*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!!!!!!!