personal updates

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!!!!!!!

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

đź“— 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