Monday Miscellany: Cue the longing!

Notes from September 15 - 21

Sep 23, 2025

This morning I woke up with overflowing motivation to achieve, so I spent the first part of the day washing two loads of laundry, scheduling a state inspection for my car, emptying my inbox, reading a few Substack posts from people I follow here,1 making a brain dump list of tasks for my design business, packaging and mailing a couple of books that I’d sold on Pango, and reading on the porch for an hour while I drank my coffee. I don’t know where this little burst came from, but I’m not asking questions and I’m not complaining. Just zooming.

I’ve wrangled myself into sitting down and starting to type, but I can already feel the restlessness in my body and mind, one itching to get up and keep moving while the other cycles wildly through the list of tasks I could be knocking out right now if I weren’t writing. But I have things to say! Important2 things, about (checks notes) a decades-old supernatural teen drama!!

Read this week

That’s right folks, in case you missed the footnote to last week’s newsletter, I’m reading the Twilight series. Let me explain.

I first heard about these books in the summer of 2008 when I flew to St. Paul for AmeriCorps VISTA3 training—Amanda, my randomly-assigned roommate for the weekend, couldn’t stop talking about them. At the time I wasn’t particularly interested, but when I got home I started seeing references to Twilight everywhere, and eventually I decided, sure, I’ll give it a try. I bought the first two books in the spring of 2009 and read both, then got the third and fourth, which… have been sitting on my shelf ever since. I kept meaning to finish the series, but after a while, it had been too long to jump right into the third without first rereading the earlier installments, so as one does, I dragged my feet for literal decades and moved these paperbacks from house to house at least three (maybe four) times and always figured I’d get around to them eventually. When I realized that this fall marked the 20th anniversary of the first book’s publication (and found out that my Book Riot faves would be discussing it on their new Zero to Well-Read podcast), I took that as a sign to finally, finally, read the series from the beginning.

I probably don’t need to tell you what Twilight by Stephenie Meyer is about, but just in case: Bella Swan has just moved in with her dad in Forks, Washington, and is joining the junior class at the local high school. She is quickly introduced to the Cullen family, a crew of super pale, super pretty people who keep to themselves and sometimes (when it’s sunny, hmmm) don’t show up for class for a day or two. One of the Cullens in particular, Edward, catches her eye and (despite his abundantly confusing and off-putting behavior) captures her heart and from that point on, it’s all over.

Reading this as a 22-year-old was one thing—I was already a bit past the point of relating to Bella, but not so much that I didn’t remember how intense and deep teenage love could feel. Back then I consumed this story as a partially disinterested observer, aware that I wasn’t its target audience but still able to suspend disbelief and gobble up its almost five hundred pages like candy. Now? Oof. Nearing forty, I know too much. I can’t look at Edward and not see the signs of an abuser: jealousy, wild mood swings, physical restraint, emotional manipulation and control. And, on a superficial level, he’s just annoying. My dude, get a hobby! Let Bella live!

The other gripe I have with Twilight concerns people’s speaking volumes. No one, it seems, talks in a normal tone of voice, ever. One moment they’re whispering, breathing, or even mouthing,4 and the next they’re growling or snarling, sometimes through their teeth. Besides being unrealistic, the sudden shifts from one extreme to the other left me exhausted.

New Moon was a welcome relief, then, since it shifts focus away from Edward, whose family has left Forks, and instead follows Bella’s deepening relationship with Jacob, a long-time family friend who lives in La Push on the nearby Quileute reservation. Jacob is kind and dependable and has interests outside of singular, all-consuming, eternal love, and when he and Bella spend time together they do things, like finishing their homework, discussing local legends, rebuilding motorcycles, talking about their friends and their feelings, seeing movies, eating meals, and laughing—so I instantly preferred him to Edward.

But! Toward the end of this book, Jacob starts acting weird and then inexplicably stops returning Bella’s calls for a while. And again, everyone probably knows already, but here is where the central conflict and love triangle of the series is established—while Edward and his family are vampires, Jacob comes from a community of werewolves and seems to have maybe become one himself?! Cue the Romeo and Juliet references! Cue the longing! Cue two dudes now trying to “do what’s best” for Bella, which basically means performatively “protecting her” from each other! Cool!!

I’m about halfway through the third book now and planning to finish the series by the end of this week, so come back next time for more hot5 takes about Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, and the series as a whole. I have to say—even though I’m pretty far outside of my reading preferences here, I am really enjoying experiencing this story long after the fact as a cultural phenomenon and good-naturedly ranting about it. And I’m legit looking forward to watching all of the movies when I’m finished, only one of which I’ve seen before.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I may earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Heard this week

So I’m currently in the midst of a pretty intense late-1980s Nanci Griffith moment, which started when Jordan and I were exploring Roanoke on our anniversary trip last week. We stumbled into a cute little vintage record store, and after browsing around for a while (this part is unrelated), we might have splurged on a vinyl copy of CSS’s iconic 2006 album Cansei de Ser Sexy—one we listened to a bunch when we first got together—as an anniversary gift to each other. This place also had a small selection of cassette tapes, which is something I will always take a moment to sift through, and amongst the assortment of familiar classic country and slightly triggering contemporary Christian6 I found one I couldn’t leave behind: Storms by Nanci Griffith.

My dad used to play her music at our house when I was growing up, and based on the album cover and a few recognizable song titles, I was pretty sure this had been one of his go-to picks. At $3.50, why not? When we got home from our trip, I put it on the tape deck as we unpacked our bags and immediately knew I was right. These songs transported me straight back to my childhood home on a Saturday afternoon, doing chores while Mom tidied up the kitchen and Dad tinkered around in the garage, Nanci’s charmingly nasal yet gentle voice reminding us that “if we poison our children with hatred, then the hard life is all that they’ll know.”7 Even now, I can practically hear my dad’s tenor layered on top of Nanci’s alto, singing “so long to the blue days of wishing.”

I’ve been playing Storms pretty much non-stop since buying the tape, and getting back into these songs made me curious about which other ones were buried in my subconscious. So I scrolled through Griffith’s discography on Spotify and recognized another album, The MCA Years: A Retrospective. This one has a few live tracks and includes the stage banter and storytelling leading into the songs, and I was surprised again at how quickly I remembered even these parts. Before “Love at the Five and Dime,” Nanci talks about going to the Woolworth’s in Austin, Texas, and then finding one on tour in Europe and feeling comforted by how similar it was to the one she knew.

Woolworth stores are the same everywhere in the world. They have this wonderful smell to them; they smell like popcorn and chewing gum rubbed around on the bottom of a leather-soled shoe.

And there was Dad, in my head again, so familiar with the story that he could recite it along with her. I can hear him so clearly, the playful intonation of his voice as he would join in on “the bottom of a leather-soled shoe.” Writing this, I feel like I’m eulogizing; to be clear, Daryl Poe is alive and well. It’s just that this version of him, and the kid version of me whose young life unspooled to this particular soundtrack, has been lying dormant in the recesses of memory for a while. I’m grateful to a serendipitous cassette tape find for bringing them back into the light.

Who gave Phoebe the right to be this cute

Haiku round-up

Haiku is a poetic form that originated in Japan, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern. At the beginning of 2024, I started writing one every day, and while traditional examples include thematic reference to the seasons, mine tend to be a bit more all over the place. Here are this week’s efforts—enjoy!