Monday Miscellany: Act insane because it might confuse him

Notes from March 10 - 16

Mar 17, 2025

Happy Monday, friends! I woke up a little grumpy this morning, but it’s sunny and clear and cool here in Winston-Salem today, and after some coffee and a few miles on the greenway trail, I’m back in good spirits.

How could I not feel better after being treated to such a view?

This past week was a lot—work is chaotic because of the big renovation project that just started at the coffee shop, we had family staying in our little house with us a couple of nights, Jordan’s new job situation is kicking into gear, and of course my body chose to align its hormone cycle just perfectly with all of this. So I’m grateful to be sitting here now, alone in my home and rested from the weekend, with a sleepy cat on my lap, cold air and birdsong drifting in through the window, ready to recap these most recent days.

Currently reading

This month’s McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern pick was an older one from my unread shelf, issue 56. What first drew me in was the drawing style and muted color palette of the cover, which I later discovered was part of an illustrated story by Rui Tenreiro.

But what really hooked me were the letters at the beginning of the volume, a particularly strong batch by a few names I knew (Emerson Whitney, Jose Antonio Vargas, Michelle Tea) and a couple I didn’t (Kristen Iskandrian, Mary Houlihan). In Michelle Tea’s piece, pictured above, she mentions getting a bagel and a coffee at the cafe and sitting down to read How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, a book that is currently on my shelf and now at the top of my list. (Whenever I see a book I own or have been thinking about appear in something else I’m reading, I always take it as a sign. Anyone else?)

She also writes about a scare concerning something found in her breast at a routine mammogram, a situation I, too, have experienced.

…and the woman just keeps digging and digging and sliding the wand over this one area and I guess that’s where the something is. And I start crying. I can’t believe it. Thankfully, it’s just a few tears and the woman is very intent on the screen she is staring into but now I am thinking that I am going to die and I have a four-year-old and this now makes dying terrible, awful, the worst. And I can’t stop thinking about it, I’m flooded with tragic vibes. (15)

There’s something really special about encountering such familiar and relatable moments in the writing of others, the feeling of oh, YES, I know exactly what that feels like, even if it’s difficult or sad. In the end both Michelle and I were okay. I distinctly remember the day I found out that my something was just a cyst; I was on my way to book club and I suddenly felt worlds lighter, practically weightless, blessedly released from the doomed future I had already imagined into being, no longer forced to accept the idea of Jordan inevitably falling in love with someone else after I was gone.

Along the same lines, related to the deep and instantaneous mental spiral we can sometimes sink into when the threat of bad news looms, but written in a delightfully lighthearted tone, is Dawn Davies’ story “Music to be Played if I Fall Into a Coma,” one of my favorites later in the collection. It is what it sounds like, with a heavy dose of humor thrown in to lift the mood:

Just in case, I have compiled a list of acceptable music to be played throughout the entirety of my coma, preferably through high-quality headphones. Seriously, if I end up in a coma, somebody please spring for the Audeze. You can get them online from Crutchfield. They cost four grand, which is about what my car is worth, but a coma would be an appropriate time for an extravagant purchase. (96)

Other standouts from this excellent issue:

“Only the Lonely” by Jincy Willett, about an older woman trying to keep her cool when interacting with a nighttime intruder in her home, following her mother’s long-ago advice to “act insane” because “it might confuse him.”
“The Apartment” by T.C. Boyle, about a middle-aged man who makes a deal with an older woman to pay her a monthly stipend if she’ll agree to leave her apartment to him when she passes away. (This one was featured in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #74 as well, a “best-of” issue, which I discussed a while back).
“The Good Ones Are Not Here” by Chukwuebuka Ibeh, about an attempted prison escape that doesn’t go quite as expected—the ending of this story actually made me gasp.

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Currently watching

Last month I mentioned seeing Beginners at our local independent theater as part of their fifteenth-anniversary celebration. Well, this past Wednesday they showed the second film in this retrospective series: Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012)! It was definitely better attended than Beginners; the room was practically full, and a good portion of the audience was comprised of The Youths, which made me feel simultaneously kind of old and kind of cool. I’m a Wes Anderson fan and own all of his films on DVD (please see previous “old yet cool” comment), but I hadn’t seen this one in a while. It remains charming and funny and gorgeously shot, as I remembered—what especially stuck out to me this time was the soundtrack (orchestral, playful, perfect) and the very yellow and brown color cast (TASTY).

Saturday evening was a free night at home, so we decided to watch Baby Driver (2017). I always forget that this is an Edgar Wright movie—maybe because I associate him so closely with Simon Pegg, who isn’t in this one? But when I remember, it makes total sense. Quick wit, quick cuts, killer needle drops, very smart use of visuals, it’s all there. And the driving stunts!! I’m not usually an Action Girlie™, but I could watch those car chase scenes all day.

We celebrated a friend’s birthday with pizza and a movie on Sunday, and he proposed Anaconda (1997), a supreme throwback which I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen once, with my church youth group in my early teens. WOW. IT IS BAD. But like, good bad. Dialogue that makes no sense, the strangest assortment of actors I ever did see, CGI effects on par with quidditch scenes in the first HP, that one moment where they apparently forgot to film the boat floating away from the waterfall so they just played approach footage in reverse, and we’re only scratching the surface.

Not to mention baby J-Lo and Owen Wilson, and Jon Voight’s terrible accent! This was such a delight to revisit.

And another thing

🗣️ I finished my sweater!! She still needs a good blocking, but look!

This was my first time knitting a pullover, and I had such a good time doing it. I got a feel for the basic top-down construction of a garment like this, learned about the magic loop technique and realized that I prefer using double pointed needles, figured out why my sleeves were showing some laddering, and ripped out a whole sleeve so I could redo it and fix this mistake.

I went into it feeling a little intimidated, but the pattern I used was simple and clear, and in the end, as long as you know the basics, all you have to do is follow the recipe and learn the rest as you go. Apt advice for life, too, perhaps. Now—what should I knit next??