hu cares | mundane morals

Remember when sitcom episodes imparted some ham-handed moral? Boy Meets World: honesty is the best policy; just own up to it when you blow up Mr. Feeny’s mailbox and everything will be ok. That one episode of Saved By the Bell: don’t do drugs, even caffeine pills (and if you do, tell your friends about it so they can help you get clean). Sabrina the Teenage Witch: manipulating people (and the time/space continuum) is bad and doing so feels bad, even if you’re a witch and can get away with it.

I’ve been noticing little morals in everything lately. Even the most mundane stuff feels like A Life Lesson, and it feels very cheesy, so imagine all of these set to 90s intro/outro electric guitar riffs and studio audience laughter and “aww”s:

💊 Each morning I take vitamin B12, vitamin D, and a pill to manage my blood sugar. Swallowing three pills at once is kind of unpleasant, especially because the vitamin D capsules I last bought are enormous. I can’t believe it took me years to figure this out, but: I don’t have to take all the pills at the same time! Sure, it takes slightly longer to swallow them individually, but there is no reason to endure discomfort for some marginal gain in efficiency.

🌱 When we moved into this house four years ago, our sweet neighbors saw plants in our windows and brought us an amaryllis. It’s faithfully bloomed every spring, but this year, its remaining leaves yellowed. After I removed them, all that was left were the flaky husks of long-dead leaves. I assumed it had died. A few weeks later, I still hadn’t found the time to throw it out — but then a bit of green appeared. It was alive after all! It just needed to start over. Its old leaves had served their purpose, and now it was time to grow new ones.

🌸 I assumed the orchid had finally bit it, too. After all, we’d found it by the side of the road eight years ago, in the dead of winter, and I’ve always thought of it as a sickly thing, potentially on the verge of death. This time I was sure it was truly the end: I’d never seen its leaves shrivel and yellow like this, and even its air roots were struggling. But no, I think she was just having a big rest. Last week I noticed a new stalk growing stealthily under its remaining leaves, and this week, seven tiny green buds have appeared. We associate spring with blooms and autumn with dormancy, but my orchid is on her own schedule and she has decided she will bloom in the fall.

🕳️ Maeby’s passion is digging. She has two favorite digging spots in the backyard: underneath the rhododendron, and in the corner by the fence. Over the four years we’ve lived in this house, she’s never made any real progress. Some days, she digs a hole, then immediately begins digging a second hole right next to it, which fills in the initial hole. Then she starts the process again, sometimes five minutes later, sometimes a week later — and she does this despite our many protests. The important thing is that she’s having a great time, and sometimes after she’s worked very hard, she lays down next to her holes and falls asleep in the sun.

🧗‍♀️ At the climbing gym, routes have a placard underneath indicating their difficulty. When the setters put up new routes, they wait a few days to hang those placards; instead, the signs just read “NEW.” I routinely underestimate the difficulty of “new” routes and attempt (or even send!) harder grades than I otherwise would, all because I have no expectations going into the climb. (And yes, I know this is not news to fellow climbers, but it never fails to surprise me when the grades go up a few days later.)

🛑 My neighborhood is full of charming alleys. Earlier this week, I noticed a new sign in front of a gravel path I walk by all the time: “DEAD END: not a thru street.” But it’s not true; on the other side of the path, it connects to a major street. I walked to that street and discovered there’s a DEAD END sign on the other end of the alley, too. Trust no one.

📈 At a Books to Prisoners shift, the third letter I opened was an angry screed cursing all of us for not having the specific books the letter-writer asked for last time. My first reaction was defensiveness, then sadness — the letter’s anger was so incommensurate to the perceived offense that clearly, the writer had a lot going on. It was the first negative letter I’d seen yet; the vast majority are pretty business-like in their requests for comics, fantasy novels, construction guides. In some cosmic balancing, the writers of letters 8 and 10 had just spent a stamp to mail their thanks, to share how much they’d enjoyed what we last sent them. If only this were the way things always went, every bad thing smoothed out by two good ones.

Words to live by.

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Unsolicited recommendations

• Strawberry lemonade Spindrift.

• This Washington Square Review interview with CJ Hauser about writing and life and identity.

• Biking through a light drizzle.

• Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. (Thanks to Leah for turning me on to this.) My last Livejournal post here was pretty maudlin, and I am grateful to friends who checked in, and yes, Dad, I am feeling better; Marche’s meditation on writing as a practice versus a career captures the type of griping and despair and nihilistic optimism I can usually only find at a journalist happy hour. It includes this gem: “Writing may be a cosmic howl, the pursuit of humanity’s proper place in the universe and a glorious reckoning with the limits of meaning itself, but it’s also a job. For a lucky few, the job is like running a failing haberdashery. For the majority it’s more like trying to sell T-shirts out of the trunks of their cars.”

• Speaking of journalism happy hours: go to one where someone accidentally walks off with your phone. Conveniently (or inconveniently, depending on who you are in this scenario), they live on an island, so the handoff requires your respective partners to coordinate meeting somewhere in downtown Seattle. This leaves you blissfully phoneless for a day, creating the space to (1) hit publish on this Livejournal post and (2) reflect on how that little metal rectangle might as well be an appendage with how dependent on it you’ve become.

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Lately(ish)

• Last year, I wrote a feature for Slate digging into the science behind a popular factoid about when your brain “fully matures” — our brains are constantly growing and changing through age 25, yes, but also well beyond. I recently learned it’s an honorable mention in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing! (The list is in alphabetical order, which means I am listed right next to my favorite published piece from my good pal Kate: if you haven’t read Bat Facts, fix that immediately.)

  

  Thanks to HCN editor Emily Benson for telling me about this and sharing this photo. Emily has a fantastic piece in the anthology this year, well-deserved especially because it required her to crawl through some gnarly caves!

• The fall has brought a whirlwind of psychedelics news for my work writing The Microdose — one of my favorite interviews I’ve done lately has been with Jared Moffat, deputy policy director at New Approach, the PAC that has been instrumental in passing state ballot initiatives to set up psilocybin servies in Oregon and Colorado. New Approach filed two ballot initiatives in Massachusetts, and I believe that interview broke the news that New Approach decided to move forward with the version of the initiative that allows people to grow some psychedelics at home.

• After much hemming and hawing, I have decided to turn on paid subscriptions for this newsletter. I plan on keeping posts free for the foreseeable future, but appreciate readers’ support! (If you’re a paid subscriber, or are considering becoming one, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about what “subscriber-only” features sound fun to you.) And if you haven’t yet subscribed, Substack constantly reminds me to remind you that you can do so: