What’s up you birdies?
I just made my annual pair of jean shorts. My relationship with jeans is somewhat akin to a traditional people’s relationship with a single felled prey animal (by “somewhat akin” I mean “loosely poetically related at best”). I have one pair of jeans. I wear it every day for 7 months. When it gets hot, I chop it into shorts and buy another pair of jeans. I’m always really pleased with the shorts, then by the end of the summer they are dumpy and covered with grease stains and I throw them in the garbage. I think I get a lot of wear and tear out of a pair of jeans. It strikes me suddenly that “jeans” is a weird term and object. Do other people still wear jeans? Is it just me? I will have to pay attention the next time I’m out of the house. I tend to be 10-15 years behind fashion trends so if jeans are “out” now I will stop wearing them when I’m in my 50s.
What will the mom jeans of the future be? Or do mom jeans transcend temporality?
We went to a comedy show the other night and were stunned by the window into Regular America it provided. Regular America is terrifying. I can’t believe people make fun of hipsters when this is what Regular America looks like. Give me a handlebar mustache and a stupid pair of suspenders any day.
The comedy show was very good. Comedy is a very interesting art form.
Currently feeling like I am losing the battle at warding off hysterical terror about the state of the world. Read a document about the neoliberalization of the American college student that made me actually sweat through the shirt I was wearing.
It’s weird how when you’re a kid and you decide what you want to do with your life, you have no way of knowing how that chosen profession is going to change during the decades it takes you to actually get to it. I bet kids who wanted to be doctors in the 70s had no idea that by 2014 it would primarily involve doing 8 hours of insurance paperwork every day.
I finished grading my papers and they were mostly so good I was touched and validated as a human being, though, so there’s that. Tomorrow I am bringing them cookies and handing back the papers; then I will never see any of them ever again. Such a good class! I will miss them.
Getting back into working out. Went to the gym 2 days in a row; today I did some yoga. My body feels creaky and my knees ain’t too good but overall things are okay, knock on wood. I’m wondering what “corns” are because I think I might have one. #PushinForty, my award-winning hashtag. So many things in my day-to-day life should be hashtagged that. Yesterday I went to a party and as I left, the bass player in my band, who is a young stud of only 28 years or something, said he wanted to hang out, and that he gets off work “after 7:00 every day” and I made a face that made him laugh. He likes to ask Katy and me what time we woke up that morning whenever he sees us, because the answer is always delightful and hilarious to him. Last night he liked one of my pictures on instagram at 3:30 in the morning. Was I ever so young? Actually probably not; I think I’ve always been a bit of an old grouch and a true Early Bird. In college I was always desperate for someone to go to breakfast with me at 7:00 and no one ever would.
I love getting up early. When I wake up without an alarm and I don’t have to be anywhere and it’s just barely light outside I am very happy. To make thick strong coffee and listen to the world slowly wake up is a delight every day; my neighbors’ chickens yelling; car doors slamming. I get a lot done. Sometimes I get so much done and then I look at the clock and it’s only 10:00 am and I feel great. The only downside to being a morning person is that at 9:00 you really need to go to bed, like for real. So you basically miss out on everything fun, with the sole exception of morning coffee, which you have no one to share with, because your husband won’t be up for hours. And then you accidentally text someone at 5:45 in the morning and now they know what a loser you are. And you are becoming your parents. Next I’ll be doing shots of algae and taking five thousand pills while making the world’s most enormous thing of oatmeal.
How do you think we can spend less time online? I barely even know how to use a computer and yet somehow I sit in front of one all day every day. Much of my work legitimately requires a computer, but that’s all the more reason to get the eff off of it when my work is done. I hate the feeling of automatically reaching for my phone if I stop being stimulated for two seconds. I hate that I can’t just sit quietly on the bus. I hate that I don’t read for hours anymore.
Saying that out loud makes me feel super lame and so I am just going to make those changes, starting right now.
Blessings be upon you people
