Friend of Kermit
who said that every wish would be heard and answered?
Welcome, dreamers!
Something has me on a weird woo-woo kick of seeking starry skies, wishing on fallen eyelashes, and staring off into space, waiting for my energy to dissipate.
This may be because I’ve been staying up way too late and drinking enormous amounts of caffeine.
On the other hand, this weird time between grant applications and annual reports does seem like a moment where anything can happen. Do you feel this in the air? That maybe we don’t have to take the well-worn road and end up where everyone thought we would? Maybe we can skip a grade, get a job through charm, have a tailor sew a button on a winter coat for free, find money lying in the street?
It could happen. Things do.
Day-dreaming is underrated. I do not do it enough, is what I’m trying to say. I always cram every single second of my waking time with something to get done: even if it is just trying to get through the piles of paperwork on my desk (I have just unearthed the paperwork from the writing conference I attended last year around this time…untouched since the last year).
How does time sweep you off your feet like this? It is an icy river that seems to only get faster the more frail we become. Swim strong, friends.
Or save your energy, let go, and drift. You’re sure to get somewhere a lot faster if you’re not fighting the current. So long as you’re not just following the crowd, might even be a more interesting place.
Writing News:
I actually have new publication news!! It missed the last newsletter by moments—my New York Times Metropolitan Diary piece was republished last week in Living City (a magazine that to be honest I had never heard of before my brother sent my story over to an editor on the masthead who emailed me in a panic. He wanted to reprint my essay but he had no desire to call the NYTimes). I did it and everything was great. The publication turned out to be absolutely stunning.
And in my New Year’s House post last week, I completely forgot to show you the two best Christmas presents of all time. Both are from New Year’s House people and both about my book!
Here’s a gnome with excellent reading taste. I love this guy.
The second super-amazing gift I got was a necklace:
(Also this was is not a Christmas present, but I should also mention the gift of an Author Clock. This magnificent small device has sentences from books (with author and book quoted) for every single minute of every single hour. It changes every 60 seconds to a new, accurate quote with the correct time. It’s fantastic. Check it out. )
If you want a good night out - come to the Pen Parentis pop-up literary salon at The Writers Room on January 17 at 6:30pm. I chose that date because it would have been my mother-in-law’s birthday and I wanted to do something lovely and art-driven to commemorate her life. It also marks the tenth anniversary of Pen Parentis being a 501c3 nonprofit. You are very welcome to make a donation in Natalie’s honor to Pen Parentis using this link. You are also very welcome to join me and Christina Chiu and Writers Room ED, Donna Brodie, as we host this amazingly wonderful in-person reading. (I’m told there will be Bubbly and Goldfish Crackers and really what else can a girl want? )
Random Final Thought:
I enjoyed watching Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway and utterly hated its message. I reviewed it and two other shows I saw right before they closed. I also saw the film Killers of the Flower Moon and wasn’t sure why it was so long, though I was captivated by the movie for the whole three and a half hours. What I liked best this week though, was the Edward Ruscha exhibit at MoMA. I ducked into the museum to take a zoom call and it left me breathless with joy. Here’s a particularly wonderful one—I hope you like it!
Daydreaming is a warning sign in my case. Boy did I used to do it, and it was a symptom of a disorganized life and a disinclination to engage. But I think you have identified the space it occupies perfectly. It bridges work and not work. I used to work too little; some people can likely work too much.
I still think it's a phenomenon that deserves some scrutiny, and we may not all mean the same thing by it. "Failure to concentrate" is known to be a symptom of anxiety. Does daydreaming fall under this umbrella? Daydreaming likely differs from that sleepy period when one is trying to fall asleep, but how about the minutes in the morning when some of us fail to get up, and five minutes seems like 30 seconds? Again, the contrast with work strikes me there. You've dealt some with perception of time in this newsletter, and the way time passes slowly when one is feeling slowly and first arises is the opposite of how it passes so excruciatingly slowly when you have things you want to do and are stuck waiting in line.
The main thing about daydreaming that I see that is positive is that at least you are alone. Yes, it is and can be a running away, but it's not a running away to the technological numbing of the phone or television. And maybe running to work, too, for the lonely, is a way of not being alone. There's nothing necessarily glamorous about being alone, but one should be able to be alone, as one should be able to do everything, if the case calls for it.