How’s everyone doing? I slept with the emergency go-bag and a flashlight next to the bed last night, but so far <knocks wood> no more earthquakes. Back to worrying about plague instead of natural disasters!

I’m assuming that, like me, everyone needs distractions and reassurance. Something that distracted and reassured me on Monday was Robin Sloan’s March newsletter. It’s rambling, it’s full of links, it has C.S. Lewis quotes about hard times, and tells us how to keep going when nothing seems to matter:

We’re entering a stretch during which no subject, no task, other than this pandemic and its prevention will seem to “matter,” and I am here to insist, as you contemplate the next level of the video game you were building, the next stitch in the fanny pack you were designing, the next edition of the newsletter you just started:

It matters.

[…]

Every calamity fractures the world, opens new seams: many economic, some political, still others aesthetic.

In 1816, the gloomy “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley stayed indoors at a lakeside hotel; not quarantine, but maybe quarantine-adjacent. There, bored and haunted, she conceived the story that would grow into her novel Frankenstein, the foundation stone of the genre we now call science fiction.

It’s moderately annoying when people invoke work like that, because it feels like the implication is, if you’re not writing Frankenstein what are you even DOING? That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the big, bright examples help us see it clearly: toil in the shadow of calamity will have its day.

Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.

A crack in everything; that’s how the art gets in.

This essay by an Australian novelist in her 70s (via Robin Sloan’s newsletter) is fire and goals, starting with the title: The insults of age: A one-woman assault on condescension.

I’ll let you read how she got fed up enough to get to this point but god I love her for this:

Habits of a lifetime peeled away. The world bristled with opportunities for a woman in her 70s to take a stand. I shouted on planes. I fought for my place in queues. I talked to myself out loud in public. I walked along the street singing a little song under my breath: “Back off. How dare you? Make my day.”

(See also: An Axe for the Frozen Sea for rage in your 40s)

I’ve been sitting on a link to an article by Ann Helen Petersen (sign up for her newsletter–it’s one of the best) for a while now, and why not start with an essay for the year? It’s about the Mr. Rogers movie from November, which I guess I need to see, and how adults get so good at not feeling feelings (surprise!).

We swallow existential questions, and the despair or wonder that blooms from them, and work. Fear of losing a job, fear of losing a parent, fear of being a bad parent—instead of sitting with those feelings, again, we work. Because work means money, and money brings a modicum of stability, and relief, however temporary, from that same fear. Work doesn’t actually give us peace or solve our problems. But for a lot of us, it’s what we’re good at and what we know, which is far more comforting than staring at the abyss of what we don’t.

She later quotes the movie:

“To die is human,” Rogers tells Lloyd’s family as they studiously avoid talking about his father’s imminent death. “Anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable.”

That…might be one of the smartest things I’ve ever read. Something to remember going forward.

The Atlantic—with a lovely new brand refresh–has an essay by Tom Junod about his friendship with Fred Rogers. He talks about his essay inspiring the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and what Mr. Rogers would make of society today. It’s just..nice; thoughtful and sad and but still hopeful.

This was my favorite memory he shared about Fred:

I get the newsletter from journalist Anne Helen Petersen and this week’s was so good, it’s hard not to excerpt all of it. I’ll let you get the gist from the paragraph below:

Read it all (and subscribe yourself) here.

(Very) tangentially related to the fabulous crane print fabric on yesterday’s wedding guest dress, here is a gorgeous essay by CJ Hauser titled “The Crane Wife.” It is just exquisite: talking about her broken engagement, what it means to want something, endangered cranes, even bad almost-mother-in-laws.

I had arrived in my thirties believing that to need things from others made you weak. I think this is true for lots of people but I think it is especially true for women. When men desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not received something they need they are “deprived,” or even “emasculated,” and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs she is needy. She is meant to contain within her own self everything necessary to be happy.

That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.

(I’ve been going to therapy once a week for ten months now–but there are still moments, regularly, when I am gently reminded by my therapist that humans evolved to need other humans. Being “needy” isn’t bad; it’s normal)

I signed up for journalist Ann Helen Peterson’s newsletter a while ago; each week has a “just trust me” link with no explanation. This week’s link was an essay by Victoria Gannon about working as a contract UX writer in San Francisco. It is wonderful and awful and captures exactly what being an outsider at a mostly male company feels like (see also: Pixar’s “Purl“).

From “The Metrics of Backpacks“:

I am in a foreign country; these are my hosts. I study their dialects and graph their inflections, seeking fluency. I listen as they discuss fishing trips and ways to get their wives to watch science-fiction movies and how annoyed they get when she eats their leftover burrito from the fridge. I offer up pieces of my own life that I think they will like: stories of my boyfriend’s obsessive CD collection, memories of the science-fiction movies my brother made me watch as a child. I too cringed at the green of the Emperor’s blood in Flash Gordon; I also sat in awe when the owl in Clash of the Titans moved its brass wings. But this is belonging by proxy, a male escort at my side; it is never inherent.