Babes and bots,
I know it's been a while since my last confession and I hope you'll forgive the interlude. I was busy putting my mother's shoes on. My lovely mother, who recently had hip replacement surgery, has been wheeling about the house true to her badass form. With distinction. Please give her your love; she deserves it.
We can't blame all our problems on our mothers, though, much to Gen Z's dismay. So it's only appropriate that I take responsibility for my part in the absence: I suffer from a common problem that plagues many. When I am not busy, I am not productive. Now, I can see how one would point out the fatal flaw here. As in, why don't you be productive so you can be busy? To these haters I say, why don't you give the federal government a stimulus check to offset our nation's torrential debt? Or, why don't you force a smile if you wish to achieve existential happiness?
My mother once told me that smiling at yourself in the mirror is scientifically proven to make you happier. I'm sure she got her information from a valuable source, and I'm sure if I tried this activity it might work, but I'm also sure that smiling at myself in the mirror will not solve abandonment issues, social anxiety, or my intensely childish fear of commitment. As one adored, slightly problematic instructor once told me, who knows what's good and what's bad?
At any rate...
some humorous interactions from life
1. Doting grandchild that I am, I did a small series of portraits of my grandmama while staying with her for four weeks. I saved the worst for last. Grandmama took one look at my little sketch and said to my cousin, "do I really look this bad?" Upon further inspection, I did in fact draw a troll.
2. I re-matched with some tinder dude the other day and have been engaging in some light conversation. I brought up the fact that I thought we'd matched before and asked if he'd made a new account. I then asked him why he was on tinder, prompting him to reply "still single lol." "No, no" I said, "I mean what are you looking for?" He said a girlfriend, but it appears he will settle for far less (i.e. me). Apparently, I have made plans with this guy multiple times and failed to follow through. I feel awful, and also want to cancel our date on Tuesday because men who like me happen to terrify me. Perhaps I should smile more.
3. I have wrinkles! At 23! In fact, I actually forgot I was 23. Grandmama asked me how old I was the other week and I replied quite confidently, "22." She looked confused. I corrected myself. She assured me wrinkles at 23 were no less premature than they would be at 22. "Sorry, honey!"
4. And then, of course, there's this:
5. And this:
current reading/other notes
Might I recommend
Bestiary by K-Ming Chang because my goodness, talk about a novel that bends genre and makes the whole world seem magical! Chang's work is unlike anything I've read before and I'm enraptured and content and enthralled and I will no doubt go back to this masterpiece again because I'm convinced Chang is a genius.
In Jiangsu, my mother said, where my ba was born, there were daughtertrees. When a daughter was born, every family planted a camphor tree outside their home. Its branches grew parallel to her bones. Sometimes the tree grew scales down its trunk and sprouted a single jellied eye, like a fish, and sometimes the tree had a mouth in the center of the trunk, where birds were born, except these birds had no feathers, just skin, flightless as fists. When the matchmaker walked by your house and saw that the tree had grown to the width of a wasit, she knew it was time for your daughter to be married away. The daughtertree was cut down, chiseled into trunks to carry her clothes and bedding. When my mother was born, Agong tried planting a camphor tree outside the military village where they lived, but the soil there was incestuous with the sea and too salty. The tree was salt-sick, its trunk crumbling. Every day, Agong measured its waist with his hands, but it remained the width of his wrists. My mother was relieved: As long as the tree never grew wide enough to be wed, she'd never have to leave home. She asked of every tree she saw: Don't ever grow a body worth cutting down.
How to read this book: You have to pay attention to every page, every word, every story, because they build on one another like gene pools and if you forget something you're lost. Some people might call it cluttered or chaotic, I call it absolutely fucking brilliant. Should you decide to support Chang's work by reading it, I suggest you divorce yourself from the novel you think you know first.
I recently came to the fashionable realization that some stories do not fit inside books or genres. Some stories are too big. In fact, one could argue, any story worth telling is too big for a book. Thus, of course, why the arts exist. It's writers like Chang and Justin Torres and T. Kira Madden who approach genre like one might approach a beautiful catastrophe. Because, where art is concerned, what you see is not the only thing you get.
Chang is 23, the same age as yours truly, and published a whole poetry collection at the ripe age of 20. Let me repeat: Chang published their first book at TWENTY YEARS OLD. And now, in 2021, Bestiary was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. If you're looking for a new icon, look no further.
That's all for now, folks. Send my best to you and yours & thanks for taking a bite out of my sandwich.
xoxo BLT
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