ALL TAR PULLS

Even though the word makes me feel like a new age freak, I have written before about having a small personal altar, but the previous incarnation used to be a little smattering of objects on my side of the headboard. Now that we have a giant fucking house for 2 people & a dog, I have my own office, which has become my less-little bigger-smattering of objects, full of tiny altars to different things, including this one:

altar? i hardly know'ar!

It looks like I know anything about crystals; I don’t, I mostly just like rocks. I know they have meaning & I’ll sometimes pick up a specific one if I’m looking to stay mindful of that specific thing, but largely to me they are pretty & sparkly & impress upon me that nature is crazy. Actually most of this is nature & how awesome I think it is: turkey feathers & birch shavings & tiny bones & tiny pinecones & butterfly wings. The skull is solid stone, a present from M for some gift-giving opportunity, or just because. I also have a card about Blanca, patron saint of comfy sweaters who personally knitted one of the coziest ones in my closet, & my favorite photo of M & me.

I decided to dive back into a small thing I started doing when I first set this up. I pull a card from three different decks—Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (digital version), a holographic Rider–Waite tarot set + Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change, & Dirt Gems—& usually marvel at the way they seem to coincide with each other.

I spent the week thinking about this spread.

REPETITION IS A FORM OF CHANGE

This one struck me as I pulled it. Oh, I immediately thought, of course it is. Repetition is a path to change. Repetition is a form of change. Change becomes itself through repetition, & through repetition change changes into stasis, & then the cycle starts all over again.

card from Oblique Strategies, drawing mine

Staying the same while everything changes around you is a form of change. We experience time as linear. Not changing is like driving in a straight line & stopping for nothing: you’ll technically be doing the same thing, but the view out the window is sure as shit going to change. So’s the feel of the ride & your suspension & other car words I can’t fake knowing how to use in a sentence (I’m not a car person). I don’t think you can say you stayed the same if everything around you is different——you can’t separate yourself from all that context all around you.

I think I’ve always been afraid of changing [too much/not at all]. I guess it might seem silly to be afraid of both, but that’s me. I look back on past versions of myself like damn, who were they??? How did they get here??? Where did they go??? & yet I look at myself sometimes & think, still the same old me, even after all these years. Earlier Kirins got me to here, I understand they’re all connected, I just feel like I don’t have access to them anymore, like cocoon layers I thought I was shedding for good it turns out are more like onion layers mostly-but not entirely-disconnected. I realize as I write this that, while I think I’ve eaten this thing exactly one (1) time in my whole ass life, I am talking about a Blooming Onion of the self: a thing split open & laid out & fried, but still ultimately stuck together, time continuing to pull it apart. Well, I tried, but it turns out it doesn’t quite work to use Outback Steakhouse as a vessel of poignancy.

THE CHARIOT

my hand holding the chariot

Yoked to the riddle

were the words I finally landed on to synthesize what I’d read about this card, & what it made me think about. This card is also about change, about moving forward, & about wrangling the mysteries of life into something like balance, hence all the dichotomies in the imagery, yin & yang, civilization & nature, sun & stars, control & submission, power & impotence.

Most guides will talk to you about ambition, willpower, & success. Dore has a bit of a reactionary take, but one I appreciate, writing about how Americans can’t conceive of the failure of willpower. What happens when we can’t wrangle the mysteries? What happens if we can’t muscle our way out of this one just by yanking on the reins? What happens when we’re stuck on this ride, like, literally our legs have disappeared and we’re just a torso smushed onto the platform of a weird chariot being drawn by two tittied sphinxes?

Yoked to the riddle would be a good way to articulate how I feel about life. Here I am, yoked to this thing I often find hard to understand. I’m trying my best to keep this bizarre vessel in driving shape, and to enjoy the ride. (Another car metaphor, too. Coincidence? Or just a staggering lack of imagination on my part?)

GINGER

First, the Latin name of ginger, zingiber officinale, is fun & also weird. Zingiber stemming from the old Tamil iñcivēr, which means ginger root. Officinale from the Latin officina, meaning a workshop or manufactory, used to denote plants often used in herbal medicines that would have been sold by an apothecary.

Ginger is an unobstructor, an herb to release blockages. It cleanses & reduces inflammation & improves circulation & combats nausea & pain. Ginger is a chariot of change. A phrase from Dirt Gems re: ginger was fire for the oceany tissues, which I fucking love. Ginger is a controlled burn that is coming for the dams you’ve built within yourself. Let it go. Spice it up. Release what is holding you back. Let your oceany tissues flow.

On a mundane note, we love ginger in this house, we’re ginger stans. Slap some ginger on/in something & it’s guaranteed to taste better. A dish is hard pressed to have too much ginger for us.

beginner’s animation by me

LASTLY, LATELIES

📖 Middlemarch, by George Eliot (a reread for me, still 5⭐️)

📽️ “Hausu” (1977)

🎶 Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

📺 “Detroiters”

🎮 Okami (guys I’m obsessed with this game)

〰️〰️〰️〰️

I actually really enjoyed setting out to write about this over a week. The disparate elements made it easier for my brain to think laterally, and I especially appreciated that the exercise gave me fun ideas for visuals. Was this interesting to you at all? What’s up in your world? Write me back, if you wanna.

💌KM

catchup, ketchup, catsup

in

hi friends—

BRAIN BYTES:

from these last, long months

nostalgia

i knew i still had my very first gmail account, kirinn@gmail.com, but on some whim i decided to log in recently and comb through it. it mostly consisted of deleting spam and 3,000+ emails that were utterly useless (did i not understand how to delete emails when i was 14-18 years old??? apparently), and it also involved deep-diving into an enormous well of embarrassment and nostalgia, made up primarily of livejournal entries and copied & pasted AIM conversations. in a fit of proactivity (and also probably embarrassment), i deleted and purged my longtime livejournal, but through this email excavation i discovered a remaining, earlier livejournal, and…yeah. be careful wading into the depths of your past. i can’t seem to decide whether it’s helpful or harmful, but i don’t think it’s for a lot of people regardless. me, i will masochistically continue to preserve the remnants of my former selves no matter HOW much of a psychological toll it takes on me to revisit these shadows!!!

on a related note, i really, really, really, really, really, really, really miss AIM. what i wouldn’t give to have it functional and populated again with everyone i know.

camera obscura

m decided to get into film cameras, which means i 1) have been exposed to an extremely concentrated amount of information about them in a very short time and 2) am now co-owner of a lovely and ever-growing collection of them. we’ve been dicking around with point and shoots, and it’s been nice to think about photos, and why we take them, and how to do it. i still remember the time derrick holt complimented me on ig by saying i had a great eye for light. let’s hope i can bring that great eye to the roll of fuji 200 in this nikon lite touch af! results to come, from that and other cameras, in future missives.

*rihanna voice* work work work work work

i quit my old job back in july after procuring a new one. this line of work is still so fucking bizarre to me but i am okay at it and it pays and i never have to leave my house. i harbor no hope for any agency now; i assume the insanity will be the same everywhere, and that i will just keep jumping from sinking ship to sinking ship. but i left the interview with my primary coworker and functional boss hopeful that our values are as aligned as they seem. capitalism is a sticky web that all but the wealthiest of us have to navigate, but if enough people are on the same page, can’t it be mostly bearable? maybe not. worth it to keep experimenting towards that end though.

space & time

my last day at my old job was july 23. my first day at my new job is this tuesday, september 3. i did indeed take almost 6 weeks off, mostly because we knew that kathy was going to die soon and also because i have not had more than 3 consecutive days off without obligations since fall of 2021. the way my mind exhales when i am left to my own devices again. the way i always feel healthiest and happiest when i am (mostly) master of my own schedule. i think that a lot of people struggle to find meaning if they don’t have external validation or accomplishment; as i get older, i’m finding the opposite is true for me: it gets in the way of me enjoying living life. i want more space to tune in to the experience of existing, in this way, in this time, for this window. give me space, give me time, gimme gimme gimme.

death

kathy, my mother-in-law, passed on august 4 after an intensely difficult battle with MS and another undiagnosed neurological disorder or disorders. it felt long, but in reality, it was extremely short: just 7 years took her from fully functional to wheelchair-bound, from a healthy 59 to dead at 66. i’m grateful we got to see her more in these last few years. words cannot really explain how deeply proud i am of m, my love, my best friend, for all the incredible care and advocacy he provided for her to the very end, for the way he walked with his mom through this ending. tough fucking shit, to put it poetically. it was miraculous to witness, and humbling to participate in. kathy deserved better than she got in this life, and i hope she’s finally found peace. i’m actually going to watch the packers play this year, for you.

kathy’s resting place

toward a more frivolous ending

stationary! i’ve been experimenting the last few years with journals and my journaling routine. i’ve been journaling for 20+ years, and have used everything from drugstore composition notebooks to moleskines to fancy shit. in the last few months and toward the goal of better embracing my mercurial nature, i got into these fancy leather 6-ring binders, and i am appreciating their boundless internal flexibility hidden behind the veneer of coherence and consistency. i’ve also been iterating and iterating on how i journal, and what’s working for me right now is:

  • keeping a log on my phone for things that i want to be readily searchable to the exact day

  • using a single page in my journal in the mornings to summarize the previous day

  • creating a portal to myself (carving out time once a day to listen to music and type away without stopping, thinking, or self-editing—a kind of morning pages, but not always in the morning and not the way julia cameron teaches because i just never jived with the artist’s way)

LATELIES

🎶 grapefruit - maaya sakamoto (1997)

🎮 “just crow things”

📺 “american nightmare” on netflix—this case was not on my radar at the time and bro it was fucking crazy!!!

📽️ “godzilla” (1954)

📚 girl, woman, other by bernardine evaristo (⭐x5)

here’s to enjoying the last dregs of summer. autumn awaits, o my heart.

💌 KM

we said we liked rain

*t-boz voice* yes / it’s me again / and i’m back

hello.

the last time i wrote to you, it was december 2023. it is now april 2024.

holiday months really take it out of me, and i’ve spent the last 3.5 months saying, “i’m just so tired from the last 2 weeks,” every two weeks since 2024 started. work going crazy in december + the holiday gauntlet + traveling over christmas + air travel getting worse and worse* + a single week off from work + a record-breaking 17” of snow directly into a 3-week spell of -30 degree fahrenheit temperatures + work continuing to be idiotic + social events every few weeks = one extremely tired kirin. getting older, as i’ve been told and as i’m now experiencing, mostly means the time it takes you to recover greatly increases.

speaking of which, i turned 35. a nice, round number, 35. feels like it means something, though i’m not exactly sure what. i got 2 perfect birthday cards, one from an aunt and uncle and one from my parents. the one from my aunt and uncle said something to the effect of congratulations on still being young-ish. i liked this one a lot as this is exactly how i feel: still young-ish. i’ve never been much for fearing aging. i’ve always felt old, ancient, as i’m sure i’ve said here before. i want to embrace and appreciate getting older, not run terrified in the opposite direction. i hope to continue to feel young-ish, for as long as i’m lucky enough to continue getting old-er.

the one from my parents said happy one year closer to death. they know me so well, don’t they? i felt very seen. it went up on our fridge, right next to another card they once sent us that says there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort. me in a nutshell: i love not going anywhere and thinking about death.

speaking of staying home, we have done a lot of actually leaving our house! congratulate us, please——we are bad at this. we got breakfast in january with potential new friends here in madison who immediately ghosted us (such is making friends as adults, i guess?). we went to milwaukee several times, separately and together, both for quick jaunts to grab meals with friends and for overnight stays to see a show (which turned out better than we thought it would) and to go to the midwest gaming classic (which was actually incredibly fun!!!).

other than that, the only thing of note is that m and i have been working on a creative project together that has been a lot of fun. we hope to have it ready to go in the next month or two. i will send out more details about it when we’re closer to launching it, but it promises to be overly ambitious, chock full, and thoroughly m and i in all our weird, polymath assholery. the very first creative project m and i worked on together was a lynchian short film set on sweet briar’s campus, which we wrote, shot, and edited in ~24 hours back in july 2013; i’ve loved getting to work on something again with my favorite person, and with no limitations other than what the 2 of us can feasibly do (which, it turns out, is simultaneously 1) a whole hell of a lot and 2) also really hard).

even though no one ever responds to these (no pressure but i would always love to hear literally anything from any of you!), i am going to try to be less precious about them. i’m going to aim for 1 monthly life update email, like this, 1 latelies email at the end of the month, in case you’re looking for books/tv/movie/music recommendations, and potentially 1 additional sometimes-monthly something that who knows what it will be.

the title of this missive comes from a new thing i’m trying around quarters of the year, which includes titling them for my own life. we said we liked rain is my Q2 title, and it isn’t particularly deep: i/we do like the rain, and i/we have said we like rain, but metaphorically, this is me reminding myself to embrace the deluge that spring always brings. maybe i’ll write more about this new thing later on in the year.

that’s it for now. as i said, feel free to write me back with any! amount! of words, updates, insights, musings, jokes, fears, questions, paradoxes, or unsolvable math problems. the point of this is not to spew boring life updates at you, but to try to stay connected with people in a different way. <3

xoxo,

km

*my december flight to my parents’ house in SC was grounded half-way through because we were actively leaking fuel. the pilot didn’t tell us any of this, and they didn’t even inform us we were being rerouted until well after we had already landed! we could have exploded in the sky!!! this life-saving measure meant that instead of landing at 9pm as scheduled, i did not land at my destination until a cool 3am!!!!! i love paying too many hundreds of dollars just to not die but never arrive anywhere on time after the newly most stressful journey!!!!!!!

a quick note to close out the year

‘tis the season for year-end wrap-ups (fa la la la la, la la la la). i must admit: here, at the very end of 2023, i’m fucking tired. you might also be feeling the exhaustion; most people i know are wrung out from the year. to paraphrase one of our favorite youtubers, 2023 was a good year that sucked. this was truly the first “back to normal” year for most people—when they finally put the (still ongoing, for many people) pandemic of the last 2 years behind them—and i think we can see very clearly the effects and consequences of slingshotting from years of terror-inducing isolation in which many of our foundational systems were rocked back to a collective delusion of normal that, for individuals, groups, and institutions, no longer exists outside of various forms of propaganda.

i’m not here to write about that, i have to remember. i don’t want screeds and diatribes and opinions. the world has more than enough of that already.

if i had to summarize my 2023 in a paradox, it’d be: motion/stagnancy.

i ran over 300 miles in 2023, and walked another hundred at least. my job was in a frenzy from january to july, and then i moved to another agency, another disease state, another team for the second half of the year, which also went a little crazy. matthew was driving to and from la crosse and then to and from middleton for three quarters of the year, and september through december included travel and/or holidays every single month. we have chased after doctors and contractors and jobs and friends and family. it was our first full year in sun prairie and in madison, and we got out, for us, a considerable amount.

but there was so much sitting, waiting, holding our breaths, so much doing the same things over and over again, driving the same roads over and over again, confronting the same issues over and over again. i cannot lie and tell you that my second full year in a corporate 9-5 job did not feel suffocating and claustrophobic most of the time. despite so much motion, we have been stuck in many holding patterns this year, stuck in a way that feels like quicksand, where you aren’t aware how deep in you are because of how slowly the sludge pulls you under. there’s a palpable difference between relaxing in place and being held still.

in a lot of ways, 2023 flew by precisely because of how fast large swaths of it flew by versus how slowly some of it creeped. the pandemic has truly warped my general sense of time—it feels so elastic now, so nonlinear, calendars feel meaningless—or maybe that’s age. this year, matthew and i celebrated our 10th anniversary of meeting, our 9th anniversary of being partners, and our 6th anniversary of being married—all that time has felt like a single drop in a huge bucket i want to keep filling, whereas my 2.5 years in pharmaceutical advertising feels like an enormous rain barrel i have to keep finding ways to drag a little further.

enough about 2023. enough. i’ll be glad to put this year to bed. looking ahead, in 2024 i want to try to cultivate a positive paradox instead of discovering one at the end of the year, and i want 2024 to be the year of grounding/floating.

i want to find more ways to ground myself in 2024, more ways to feel connected to where i am and who i’m with. i want to dig deeper, root deeper, discover more of what’s in my earth’s core and embrace it, honor it. i want to feel solid in 2024, i want to be happy toes wiggling in the dirt, i want to feel steady on my bare feet. i want to lay low and put my ear to the ground and listen for the subtle rumblings of what’s to come.

but i also want to find more ways to go with the flow, float down the river, feel the ease and weightlessness of buoyancy. i want to be carried, cradled, supported. i want to aim a little higher and think a little bigger and dream a little harder. i want some things to look forward to, to float towards. i want to hold my head a little higher and fall easier, recover faster when i get knocked down. i want to let things go, let things slide through my fingers, watch the ripples extend outward and eventually dissipate back into the body of water they came from.

earth and water; fire and air—maybe paradox wasn’t the right word to use at the top of this, maybe dichotomy would have been better. double-edged things. dependent things. yins and yangs. i’ve always been dichotomous, though i’m starting to think that a truer way to be. more on this idea later.

if you feel like it, i’d love to hear from you about your 2023 or what you hope for your 2024.

i’m also thinking about trying to do some more conscious newsletter writing in 2024, including potentially sticking to a regular but small-scale schedule. it might look something like a short latelies email, where i focus solely on media recommendations, an email like this one where i write about something personal and/or something on my mind, and maybe a third thing i haven’t determined yet. if there’s anything you especially like getting to read about from me, or anything you wish i’d do more of (or less of! i won’t be offended), or something else you’d like to see (an advice column?? in-depth book reviews?? fiction??), let me know.

signs of life and death

what was already going to be a marathon texas family visit at the end of october turned into a much more existentially interesting weekend than anyone could have anticipated: over the course of 4 days, i said goodbye to my actively dying 95 year old maternal grandmother in dallas and celebrated the end of her long and robust life, and then, in less than 24 hours and after one short drive to cleveland, i celebrated the start of my paternal grandmother’s 90th year of life. so i did a lot of concentrated thinking about living and dying in that weekend, and in the few weeks since then.

i don’t have much of an external relationship with death. people i’ve known have died; so far i’ve mostly been insulated from death that truly affected my everyday life, which some people would call lucky. but death seemed important to me from a very young age, and despite my lived track record with it, i think about death regularly, i would say a bare minimum of once a day. i think about my own death and the death of the people and creatures i love and value most in this world. i think about what happens after death, both for the dying and the living. i think about the death of plants and trees and ideas and emotions and relationships and versions of self and ways of seeing and, and, and, and. the period at the end of a sentence, i think about death a lot as it’s the other only thing all humans have in common, besides being born. it’s also one of the few things we know we have in common with every other form of life: everything starts somewhere, and everything ends somewhere, reintegrated into the cycle to start something else all over again.

as someone who has no interest in living forever and who has often found existing difficult, the idea of death is not devoid of comfort to me. as someone who has control issues stemming from anxiety, the idea of death is not devoid of terror to me. as someone who enjoys mentally grappling with the many quandaries of complex existence, the idea of death and the ideas around death are a rich and fertile soil for digging.

i hold a lot of admiration for the way my grandmum went out. she was clear-eyed, present, graceful, practical, and, up until her body as a vessel truly could no longer support her consciousness or spirit or animus or whatever you’d like to call it, she approached dying as an opportunity to continue living: she laughed, made jokes, enjoyed what she could, kept sentimentality out of it. i firmly believe in following a good example when one is set for you, and my grandmother on her death bed set a great one, which i felt gave me permission to approach her death the same way.

i was not emotionally close to my grandmother as i’m not sure that was ever one of her biggest priorities, neither in her own life nor in her relationships to the people close to her. and yet a death bed is an innately intimate one: no matter how exacting, how particular, how put-together a person can be in their day-to-day life, dying is an act of undressing down to the very core (and then some). since i think about death a lot, i was delighted—and some may balk at the word choice, but i stand by it, delighted—at the window of intimacy i was granted in vy’s last few days of containment in the form of my grandmother.

i have never once, not once, not a single time in my whole life that i can recall, seen my grandmother without her hair done. i spent summers with my grandparents, have gone to countless amusement parks, taken countless morning walks, played tennis with, slept alongside my grandmother, and even when we shared a hotel room, her hair was coiffed when she went to bed, and in the morning upon waking she would get up, go to the bathroom, and brush it back into shape once more. she stopped dyeing her hair only a few years ago, into her 90s, allowing it to become a beautiful snow-white coif, but still it remained coiffed at all times. her one repeated complaint on her death bed—besides the quality and selection of hospital food—was that she couldn’t get her hair done. it was a true joy to see her still abundant little head of hair sticking out every which way as she finally succumbed to bed head. it will also be one of my fondest memories of saying goodbye when, on the one morning i got to spend with her, my mother pulled a brush through one side of her hair and passed the brush to me to do the other side. i kissed my grandmother’s forehead!!! these are some of the most tender moments i ever had with her, and i cherish them.

saying goodbye to someone is a real luxury and i am humbled that i got the chance to do so with my grandmum. in life she was utterly herself, uncompromising and unbothered, a great lover of life with the track record to prove it, and when death came for her, she was ready and willing to add that undiscovered country to her very long list of places traveled. i was lucky to know her and to have a quarter of her genes in me, and i’ll miss her.

to bookend the weekend with the celebration of my meemaw’s 90th birthday felt right, another privilege, another humbling chance to observe and participate in the full range of human experience. my meemaw is so loved: despite her introversion, something like 80 of her siblings, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, friends, and girl scout leaders converged on the cleveland civic center to ring in her ninth decade on earth with food, fellowship, and a veritable fuck-ton of noise. it was raucous and alive and full of cheer.

experiencing such polar extremes is a rare occurrence, especially in such a concentrated period of time: life and death, the different sides of my family, the hush of a hospital and the din of a party, adulthood and childhood and a future old age i have yet to reach blending and blurring and bouncing off of each other. it was rich, and i feel richer for it.

we ate dinner at vy’s house while we were there saying goodbye, and walked around to look at some of her things. in a drawer in her jewelry box, my mom and i found these tiny plastic animals that i remember playing with as a child. nostalgia flooded my system: i hadn’t thought about those little toys in years, and a slew of sense-memories came rushing back to me. i put them in my pocket and brought them home with me, placing them out on a shelf in my office where i can see them all the time now. yesterday was my grandmother’s service, which i didn’t travel to texas for. m and i were out and about in madison and walked into a retro toy store we’ve been in once before. immediately upon entering, the first thing i saw on an extremely crowded shelf was the exact same little plastic animals as the ones my grandmother had. i have never ever, not once in my whole life, seen them anywhere else that i can remember.

i have 1 deer, 1 bear, and a smaller version of the elephant

this type of experience always inspires a lot of questions in a mind like mine—is it just a coincidence? is this confirmation bias? have i seen these before but never noticed them until the context became more important? is there life after death? is reality a simulation?—but these are, perhaps, questions for another time. ultimately, the fact that i just happened to stumble upon them within hours of the official celebration of my grandmother’s life felt like a nod from the universe in my grandmother’s direction. rest in peace, vy. you modeled a life well-lived to the very end. may we all be so lucky as to do the same.

me and matthew with both my grandmothers at our shindig in 2017

latelies

🎵 “once now, then again” EP — lutalo

📽️ halloween is our favorite holiday and we watch horror movies the whole month of october. my grandmother died at 4am on november 1, which we’re counting as all hallow’s eve and which we think was pretty badass of my grandmother, to go through the open doorway on samhain. this year we got 25 movies in, including starting a rewatch of all the “friday the 13th” movies on friday the 13th

📗 devil house by john danielle

📺 “kitchen nightmares” (2023)

dispatches from antisocials

+ it has almost been 3 months since i deleted instagram, and i highly recommend the move if you’ve been considering it. i have more time, more mental energy, and more ability to hear myself think: my brain is quieter, and my opinions, thoughts, and impulses feel more my own in a way i haven’t experienced in a long time

+ see shots you might have missed from the kiringram below

thanks for being here. drop me a reply to let me know how you’re doing, if you’re so inclined.

xoxokm

May 4, 2023 - DEEP IMPACT

Last month, I wrote to you about winter and the kind of mental clarity it can bring. Unless you’re my neighbor in the the American Midwest, you’ve most likely moved onto spring weather. We have only just started to! On April 15, it was 85 degrees and sunny and we were sweating on our walk; 7 days later, on April 22, M and I were at a cabin, and we experienced approximately 8 million different forms of winter weather phenomena in a single day: sun, clouds, rain, sleet, hail, snow, wind. At the start of this week, a somewhat confused sleet fell, and 23 MPH winds were violently tossing around the just-budding tree branches.

Since I last wrote, I found myself thinking a lot about impact, big impact, small impact, deep impact. And no, not the 1998 disaster film starring Téa Leoni and Morgan Freeman—but also YES the 1998 disaster film starring Téa Leoni and Morgan Freeman.

This gif may have triggered your intense fear of water-based enviro-apocalypse scenarios, and if it did, I apologize! The pickings for Deep Impact gifs were slim, so I begrudgingly went with this one.

Looking at the roots and definition of impact was fun. This is a word that gets thrown around a lot in 2023, and it’s always good to remind ourselves what words actually mean and where they come from. Derived from the Latin in- + pango meaning ‘to fasten or drive in,’ evolving to impingere meaning ‘to push, impel, or drive,’ by the 17th century impact had come to mean ‘to press closely or fix firmly’, and use of the word grows exponentially after the 1600s. Now, Merriam-Webster defines the verb as ‘to have a direct effect on, to strike forcefully, to press together’ and the noun as ‘the striking of one body against another, the force of impression on one thing or another.’

Impact is a word I’ve been thinking about lately most definitely in tandem with running, but I can also say that, due to lessons in my life both constructive and destructive, I have always been obsessed with the concept of impact: how things are affected when they collide, come into contact, enact upon each other. There are, of course, obvious lessons that many people learn despite different life circumstances—do unto others as you would have them do unto you (do being impact), you get out of a situation what you put into it (get and put being impact), for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction meaning that if object A exerts a force on object B then object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A (action and force being impact)—but there are also many lessons we learn based on our extremely specific circumstances.

From a very young age, my bedroom, wherever it was, was a cherished and beloved space simply because it was mine. The only direct impact there came from me, and I was freed, however temporarily, from the various impacts of other spaces, other people. This maintained into my adulthood, and persists even today; it’s something M and I have had to negotiate, since he prefers to host, having learned the lesson in his life that his space was one he could control to help shape how other people were expected to behave. Despite having been trained to be a good host, I would always rather visit someone else’s space than have them visit mine, simply for the fact that I feel much more in control of how I respond to the impact of others than how others respond to the impact of me. My life has been spent analyzing my impact on others and coming away very confused at the results, and so one of the ways I dealt with this confusion was to try to reduce my impact on anything, wherever possible. But this, of course, is a fruitless endeavor, fundamentally impossible, since

IMPACT IS CONSTANTLY OCCURRING

By nature of the physics of the world we find ourselves in, bodies are always hurling around, colliding with each other, dinging up each other’s surfaces and then rolling along our merry way into the next object we must impact upon, and be impacted by. I cannot protect the surface of my very small planet from the marks and pocks of other bodies in space; for a long time, I tried to pretend as if I was unimpactable, damn near believed it myself, longing desperately for an existence where I didn’t feel so banged up by everything. And this feeling, too, was the result of impact, a lesson learned from constantly running into other bodies in my solar system: that above all else, we must appear untouched, a perfect marble floating through the dirt of space, a placid lake untouched by the tugs of tides. For someone to know they had impacted us meant that we had somehow failed—at what, we weren’t sure, but we knew the failure could not be suffered by us or by anyone else we looked to for guidance.

Impact is also a constant state of both/and: we are both perpetually impacting and impacted upon. It is a continuous state of duality. It is the meaning of relationship—to impact and be impacted by—and we are all, no matter how desperately we try to fight it, in relationship: with the many parts of ourselves, with each other, with this world and everything in it. We are the product of a million points of relationship, but too many of us careen around the cosmos pretending that we touch nothing and are touched by nothing,

A whole new world of agency, understanding, and accountability opened up to me when I was able to finally understand that impact is constantly occurring, and that I can either work with it, or continue to work against it to my detriment and to the detriment of those around me. When you acknowledge how little control you have, you are able to pinpoint exactly where you do have any semblance of control, and it is often in corners we wish it wasn’t. I cannot control other people’s orbits, cannot, for the most part, control whether pain, misfortune, or tragedy set a collision course with me. Within that, what I can control are some of the few, tiny, insignificant forces I exert upon myself and the world around me, and how I respond to the collisions I cannot control.

Anyway, all this is to say that this month, I’ve been paying particular attention to the impact I can control, and I’ve been trying to make better choices, choices that positively impact my well-being and the well-being of all those entities I’m in relationship with. This can look a lot of different ways depending on my focus:

  • 🧠 brain (reading books, reducing screentime, single-tasking)

  • 🖤 heart (practicing gratitude & acceptance, calling folks, acknowledging my feelings/successes)

  • ⚡️ energy (silence, low-power mode at work, dedicated me time, putting anxious energy into action in service of healthy tasks)

  • 🤸 body (stretching, morning yoga, running, taking breaks)

I’m definitely not making the best choices 24/7, but being able to dialogue with myself and have a better impact on myself more often is BRAND NEW for me, and means I get to reap the benefits of those choices more frequently. And let me tell you if no one’s ever told you: being healthy is hard, but when you can do it, it feels fucking great!!! I’m not old yet (and I don’t really have complicated feelings about getting older either—maybe a subject for a future letter) but I am aging, and I want to be able to head into the second half of my life continuing to feel as good as I’ve felt lately.

May we all continue to learn how to shape our own impacts, and to practice shaping how we respond to the collisions that are outside of our control.

latelies

Bringing this section back for gentle animal because I love it. Here are some media I’ve recently enjoyed:

📚 The Children’s Book by AS Byatt: I just finished this and absolutely loved it. Read if you’d like a sprawling and beautiful ~700 pages about the feelings and observations of a multigenerational group of artistic/intellectual Britons living through the end of the Victorian period into the Edwardian period and subsequently WWI. I don’t usually love war fiction, but I have to say, this was the most impactful thing I’ve ever read about WWI.

💽 â€™Radiate Like This’ - Warpaint: Discovered this album via “From The Basement,” one of our favorite music series, and it has been a consistent go-to for me since. Good for rainy mornings, chilling out, introspection.

📺 That 70’s Show: Consider this personal homework, but I never really watched this prior to moving to WI, so M and I have been turning to this when we need something light and easy. For the most part, it holds up as a solid sitcom with some really great TV performances, and it holds up as a representation of the midwest I am coming to know, and it is also further driving my developing love of 70s aesthetics.

What have you been impacted by lately? What of your own impacts have you been contemplating?

Until next month.

KM

PS: I almost didn’t write this one because I already, after a SINGLE LETTER, started to get up in my head again and let my inner saboteur bully me out of it—but I didn’t. So I’m taking a brief moment here at the bottom of this to congratulate myself on that. Way to go, me.

April 1, 2023 — reflections on winter

Hi friends,

I want to start off more simply this time. I’m getting better at resisting my very ingrained urges to over-complicate things, and I’m getting better at sticking with an impulse through my first, early rumblings with it. Spaces like this make me nervous because I never know what to say. The urge to be overly formal, to write something meaningful, to send y’all something “worth reading” always takes over, and I immediately get too in my head, and then nothing ever actually gets written. Take a chill pill, Kirin. Fuck.

And so, again, I want to start off more simply this time. I want this to feel like letters to friends, because, ultimately, that’s what it is.

As I write this, I’m wrapping up my first full-fledged winter season since 2014. I can’t believe it’s been almost 10 years since I lived through an actual winter, let alone a Midwestern winter where, at its coldest, we experienced a stretch of days with lows in the -30s, and we woke up to windowsills glistening with ice.

A dirty windowsill with a large but beautiful sheet of ice on it, and yes, this is the indoor side of my office window

By and large, I loved this winter. Only in the last week or so, when we’ve been bouncing between 50 degrees and foot-and-a-half-of-snow weather within days of each other have I started to feel a little over it. I’ve never minded winter—I find the cold bracing, refreshing, and cleansing. In December, I stumbled across this IG reel from a Native creator that reinforced my feelings towards it: winter medicine is mental clarity. I think I always felt that way about it, before moving to the land of eternal summer.

Our house was one of the main factors the winter wasn’t hard to bear. Understandably, a lot of people go stir crazy, succumb to cabin fever at some point in the 6 months that winter reigns. In our household, however, ‘cabin fever’ is less of a fraught mental state and more 1,00,000% our aesthetic, especially given the chalet-feel of our WI home. It’s also a far cry from any CA place we ever lived in: with 3,000+ square feet for two people and one nugget, there are lots of different areas in our house set up for different activities and vibes, which gives us plenty of scenery changes depending on our mood, the day, or anything else.

We also tried to get outside as much as possible. Matthew’s hella Norwegian, and a few years ago we read some piece about friluftsliv, a Norwegian word/value which means ‘open-air living’ and essentially boils down to getting outside no matter what the weather conditions are. That’s been much easier to do here, and whether it was walking to the weekly farmer’s market every Saturday before it moved indoors for winter, or taking our golden Nugget for long walks to the marsh and small lake nearby, I’ve spent more time outside here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived.

Running has also gotten me outside more regularly than ever. I’ve now been running on and off for as long as I’ve lived away from winter (almost 10 years now???? can you/I even believe it????). But I felt a real change, seemingly overnight, when we landed in WI last June. For the first time, it felt like my brain wanted to run, and my body was ready to just do it. So, despite our temporary rental being in the hilliest fucking area ever, I started running again, and I kept it up throughout our move to Sun Prairie and our first fall here. I even went for a run while traveling for my brother’s wedding, much to the surprise of my family.

After running all summer and all fall, I wasn’t sure how winter would affect me. But I was for the surprise this time because, as it turns out, I fucking love cold-weather running? As it turns out, I run around outside in snow and wind and temps below 20 with a dopey fucking smile on my face? If Kirin from 10 years ago drove past Kirin of Now running 4 miles out of doors at the height of winter while smiling like an idiot, past Kirin might prevent present Kirin from even being here at all by being so fucking startled that she jerked the car right off the road and into a ditch so that future Kirin never even started running at all, let alone integrating running into their routine so thoroughly that they now just get sad when it turns out they CAN’T run.

A blurry selfie of me looking like a Very Serious Runner—but the nerd wall of Escaflowne LASER DISK COVERS behind me should balance it out

Anyway, all this is to say that the winter did exactly what it’s supposed to do: it swept out of the cobwebbed corners of my mind and brought big ol’ gusts of invigorating clarity. Sure, it is still somehow snowing a little bit again today…😅…but man, I missed the natural rhythm of change and connection that seasons lend. Seasons force you to recontextualize yourself and your life: how do you adapt and evolve with the winter, since you have to adapt and evolve? What does winter bring to you you that you can carry into spring? How does winter make you more grateful for those rising temperatures, for more freedom to go outside? What do you miss about winter when it’s passed, and what will you look forward to come next winter?

I’d love to hear what this winter held for you.

I’m going to try to make this a more regular thing, potentially once a month. No promises but to try.

Yours,

KM

i lost my leg like i lost my way

on balance, in all forms

Today’s title from "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead" by Gorillaz (listen on youtube).

i.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about balance: work-life, internal-external, me-you, intellectual-emotional, indoor-outdoor, even literal, physical balance.

I’ve been thinking about balance in regards to this newsletter offering, trying to find the right weigh-ins between monologue and dialogue, personal and public, micro and macro, transparency and curation. I started this because I wanted a different way to connect with people, and so far it has provided a few truly beautiful moments of connection that would not have come about without it. I started this because I wanted to write more, about something, anything, and it seemed like my life might be the easiest, most immediate entryway.

But it’s been a struggle—the exact struggle I signed up for, of course—because I am not great at sharing, though I’m learning. I want everything I share to be meaningful, impactful, important—and yet, it can’t be, because I’m also a dumb human with a limited perspective, no real impact on the world at large, and limited intellectual and emotional resources. I have learned that dialogue has to begin with sharing; that the only way to receive openness, honesty, and presence, is to first and foremost offer them up yourself—but I am still learning that doing so in no way guarantees you receive the same. That is a struggle. It feels unfair sometimes.

The one thing it does give me is a calm, a peace of mind that is brand new to me: I did it, I showed up, I worked on staying open and present, and in truth, as long as I do that, whatever I get in return is none of my business.

ii.

Though I sloughed off this identity and buried it deep underground from the end of high school to my late 20s, I was an athlete for much of my adolescence, playing tennis and basketball and lacrosse but ultimately sticking with my first and true sports love, soccer, for the longest. I have a natural relationship with my physical instrument—when I’m not overthinking it, which is less rare these days—pretty good hand-eye coordination, pretty good rhythm, pretty good innate sense of physics and motion in space.

Like many of the things that are important to me now, if Kirin from over a decade ago knew that one day, they’d be running three times a week, doing yoga three times a week, and stretching every night before bed, they’d worry that a bodysnatcher had come for them at some point in the future. I have had to do a lot of accepting of the fact that my physical health is as important to my overall well-being as my mental health is, but I know it is true, and these days it gives me a lot of comfort knowing I can do things for my body that quiet my brain and make me feel better holistically. I owe a great deal to this corporeal vessel, and now I try to thank it in a variety of ways.

Recently, I was transported back to my soccer days. I was trying to balance, and whereas I’ll sometimes hold onto things to shortcut the process, this time, all I could do was rely on the balance trick I’ve always used. I know some people touch their belly buttons or noses, or point at a spot to keep themselves steady, but what works best for me is simply picking a spot and focusing on it intently. When I do this, my mind goes quiet, my body goes still, and it can sustain itself in a wide variety of awkward positions with pretty impressive stillness. The moment my focus slips, so too does my balance.

Because balance has been on my mind, this recent example stuck out to me as an excellent metaphor for mindfulness. Yes, I’m still prattling on about mindfulness as a great source of balance, because the lesson is still proving itself to me over and over again—if my mind is an ocean, it is calmest when it picks one simple thing directly in front of it and genuinely focuses on that thing. For so long, I felt unmoored in the waters of my mind—anxiety is a storm, and I was frequently tossed on its crests and waves, at its mercy, though I wouldn’t say it was merciful at all. The body and brain are not so different, are, of course, innately connected, are nearly inseparable from each other. The thing that stills my body is also the thing that quiets my mind: focus, intention, presence in the present. It’s not rocket science, y’all, and yet it often feels like the hardest lesson to keep learning and keep learning and keep learning.

iii.

Recently, thanks to now years of therapy and a few months of Buddhism, I have been watching my brain rewire itself in the present, edit its code to change the outcome of a process. It’s been, not gonna lie, really fucking rewarding, because I can see and feel and know, deeply, its effects on my life. This too feels like a kind of rebalancing, adjusting the scales, weighting the mechanism so that it functions smoothly. While I’m using a lot of intellectual language to describe it, I have felt its effects most in moments of great feeling—another kind of balance, my intellectual mind and my emotional heart working in tandem to right the ship, talking to each other productively, collaboratively, interacting in concert to steady themselves, itself, me.

One of my go-to phrases lately has been, “It’s none of my business,” and it has been a balm. I know this is not a new phrase by any stretch of the imagination, but I heard it differently recently, and it stuck with me after that. I am not ashamed to admit that the way this phrase came to me recently was through an interview with a NFL coach. No, I don’t know which one—M might know because, though I might have changed significantly over the years, I ain’t out here watching or reading interviews with football coaches, and he is my ever-present, sometimes-accepted but oftentimes lovingly-humored source for anything and everything football. But, to summarize, the coach was asked what he thought about NFL drama that didn’t even pertain to his team, and his response was: “I think it’s none of my business.”

I think I’ve usually heard this phrase delivered differently, as either “it’s none of YOUR business,” or usually with a caveat that nullifies it, like '“I know it’s none of my business, BUT…” What I heard this time through the phrase was, “It doesn’t concern me, and therefore I don’t concern myself with it.” And I was like DAMN, girl, that is a truth. It feels similar to another idea that has been rattling around in my brain for the last year, a quote from the novel Weather by Jenny Offill: “in some Zen monasteries gossip is defined as talking about anything not directly in one's gaze.” I had a similar reaction when I read this quote, this feeling of being smacked in the face with something obvious and simple and true: if it’s not in front of you, it don’t concern you. If it doesn’t concern you, don’t concern yourself with it.

This phrase has been getting me through some moments lately with great success. One example: despite having a very independent I-do-whatever-the-fuck-I-wanna-do quality to my essence, I have often been overly concerned, sort of against my will, with what people think of me, whether they like me or not. I do an okay job of masking it, but that itself has created a deep imbalance in how I feel versus how I say I feel, in what’s actually important to me versus what I let feel important to me. In a few recent professional exchanges with a new person, I’ve watched my heart go oh no, that moment felt weird and I’m pretty sure it means this person doesn’t much care for me, and what will I do if this new person who doesn’t know me at all doesn’t like me? And then I’ve watched my brain chime in with if they don’t like me, that’s none of my business. And y’all, IT’S WORKED. May each of you make only your business what actually concerns you, and may all of us concern ourselves less with that which is none of our damn business.

a few latelies

📺 // M and I have been so burnt out and hungry for good stories that we’ve gone back to some first seasons of television shows that we think are really excellent, including Dexter and Deadwood. Both shows have such excellent first seasons, such good storytelling, such good writing—and then their second seasons immediately, in my humble opinion, suck ass, as do all ensuing seasons. But the first seasons are good enough to watch and savor on their own.

📽 // We finally watched Palm Springs on hulu, and it was one of the best new movies I’ve seen in a long time (I haven’t seen a lot of new movies in the last few years, so if this incenses you, know that it is an opinion of admitted ignorance but also that it’s still a good movie okay). Good script with solid, funny writing, nothing felt belabored or overly expository or explanatory, the performances are excellent, and the message and general philosophical landscape of the movie really resonated with me. We also immediately ran out and bought a pizza float for our pool, so expect pictures of that in the future. On the flipside, Zack Snyder’s new movie Army of the Dead was fucking terrible and still two and a half hours long and I think we should all collectively vote to STOP HIM from making movies anymore because I don’t think he’s actually contributed anything worthwhile to medium of film (fight me on that if you wanna).

📚 // The virtual book club I (re)joined last year has been killing it with the last two selections, which I will recommend here. Our April selection was The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, which is an excellent Native horror novel, super anxiety producing and well-written and ultimately really beautiful in its sentiments and execution. Our May selection was The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, the author’s only novel written in her short life, and an absolute literary gem that I think should be studied, annotated, and revered as much as Ulysses by Joyce—easily belongs in the literary canon, and should be taught in schools across the nation.

💽 // Two new-to-me albums that I’ve been listening to are: “Ruby Vroom” by 90s band Soul Coughing (spotify), a kind of 90s alternative acid jazz album that is beautiful and chaotic and weird, and “The Cold Nose” by pre-Grizzly Bear band Department of Eagles (spotify), which was made by a bunch of asshole NYU music students but is a really funny, clever homage album to a bunch of different types of music (“Forty Dollar Rug” is my favorite track and I have been shouting its simple refrain in my mind for weeks now).

it is summer now, and we will be outside

it is summer now, and we will be outside

I, as always, thank you for being here, and remain yours, ready to receive.

KM

we sit quiet, trying to solve just how not to stay stopped

on birthdays, celebrations, and who we once were

Today’s title from a real indie sleeper/youtube musician from way back, “One Year Later” by singer-songwriter Danielle Ate the Sandwich (listen on bandcamp).

Today is my birthday.

I am loath to write this—as I’ve said before, I have historically kept my birthday secret, sometimes even from people who love me and already know when my birthday is, because I don’t like anyone making a fuss over me, and I would rather internally combust than draw attention to something like the day I was born by no achievement of my own—but I wanted to do something different this year. I’m working on integrating all my past selves, or, at the very least, appreciating them, which is sometimes hard to do because I feel they are so disparate, so different, so at odds with one another. But they aren’t: they’re all me.

I am also working on celebrating things, even if it doesn’t look like how everyone celebrates. I have resisted and continue resisting celebration, mostly because I’m always so damn scared that there’s nothing to celebrate, or that celebration will serve as a kind of jinx, you owe me a soda, you owe me that positive energy back, but in reverse now. It’s much easier not to celebrate, and I tell myself it’s safer. After all these years, I’m still afraid of looking foolish to other people, of feeling foolish within myself. I’m working on that, too.

I’m 32 today, which is one of those stupid birthdays that means nothing other than another year has passed. There are no 32 year milestones, no novelties, no gateways opened. I’ve heard friends say it’s merely one year closer to mid-thirties, which they always say with a kind of grimace—but I’ve never felt that way about age. So, to celebrate an otherwise meaningless number, I decided to take some time today to look at previous 2-year incarnations of Kirin.

at 2

Kirin lived in New Hampshire, where she saw the most snow she’d ever see (though it’s unclear whether the memory of snow walls is a real one or a fabricated one created after the fact out of stories of snow walls) and had a pool at her house which could only be used during the smallest window of summer (the pool, she wouldn’t remember at all). By all accounts, she was talkative, expressive, precocious as fuck. She was a sparklequeen, and dressed her enormous dogfriend Amadeus up for tea parties. In the photo below she’s roughly that age, on vacation in Montreal with her glittered tiger facepaint and her impeccable early 90s mullet. In the distant future, amidst her wedding celebration, her mother will tell a story that Kirin has never heard before about 2(ish) Kirin getting ready for a date with an invisible gentleman. She did her face, grabbed her purse, and “left” for the date—but came back very quickly. “He didn’t treat me right, so I left,” was the answer she gave her mother when asked how the date went.

thinking about bringing this look back into 2021 when I finally go anywhere ever again

thinking about bringing this look back into 2021 when I finally go anywhere ever again

at 12

Kirin was in Lynchburg, VA, the place she’ll always somehow, maybe even frustratingly, think of home, even after her parents move away and she has no reason to go back there. She was mouthy now, and mean to a lot of people who didn’t deserve it as only preteens can be. She was almost to the end of her first year of middle school, at a fancy new private school with a class of only 24 students, most of whom had gone to school together their whole lives. Kids had only just started being mean to her; she didn’t know how bad it would get. This might have been the last time in her life that she ever truly tried to fit in—she tried very hard here and reaped a harvest she never wanted again. She had a boyfriend for a couple weeks. They went to the Valentine’s Day dance “together,” Kirin with her boy hair in a thrifted vintage gown, a satin affair in deep magenta, makeup done very tenderly by her father. He broke up with her because she was “too weird and too overdramatic,” and he wasn’t wrong. Her most visceral memory from this time period is when she tried to play lacrosse with the boys one day, padded up and talking trash. Someone pushed her down, and the boys circled her and jeered insults. They didn’t do much else, but she’d never forget looking up, them silhouetted against the bright sky, their features indiscernible, that feeling of danger, being surrounded by boys who didn’t like you.

one of the few photos I could find from this time period, of me and my beloved razor scooter

at 22

Kirin was almost done with college. Her first ever play was being produced on the mainstage of her very fancy theater school, but she planned to have a successful career as a working actor in NYC, the city of her dreams. She had a ride or die crew, got lunch with her professors where they treated her like a colleague and told her how sure they were that she was going to be successful in whatever she put her mind to. She was wildly happy sometimes, ecstatic almost; one night alone, headphones in, music blaring, rain started to fall and she ran all the way from campus to her apartment, not because she didn’t want to get wet, but because the streetlights shined so beautifully, and because it felt good, and because she could, dizzy with contentment the whole way. Other times she was desperately sad, unsure of who she was but absolutely sure she was getting it wrong. Her whole life was ahead of her and she felt it, and, as usual, her expectations for the future were wildly off-base.

my hottest and best date ever, second only to M, who I thankfully locked down (love you, Bralow)

my hottest and best date ever, second only to M, who I thankfully locked down (love you, Bralow)

at 32

Today Kirin is exhausted from a late night full of deep discussion. They know they’ve made progress, and sometimes they see how far they’ve come, and sometimes they see how far they still have to go; sometimes, both. Their life looks nothing like any Kirins before would have predicted: they have an incredible spouse, a dog that is not a Newfie, the longest hair they’ve ever had, and a cleaning routine. They’ve had the hardest and also best few years in a row here, and that isn’t even counting the fucking bonkers pandemic they’re still living through. They are not an actor. They are not a playwright. Sometimes, they are a professor; many days, they just are. They have no discernible career or success, and they have a lot of love, and a lot of happiness, and a lot of contentment. They are working so hard on so many things, and learning how to make the work more fun, less serious, more useful. They still love sparkles; they have a pool, again, and this one they’ll be able to swim in most of the year. They still get nervous around middle schoolers, even after all these years, sure that those punks, too, will find some way to be overpoweringly cruel to them. They still have trouble expecting things to go perfectly or exactly according to some secret but meticulous plan, are still unsure of exactly who they are, are still worried about getting it wrong—but they are worrying far less, caring far less about being someone other than who they are right now, learning to put less pressure on things to go any way other than how they go.

They’re here. I’m here. That’s enough.

Happy birthday, Kirin.

put them 32 hands UP, muthafuckaaaaaaas

put them 32 hands UP, muthafuckaaaaaaas

Thanks for reading. As always, yours, ready to receive.

KM

i wish i was born a man, so i could learn how to stand up for myself

or how we can still stand up for ourselves, however small

Today’s title from one of my favorite fuck you anthems, Martha Wainwright’s “Bloody Motherfucking Asshole”. Crank this up when you feel like singing the chorus over and over and over again.

This is one of those curves you can’t see coming when the year changes from 2020 to 2021 and you want to do something different to connect with people, so you sign up for this cool, free newsletter website to begin a new journey. What I knew about Substack when I chose that as the home for gentle animal was that it was easy to use and I liked the UI and it was totally free—all great things.

Friday morning I got what would be the final Substack newsletter from the wonderful writer Mary Retta (twitter) in which she detailed Substack Inc’s financial support of a handful of transphobic writers. I’d heard nothing about this because I am not on much social media and I don’t read the news anymore, so I did some research, and, yep, they’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a variety of transphobic writers to get them to come write newsletters for Substack.

It wasn’t even a choice for me so much as a what next? I do not have time or space for transphobes in my own life, and I choose not to financially support businesses, if I can, who use their resources to support bigotry, hatred, or ignorance. Do I still get Chick-Fil-A sometimes? YES, okay, I’m human, I’m flawed, and a #1 combo is so fucking good. But gentle animal is mine and I want to continue it, and I don’t want to feel conflicted every time I write another post.

In the past, my reasons would have been purely ideological, a moral conversation about right and wrong—I am 100% sure it is wrong to discriminate against trans people and I know that morality, biology, and history are on my side here. But this issue, as of a year ago, affects me more directly now.

ooh, scary, personal information

A year ago, I began to identify as nonbinary. This is not necessarily the same thing as being trans, though some people do identify as both nonbinary and trans. I do not—I am not trans. But the reason these identities are so innately tied together is because they both essentially do the same thing here in America, which is to challenge our existing and extremely limited ideas of gender, often with great danger to the vulnerable people who challenge these ideas. The fight for trans rights is the fight for everyone’s gender rights, including your rights as a man or woman and my rights as a nonbinary individual.

I have always struggled with gender identity, or should I say I had always struggled—until I learned more about the nonbinary community. This is one benefit of growing older: if you can manage it, you get to keep up to date on all the new words that kids come up with for things you felt but never had a system to identify, or old things that lots of people have felt but that we, in this country, have wiped from history and refuse to acknowledge.

Nonbinary, put simply, is exactly what it sounds like: it refuses to subscribe to the Western idea that there are only 2 genders in a binary relationship to each other, male OR female, girl OR boy, woman OR man. Some days, imposter syndrome rears its ugly head and I feel silly to call myself this—it feels, simultaneously, overly complex and overly simplified at the same time. But in these moments, I take a deep breath, and I remind myself what the term means: it simply means that I do not subscribe to our Western binary system of gender, and I honestly think it’d be a healthier world to live in if more people did not subscribe to this binary. That, in and of itself, is enough of a reason to identify that way.

Frankly, I believe the many binaries of Western culture are mostly harmful to us, as they force us all to live inside much smaller boxes than we need to, or force us to rail against very small boxes that we shouldn’t have to exhaust the energy fighting. Sex and gender are different, but in this country, they’re welded together—if you read my last newsletter, with thoughts on cleaning, this is exactly what I’m talking about. For many years, I felt like I was expected to know how to clean or cook because I was born a woman based only on identifying the sex organs of babies (which sounds weird when you write it out that way…), and this turned cleaning into something I felt I had to fight against, because I was a woman but I didn’t do those things and I felt I shouldn’t have to. The biggest dividend that coming to better terms with my identity has paid out, for me personally, is actually embracing a lot more of the feminine qualities that I struggled against for so long because other people expected me to have them. And, again, as I type this I worry that someone will read this and think, “See, that’s proof that this is all nonsense, because identifying as nonbinary has helped her become more womanly, which she always was.” But this brings me back to the harm of binaries: maybe if I hadn’t been prescribed a gender identity from birth that had nothing to do with who I am but everything to do with social norms, we wouldn’t need the nonbinary identity anyway.

As I’ve said to anyone I’ve told who knows me, I’ve been genderfucking shit my whole life. Another way I know this identity is true for me, even when I sometimes feel anxious about it, is that it literally changes nothing about my life, other than many days it makes me feel more at ease with myself, who I already am. I feel most comfortable when I think of myself as a shapeshifter, when I am allowed to be who I am, in that moment or on that day or for that year, regardless of what masculine or feminine qualities that being encompasses.

I am generally a very private person. I don’t like announcing things, I don’t like people I’m not close to knowing intimate details about me and my life, hell, I didn’t even keep my birthday on Facebook (when I still had one) because I hated getting happy birthday messages from people I don’t talk to on a regular basis. I have “come out” about this new identification, among a few other new identifications, to very few people. But I also believe that, if I say I want to live in a world where I’m the majority for identifying outside the binary, then I can do some things to help foster that change, including identifying that way publicly. People don’t often consider something is possible for them until they see it—I know that was a major part of my struggle with these questions—and if I can ease anyone else’s anguish at all by living authentically and publicly, then I want to do that. As I get older, I see how easy it is to let old social norms dictate the way we think—the “kids these days” mentality—but I do believe that listening to younger generations can be expansive for us as we get older, can help us learn new things, broaden our worldview, and find greater peace with ourselves. They take what we give them, and they build on it, usually for the better. Age isn’t better than youth, not in all ways, and this is another harmful binary that we often subscribe to in this country.

Of course, I’ve had to think of some things, like pronouns. I honestly couldn’t care less about pronouns generally—because of this, I don’t feel much of a need to correct anyone’s usage of pronouns, or to ask for specific pronouns to be used. Since my name’s a little ambiguous, I’ve often been referred to as Mr. Kirin McCrory if someone hasn’t met me yet, and it never bothered me (in fact, I spent many years of my childhood being interpreted as a boy often and enjoying every second of it). Feminine pronouns are fine with me too—I was socialized as a woman and that’s how many people know me, and my femme presentation and straight-presenting marriage certainly doesn’t cause anyone to question feminine pronouns for me. I have started using they/them pronouns for formal presentations of myself for the same reason I’m writing this today—because I want more people to acknowledge and to get comfortable with the fact that gender identity is up to the person themselves, and that feminine signifiers do not make me a woman. I’d love for you to use whatever pronouns feel most comfortable or most appropriate for you.

You might have questions about this, and you’re free to ask them! I have loved engaging with other people’s questions, as they help me to continue to think about my own identity. Coming out about anything is traumatic for some people because it really changes what their life looks like, but as I said, this changes nothing about mine: M, my spouse, knows and is supportive and has been my main confidante as I figured this stuff out, and he loves me precisely because of who I am, this included; no one who knows me has been surprised; and all it does, for me, is give me a better understanding of myself. My hope in sharing this information is that it’ll help you have a better understanding of me, and give you some things to think about for yourself or the world.

what this means for gentle animal

Nothing. If you signed up for the Substack newsletter, which all of you have, I’ve migrated your emails over to a spreadsheet. I looked around at a few other free platforms to host the newsletter, but now I’m afraid of the same thing happening in the future, some platform making another at best ignorant and at worst bigoted error that I don’t agree with, and having to move this all over again. To avoid that, what I’ve done is set up gentle animal to be hosted by my personal website. You’ll still get newsletters in your email, but now they’ll come directly from kirinmccrory@gmail.com. You’ll still be able to like, comment on, or share posts by clicking on the links at the bottom of every newsletter, which will take you to the gentle animal blog on my website.

I’ll end this newsletter with my all-time favorite nonbinary meme that I’ve seen. Those who know me well know my infinite and eternal love for Will Smith, Scientology be damned, and so this meme feels especially appropriate for me:

mibmeme.jpg

Thanks for reading. As always, yours, ready to receive.

KM

cleanliness is godliness, and god is empty just like me

or how the drying of a single plate can be joyful/joy-full

Today’s title is my from sleeper favorite Smashing Pumpkins’ song, â€œZero”, which, if you listen to, you should really crank up as loud as you can, which is what I always do when this song comes on. James Iha’s guitar riff on this song is impossible not to bang your head to.

I was not, historically, a very clean person. Some things, I’ve always been very organized about—schedules, calendars, books, what I’m carrying with me—and it’s not like I’m a slob. I have been a slob, from time to time: one stretch, in particular, I was working late shifts at a dive bar in NYC, getting home at 4am, sleeping until noon, going back to work, and my room was a fucking disaster—clothes everywhere, drawers open, no regard for my living space.

a still from a somewhat successful vine from that time period, where a stranger commented on how disgusting my room was

a still from a somewhat successful vine from that time period, where a stranger commented on how disgusting my room was

But domesticity, in any form, has never really been a forte of mine. Cooking, cleaning, nesting, houseplants—these aren’t really things I do, or things I did. I suppose I nested—my rooms always felt like mine, and I organized and set them up to feel that way; but one room does not a household make. I made food for myself, sometimes—but friends would often liken my personal culinary abilities and tastes to that of a small and incapable child: frozen chicken nuggets, cereal, toast, sometimes I would have spoonfuls of peanut butter for breakfast. I did not clean—I would pick up sometimes, I would organize sometimes, but cleaning—surfaces, vacuuming, sweeping, whatever, that was something I did not do.

I started thinking about cleaning once we got Nugget in 2017, because he sheds like a motherfucker and it’s not fun to live in, especially when your spouse has allergies and you aren’t working as much as he is. So I started cleaning, on a small scale and only occasionally. But though I would do it sometimes, out of necessity, I still hated it, every time. I hated it even more once I started cleaning more things in more ways: I would wipe the whole fucking kitchen down and then 5 seconds later, crumbs would be everywhere again. In my mind, it took up too much of my time, too much of my energy, for it to just be temporary and “domestic.” I did not have a ton of respect for these things—I grew up thinking that my brain was my superpower, and that only things requiring and showcasing my brain were worthwhile.

To make a long, meandering personal story short: if you had told me ten years ago that some of the most concrete feelings of accomplishment in my adult life would be doing dishes right after using them and putting them immediately back on shelves, or developing a weekly cleaning schedule where I effectively clean the whole house every week, or cooking a simple stir fry by myself, I would have either laughed in or thrown a punch at your face.

As my adult years have started going by, I’ve grown less and less interested in my brain and all the things it can do. I used to feel so superior about my intelligence; now I often feel ignorant, but not in a bad way—whatever that clichĂŠ is about wise men knowing they know nothing, etc. I used to feel like I wanted, needed to do, should do something “important” with my life and my time, like domestic things were beneath me, and that if I engaged in them, as someone who was socialized as a woman, I was effectively regressing into the 1950s.

Minimalism and Marie Kondo got me thinking about my surroundings and my relationships to things, and once I started thinking about taking care of the things in my life as much as I take care of anything else, cleaning became easier. I have never been an ambitious person, though I told myself I was for a long time; once I started questioning that, once I started being honest with myself about what’s healthy for me, the person I actually am and not the idea of myself I have in my mind, once I started looking at time as a gift and not as maddening countdown towards zero, I realized there was actually very little I could do with my time that was healthier, more meaningful, or more importantly contributory than caring for my immediate surroundings, or myself, or my loved ones.

I’m reading about Buddhism these days and trying to be present, trying to find joy in each present moment, and the next one, and the next one, and y’all, I have dried a single plate only to see my smiling face staring back at me. Who is this person, and why are they so happy doing nothing? But then, of course, it isn’t nothing: joy is rooted in care for and attention to the present, and why would a single plate deserve that any less than anything else? Why would I deserve that any less than “success,” or “accomplishment,” or any of those other words that, ultimately, mean very little to me and mainly inspire feelings of anxiety, inferiority, or judgement?

the very simple stir fry i made this week, on one of these single plates

the very simple stir fry i made this week, on one of these single plates

It was hard to learn, don’t get me wrong, and sometimes I still hate cleaning, and sometimes I skip it because I don’t feel like it, and I’m still unpacking lots of resistance to and shame about being a femme person whose male spouse works in the world while they mostly take care of the home—but my surroundings have never been cleaner than they have been this last year, and my meals have never been healthier than they have been this last year, and my time has never been better spent than it has been when I choose to hone in on what’s in front of me and care for it. It brings me joy every time I manage to do it.

latelies

A new maybe sometimes section where I give you some things I’ve liked recently.

📺 // We did watch all of “WandaVision” which for me, like most TV now, got worse as the season went on, and I know fuck all about these comics so I was lost a lot of the time. I appreciated the attempts at style though, and I wish the second half had held up to how good the first few episodes were.

We’re also still making our way through “Seinfeld,” which I’ve never seen any of until now; I like the actual episodes a lot when they don’t involve social issues the coverage of which is inevitably tone deaf now, but I gotta tell y’all, I never laugh at the stand-up footage and that in and of itself is always kind of hilarious to me.

💿 // Recently found the album “T H E” by Japanese band tricot (spotify), which I described to Gemma as math rock shoe gaze. Because I do not speak Japanese, this has been a great album when I want to listen to music but don’t want words, but also don’t want pure instrumental or classical stuff.

I also, hilarious, have really been enjoying “Sailing The Seas Of Cheese” by Primus (spotify), which was NOT a band I ever listened to and I’m pretty sure I used to make fun of people with Primus t-shirts. I think maybe I thought this band was heavy metal, and it seems like a lot of the people who listen to it think it is heavy metal. I have never liked heavy metal or prog rock, the two most obvious genres that Primus might fit into, because I’ve always found them to be genres of music that take themselves, and that fans take, super seriously, and I have a self-made button that says “fuck you, irreverence is my life force” so you can imagine how I fared with these genres, and honestly if I want to listen to musically complex stuff, I’ll listen to actual classical or jazz, thank you very much. But M made me listen to some awhile back and I actually really like it—I’d describe Primus as punk prog rock, or a satire of heavy metal, and I find it musically interesting, artistic, and deeply irreverent.

📚 // Read Cold Millions by Jess Walter for March bookclub, and felt pretty meh about it ultimately. It was well-written and I liked it as I read it, but it felt like an A+ extra credit creative project for a history class, and this book did not make me miss reading books by white men, which I have done so sparingly over the last near-decade that I can always sense it immediately when I start one, and which never seem to prove me wrong by the end.

However, Insurrecto by Gina Apostol, which I finally picked up and actually read in January, was amazing, if you like weird, obtuse meta narratives, which I do. I used to be a big hoarder of books, used to pride myself on being able to lug around the boxes and boxes and boxes of books that were mine; now, I have two small shelves of books, one for nostalgic things like my HP books (fuck terfs, though) and Sailor Moon graphic novels, and one for nonfiction that is useful/wonderful and fiction that I loved so much I would read it again. There were only 10 books of fiction on that shelf, and Insurrecto immediately joined its ranks.

So, what about you? Are you a clean person, do you enjoy domestic things? Why or why not? What have you read/watched/listened to lately? I’d love for you to respond, even if it’s just a sentence or two about what’s going on with/for/around you, because I, as always, thank you for being here, and remain yours, ready to receive.

KM

for who i am, for, for, with love

or random things because i don’t know this time

Welp, I got three gentle animals out before feeling like I totally ran out of ideas. That’s more than I thought I’d get! And also I am not surprised that my energy pretty immediately ran out—writing long pieces about personal experiences every week is a surefire way to run out of steam.

And, I have been busy, and burnt out. M’s kidney stones turned into a week-long fever dream of ER visits and an eventual minor and non-invasive but still emergency surgery. He is fine now, or getting there. I immediately, after that long and lonely week, went into a week-long virtual theatre conference which was a time, let me tell you. I’m not a conference person; I might be an anti-conference person. Stay tuned to find out what this means for my leadership position whose sole focus is…organizing a huge college theatre “festival” (re: conference).

But there are always excuses, and not everything can be long and personal. So after a few days of wondering what I would write about next, and then after a few more days of that old familiar I should have never started this in the first place and no one will notice if it just silently disappears feeling, here I am, back again, writing another gentle animal to you today.

But today’s will be casual! And a collection of things. Random, one might say, but all connected to what my life has looked like lately.

for ears

Lately, I have been drawn towards listening to piano music, some classical, some contemporary. As I’m often doing work right now, this is an obvious choice for background music, and as a trained pianist, it’s been nice to let my brain latch onto something from many moons ago. Fortuitously, the two albums I’ve been digging into recently also have very pleasing—and strangely apropos—covers.

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“Bach / Chopin” - Vikingur Olafsson (on spotify)

for eyes/brains

My reading really took a hit in the first weeks of February, but I had just started Matthew Salesses’ wonderful Craft in the Real World shortly before M got the kidney stones. Salesses is a wonderful novelist and essayist, but he has been my favorite writer writing about craft for the last 5 years. As a Korean-American adoptee, he writes often of the idea that craft is culture/cultural, and it is an idea that warms me to my very core. As someone who had a lot of issues with my MFA program and the classes therein, Salesses’ essays—which eventually led to this book—were very healing for me, when I could find them. I’m doing some unpacking now about just how much my MFA experience harmed my writing instead of helped it, and this book is, to use a colloquialism but to mean it wholeheartedly, giving me life.

I often talk about the responsibility of storytelling with my students and with other artists, and here’s a quote from p.22 of the book, where Salesses’ paraphrases a Native craft writer, Thomas King:

…King…respects the shared responsibility of storytelling, and warns us that to tell a story one way can “cure,” while to tell it another can injure.

“Craft in the Real World” - Matthew Salesses (bookshop.org)

for hearts

Almost two years ago, I was working part-time as a writer for an app where you could read in-depth summaries of mainly self-help books. One of the first books I summarized was The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I went into the book with a bit of a chip on my shoulder (I’m a contrarian and it was ALL THE BUZZ back then) and came out an obsessive tidier who still practices minimalism (so eat shit, Kirin of 2019, and maybe stop being such a dick about things just because other people like them).

In one section written specifically for her Japanese audience in regards to shrine charms, Kondo gives ideas to non-Eastern readers for having a personal shrine somewhere in your home, where you can pick your favorite, most joyful mementos and knickknacks, and create a small, personal altar in your home. This is in direct keeping with one of her main principles, the idea of turning your home into a place of joy, your own sacred space, and filling it with positive energy.

I’m not much for what I call “woo woo shit,” but I also now have a lot of what other people would call “woo woo shit” in my life (I am large; I contain multitudes; leave me alone). And one of them is a personal altar, a small space where I have a collection of things that make me feel like me, that remind me of people I love, and that brings me joy and a sense of the sacred.

It has been bringing me a lot of heart, and I need it right now, as most of us do—so I thought I’d share it today.

my personal altar

my personal altar

There is a fair amount going on here; though I do practice minimalism, I continue to do so mainly because I am so susceptible to hoarding anything and everything. I am also an avid list-maker, so here’s what’s in this shrine of mine, starting in the bottom left corner and going clockwise in a spiral towards the dish:

  • The Astronomer’s Apprentice skeleton embroidery (by CrimsonPins)

  • Evenstar necklace

  • Battlestar Galactica cufflink

  • A witch? conductor? woman warrior? earring

  • Silver dollar

  • Battlestar Galactica keychain

  • 1 of 2 Kirins on a stone sphere, with a spacey resin ring around its neck

  • Larger Kirin carving

  • Polaroid of M and I in Ireland, with a bracelet draped over it

  • Brass abacus

  • Small brass elephant, small brass dragon, small turtle charm barely seen

  • Disguise pen

  • Kirin necklace, with a gold-toned Kirin pin attached

  • Silver dish

  • Blue sandstone bracelet

  • Crystals: amethyst, citrine, rose quartz, clear quartz

  • Small rock from the moat of Kasteelwell

Do you have a personal shrine somewhere? What’s in yours? What would be in yours, if you made one?

Thanks for being here. As always, yours, ready to receive.

KM

i'm so tired and i wish i was the moon

or how an early-morning ER trip got me thinking

I am tired. I know you must be, too. Or maybe you aren’t! It seems like some people aren’t? But I’m fucking tired, tired, tired, and I wish I was the moon (the titles of gentle animal, if you haven’t already realized, are always song lyrics).

I was already tired before Monday. Over the weekend, I opened up a blank gentle animal post and tried to write, and…nothing. Nothing to talk about this week, nothing coherent on my mind, nothing but imposter syndrome reared up as I stared at the cursor blinking in the wide, empty sky of this newsletter. I started feeling burnt out around Christmas, from working all the time throughout the pandemic when all I wanted was to rest, from stressing out over shit that actually doesn’t mean anything right now while hundreds of thousands of people die and lose jobs and lose family and get sick, from watching part of the world plow forward with their trivial lives convinced that something about them means they’re worth more than the rest of us. I usually get around 8 hours of sleep every night, and yet 2021 has been mornings of exhaustion, no matter how much sleep I get. What are we doing all this for? my brain asks me. I have no answer.

I was extra tired after we went to bed late on Saturday night and I got less than 6 hours of sleep and I felt like shit all day Sunday, that kind of running-on-empty feeling where my eyes feel like black holes and I feel hungry and unsettled and vacant most of the day. Man, I thought, is this what getting older feels like? One less hour of sleep than usual and I’m a fucking WRECK. So M and I tried to get in bed early Sunday night and “get some good sleep.”

Sunday night—or, technically, Monday morning, around 12:45AM, M wakes me up. The volume of our white noise machine plus my body’s need for sleep leaves me discombobulated, but he is telling me he is in pain, so I have to zero in. M has a history of kidney stones, which, if you do a cursory google search, is one of the more painful medical phenomena out there—a lot of women who’ve both had kidney stones and given birth say kidney stones are more painful. “If it gets too bad,” he croaked, “you’ll have to take me in.”

I’m pretty good in a crisis; I hold it together, keep a relatively level-head, and try not to panic or let emotion overwhelm me. So I got myself ready to go, just in case, and I sat with him an hour in the bathroom, him kneeling at the altar of porcelain and pain and purging, me awkwardly bending over him to rub some tension out of his back and shoulders. It was hard to see him this way, to be able to do nothing but attempt to rub some tension out of his shoulders. Around 2AM we called it: he’d have to go to the ER.

Thankfully, there’s a big hospital less than a mile away from our new house, so we wouldn’t have to go far. I dashed around, dazed, trying to make sure I had everything: mask, healthcare card, wallet, water for Nugget since I didn’t know how long we’d be gone, driving carefully down our neighborhood’s shit pavement as every little jolt made M wince. I hadn’t even thought about what would happen once we got there.

What happened once we got there, I should have seen coming, but it hadn’t crossed my mind yet. M and I have been stringently isolating since the pandemic began, we are up to date on news and statistics and science, we curse the people who think they deserve special treatment while denying any of this is happening. I dropped him off at the doors, watched him hobble inside, parked the car, and hurried after him—but was stopped at the entrance. Only patients allowed inside the ER, period, even the waiting room. I wasn’t going to argue with them: I know why this protocol is in place, and I don’t think I’m the exception. But then confusion set in: how would I know what was going on, and now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure M had his phone, and it turns out he didn’t, so I ran back to the car to find it in the front seat, and ran it back to the two masked healthcare professionals guarding the entrance so they could give it to him inside.

“It’s chilly outside,” one of them said, “so we recommend waiting in your car, or returning home if you live close by, until you know when he’s going to be release.” I nodded, still dazed, and made my way back to the car—it was chilly outside, and in our rush to leave, I hadn’t thrown anything over my sweatshirt—and I climbed inside and shut the door.

Bearing witness to M’s pain had been bearable, because I was with him. Now, though, I wasn’t. Now, though, he was in intense pain somewhere, and I was not there. Now, though, in the quiet hum of the car, 2:08AM on the clock, the adrenaline came crashing down on me and pushed its way out of my mouth in a sob. I didn’t have anyone to hold it together for anymore; M was alone, I was alone. I finally calmed my breathing—don’t want to scare him or make him feel bad, I thought—and called him. I know he’s in pain, I thought, but he’ll answer, he’ll let me know what’s going on.

But he didn’t answer. I tried again, no answer. Fine, texting then: “Call if/when you can and let me know what they tell you or when you can get in.” For now, our dog was panicked and at home less than a mile away, so I’d return there and…well, wait, I guess. I kept my phone open to M’s texts sitting between my legs for the drive home. The moon shone down on me; I was tired.

When I got there, still nothing from M. I tried calling again, and again—now it was taking forever for the ringing to start, and even then, it’d ring twice and go straight to voicemail. I felt a pit open up in my stomach—if I couldn’t get in touch with M, what could I do? I’ve been to the ER before, but what was the protocol now, during covid, if I couldn’t sit with him? The total blank on what to do made me panic and feel dumb; I found myself googling can you call the ER to get updates on someone? which mostly produced results about how to find out if someone was at the ER.

Thought it felt like eons had passed, it was only 2:30AM, so I called the hospital, got connected to the ER. “I just dropped my husband off there with kidney stones and I was wondering if he’s gone in yet or what the deal is or…” I didn’t know what questions to ask, what to do. I gave her M’s name; she, presumably, scanned her documentation.

“Oh, yeah,” she said casually, maybe even annoyed, “I mean, he’s only been here, what, half an hour? So he hasn’t gone in yet.” I stammered something about just not being sure how to get updates on him because of covid and thank you so much and okay goodbye. You probably should’ve mentioned he’s in excruciating pain, so half an hour is a long time to wait, I thought, probably should’ve advocated for your partner, probably should’ve taken a deep breath and asked her the best way to find out updates—now we know nothing, again, good job you idiot. I texted M again: “Front desk not helpful so check in with me if you can, even if it’s just liking this text.”

Nothing.

I called every few minutes for the next 40 minutes. Sometimes the call would take a lifetime to connect, the silence stretching out before me until the ringing began; still, phone calls were only ringing twice and then going straight to voicemail. I wondered if the guys at the door had actually given him his phone, wondered if they hadn’t been able to find him and still had the phone and were now silencing call after call from someone whose name they didn’t recognize. An eeriness set in for me: I was alone. There was nothing I could do. It was 3AM, and there was absolutely no one I could talk to without waking them up in the middle of the night, an emergency, my brain told me—but was this one? I read about whether people died from kidney stones; they didn’t, not suddenly, so that gave me some peace of mind. I kept begging my phone: please give me something from him, anything. I kept wondering what I would do, who I would call if this was actually an emergency at 3AM; in the age of cell phones, can you wake anyone in the middle of the night?

(I know you can. I know my father sleeps with his cell phone on his bedside table, volume turned up, just in case we need him. We do not, personally, sleep with our phones in the bedroom—and this was the first night that made me think maybe we should.)

Finally, at 3:10AM, an hour after I’d dropped him off at the ER and heard nothing, M texted. “In a bed on morphine. Test came back with one stone passing. No cell reception. Had to get guest wifi just to text.” The rush of relief, the moon’s bright face, my exhaustion transformed, for the briefest moment, into ecstasy; anger instead of fear at the thought of an ER with no cell service; the ability to laugh at M’s next text: “Tough to text on morphine.” I could finally rest my eyes—though I didn’t sleep, instead I lapped softly at the borders of it, thankful just for the room to relax—for the next hour until he was discharged and I picked him up again at the same doors I’d sent him through two hours before.

He’s still recovering; the stone hasn’t passed, or there’s another one. We have slept at odd times and never soundly enough. Having gotten a glimpse into what it must be like for anyone in the era of covid to deal with hospitalization of loved ones, I feel so humbled, so grateful to have only encountered it briefly. The agony of waiting outside, unable to follow someone through the doors, is the worst kind of tired, where you wish you were the moon.

a photo of my dog’s beautiful, dumb moonface, just for some levity

a photo of my dog’s beautiful, dumb moonface, just for some levity

Will gentle animal ever not be (partially) a downer? Let’s find out.

Thanks for being here. As always, yours, ready to receive.

KM

you think that this phenomenon is some coincidence

or does it mean anything when things line up

This is not the letter I thought I’d be writing this week. In my typical fashion, I started approximately one trillion different letters about various subjects, a lot of them unnecessarily lengthy, me trying to cover too serious a subject, in full, at too early a date—this is a pattern, for me, in writing and in communication.

Patterns, what the human brain looks for. Coincidence, something the human mind creates, or searches for, or ignores the rest to find. I’m not a big believer in the “everything is meant to be” mentality, I don’t subscribe to the idea of some carefully chosen design laid out for me by some all-knowing presence. I have, recently, started to talk to the Universe, the closest I can get to a thing bigger than myself that I can take comfort in, and I have started to try to see things as opportunities presented by the Universe. Is it coincidence that the Universe offers up X when X has been on my mind? Maybe. But I’m the one living this life, so if I can get something from it, I should probably try.

All that being said, the last week was a bizarre confluence of coincidences that I find I must tell you about, whether I want to or not. It has been on my mind, and that was the whole point of gentle animal.

the mouth of the river

Did you know the word confluence also means the junction of two rivers, usually of approximately equal width? I did not, until I googled it just now. I am usually aware that when I see A Lot of Coincidences, they stem from the same source that is obviously impacting what my brain is looking for.

The source for this week’s letter is the sprawling fantasy novel Little, Big by John Crowley. I read this from 1/9-1/17 for a virtual book club. A NPR review of the book described it as “the only example of contemporary magical realism” that someone knew of. I think that’s a good way to basically explain it: published in 1981, it is a world that looks like our America, that also has a faerie world at its heart.

I have complicated feelings about it—which I’m happy to share with any of you who are interested in it—but I won’t go into those here. Suffice it to say, magic, inexplicable things, confluences were on my brain because of this book.

the last junction, which happened first

Due to its fantastical nature, it will probably not surprise you, then, that the first realm to be most directly impacted by this novel was my dreams.

I have not historically been A Dreamer, but I have found recently, deep in the throes of covid isolation, that this is changing. I have dreamed every single night for the past 2-3 weeks—of large gatherings of people, primarily—and though I can’t remember all of the dreams, I always remember that I have dreamed.

On the night of January 10th, I had a dream which I won’t detail all of, just the ending.

This dream had already turned magical realism on its own, but at the end of it, I was in the small but airy dining room of a kind of European flat that was not mine. M was with me. On one of the shelves behind him, suddenly I noticed the helmet of an old suit of armor that I had not seen before. The visor raised on its own, and inside there was a man’s face. This face began to speak to M, though I could hear it: “Something happened yesterday, something small, and you thought you were going to be fine, but you haven’t been feeling well since then.” As it spoke, particles of golden light floated out of the helmet’s opening and encircled M, turning his face from neutral to panicked to pained. He clutched his sternum. I was in front of him then, rubbing my hands across his chest, trying to sooth him with variations on you’ll be fine. It didn’t work; the pain intensified; my calming you’ll be fine changed to a panicked no, please, no. He collapsed against me, I caught him in my arms, and Dream Me let out a horrible, guttural scream, which startled Real Me awake in the middle of the night.

[This is not rare for me: having never been afraid of my own death, I am now constantly terrified by the prospect of M’s. This is not news to him: we’ve talked about it, and I’m working on making friends with death in a variety of ways. A topic for another time.]

This was not yet a coincidence, at the time, just a bad dream. It would become a coincidence.

the second junction

On January 15th, I was outside in our backyard, walking around while Nugget, our dog (whose real name is Bear but who is more often referred to by his nickname), smelled around. I have walked the circle of our backyard many times: we have a small, kidney-shaped pool at the center, cement circling it, rock areas around that with succulents planted in them. I have stared at the ground often as we figure out what to do back there.

But on this day, something caught my eye in the rocks that I have scanned over many times before: a pop of color, a bright green that stood out. I bent down and picked it up: a small, ceramic leaf, buried in the rocks, traces of adhesive on the back as though it had once been attached to something. Strange, I thought.

Then my eyes saw another pop of color, yellow this time—another leaf, I picked it up—and then another, green again, another leaf, and another, and another. Finally, all the color seemed gone, and I had 7 leaves in my hand.

treasure amongst the rocks

treasure amongst the rocks

Reader, I want you to know that I am sitting outside writing this on January 21st, and as I got to the section about finding the leaves in the rocks, I glanced over at that area in pursuit of the memory, and my eyes alighted immediately on yet another pop of color, and I found an eighth leaf, a fourth and final green one.

!!!!

!!!!

This certainly seemed, seems, like fairy magic—how had I never noticed these before, and have only just noticed them while reading about creatures who leave gifts for humans? And yet my rational brain says: this is coincidence, your brain looking for gifts, nothing more. Maybe your neighbors threw some shit over the fence. Maybe you never looked as hard at this area as you thought you had. Who knows. Many coincidences; no coincidences.

the third junction

On the morning of January 17th, I woke up in A Mood. M and I had had a minor miscommunication going to bed the night before, and because we were going to bed, we had not resolved it, and because we had not resolved it, I woke up in A Mood. It wasn’t a big miscommunication, unimportant really, and we resolved it later, but I found myself privately trying to articulate how I felt, what that Mood was.

Tenderhooks, I thought. Wait, no, tenterhooks, right? Tenderhooks is the colloquial mishearing of it. Right? Well, whatever, on ten(t/d)erhooks, that’s how I feel.

I thought this over my morning tea, about half an hour before I picked up Little, Big to read the last 100 pages. I had stopped on page 429 the day before, at the break before the sixth and final book.

There, on page 435, only seven pages in, the word appeared, and the correct spelling, it confirmed for me, was tenterhooks.

Now, tenterhooks is not a word I see thrown around often, hence my momentary confusion about how to spell it. It had not appeared previously in Little, Big. And yes, of course, for a book that spans 538 pages, many words are bound to be used. I am still not sure how I thought of the word tenterhooks moments before reading it; I felt as though I’d conjured it into existence on the page.

Reader, I must also tell you, I saw tenterhooks YET AGAIN in a video game—or an “interactive visual novel”—I played in a couple hours on Tuesday, 1/19: If Found, Please Return by Irish game studio—wait for it—dreamfeel. Many coincidences; no coincidences.

the fourth, and final, and also first, junction

Like the third conjunction, he last coincidence—and the first junction, in retrospect—also occurred on January 17th, in the final 100 pages of Little, Big.

I will write this section trying not to spoil the book. Forgive the vague pronouns and lack of context.

But, you remember my dream, the first junction which was not a junction yet. Well, eight pages away from the end of the book, a main character begins to feel a tingle in their left arm and hand, a “warning bell” that they do not heed but that we know they should, and then their heart begins to open up, a “premonition, or in the intimation of a revelation,” and the opening widens and the pain rushes in along with nature and their family. Another character passes them in this moment, the moment of their death. “Face to face,” she mutters. Face to face. This character takes no further steps, has no further lines; they appear, after this point, only in reference to their burial, performed alone by their spouse.

I know heart attacks are commonly used in stories to denote sudden, “unexpected” deaths. I know there is really nothing unique in worrying that your beloved spouse will die, suddenly, “unexpectedly” from a heart attack. I know there is then nothing unique in an author using a heart attack to suddenly, “unexpectedly” wipe a character from her pages.

Time and distance can, of course, turn nearly everything into coincidence. I try to remember if there was any hint before page 530 of this extremely long book that this character would die this way—something, anything to explain exactly how my brain turned a passing clue into a nighttime terror many days before that information would culminate in an eerily similar death scene for a character in a book. I don’t remember; there might have been. Does it, ultimately, matter?

Life is many coincidences; life is no coincidences; life is all coincidences. The scope of my knowledge is not wide enough to encompass the answer to this question, nor will it ever be, and so, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I think I used to either write them off completely or coincidences used to freak me out; now they mostly make me laugh—a cosmic laugh, a kind of fantastical chuckle, more sure of the knowledge that things either are or aren’t, that they can mean something or they don’t, that people are here or they’re not. It’s ultimately up to us how we understand these things.

I am working on my relationship to death, and in a documentary about a handful of people who are living out their last days knowing they will die, a woman tells a story about a thin silver thread that danced in her window the day her lover, a man who lived for dancing, died. “I wanted someone else there to confirm what I was seeing,” she says, frustrated in a way that communicates there was no on there to confirm. “But I thank Clair for that, for that sign from him.”

holding hands at our wedding celebration, captured by Bri McDaniel

holding hands at our wedding celebration, captured by Bri McDaniel

Many coincidences; no coincidences.

Thanks for reading. As always, yours, ready to receive.

KM

all by yourself, all of us

or why this, why now, why, why, why

This has been a long time coming.

If you, like me, are part of the last generation to live in both worlds—childhood memories of landlines and no internet, days spent biking around the neighborhood with nothing else to do, juxtaposed by young adulthoods of increasing expectations of connectivity and productivity, 24-hour news cycles and instant fame and trauma as a marketing strategy—you might feel similarly. This is not to discredit how folks older than me or younger than me feel about today, about what we’ve become, about where we’re headed, but I think it is a unique place to land on the human, American timeline.

I have become tired, tired on a cosmic scale, bone-weary, soul-sapped, absolutely exhausted by “social media.”

It only hit me in the recent past (i.e. a week ago? time is meaningless in this the year of your lord 2021) that social media, as we know it today, only really took off around 2012/2013. I lived a childhood without home internet, and then internet right up until I left for college was a thing you had to schedule doing, and yes, I had facebook in high school, but only at the very end of high school, when they stopped requiring a college email address to register for one. Somehow, in the last 9ish years of my life, I have forgotten the Before and replaced it with something After; social media stretches out infinitely behind me, what would we do without insta, twitter, fb, snapchat, tiktok, goodreads, &c, &c, &c, except I didn’t even have a smart phone until the very end of college, right before I ostensibly started my Real Adult Life and moved to New York City.

I deleted my facebook in the fall of 2019 and haven’t looked back since. I deleted my twitter spring of this year, purging it for a brand new account where I could follow 5 people and not condemn myself to doom-scrolling that was keeping my lifelong anxiety at extremely high levels. Somehow instagram seems the hardest for me to get rid of, though I’m not sure why—I only follow like 50 people on there anyway, and I rarely post.

Part of what started this purge was a simple pro-con list. I can rattle off all the cons that everyone can about social media—a time suck, a great weapon of comparison, not good for your eyes, divisive, two-dimensional, now mainly a marketing tool—and I know what other people’s pros are. But when I started to list my own pros, the weak ones fell flat immediately (it’s necessary for people with certain careers or aspirations, said I, someone with absolutely not that kind of career or those kinds of aspirations) and even the good ones felt hollow. To keep in touch with people? I wondered. Was it doing that? Did I really feel like instagram gave me useful information about what was happening in the lives of people I cared for?

Once I started interrogating my whys, started looking at, closely, metaphorical magnifying glass in hand, the list of my pros against my cons, it became nearly impossible to ignore: I get nothing good from social media, and it costs me a lot. Why, then, would I keep doing it? Social media doesn’t feel social to me anymore, it feels compulsive. It doesn’t feel media-based, it feels media-exploitative. It doesn’t feel connective, it feels like a facet of the ever-increasing disconnect I feel to the world at large.

Now, as I get older, I yearn for community. I yearn for friends—not many, but all important—to have conversations with, and share food with, and keep details of their lives fresh in my mind. Social media runs contrary to how I want to interact with people—intimately, honestly, presently. It took 2020, a year where the predominant way I kept up with people was through social media, to show me that fully, and for good. Social media is a scrap, and I’m tired of scraps—I want a whole-ass meal of connection! Social media makes it harder for me to get that, for myself, in my way.

So, here we are then, with gentle animal. I have realized, through therapy and time and the single most important intimate relationship of my life that I have with my wonderful spouse, M, that relationships with others begin, primarily, with your own showing up.

This is my plan for showing up, for now.

gentle animal will be, hopefully, a weekly or semi-regular missive where I write to you about something that has been on my mind, and probably include a photo or two from my life, some things I am reading or watching or listening to or doing. I do this as an offering: my hope is that you will write back to me, about what has been on your mind, with a photo or two from your own life, or things you are occupying yourself with. You don’t have to do that—that, of course, will be up to you—but it will be welcome here. Lastly, this is a way for me to show up for myself in the area of writing. This will be a topic for another time, but for the last decade I have called myself a writer of many kinds, and have very little to show for it, for lots of reasons. I am tired, yes, of social media, but really of not showing up, for the people I care about or for myself.

Like your neighborhood stray, or the rescue you curl up to, or the part of yourself you still contend with, gentle animal will show up on your figurative doorstep, and if you let it warm itself there, hopefully it will give to you and be ready to receive.

someone’s gentle animal encountered in Scotland 2013, captured on film by me

someone’s gentle animal encountered in Scotland 2013, captured on film by me

Thanks for showing up, here, now. I am ready to receive.

Yours, KM

Book Review: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

BOOK: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

RATING: 4/5 stars

“A man is free, at least—free to range the passions and the world, to surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasures. Whereas a woman is continually thwarted. Inert, compliant, she has to struggle against her physical weakness and legal subjection. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat, quivers with every breeze: there is always a desire that entices, always a convention that restrains.

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Sister Justine Nadely--an historical monologue

As mentioned, I write every summer for the Candlelight Tours at Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, VA. These tours take visitors on a path through the cemetery and feature short monologues and scenes based on the lives of people buried there. I've worked up a bit of a reputation as having some of the more, well, progressive and aggressive pieces in the tour, which a fair amount of people seem to appreciate and which seem to get everyone, regardless of their taste for the pieces, talking…

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On Women Writing, and Writing Women

My MFA program was hit or miss in terms of instructors, but I got stuck with a hard miss on several occasions. This one professor taught all but one of my playwriting workshops, and had a field day throughout my two years there teasing me about only writing female characters. He'd rib me about only wanting to torture men onstage, rib me about writing yet another script that had mostly if not entirely female casts. "You know what I want you to do next quarter?" he said to me once. "I want you to write a good, kind, likable male protagonist…”

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