Journalism

It’s Friday, a WFH day, and I’m not particularly productive right now. I have several big projects to tackle and I have to panic for a bit, and beat down my adult ADD, before I can really make progress. I wish I wasn’t like this but I am. It’s a holiday weekend, so I plan to get some things done to clear some space in my head. If you’re going to declutter, then you might as well start with the messiest place. My house is pretty neat; and now that Christmas is over, it’s pretty free of clutter, too. My brain, however, is like an episode of “Hoarders.” I might not be able to dig out on my own. 

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One of the things I hope to do this weekend - maybe not finish but at least work on - is my 2023 book list. I’ve already written about a book that I read in 2024, so I’m out of order as usual, but I am making progress on finishing the 2023 list and maybe I’ll publish it in January not February. 

It’s Saturday morning. We’re leaving for a swim meet in a little while (Marymount @ Gallaudet) but right now I’m just enjoying the three-day-weekend Saturday morning vibe. I love my job but there’s nothing better than a holiday weekend. It’s even better than vacation because a paid holiday is just a pure, unearned gift. Marymount hosted Catholic last night, our first evening meet as a Marymount swim family, and the boys’ team’s first loss of the season. But it was close and competitive and a lovely way to spend a Friday night, sitting in the Rose Bente Lee Center pool as the late winter afternoon faded into twilight. 

And see, there’s the problem right there. If I’m ever going to finish that book list, I need to write about books, not swimming. 

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“... what they had wanted all these years was not for concrete things to happen but for abstract possibilities to remain available.” This is Lea Ypi, writing about her parents’ ambivalence about Albania’s first post-Communist election. I’m reading Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, her very extraordinary memoir of her life as a child and teenager in late Communist and post-Communist Albania, a country about which I know practically nothing. Ypi’s family kept secrets about their “biography,” including the fact that her great-grandfather was one of the country’s last pre-Communist Prime Ministers. When Communist rule ended, Ypi had to relearn her own family’s history, and re-examine everything she knew and believed and thought that her family believed. How does a young person, already whipsawed by adolescent confusion, regain her bearings when she finds that the country, the belief system, and the family that she thought she knew turn out not to be a sturdy structure with a rock-solid foundation but a rickety makeshift shack held together with spit and glue and lies? Who are you if your family isn’t who you thought they were? What are you if your country no longer exists?

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And what are you if you can’t seem to get up off the couch? It’s Monday now, MLK Day so I’m off although I did plan to do some work today to make up for a planned short Friday. But it’s 10:30 and although I have showered and done some housework, I’m nowhere near my desk. I can’t seem to pull myself off the couch right now, physically or mentally. It’s very cold, and snowing lightly. I don’t have to leave the house today and I probably won’t. MSNBC is on as background noise in my family room, the warmest room in the house. 

Oh my gosh what is wrong with me and what am I doing? It’s 10:45 now and I’m wearing pajama pants and a hoodie, curled up on my couch, my hair still wet from the shower and absolutely no plans or ideas or energy or inspiration for this gift of a day off that I don’t want to waste but am in fact actually wasting. I need to pull myself together. Or maybe I just have to accept that today is one of those proverbial days, filled with lots of abstract possibilities. I just don’t seem to have the energy to make any of those possibilities concrete. 

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I’m back at work now. It’s Tuesday, a day on which I almost always work from home, and everyone else is working from home today too thanks to the unexpected snow accumulation. Why unexpected, I don’t know, because the forecast was clear, and it is January, but it’s been so long since we have had actual winter weather that I didn’t think that a real snowstorm was possible. I thought the forecast was just weather-industrial complex hype. I thought it was just another media narrative. 

We only got maybe five inches or so, but this is the DC suburbs of Maryland, not Buffalo. We’re famous for freaking out at the smallest accumulation of snow. I haven’t left my house since Sunday but I’m sure that if I ventured out to a grocery store today, I’d find shelves stripped bare. Thankfully I didn’t run out of milk or toilet paper because I’m always ready for the worst case scenario. Rain, snow, whatever - I seldom run out of anything. 

And speaking of the worst case scenario, yesterday was also Iowa caucus day and of course Trump won by a landslide. Not that Haley or DeSantis are anything other than repugnant to me, but the idea of another Trump presidency,  which is a very real possibility, fills me with something close to despair. I just can’t bear the thought of looking at his face and hearing his voice every day for four more years. I dread the rest of this election season. I used to love election years, too. Sad!

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But I’ll tell you what. An entire childhood and youth obsessed with political repression and dictatorships had its upside. I’m prepared. No matter how much I hate what might be happening a few miles from my front door in Washington, I am prepared to live my life and do my work and go on with my daily existence without regard to politics. Unless it gets really bad and they start rounding up dissidents and I end up in a detention camp. 

And this is why I shouldn’t be reading political memoirs, or doomscrolling my newsfeeds, or listening to MSNBC all the gosh darn livelong day. I should probably just go outside except that it’s literally 12 degrees out there, which is absolute nonsense. This weather is trash. This weather is for penguins and polar bears and ice fishermen. 

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Have you seen “The Holdovers?” A friend and I had planned to see it in a theater, back in November or early December; and what with the round of one damn thing after another that constitutes life for middle aged ladies, we ended up postponing our plans multiple times and ultimately missing the short theatrical run. And then we had to cancel three consecutive planned dates to watch it at my house. One damn thing after another, I tell you. Last Saturday, I realized that my husband had to work in the evening, and my friend’s husband was going to be glued to an NFL playoff game, so we made a last-minute plan to watch the movie together with another friend, and we were all free, and no one got sick and no one had a last-minute work obligation or family emergency, and we actually got to sit down with wine and popcorn and watch the movie. 

I don’t know why, but I can’t get enough of movies and books about exclusive boarding schools and colleges - preferably in New England in the middle of the 20th century, but any story about a boarding school or prestigious college will do. The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Prep, The Secret History, Brideshead Revisited, “Rushmore,” even “The Dead Poets Society” - I love them all.  I also adore Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (absolutely hilarious in “Only Murders in the Building”) - and so I knew going in that I’d love “The Holdovers.” And I did. It is hilariously funny, but also heartbreakingly sad, with its little band of outcast characters stumbling through a cold and gray holiday season full of empty days, loneliness, and grief. And the cold and gray and emptiness are sweet and human and really beautiful. It’s a beautiful, perfect little movie. I hope it wins everything. I can’t wait to watch it again. 

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It’s Friday again, and in my original plan, I’d have been driving to Fredericksburg for a late afternoon meet between Marymount and University of Mary Washington; but there’s another winter storm, and the college swimming powers that be cancelled the meet. It’s just as well. The idea of my son and all of his teammates riding on snowy roads in a charter bus was making me very anxious, and although I had been looking forward to the meet, I wasn’t looking forward to the drive. I’m hopeful that tomorrow’s meet at St. Mary’s of Maryland will proceed as planned. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been writing this for a whole week and I’m still looking for the unifying theme that will give me an excuse to paste the whole mess into my blog editor and press publish. Didn’t I say something about brain decluttering? Not only have I not decluttered my own brain, but now I’ve dropped a whole bunch of junk off in yours. Sorry. 

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At the end of Free, Lea Ypi shares some of her teenage journal entries from the year 1997, a violent and chaotic year in Albania. It was my favorite part of the book, just a person thinking and feeling and writing it all down knowing that it’s possible that someone might read her journal one day but that it’s just as possible that no one ever will. And that is my unifying theme, for this post and for every word that I write on this blog. Sometimes people read this stuff, which is lovely; and sometimes they don’t, which is fine. I write because it’s the only way that I can begin to make sense of things. I write because I have to.