black clouds over Tehran. I’ve read the letters from the malnourished children inside Dilley detention center. It doesn’t get more dystopian than the reality my country has created.

What I need now is hopecore. I need stories that show me the good and that amplify the positive side of humanity. I need to imagine what will come after all this is over. I need art that offers a future worth living for for. I want to walk into the theater in tatters and walk out stitched back together. I want literature that shows me why it’s worth surviving harder. I want music that makes me want to grab my neighbors’ hands and sing. I need to be convinced that there is hope for us yet.

It is very hard in many ways not to know what happens next. If we let ourselves slide willingly into the authoritarianism we voted into office. If we launch a ship into the distant sky. If we make a drastic change and jump into the unknown. But sometimes that’s our only choice. Sometimes, when our back is against the wall, we have to go for the long shot and say a Hail Mary and hope it all works out.

Ryland Grace woke up in a spaceship not knowing who he was or how he got there. He was a scientist turned teacher turned astronaut, and he met his best friend in space, and together they saved their respective worlds. It was a very, very long shot. But Project Hail Mary gripped the decades and took a chance and mumbled the words to the prayer anyway.

If I’m being honest, I won’t miss a lot of elements of Catholicism after I leave my job in May. I won’t miss the up and down, the same seven or eight songs on a loop, the feeling of obligation nagging over genuine belief. But there are some things that will stick. The feeling of an entire community sitting together in silence. Walking out to the Mary statue for May Crowning at the end of the school year. The comforting, meditative, ancinent rhythm of the rosary, of mumbling the Hail Mary over and over again.

In the fall I’m going to Aotearoa, New Zealand, to hike Te Araroa. It’s a 3,000-kilometer trail that winds its way from the very tip of the North Island at Cape Reinga all the way to Bluff at the south end of the South Island. This has been my plan for years: teach, save money, travel in the meantime, and then, when the time is right, leave for a hike in the southern hemisphere.

For a while now I’ve lived the safe and stable and comfortable life. Respectable job. Health insurance. Family. Community. It has been a good era and a good choice. I’ve grown as a teacher, I’ve nurtured close friendships, I’ve run marathons, I’ve scooped the marrow out of my city. I’m happy. But it’s also smothering me. I need mountains and coastlines, I need movement, I need to be far away, I need to reset my perspective and zoom out on the world again. I need to know that other worlds are out there and that there’s hope.

It is terrifying to be once again at the edge of the yawning maw of the future. My next year or so is clear, but beyond that? No idea. In a way I feel irresponsible, like there is an invisible imagined authority telling me that this is absurd, that I’m too old for this kind of wandering, that I should settle down and be normal like everyone else. But the world is simply too big, and life is simply too short, for me to listen to that voice. If I have the chance, I’m going to go. While there is still a world to see. While I still can. I’ll launch myself into the twinkling pink space of tomorrow. Say a Hail Mary and pray there’s enough time for all of us. Hope we can find a way refill our grace.

It’s literally so crazy what sunshine and a couple warmish days can do to a body. I walked outside into a sixty-degree-and-sunny afternoon earlier this week and almost sank to the earth and kissed the sidewalk and broke into grateful tears. I would walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting if it meant one perfect, extremely good-smelling spring day. Suck it, Punxsutawney Phil. Spring is now. Spring is in me. I AM spring.

I suddenly have motivation again. Suddenly want to go out in the evening again, suddenly want to leave the house, be social, sing, dance, create, run. I want to crochet all the things, read all the things, do all the exercise. I want to write—hence the monthly newsletter nowhere near the end of the month—and I want to dream, travel, go somewhere, do something hard. I want to start walking and never look back!

I’ve felt my anger taper off over the last week as I have stopped engaging as much with political content on social media. Bad Bunny was a beautiful distraction, as is Olympic ice skating. I’m less aware of The Horrors, and therefore happier, and this concerns me. I want to be informed. I want to still pay attention. Because obviously, despite the fact that Operation Metro Surge is officially ending as of today, nothing has meaningfully changed on the ground. ICE is still in Minneapolis unleashing terror, and people are starting to hide folks in their houses, and mutual aid networks are more important than ever for keeping immigrant families alive and fed because they’re too scared to go to work. The national media has turned away from the Twin Cities because we all have terrible attention spans, even for atrocities.

For better or for worse, anger and outrage aren’t really sustainable long-term. You can’t stay permanently shaking with rage. And yet, if you don’t feel rage somewhere within your organic core right now, are you even human? Are you even a creature? Where is the line between awareness and despair? And do I even deserve not to despair? To feel this joy that is now blooming in the newly-dawning warmth?

The almighty algorithm recently delivered to me a gorgeous tune by the name of “Revolution Drinking Song” by Willowbrook. The refrain goes like this:

Whoa-oh, drink to the people
Who stand against evil:
The protestors, punks and the gays
We'll dance until morning
While they're out here snoring
The woke is about to awake!

I listened on repeat all night after the first time I heard it and added it to my playlist of protest songs titled, somewhat ironically, “rage.” There is deep-seated and holy rage in “Revolution Drinking Song,” but I would argue that its defining feature is joy. It’s a folksy-feeling tune that’s catchy and easy to sing, the kind of thing you could easily learn and remember and teach your friends even after you’ve had a few.

This song reminded me that joy is the only emotion of resistance that is going to be sustainable in this dark American era. If I don’t feel joy while attending a protest, participating in community organizing, or speaking out on behalf of the most vulnerable, then I’m just not going to do it. Guilt, fear, and anger don’t motivate long-term, but joy does. And I don’t mean momentary, fleeting thrill, or shallow happiness. I mean sun-on-your-face-after-a-month-below-freezing joy. I mean warm-weather-and-melting-snow joy. Deep joy, sustainable joy. All the art. All the colors. All the songs. All the laughter.

Every winter ends and floods into spring, I know this from my thirty-two years as a human on this floating rock. But every year it still feels dark and cold and horrible, like I’ll never see the sun again. And yet it has arrived to remind us all that we just have to wait sometimes. Warm sun on skin feels infinitely better when it follows such a long time of dry and heartless cold. We emerge from our hiding and rejoice. We’re plants and animals and organisms respirating towards tomorrow, when the light will come again, and we will be free.

And this January, especially. This terrible, endless, frigid, most awful January in this dumpster fire of a dying country. This January in which we are forced to watch as ICE unleashes terror on the Twin Cities and murders American citizens in broad daylight and then our leaders go on TV and blatantly lie about what we all saw with our own eyes. This January with the cold snap and the big storm and the far-below-freezing-for-weeks weather.

Don’t get me wrong. Even this most unholy of months also contained profound joys. Even January contains multitudes.

I rang in the new year with my mom at Epcot, where I took her to her first Silent Disco. I went to Maple Fest at the Nature Center with Grace and learned about the maple syrup making process. My friends and I got together on a Sunday afternoon to make 2026 bingo cards. I got two snow days in a row this past week, on a Monday and Tuesday of all days, and that was an absolute treat. I baked bread and cooked curry lentil soup (shoutout to Emily for that recipe), and I finally watched Heated Rivalry. Twice. Absolutely bless those adorable silly geese. Hollanov forever.

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I spent MLK weekend in Florida with my wonderful boyfriend (oh yeah, I have one of those now!) and discovered that Orlando, as a city, is actually very beautiful— it’s full of leafy neighborhoods and botanical gardens and gorgeous parks in which peacocks roam freely and river otters swim in the lakes amongst floating plants.

And something else really good happened, too. I finally stopped doomscrolling, got off my phone, and started taking action.

I have really bad static inertia. I must have the exact variety of brain that our evil tech overlords had in mind when they designed apps like Instagram. I can scroll like no one else can. If scrolling were an Olympic sport, I’d get the bronze medal, at least. I was consuming horrific content at a horrific rate. Renée Good. Alex Pretti. Shot after shot after shot. Poor sweet five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos kidnapped by ICE to Texas. Footage of the massive protests last Friday in Minneapolis, happy-crying watching the good people of that cold cold city show up en masse on the right side of history. But it was too much. Too much. I was posting and posting and not doing anything. Enough was enough.

So I started doing things.

I’m a millennial, which means, among other things, that making me make a phone call is the worst thing you can do to me. I am aware that right-wingers call their members of congress at a staggering rate, much more often than people on the left, and I am aware that this is a problem, but I had been putting off this very easy action because, again, I Hate Phone Calls. But, reader, I finally did it. I picked up 5 Calls and called my Republican senators and told them what I thought. And then I did it again the next day. And the next day. And guess what? On Thursday the 29th, Kentucky senator Rand Paul voted against the bill that would increase ICE’s budget to $75 billion over the next four years. He voted against it for reasons that are not mine, but still. A no is a no.

I’ve been to two protests in downtown Cincinnati this month, one just after Renée Good’s murder and one last night. Both times, I expected a small group, and both times, a huge crowd greeted me, a crowd that only grew as we started marching through the city, chanting and singing and calling for justice. It felt electric, energizing, so good to be out there in community marching. Protests are only one small symbolic piece of a much larger puzzle, but still, it’s action. It’s not sitting in my house hemming and hawing about whether to start prepping or get plans in place to move abroad or spiraling into general doom. It’s being outside, it’s being together, it’s showing up.

My friend KG in Minneapolis—who is heavily involved with the resistance there—sent me a link to a webinar hosted by Showing Up for Racial Justice on Tuesday. The session was focused on action steps ordinary people can take, inspired by lessons from Minneapolis. I attended, and took notes, and got ideas like joining a Signal group, inviting people in by hosting a potluck, and sharing information about how ICE operates and how to respond.

One of the most meaningful moments of my teaching career happened yesterday. One of my coworkers led a group of students in saying the rosary while walking around the school, in solidarity with the nationwide General Strike. Teachers can’t exactly strike or talk about our political opinions, but there is one thing we can do at a religious school: pray. It was optional; we didn’t tell any of the students that they had to join us. We just said we had to speak out against the state-sanctioned violence that directly counters all the teachings of the Church on respect for life. Neither of us really expected any students to join, but there was a big group. They had organized amongst themselves, distributing rosaries and making a plan to walk. We circled the building, cycling through the Decades and the Sorrowful Mysteries and the Glory Be. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. It was a risky move in our environment. We’ll see what consequences await. But action should involve risk. If it doesn’t, it isn’t action.

Are these actions having any impact, at least beyond my immediate community? No. Probably not. But it is in your immediate circle that you can have an effect, anyway. I’m not so naïve or self-aggrandizing to think that my measly little individual calls to my senators or our one small prayerful walk at one small school on the edge of the Ohio River can possibly make a difference on a national scale. But that isn’t the point of individual action. No one can change the tide. But everyone together, having hard conversations, taking small risks, can begin to cause a shift. We only win by organizing. We only win by working together. I believe that that shift is not only possible, but already happening.

People I’ve never seen be political before are speaking up on social media and in conversations against the state-sanctioned terror of ICE. The protests in Minneapolis last week were some of the most impressive I’ve ever seen. Ordinary people are organizing and communicating and educating each other and showing up in impressive and creative ways. We’re learning from other countries, from history, from from each other. It’s happening, it’s happening, and I have to hold onto it’s happening to remain any kind of sane.

There is so much more that all of us can do. But it’s a good start to just do something. Get off your phone. Quit doomscrolling. Instagram wants to rage bait you and keep you engaged. I would know—I’m among the most easily rage-bait-able social media users in history. But I’m telling you, it feels so good to just pick something and do it. You don’t know what else it will lead to. What one little step forward will cause which dominoes to fall.

Stay informed, but stay sane, too. Dance. Learn. Explore. March. Scream. Go for a walk. Fall in love. Write a poem. Read a book. Otherwise, what kind of world are we fighting for?

One where I have to wake up, get focused,

get dressed, prep for the day, walk out the door,

stand in front of teenagers absorbed with gossip:

who’s still together and who’s breaking up,

and did you hear what she said in the bathroom?

Pop culture, college apps, prom dress, basketball.

Meanwhile, in offices down the fluorescent hall,

the admins run a ship as tight as ever. Funds raised,

parents met with, quarter grades submitted. Like

nothing is amiss. Apply for this! Great news! As if

we aren’t oblivious frogs in a quickly warming pot.

But what can you do? Meanwhile ICE, in my other life,

murders in cold blood and the vile mouths talking

endlessly call it self-defense. Fucking bitch.

The refrain of every small angry man ever spurned.

She was killed for existing and trying to leave

the scene. Women know the score. We have felt this all

before. But now she’s white. Now, she’s us. And we

are afraid. Blood on the ground and all of our hands.

I watch videos and am terrified. I wonder what it will take

to convince ourselves to fight. I wonder when, not if,

the war will begin, and how I can even be thinking about

anything else. I wonder in my dark moments what I did

to deserve this fate: being born in a place built entirely

on the bloody back of hate. But what can you do?

I have to go to work. I have to teach these words.

Pretend like it’s not all crashing down around us.

I have to eat and sleep and dream into believing

that we have what it takes to save ourselves

from the mess we’ve made. I have to write a poem

to make a container for despair. I have to show up.

Have to rage. Until the sun swallows the earth.

Until they put me in the dirt.

This season I rewatched that movie for the first time in quite a few years. It hit different, and not just because I noticed all the “adult” jokes sprinkled throughout that went way over my head as a kid. (“He looks just like your boss!” and “Graciously paid for by the taxpayers of Whoville!” come to mind.) I have begun to genuinely accept, for the first time, I think, that I am kind of over Christmas in a way I never imagined I would be—or at least over all the superfluous kerfuffle. I lowkey kind of vibe now with Cindy Lou Who’s existential dread surrounding the over-the-top-ness of what the season has become. And I feel… weirdly okay about it.

I had a wonderful childhood, and Christmas was a consistently magical part of it. Of course, this magic was largely, if not completely, the result of my mother’s labor. She’s essentially a Who. She loves Christmas, every part of it, and always has. By the time I was in high school, we had six full-size Christmas trees in the house, and “Santa” still came every year and deposited a pile of gifts wrapped in paper specifically reserved for that year’s “Santa presents.” We have multiple generations’ worth of decorations, all placed in their traditional spots and grouped according to type: Nativity, Santa Claus, snowman. One tree is all cow ornaments; another is all frogs. (It’s a long story.) Suffice it to say: Specht-Bird Christmases are historically an event.

I’m grateful for this fact. Some of my warmest and happiest childhood memories surround our holiday celebrations: the peace of an unhurried Christmas morning with quiet music playing in the background; family and friends gathering around the table and laughing until well past midnight; crying in a candlelit sanctuary during “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve; opening the Advent calendar every day during December. I’m rich in Christmas memories that extend far beyond the gifts.

This is all true. But what’s also true is that this year, I just felt so over it. Everything just felt mid. I felt like I barely had any gift ideas, and on top of that, I had no motivation to drum up ideas. I was behind with everything and couldn’t find the drive to get caught up. I procrastinated finishing the decorations, finishing the wrapping, doing any little holiday-related task—when I normally love it. And I found myself wondering where this change was coming from. Is it because of all the AI slop in the world now, making advertising for the season even louder and more annoying and less full of genuine meaning? Maybe. Or maybe it’s the state of America right now, which casts a kind of drab pall on the background of any other event. Or maybe—and I think this is the most likely reason of all—I have just become saturated. All the fuss. All the extra unnecessary stuff. All the crap that you can just picture in a landfill before it even leaves the store. Or Jeff Bezos’ Palace of Pain. It’s all just horror and noise. All the noise, noise, NOISE!

I think there’s a lot of pressure to feel jolly at Christmas, and the fact that I did not feel over-the-top jolly-ness this year made me feel a little bit guilty at the start of the season. I felt like I should have been happier, I should have been wrapping presents or putting up decorations or otherwise participating in merriment, but instead, I was just kind of floating. What’s wrong with me? I asked myself, channeling Cindy Lou. Did Christmas change, or just me?

And then I re-watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And boy, let me tell you—when a Christmas movie hits, it hits good. Let’s take a moment for the creative people who manage to craft a classic that speaks to children as well as to adults. As a kid, I adored The Grinch for its color, song, and heartwarming message. I didn’t quite understand why the Grinch was so cranky, but whatever, I loved him by the end. And minus that one mysteriously dread-inducing scene, I found it quite happy and lighthearted. But phew, as an adult? It’s immediately overstimulating with the noise of the city, everyone advertising something, people getting all in a tizzy over sales and shopping lists. And it’s immediately clear that an adult audience is at least somewhat meant to identify with the Grinch. Listen, I love hanging out by myself in my cave too. I retreat when the world gets to be too much. And if I were spurned for being born green and hairy by an otherwise relentlessly cheerful populace, I’d probably reject that populace outright, too.

In the wake of watching this movie again, something dawned on me. This theme of feeling not quite “right,” not feeling super “with it” in regards to the Christmas season, must be fairly universal, because many Christmas movies surround it in some way. Sure, sometimes people who aren’t super hip to Christmas are demonized and villainized in literature and cinema, like our old crotchety old friend Ebenezer Scrooge. And sometimes, as in the (now very annoying to me) Christmas with the Kranks, anyone trying to opt out of the much-ness is cast as strange, mentally unwell, or antisocial. There is typically some kind of resolution where the misanthrope comes to their senses and is suddenly injected with the Christmas spirit. But, importantly, that spirit and the resolution into gaiety is never about stuff, or decorations, or sales, or excess—it’s about the former curmudgeon suddenly waking up one day and realizing that they live in a community, and that it is the people who have always mattered in the end. Not the gifts. Not the junk. Not the boxes or ribbons or tags. People.

So I decided that I could stop feeling guilty about not being overly ebullient with my Christmas spirit this year. I could forgive myself for not having great gift ideas, and being behind with everything, and not getting boxes sent as soon as I should have done. Because, however imperfectly I might show it sometimes, however thin my attention span gets stretched, at the end of the day, I love my people. I love my family, all the magical memories they have given me over the years. I love my friends who are here, and the ones across oceans. I love my students and the hope they give me for humanity. I love my community. I’m grateful. And if that’s not the heart of the spirit of Christmas, then I don’t know what is.

Thanks, Cindy Lou.

But life isn’t one thing, and neither is a person, or the desert. If there’s one word I use far too often in my AP classes it’s complex. Any of my students would tell you that, and roll their eyes in the telling. “Ok, but how is that complex?” I’ll ask, about a moment of characterization, or an interpretation, or a link to a broader concept. We want to just say, that’s a metaphor. Check. But what literature demands of us is not tallies or ticked boxes, but holding conflicting truths in our hands at the same time. Seen one way, it’s like this. But shift your perspective, and you can see it as all these others. It’s just that language collapses the real world into handy, hold-able devices. Our brains want to be plastic bags carried out from towns. Our minds seek easy patterns and stick to them.

In How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan asserts that the real value of psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD is not that they make you trip, or send you somewhere else for a few hours, but that they pull you out of the ruts of your mind and re-wire old and tired connections. Humans tend to follow the same paths over and over. Driving recently, it has struck me how many roads in my hometown I’ve never gone down. How many streets and neighborhoods I have lived adjacent to, but never seen, or known, for decades of my life. It’s the same thing when you walk or run on a street you’ve only driven previously, as I have had occasion to do recently. Your perspective shifts. You find yourself somewhere new, even if it’s not new at all. I never noticed that, you might say. Or, Has that shop always been there? I’m guilty of collapsing the world around me into more easily holdable truths, instead of standing at the intersection of conflicting paths and bathing in the tension.

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I feel down to my bones that I am at a crossroads. The ruts have worn in deep and I am ready to uproot. Maybe it’s a November thing. If it’s any indication, for the past two years my November newsletters seem to have focused on a feeling of overwhelm: last year it was being desperate to lie around for five days after my surgery, and the year before, I wrote of feeling like an automaton, stuck in a robotic rut of wake, work, sleep, repeat.

In all fairness, as an educator, November just do be like that. It is the time of year when everything is a constant cascade towards midterms and Christmas events and madly trying to get everything done before winter break, and so some burnout seems inevitable. But this year I just feel uniquely tired. I have senioritis. I feel my motivation slipping away with every passing moment.

It takes energy to haul myself out of this mindset. It’s the Dark Times, the Cold Days setting in, the specter of Seasonal Depression Season, and the thought of doing anything but burrowing longer, lingering with my book and my candle in the morning, is bone-deep dreadful. I need to hold strong in the tension. I need to not be precious. This is me hauling, and hunkering, and sucking it up. I just reread This is How You Lose the Time War for the fifth time. (It’s better every time.) I’m going to every run club and gathering of friends that I can. And I’m learning to bake bread.

It’s easier than I thought it would be. There aren’t really that many ingredients in white bread: flour, salt, yeast, oil, water. It isn’t what you would call complex, even if it does take a while. But you have to add in the right ratios at the right time, and you’ve got let it rise until it’s the right size, knead and fold and coax the correct shape, and have the patience to wait in the in-between. Once you mix it all together and follow the directions, there’s little else to do but to wait and see what happens. Maybe your first loaf has a giant air bubble in it, and one end of it is unusable except as a soup scoop. But maybe your third round is complex carbohydrate perfection, soft and light and flavorful within perfect crackly crust. You can shape, you can flatten, you can poke out the air after that last proof, but much is up to the will of the oven.

This is a metaphor about life. Half-baked (sorry) because it’s late. What I mean to say is: you can have sort of an idea of how something is, or will be, but it will never be straightforward or turn out exactly as you imagined. The desert isn’t one thing, and neither is any moment or truth. And isn’t that amazing. I’m thankful that I can’t see past my headlights, or around the corner to the next turn, or inside my bread to know if it is done or not. So much is impacted by so many factors. It’s like this, but like that, too. Me and you. There are good days ahead, but there is also the now. Just hold it in your hands with me. You’ll see.

Disappear, verb: to vanish, to cease to be present, from the late middle English dis-, expressing reversal or a turnaround, on the pattern of the French disparaître. An appearance reversed; enter, then exit, Irish exit. O’Kay then. Stand up from the metaphorical table mid-conversation and dissipate into the ether, neither here nor there. Disappeared. No object permanence. Away from sight, and gone. Cease to exist.

It can be transitive, too. To disappear someone. As in, to make vanish, to make no longer visible, to render un-present. Once around, now not. Life might be easier if I were the kind of person who can make a person disappear from thought. But alas, I am made of poetry and adjectives for sunlight and cannot seem to stop weaving meaning from mist, and the missed. To me, things don’t disappear when they’re not around. They linger. Some people can do a disappearing, though. Take aim and fire and plow right through the problem. Or avoid it altogether, I guess. Hot and cold, on and off. Open a book and toss it aside before you even get through an eighth of the exposition. If you’re into reading books, that is, but apparently it’s not everyone’s cup of metaphorical tea. Or decaf espresso.

Listen. Forgive my dramatic free association. I do not have a grid-matrix, black-and-white, math-and-science brain. I don’t see life as a series of things to be gotten through, problems to be engineered away, strategic operations that fulfill some violent but necessary end. Tick the boxes every day. A to B efficiency. Work out, work, eat, sleep, repeat? Nah, man. Fuck a straight line. I’m all about a good meander, and adventure, and pleasurable distraction, and doing things from scratch, and the gloaming beyond the riverboats in the mid-October evening. I’m about getting it wrong, and compassion, and communication, however inexpertly done, and words, and sometimes mincing them, if I feel like it, and sometimes even, if needs must, turning them as a weapon on that which causes me pain.

See? Words are balm, but bullets too. Though these will certainly dodge you.

Wounded, if only ‘tis but a scratch, I roll muddy through my manic litany of self-comfort mantras. No answer is an answer. If it’s not a “hell yes,” it’s a “hell no.” When one door closes, another one opens. You won’t be too much for the right person. Believe people when they show you who they are. Yeah, yeah. I know. All well and good. This isn’t a big deal. It isn’t even a little deal in the scheme of things. It still stings, though, which I can’t explain, since this particular wasp doesn’t even register a blip on the seismometer of my highly tectonic existence. Pray, excuse the mixed metaphors. I am a bit out of sorts.

If you see me on the bench by the river these days, reading Kahlil Gibran, muttering under my breath, just know I’m trying to work myself out of that place where I blame my own cringe instead of the disturbing lack of cringe of another. I am endeavoring to escape the cycle of self-deprecation, of arbitrary self-shrinkage on the self-sacrificing altar of the imagined other. Of possibility. Of absolutely losing my mind over a what-if future that was never going to exist and wouldn’t have worked for very long even if it did. Eternally putting the cart before the horse. Miles before the horse. Need to be my own horse sprinting sunward, cart be damned.

I always write in the singular hope that someone, somewhere, will read my words and feel less alone. So whoever you are, no matter how ghosted, I offer myself to your imagination. Nothing is truly wrong, not really, even if it’s not exactly right. But shake the dust. Unclench your jaw. Over and over the sun disappears and, reliably, appears again. Our star is no phantom. Over and over, the geese, those blessed constants, just keep on honking above the riverboats and bridges and that great muddy current. Every moment melts into the next. It’s only one moment. One season. And if there is one thing that lasts, it is the fact that seasons always pass.

PS: You can order a copy of the most recent issue of Catamaran, where my essay “Love and Other Birds” is published, at this link!

But like many creatives, I always find an excuse not to formally practice my craft. Life gets in the way. Easier and more comprehensible tasks move to the top of the list. The handheld blue-light tyrant keeps me in its thrall. Distraction and procrastination own me. My attention span is getting worse by the day.

Perhaps worst of all, I don’t always really believe that I can do it. I’ll read some amazing piece of writing that someone else put together and just slump a little and think, “I could never write like that.” I’ll watch a video or listen to a podcast where someone talks about their writing routine and think, “I will never have the discipline that it requires to really be a writer.” I set myself up for failure before I’ve even tried. I self-sabotage. I doubt.

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And then on the other hand, I’ll read some bestselling book that is, in my opinion, terribly written. And I’ll get pissed off at myself that I don’t believe in my own abilities when so many people are finding success. And I’ll think, “Well shit, if they can get published, then so can I.” Egotistical, maybe? I don’t mean to put any author down because writing is Really Hard. But still. Even if you only write a book out of spite, at the end of the day, you’ve still written a book.

When my friend Amelia decided she was going to hike the Appalachian Trail in 2019, she announced her plans on social media because that way, there was no going back. She was committed. Set your intention sailing into the world and you force yourself to fulfill it. So I’m taking a cue from you, Patches. Here goes.

I’m writing a memoir.

There. Now I have to do it. Whether it gets published or not, whether more than a handful of people read it, whether it’s great or it sucks or it’s somewhere in between: it is going to get written.

Here I must give a shout-out to my dear friend Allie. Earlier this month we met up for dinner and a walk, during which we discussed our writing at length. She announced that she was writing her memoir, which inspired me to recommit to mine. So for the past four weeks or so, we’ve been meeting each week to write and give each other feedback on new sections of our projects. Over beers and pizza bread, in the warm glow of the chapel that is Highland Coffee House, we spin and weave the raw material of our stories into paragraphs. We title that which is nameless. We crack open the hearts of our pasts and pour them out onto the page and into each other. I tell you. If you want to really get to know how beautiful your friends are, read each other’s memoirs.

Committing to this has given me a direction around which to orient my thinking. I’m constantly returning to episodes and vignettes I want to include or leave out or approach differently. I’m mulling over memories through a more poetic lens, looking backwards in order to understand my forward motion. Suddenly these collected stories of lands and trails and lessons take on a narrative arc and shine. I’m constantly grateful for my life, but writing these stories has made me impossibly full to bursting with gladness.

I understand that it will take years to complete and the final product will likely be unrecognizable from what I have today. This is just how life goes. It’s scary and gorgeous. I can picture so clearly what I want the title to be, how I want the cover to look, and where I will break the sections. But I accept that it might end up completely different. Until then, I’m loving the drafting. The becoming. The messy process of it all. Enjoying the chaotic nonlinear dance.

Here’s a little excerpt of my first-draft chaos of my Flagstaff chapter, if you’d like to give it a read. Thanks for being here.

Every night sky reminds me of the night sky in Flagstaff, Arizona. From the side street next to my house I could look up at the end of any day and see the bright splatter of stars so close, I felt the light in my fingertips. Stardust skin. I would come home at the end of the day, walking the mile in the dark from my office on campus, and glance heavenward for one lingering moment before I punched in the code for the garage door and waited for it to open. I would stare up into the expansive night, feet tired and brain weary, and catch the filmy edge of the Milky Way loping lazily above Mackenzie Drive. Glittering. I would trace my eyes in a weighty ellipse around the edges of the galaxy, and I could almost feel its unseen rotation.

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The Kachina Peaks rise majestically out of the earth just north of Flagstaff, punching into the sky from the scrubby plateau below. They’re called the San Francisco Peaks by white settlers, but the title of the wilderness area to which they belong, Kachina, derives from the name of Hopi spirit beings, some of whom are believed to live in the Peaks for the second half of the year and bring water to the area in mid-summer. What is now a collection of several large peaks was once a 16,000-foot volcano that erupted about a million years ago. The tallest of the Kachina Peaks, Humphreys Peak, is the highest point in Arizona at an altitude of 12,637 feet. From up there, Flagstaff is so tiny it’s almost nonexistent. Instead, it’s the land and sky that take the show, stretching on seemingly endlessly into the horizon.

When I decided to move to Flagstaff, I couldn’t stop googling pictures of the Peaks. “Flagstaff mountains,” I entered in the search. “Kachina Peaks.” “Flagstaff Kachina Peaks.” Images appeared of pink sunset skies and giant mountains rising beyond the tiny town cluster. It was impossible to believe that I would actually get to live there, among the rocks, the stars, the Ponderosas, and the mountains. It continued to seem impossible until, driving west with my parents in a U-Haul, towing my little silver car behind us along a road trip of the vestiges of Route 66, they popped up in the distance. Rising as if pointing to the sky, asking, See?

The Peaks became my compass. My point of orientation. Walk out of a building, find the Peaks: that’s north. Driving along long stretches of roads into the distance, and the mountains dictated the direction of travel. From far out on the plateau, look back towards the peaks in a summer monsoon, with clusters of clouds and lightning, and it becomes obvious why the Hopi people believed the Kachinas brought the rain.

To a layperson like me, the geology of the Coconino Plateau is a dizzying and magical labyrinth of rock and movement. I had only the vaguest sense of how the long history and movement of the earth made these features: volcano, glacier, tectonic plates, rain. What I knew on a practical level was that the rock of the peaks was different from the rock of the canyons closer to my house. Up in the cool shady Peaks, all was dark brown basalt. At the local climbing area Le Petit Verdon, aka “The Pit,” along the Sandy’s Canyon Trail south of town, the walls were well-loved pocketed limestone baked in the sun.

One undeniable draw of Flagstaff, and a key reason I ended up there for grad school and not Boston or New York, was the rock climbing. It was a new and overpowering obsession. As soon as I moved in, I spent most evenings at the local climbing gyms meeting up with people who responded to my posts on the Flagstaff Climbers Facebook page. But it was the Pit I really wanted to go to. The only problem was that I didn’t have any of my own outdoor climbing gear. Thus far, I’d climbed mostly indoors or outside with people who had the right equipment. So when I finally found a climber with a rope and some quickdraws who agreed to meet up on my first Saturday in town to go to the Pit, I was elated.

That morning I followed the navigation on my phone out of my neighborhood and down Lake Mary Road, due south, the Peaks squarely in my rearview mirror. I turned into a gravel parking lot in the shade of ponderosas and ringed by dry beige grass bent in the breeze. I parked next to a little hatchback and watched as the climber I had planned to meet up with unfolded from the little car, his long, straight, sheet-blond hair swishing in the wind. He smiled as he introduced himself. He held a rope and a backpack full of quickdraws and carabiners that clinked rhythmically as we walked through the parking lot, onto the trail, and down into the canyon. There were more ponderosas there, and a dry creek bed, and rocks strewn about. As we approached the rock wall on the other side, we could hear the voices of other climbers. I grinned.

We climbed for hours that day. I breathed in the sweet vanilla smell of the pine, disbelieving that I now actually lived here. At the tops of the climbs, I could see clear across the forest to the Peaks watching over the land in the distance. My fingertips traced the well-established routes, clicking metal to metal and chalky skin to limestone. Arms shaking, I ascended. Hello, came a sound from somewhere inside me, face to the rock with ravens flying in the sky above. It is so nice to meet you.

I brush it off in the moment. Oh, it’s probably just the beer! Haha! Because there’s no way I can look “glowing” in my silly hat over limp, unwashed hair and my dirty King Gizz dress I’ve already worn all day and to last night’s show and had liquids spilled upon, with my crinkly-eyed goofy smile and dirty hiking shoes.

But it’s true, if I’m being honest. I really am glowing, and this becomes apparent to me when I see photos from that night afterwards—night three of three at King Gizzard’s Field of Vision music festival in Buena Vista, Colorado.

It was my eleventh King Gizz concert, and my sixth of the year. The previous two nights of the festival were transcendent; Gizz concerts always are. Night one delivered with a rocking “Kepler-22b” on the synth table (aka Nathan) and the Mind Fuzz suite, which I’d been waiting for, and night two brought me my first live “Magenta Mountain,” my favorite song—among many other highlights: lots of flute from Stu (and Joey?? Okay!); “Hot Wax” and “Hot Water”; “Superbug” with a 14-year-old audience member on Stu’s guitar; “Empty” for the first time since 2014… should I go on? The range, skill, and energy of this band has me breathless, always wondering what they’re going to show up with next. That’s where I was at on night three: not necessarily expecting or hoping for anything specific, but knowing that it was going to be an amazing time. And knowing that I had to leave it all out there, as it were, and enjoy this final moment with my new friends and our favorite band in the mountains of Colorado.

Reader, night three delivered.

Picture this: Six thirty-something Australian rockers walked out on stage in drag. (It was Drag Night.) Stu with his neon pink wig and long dress. He grabbed the mic and said to the crowd, simply, “We love you so much.” Joey in a cutoff shirt and short shorts with fishnet tights. “What up, queens?” he asked. Cavs with his hair in three ponytails á la Cynthia from Rugrats. Cookie in a flowy little floral number, Lucas in a cutoff “But Daddy I Love Him” shirt over a long black skirt, Amby in a dark blue flapper-style dress. All of them with glittery makeup on and lowkey eating. Acoustic guitars came out. The last bit of the warm Colorado daylight began to dim. They launched into a quiet, beautiful version of “Theia” that called to mind trees and running creeks, tents in the dusty distance, music rolling over mountain peaks.

And then picture me mid-crowd, beaming, as the circle pit opened up for the metal section of the show:“Supercell,” followed by “Perihelion” and “Venusian 1,” then, later, “Motor Spirit.” I don’t mosh as a general rule because I don’t want to be crushed to death. But my friend Brittney was keen, so I followed her in. I expected it to be terrifying. It was not. It was merely sweaty and joyous and silly. Bouncing around like a kid, spinning gaily in the tempest. I got a little turned around on my way out, but a guy with a giant light-up Lord of the Rings style staff pulled me over. “You okay?” he asked, grinning. “We’ll look out for you in here!”

And that’s really how it was. You’d think a crowd would be a stressful place for an introvert like me, but this was a very high quality crowd. Good vibes. Positive energy and all that. Everyone happy to be there. Every once in a while I’d look around and make eye contact with someone near me and just smile, sing together for a while, maybe dance. We ran into several people we’d met either at the festival or at previous shows and greeted them as though they were long-lost friends.

I’d told people on the first night that I wanted to crowd surf—which I’d never done before—but I kept chickening out. By the time I was properly comfortable, eleven songs in and during “Billabong Valley,” I felt enthusiastic about it again and wanted to give it a go. I told Brittney, who told our friend Grace, whose eyes immediately widened. “Hell yeah! Let me go get some friends to get you up!” Said friends came running within seconds and before I knew it I was airborne and floating above the crowd on strangers’ hands.

There wasn’t a lot of time to process it. One minute I was on the ground and the next I was being passed along towards the stage. The music sounded great from up there. The cool air was a pleasant relief from the sweaty pit. I laughed. I sang. I whooped and hollered and yelled “First crowd surf, WOOO!” If there’s any crowd I’d trust not to drop me, it’s the Weirdo Swarm. Perpetually joyous, eternally good, unendingly concerned with the wellbeing of the entire community. I was a tiny ship sailing over a giant sea of love. I knew I was going to be taken care of.

The crowd led me to the security guard behind the rail who cradled me like a baby and set me down on the ground. I didn’t register how close I was to the stage or even get a peek of the band—I was too full of warm pride in myself for having just done something that scared me. I ran around the side and threaded back through until I found Brittney again. By then the band was playing the “K.G.L.W.” outro from the microtonal album L.W., which goes SO hard, and which had been high on my want-to-see list since I watched the live version at Red Rocks from last year.

As the show went on, we moshed our way closer to the stage until we were on the left side near the rail, in front of Flapper Girl Amby for the last few songs of the night. “The Garden Goblin,” also a longtime wishlist track, was so much fun, as was “Daily Blues.” We could all tell they were coming to the end of the set. The three hours were almost up. But I tried to drink it all in, and be really present. Look around, feel the air, see the lights. Be.

The boys got quiet for a second as Stu made an announcement about Matt Gawiak, the Gizz fan who went down during Friday’s show. They’d had to stop in the middle of a song and part the crowd as the medical team rushed Matt out for treatment. It was announced the following day that Matt had tragically died from a previously unknown health condition. “We are deeply saddened,” Stu said, which echoed the feelings of shock that had run through the swarm when we’d found out.

“Matt was a huge Gizz fan,” Joey added. “So let’s dedicate this next song to him.” Everyone started cheering and chants of “Matt! Matt! Matt!” broke out. I didn’t know Matt, but I felt chills run down my spine just from that show of support.

They began slowly, not committing to a particular melody, trying to keep us guessing, until the beautiful floating opening riff of “Float Along - Fill Your Lungs” came loose, and so did something within me. It’s one of my favorite Gizz songs. It has brought me so much comfort and reassurance. When I was training for my first marathon in 2023 I listened to it on repeat on my long runs, reminding myself to just take a deep breath and keep going. And now it was also dedicated to Matt—who few of us knew, but now all of us love.

I could tell they were putting everything they had into this one. Every note felt so slow and intentional; it was obvious they were reflecting and thinking of Matt and his family. They might never have known him, but their love and care came out through the music. Less than a minute in and the tears were streaming down my face. For Matt, but also for this community I’ve come to love, and the band that has brought us all together. This world is often dark and violent and horrible but this is the same world where this music exists. The same world where people who love something beautiful can come and celebrate it together. Who can just float along and fill their lungs as one for a little while.

The last song of the night was “The Dripping Tap,” which was terrifying to be in the pit for. I did honestly think at one point that I was going to get crushed and asphyxiate. But I held on, and danced as well as I could, and watched them rock so hard there was nothing left to leave on that stage. And then it was done, and they were thanking us and bowing and taking photos, and Joey was leading us in a “Free Palestine” chant, and telling us that they would see us next year. (NEXT YEAR!!) Then they walked off stage, and it was over. Three nights, three shows, nine hours of Gizz, no repeats, all love. Glowing.

I love this band and everything they’ve brought to my life: friends, new places, creativity, wonder. The inspiration to do what I want and try new things and be loud and weird about what sets me on fire, because who cares in the end if you’re cringe or uncool? King Gizz has never cared, and they’re the coolest rockers I know. They show up in amazing drag, wearing cutoff shirts and flapper dresses and pink wigs, and proceed to blow everyone’s mind with their music. They write strange lyrics that are strangely beautiful. They have odd time signatures and wacky concepts. They speak out for Gaza, they leave Spotify, they bring audience members on stage to play, they champion artists, they loudly support the queer and trans communities, and they do everything with love and compassion. Because they don’t give a shit what’s trendy or popular or what will sell or what anyone thinks. They just genuinely love what they do, and they genuinely love their people, and their fans, and the world. And they inspire us to do the same.

Now I know, looking back, what Andie meant before the show when she told me I was glowing. I was probably grinning ear-to-ear, with all my Gizz gear on, stoked to get into the pit and maybe crowdsurf and maybe hear “Float Along - Fill Your Lungs,” and maybe cry a little bit with all the joy and goodness of the weekend. I was probably giving off the kind of contentment I feel on a thru-hike: a complete lack of desire to be anywhere else. Pure presence, pure light. The fact that a band and its fans can do that to me is wild. Gizz and the Weirdo Swarm are a gift. I’m grateful.

PS: Check out Matt’s GoFundMe page here.

Rachel’s got a new place she wants to show us, so we choose the hills route as opposed to the flat so we can run past, although it’s an aggressive choice because the last time I ran this I was in much better shape, and it was a much better month for this kind of steepness. But no matter. I love Columbia Tusculum. Love those colorful little houses with their porches and fences and gates and tiny yards, love even the hills, because the hills are what make Cincinnati what it is, somehow, and the hills harbor the hollows that have cradled me here. Her new place is so adorable. Pinkish color, spiral staircase, windows, patio overlooking the now-set scene. A beautiful place for beautiful new beginnings.

We hunch over and do battle with the incline. Other, speedier runners from our club come tumbling down on the other side of the road. Arms flailing encouragingly. “You’re basically there!” “Just a little longer!” It makes me want to flail and smile in response even though by now there is sweat pouring down every available surface of skin and we haven’t even hit two miles yet. What is this. Why did I decide to run in July. Terrible choice.

But then it’s the top of the hill, and oh, it is so green, here, and the cicadas are singing, and there is dear Lunken Airport down in the valley, Lunken of marathon training lore, Lunken loop of here-to-Milford multi-hour mornings and, sometimes, herons. “Who wants a selfie?” We gather, not touching, far too overheated, but smiling because we’re here together.

Downhill is flying. Not much of a breeze to speak of, if we’re speaking honestly here, but something resembling it, sort of. We catch up with Rick. Haven’t seen him in a long time, and the catch up is nice and familiar. Check in with Jamie. Spot a cat. Stop. Kitty!! Struggle to get running again. Spill the tea; others’ and mine. Chat shit and laugh about nonsense. How long have I been coming to run club now? Over three years? We have witnessed so many of each other’s seasons. We have collectively borne and healed from so many injuries. Run so many miles. Had so many late nights. Seen men and women come and go. Who knew a love-hate relationship with throwing sometimes-willing feet down down down on the pavement ad infinitum would bring you to such a loving and grounding place.

Finishing the last mile with Rachel and Jamie. Sun is boring a hole into the back of me now and my face is flush with near-100 heat. Fuck. I guess I don’t usually run much in the summer for a reason, but part of that reason is often that I’m injured, but this year I did the work to heal my foot and now I feel amazing, if we’re not talking about the heat. Now I’m thinking half marathon again soon, now I’m thinking big miles, dissociation, that pleasant run-brain headspace of floating along and filling my lungs and nothing else. Wow. I missed actually wanting to run. I missed seeing this as fun. I missed this particular kind of sweaty infinity.

We cut the loop slightly short because we’re just about at three miles anyway. If it weren’t so hot, I probably could have gone on. But this is where we are now, and we walk across the train tracks, and walk off the running, and walk inside to the air conditioning. I love Streetside. I think I mentioned that. It has the best patio, the best food truck, and the best beer. Almost always weird IPAs and strong sours and citrusy wheats, all my favorites. Nothing dark. No lager cramping my style. Hoppiest mosaic you’ve got, thanks. It slides down tickling all the good neurons. Or something. Tastebuds tingling, cold and pungent. Life is worth living if only for a cold local craft beer after a run.

And people. The people around me. People I have known for a while, people I’ve just met. We all have deep roots to running, this strange painful hobby that has a hold on us for some reason. As long as I can run, I will. It will always be so. Running is what made me not hate my body. Running is what made me love high school. Running is what brought my best friend and me closer. Running both fucking sucks and is the best thing I can imagine doing. Head clearing, lung strengthening, revelation granting medicine. We take it together.

Now it’s evening. Four of us talking in the almost-night. About old jobs, and relationships, and music, and traveling, and motivation. I’m almost always a one-drink girl but tonight it’s two. The sour, a deep magenta color, is electrically delicious. I ask questions. The conversation flows like a trickling stream in an over-green woodland, and I feel glad to be here down to the bones. And then it gets darker, and we call it a night, and I’m sitting in my car with the air blasting and Phantom Island playing and mustering the desire to drive away from this warm night.

And now I’m writing on my phone for a minute. I used to do this all the time back when I first started coming to run club in the winter of 2022, when I would have multiple drinks and stay until late because I’d just discovered that I was capable of meeting cool people as an adult outside of a trail context and I loved it. That’s when I learned that post run club car poetry is scripture. Change my mind. I own the night and the muggy night owns me. You’ll never convince me CRC isn’t holy. Look at us, here. Years later still running. Years later and still learning. Hills and new houses. I grow in this rich loamy soil. Tall and watered. I’m known and am knowing. Get in my car and write about it until I’m sober enough to drive home, singing.

Someone asked me tonight why I would stay in Cincinnati if I’m a hiker, why I live here if I love the mountains and have seen so much of the world and know how many other places are out there. Why I’d consider moving back here after my next hike and not moving out to Seattle, or Salt Lake. I just shrugged and smiled. “I love Cincinnati, dude.” And my voice was, I think, resounding, as though bounced off the hills and back. It’s a hard thing to pin down. This jumble of highways and houses isn’t picture-perfect pretty, or commanding of attention, or impressive in any traditional or easy way. But Cincinnati is where my run club is, and where Streetside is, and where my family is, and where that sticky-hot-oven cicada song hovers over the slow-moving river beneath the hazy July almost-night, and where those heavy green thunderstorms roll in in the summer for days on end. I have loved so many places, seen such majesty, been to so many lands this summer alone. But Cincinnati is home.

The only thing is, you have to get naked to enjoy them.

Like everything else in Japan, there is a very particular set of social rules and customs that must be obeyed in order to use an onsen. Most onsen are separated into facilities for men and women (what trans and nonbinary folks are supposed to do in this case, I’m not sure). When you enter an onsen, there’s a locker room where you leave all your clothing and take only a small towel. Then you shower at a little stall—everything must be scrubbed completely clean, in public, before entering the onsen—and place your tiny towel on your head, and get into the hot water.

I’ve known about onsen for a long time because I’ve wanted to go to Japan for a long time. My research was extensive. I love culture, and I love enjoying local specialities, and I love a hot tub, so naturally I wanted to experience an onsen on my Japan trip this summer.

But I really, really hate being naked in front of other people—outside of a sexual context anyway. And I hate that I hate it because there have been moments where this resistance has prevented me from experiencing real transcendence. Two summers ago, for example, when I was hiking in Alaska’s Brooks Range with Carrot, Gahl, and Chelsea, there was one glorious day when the sun came out and we were sitting by a creek in the blazing afternoon. Without hesitation, the three of them stripped down and got in the creek and encouraged me to join them. But I just couldn’t do it. Nevermind that we’d all taken creek baths the previous day in a different, deeper stream. Nevermind that I felt comfortable with them. I just could not bring myself to take my clothes off and get in the water, and I’ve regretted it ever since. It was damn hot that day. A dip in the creek would have been glorious. How many other times in my life will I be able to be naked in a creek in the sun in the Brooks Range?

It’s not hard to trace a line from my resistance to nakedness back to my upbringing in an American, Christian, conservative culture. When you’re a kid in this kind of environment, you learn early on the story of Adam and Eve being ashamed of their nakedness. Bodies are ostensibly sacred, but in practice something to be embarrassed by—you learn to hate your desires and cast the body as wicked and gross. And it doesn’t help that America is deep into the diet culture and exultation of thinness even to this day. We are raised in a stew of toxic ideas about our bodies. They become something more than they are: either idealized objects of sexual desire, or disgusting and imperfect sacks of flesh that we poke and prod at, eternally unhappy with, until we die. That seems to be the message, even though it’s the dumbest, most garbage lie—but a lie that drives the capitalist machine.

I wouldn’t describe myself as thin. I have wide hips and thick thighs. I was in sixth grade when one of my friends told me out of the blue one day that I had “a booty.” (Not wrong, but weird observation for an eleven year old.) I’ve always had a rounded belly, even when I was running six days a week at sixteen years old. I didn’t lose a single pound on either the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail. My body seems to retain itself, hold onto the weight and mass it thinks is best. I’ve mostly accepted this because I am educated and self-aware and can reason my way through the reality that a body is simply a body. But my baked-in shame and the inevitable influence of western media still whispers to me every day: Hate your body. Hate your body. Hate your body.

I could work out more often than I already do. I could run more, try to get a faster time, sweat to the edge of passing out. I could give up beer and chocolate and cookies. But I am not going to do these things because I choose joy. I would probably have a flatter stomach and be marginally healthier if I didn’t like to enjoy an Oberon on a patio with a friend in the summer, but if you think I’m going to sacrifice my Oberon on the altar of thinness then, brother, you do not know me. And have you ever even had a strawberry Galbo or a piece of matcha Meiji milk chocolate? Allow me to introduce you. I’m not willing to give up these pleasures for a slightly more “ideal” body. The body I have works fine: this body has hiked two of three Triple Crown trails. This body has run two marathons. This body has navigated Japan’s complex transit system without falling apart. So I have endeavored to accept this body as it is.

It was with this attitude-in-progress that I arrived at Onyado Nono Nara Natural Hot Spring Hotel on June 7, the day before my 32nd birthday. I booked this hotel because it was close to Nara’s train station and therefore convenient, but also as a challenge to myself. My friend Katie had recommended this hotel and its lovely onsen facilities, and I was not about to let myself leave this establishment without being brave and partaking of its waters.

The hotel is gorgeous. It’s built in the style of a ryokan, a traditional Japanese guesthouse. You have to take your shoes off before entering and lock them in a “shoes locker,” exchanging them for hotel-provided socks and slippers that you wear, in addition to your hotel-provided pajamas, for the duration of your stay. Apart from the check-in area, the floors are all traditional woven tatami mats, and the lighting in the common areas is a calm, dim golden. It smells clean, like wood and flowers.

All evening, I kept an eye on the TV in the room that showed the crowd status report of the hot springs facilities. It went from “a little crowded” to “crowded” as I relaxed and worked on catching up on my notes. Finally, around 11 PM, it went back down to “a little crowded.” I sighed. I was waiting for the status to change to “unoccupied,” but it didn’t seem like that was going to happen. It’s now or never, I thought. And without putting too much conscious thought into it, I gathered up the provided basket with towels and took the elevator down to the first floor to go to the onsen.

I arrived at the door with the red curtain marked “women” and entered the passcode. The door slid open. It was warm and pleasantly lit, and it smelled like high-end shampoo at a day spa. Small wooden lockers lined the walls, and in the far corner there was a mirror behind three sinks, each paired with bottles of hand and face wash, a hairdryer, and a basket of hairbrushes. A few women in various states of dress or undress milled about, drying their hair, putting clothes on or taking them off, toweling dry. As with most other public places in Japan, no one was talking. There was just calming spa-style music in the background and a feeling of peace.

Any awkwardness or weirdness I might have had simply, instantly dissipated. My heart wasn’t hammering in my chest; I wasn’t nervous or worried. I just picked a locker, took my clothes off, and put them in. I took my little white hand towel and entered the warm, womblike room of the onsen. The pleasant salon smell intensified along with the temperature and humidity. The calming spa music was a little louder in here; again, no one was talking. On the right side of the room there were several open shower stalls with little dividers between each station. According to onsen tradition, each shower also had a stool and a bucket—the stool for sitting on while washing, and the bucket for dousing the body after it’s been soaped up. I took my little seated shower, closing my eyes and enjoying all the sensations of the room around me: the music, the warm air, the pleasant smell, the splash of the water. Finally, I used the bucket to rinse my body, then used the shower head to rinse the stool and the floor, ensuring that no suds were left behind me.

There were four total pools available, two inside and two outside. I started with the warm indoor pool since no one else was currently occupying it, entering slowly before choosing a seat on the submerged bench at the far end. I closed my eyes, leaned my head back, and breathed. This had to be the essence of having a body—embodiment at its peak. Sitting in the geothermally heated water in the middle of the night in Japan, with calming spa music and the smell of good shampoo and no one talking. This is what it means to be alive. Without shame. In a moment of simple pleasure derived specifically from existing inside a body of flesh and neurons. This moment wouldn’t have been any better if I were skinnier, or if I were clothed, or if there weren’t other women around. The moment, exactly as it was, was perfect.

I don’t know exactly how long I spent down at that onsen, but it must have been at least an hour. It didn’t take me long to get too hot in that first pool, so I tried the cold plunge, but it was very cold so that was a no go. I spent a long time in the rocky outdoor pool with its little waterfall on one end, and then a few moments in the circular tub outside, and then repeated the cycle.

Sometimes there were other women in or around the pools I was in, and sometimes I was alone. I tried not to stare because it felt rude, but of course I noticed them. Every single one of them had body fat and pubic hair. Every single one of them looked so content to be there. Every single one of them was beautiful—from the older lady taking her time at the shower, to the middle aged woman confidently sitting on the edge of the rocky pool, to the insecure looking teenager with her arms crossed around her. Everyone’s body was perfect because everyone was alive in the hot water. Everyone is squishy. Everyone has so called imperfections. Women are all gorgeous and I have never truly internalized this until I was sitting naked among them in the onsen in Nara.

It turned midnight while I was in that water, which means that I began my 32nd year by doing something that would have been unthinkable to me a year ago. It was a scary idea before I did it, but I did it anyway. If that isn’t the best birthday present I could give myself, then I don’t know what is.

Eventually, I was tired, a little dizzy, and full up, so I decided that my time in the onsen had come to a close. I took my time brushing my hair and washing my face at the sinks back in the locker room just to draw out the experience to its full extent. Outside the locker room there was a lounge with standard post-onsen treats: complimentary popsicles, and a vending machine with milk in plastic bottles. It’s traditional to drink milk after bathing in an onsen to restore some zapped energy, and I was delighted to partake in this tradition. My milk flavor of choice that evening was strawberry. It was delicious.

Am I magically cured of my insecurities surrounding my body? Of course not. When you come down from the mountain—or in this case re-emerge from the onsen—the world below still exists as it was before. But I’m different now. I’ve been baptized in the waters of Japanese culture. Any time I catch myself staring at some model on Instagram wishing to be rail-thin, I’ll remember the beautiful women in the hot springs. Any time I feel frustrated with my weight, I’ll remember the peaceful weightlessness of that evening. Embodiment is annoying sometimes. But it can also be transcendent. If you ever get the chance, go sit naked in a hot spring in Japan. You’ll see what I mean.

It is crucial, I think, to face the reality of these politically chaotic times. For example, I’ve heard a lot of talk in the past few months about prepping: stocking up on supplies, making sure your passport is up to date, putting together a bug-out bag—even NPR recently published a guide to crating one on a budget, which was useful if not reassuring. I’ve sort of half-heartedly started to put together a kit of the supplies I already have from backpacking: stove, fuel, external battery, headlamp, batteries. I still can’t really muster the conviction that Something Very Bad is genuinely going to happen and that I will need to escape, though it isn’t a bad idea to plan for the worst.

But Snyder’s approach in On Tyranny wasn’t so much about fleeing as it was about resisting, pushing back, being ready to fight even potentially to the death to resist tyranny. He offers ten succinct pieces of advice for an increasingly tyrannical world. Some of his points were astute, if not ultimately surprising. Invest in community. Do not obey in advance. Get to know your neighbors. And, interestingly enough, pay for your news. Snyder contends that it’s ludicrous to expect quality information if we aren’t willing to pay for it. In order to receive genuine news, it’s important to be willing to contribute to the process of real, fact-checked, professional journalism.

Okay fine, I thought to myself, sighing, as I read this section. I’ll reactivate my New York Times subscription. I’d paused it temporarily because, apart from occasional gameplay and headline skimming, I’d fallen out of the habit of intentionally staying in the know. I’d deactivated my notifications and entered a blissfully unaware headspace. But I don’t think that’s responsible in general, and especially right now. So I logged back in and went to reactivate.

As I was doing so, I suddenly had a memory of my sophomore year of college. I took a political science class that year with an infamous and mostly well-loved professor, Dr. Shapiro, who required students to have a New York Times subscription as part of the course—it was actually a required “textbook” that you could purchase in the campus bookstore. “I often find that students, specifically American students, have no awareness of what’s going on outside of the United States,” my professor explained in his syllabus. So the idea was to hold students accountable for daily news reported in the NYT, specifically about international events. You’d see students all over campus poring over newspapers, highlighting and writing notes in the margins. It was tedious, but in that deliriously satisfying and intellectual way that college can be. I was frustrated with how much reading I had to do for that class, but not genuinely frustrated. In truth, I had never felt more aware of what was going on in the world or of the origins of what we believed politically.

So, remembering Dr. Shapiro’s mandate, and Snyder’s contention that we should pay for our news, I not only reactivated my subscription but also upgraded to print delivery. Just on Sundays—because the daily delivery seemed excessive and unrealistic to read—but it includes a daily online subscription as well. Alright, world. I can’t be stopped. I’m entering my Reading Real News Era. I’m trying to be an Informed and Aware Queen.

My first Sunday delivery was hefty. In addition to the national and international sections, there’s also Cooking, the Book Review, Sunday Styles, Sunday Opinion, Sunday Business (straight to the recycling bin; I know myself), the New York Times Magazine, and, occasionally, a second magazine with a special feature of some sort—the first week I got it delivered, the issue was focused on Japan, which was fortuitous timing since I was a month and a half away from my big Japan trip (I’m writing this from the Shinkansen bound for Hiroshima).

I was overwhelmed with content. And not just “content” as it’s come to be known in social media land, but “content” as in, people researched these hundreds of thousands of words and wrote them with their brains and their fingers and their eyes and got them edited by real humans and had them printed on real paper and sent out in little blue baggies and delivered to readers around the country at roughly the same time on Sunday morning. Here in my hands was a deliciously fat stack of facts and ideas just waiting to be explored and digested. Like a many-course Michelin-starred meal. Social media was just a bag of Cheetos in comparison.

That first Print Newspaper Sunday, I took my cup of coffee and went out to the sun room and laid out the many pieces of news in front of me. I decided to start at the beginning, reading the front cover. The stories at that point were mostly focused on speculating who the next pope would be, since Pope Leo hadn’t been elected yet, and the ever-chaotic updates of our current administration. I read one story, flipping to the continuation in the following pages, and then another, and then another.

Pretty soon I started to feel my attention slipping. Instagram was calling. Oh yeah, and there was that other thing I needed to do. And oh yeah, let’s flip to a different section now, or maybe check out that magazine? Ooh, pretty photo—No, focus! I had to manually snap my attention back to the story at hand at least a dozen times for each article I was reading.

Damn. It was hard to read the newspaper. Was it this hard when I was in college? How did I get through every article in the international section every day? I suddenly had so much more empathy for my students and what AP makes them read: dense and often old texts that require immense focus to parse, and under a time constraint too. It’s amazing that any of them get any of the questions right. Reading is fucking hard in 2025! If it’s not something you’re inherently interested in, or something you care deeply about, it takes a great wrangling of the brain cells to focus on the message. Especially today, when our attention spans are all zapped and sacrificed on the altar of the algorithm. Swipe, swipe, swipe. It’s too easy to move onto the next thing if we aren’t grasped within half a second.

I thought of this, I acknowledged it, and I vowed to continue the struggle. Feel my attention slipping? Deep breath, look at the window, continue the story. I have got to re-train my brain to focus on one thing for a prolonged time; how else are we going to know what’s what when our AI overlords seek to overtake us? I have to fight for my own attention. This is war, and I intend to win it.

Yet as the Sundays went on, reading the physical paper started to feel and less like a battle. What was at first a tedious chore became a treat. A ritual. Coffee, sound of birds singing, wind chimes, and reading pleasantly about the demise of humanity. (But also, the new pope! And why Finland is so happy! & etc.) I look forward to those deliveries now, that fresh smell of newsprint on paper, the surprise of the front cover and the topic of the articles in the magazine. Which famous writer would be a contributor this week? What cool art would be featured? That stack of papers in a blue bag holds more anticipation and genuinely satisfying information than any TikTok or Instagram carousel of Canva-curated facts. Here’s real journalism, delivered. Yum.

Reading long-form news in print has also been an exercise in resisting capitalism’s love of perfection and abandoning my all-or-nothing mentality. I have had to accept that there is no way I am physically going to be able to read everything in that stack AND still do other things with my day—and that’s okay. I try to read the international section most of the way through, as a nod to Dr. Shapiro and the most politically informed semester of my life. Then I skim the national news because genuinely reading it is too much. And then I read whatever else looks interesting.

This works for me for now. Something else may work in the future. I know the NYT has problems of its own and that I should read a mix of news. I get it. But this is a start. In the end I think there’s no one right way to read the news—just like there’s no one right way to do life. The point is that I’m trying. I’m paying for it. I’m doing the work to reclaim my attention span and willingness to struggle to understand. Because my struggle is mine. AI, social media, and convenience culture can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

West Chester is absurdly far north of Northern Kentucky to be considered part of the same metro area, but it’s worth it to drive there and back on a Monday night if it means I can watch the 20th anniversary re-release of the 2005 Pride and Prejudice with my friends in a movie theater. I’ve seen this movie before, at least once—of course I have. But I can’t remember when, or in what context. All I know is that I liked it. I loved the book enough to name my first car—the car that I recently sold—Bennet, after the protagonist and her spirited family.

I watch the story unfold on the big screen and am transfixed once more. The characters; the dancing; the English countryside; the Peak District. Ugh. My heart! An unconventional attraction, an unconventionally attractive man, in a field, among the flowers, at dawn. I can feel the tears coming and then they are there, like clockwork. “Are you crying?” my friends ask. I laugh it off. “Yeah. I love crying. Crying at movies is one of my favorite things.” And it’s true.

But it’s also true that I come tonight to the re-release of this iconic film at a particularly tender time. I’m still in the wake of a breakup of a two-plus-year-relationship. And I recently learned that someone I once believed I was in love with is now engaged. Perfectly standard life events, I guess, but I still feel kinda off-kilter and mildly unhinged right now. I walked into this theater somewhat seething, distinctly bitter, distinctly “fuck love,” distinctly “this is all bullshit,” and now I’m leaving it in tatters. Wrecked. A believer in Elizabeth and Darcy.

I can’t help it. I’m sorry. Come on. Darcy walking towards Lizzy in that field? Oh, my god. The early morning and the birds chirping and the two stubborn idiots stewing in their pining. And then his aloof ass telling her that she has bewitched him, body and soul, and that he love—love— loves her. That’s it. I’m just done for. Okay, fine. Love is real. I give up.

But then, every classic love story is problematic in its own ways, isn’t it? What do you mean you love each other? Haven’t you spent, like, three total hours together, ever? And why does no one ever make a movie about Mr. and Mrs. Bennet? What’s their relationship like, long term, twenty years on? It’s always the beginning of the story, never the middle or the end. That’s not as sexy or flashy. Where’s my model for what it looks like years later when the cameras go away and the boring everyday routine has set in and Darcy has called Lizzy “Mrs. Darcy” one too many times and she starts to lose her selfhood? When it turns out he lowkey kinda sucks? That his aloofness and misanthropy are actually not cute and quite unpleasant in the long run? What did all of the gay people even do during this time? And whatever happens to Lydia, anyway? How long does it take Wickham to start cheating on her, or to leave her altogether? And what about Charlotte? Does she remain happy being married to the dreadfully boring Mr. Collins? What if she just up and left one day? I’d watch a movie about that. Go Charlotte. Get it, girl.

I have so many questions and critiques, but I still love this movie. I still love Lizzy for pushing back against the narrative she’s given by her mother, by her culture, by her social environment—even by her best friend, who settles because she doesn’t believe she deserves more. I love how Lizzy demands more. She ends up in love in the end, but even if she didn’t, I’d still adore this film. She seems so at odds with everything around her, so dead set on pursuing marriage only for love that she never bends in her values until the most unexpectedly perfect match for her comes along: someone else just as stubborn, undaunted, and intelligent as she is.

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I tell my students all the time that they need to go back and revisit the books we’re studying now when they’re adults because then the story will hit them differently, and it will finally click. This has happened so many times in my adulthood that I have lost count. Brave New World was mildly interesting; now it is a terrifying indictment of constant on-ness and lack of depth of thinking. Lord of the Flies was kind of mid; now it’s… still kind of mid honestly, but with a twinge of horror to think about how everyone would immediately turn to violence if they were placed in the right conditions. And Pride and Prejudice? It was good, I liked it, it was a sweet love story. Now it is the story of a woman who knew her own mind. Who stood confidently on her two feet and refused to back down. Who sassed the powerful and ridiculed the ridiculous and yet wasn’t afraid, in the end, to admit her own blind spots. What a queen. What a role model. She’s the woman I want to become now.

I love this about literature. I love that an author writing over two hundred years ago still continues to inspire and move. And as this article suggests, there’s still a lot of appeal to this story, and specifically this 2005 film adaptation, which gives us a peek into more of the characters’ inner lives and unearths the turmoil and uncertainty that characterize human relationships. Darcy is inept and bumbling and reserved in this version, as in the book, but he is also clearly doing his best, and so is Lizzy. She just happens to be way more of an outspoken badass than he is. I am reminded suddenly, years later, of why I identified with this character written in another country two centuries ago: she’s just absolutely herself, all the time. She’s confident and smart and takes everything in stride.

Recently I’ve been mulling over the idea of confidence: What is it? Where does it come from? What is it built on? I fancy myself a fairly confident person, and yet I often self-sabotage, believing I’ve failed when I’ve barely even tried; believing I’m destined to fall into a particular thing; believing I don’t have a choice, so I don’t act like I do. The doctrine of inevitability. But I’m done falling into things. I want to be Lizzy: strong enough in herself to follow only what is truly meant for her.

In the end, I’m still a teenager screaming to Taylor Swift with the windows down into the night. And I love that version of myself, if I’m being honest. If I had a chance to go back and talk to her, there’s not much I’d tell her to do differently. I wouldn’t tell her to stop making those silly CD mixes. I wouldn’t tell her to roll her window up or turn her music down. I wouldn’t tell her to stop being loud. I’d just tell her that she already has what she needs, and that she should be strong. That she should follow her own path. That she should keep writing, and not be daunted to send it out into the world if she gets a few rejections. That broken hearts heal just fine. That she already is Elizabeth Bennet, and has been all along—whether or not she ever finds a Mr. Darcy.

I have worse and less patient moments too, for sure. Lots of them. Those classroom Monday moments when I have to repeatedly ask, and then demand, lower volume—and then pop a couple ibuprofen when that fails. When I get so tired of screaming (metaphorically) into the void about how all generative AI is evil and you shouldn’t even use it to write an email. (What do you MEAN you can’t write an email?) The moments when stressors in my non-school life bleed into teaching and it all becomes too overwhelming and I just want to lay down and cry.

There have been a lot of those moments recently.

I’ve turned off my New York Times notifications finally, and I deleted Instagram from my phone, and that has created some mental peace. I started physical therapy for my foot and have slowly begun running short distances again. I’ve started therapy for my brain too. I’m proud of that. I’m looking out for myself. Caring. I’m getting the issues ironed out—with myself, if not with the world. Those are, for the time being, beyond me.

For the first time since I started teaching in 2015, I’ve been entertaining the thought of what I’m going to do if I leave the teaching profession. I don’t know if it’s the phase of life I’m in, the hot mess of a political climate we’ve saddled ourselves with, the horrors of ChatGPT, or some combination of factors, but I just do not feel the spark that I used to. Education feels uniquely sisyphean in the Year of our Lord 2025. Push the metaphorical rock of argument up the hill and watch it tumble back in shallow moralizing. Force the weight of valuable struggle and gravity takes over with generative AI. If we don’t hold our elected (and non-elected) leaders to a high intellectual and ethical standard, how can we expect our kids to follow? This work is important and it matters, I know. I’m trying. I’m trying. But it’s so exhausting. Sisyphus, you wanna trade for a minute bro?

I sold my old car this weekend. I’ve had it since I was a senior in high school. She was a silver Pontiac Grand Am named Bennet, after Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. (There wasn’t much congruity between the name and the vehicle, but that’s what happens when you let a 17-year-old literature nerd name her new wheels.) It was for sure past time to trade it in, but I still cried a little when I had to let it go. The last time I took it for a drive I thought about how it felt when I got my own car for the first time back in 2011. When I finally had my license and I could take it anywhere. I laugh now at my students when they talk about how much they love their cars, but that feeling came flooding back as I was getting ready to pass it on. It called back warm spring days, getting ready to go to college, the giant open question mark of the world ahead. The terror and the excitement. Everything on a precipice at my fingertips ready to be.

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Obviously, I’ve changed and grown since I was that teenager. (One hopes that one changes and grows.) I’m a little less neurotic and perfectionist, I think. I still have no idea what’s what with most things about this planet, but I have a fairly good grasp on what I want to spend my time and energy on. But in the end, I’m still her. Instead of a little Pontiac I drive a reddish Nissan SUV now, and instead of weird homemade CDs I listen to my (still weird) music on Bluetooth, and instead of a student I’m a teacher—but I’m still the about-to-graduate high school senior with so many words to say and not enough time to say them. Still perched on the knife edge of what came before and what’s about to be.

I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t even know what I just wrote. But maybe it’ll resonate. Or not. Either way, we’re chilling. Maybe we’re all just chilling on some precipice together. Let’s topple forward together and let something roll.