Everything Happened | vol. 194

Good things

I want to begin this by saying that this year sucked and it is not my intention to engage in any brightsiding. Listen, life sucks sometimes, and hard things don’t happen to us to guide us to greater truths, they just happen!! We are not doing an online self-improvement module, we are not on a Coursera “learning path,” we are just living each day as it comes and surviving.

But a year cannot be 100% bad just like a person cannot be 100% bad and a marriage cannot be 100% bad. (A month, however, can be 100% bad and that month is August, apologies to my firstborn, a Leo icon!!)

There were good things that happened this year and I wanted to spend some time thinking about it because it is pleasant.

• January of this year was actually so bad, and that was pre-pandemic! I try not to talk about my day job much on the internet but I got stuck leading an absolutely cursed project with insufficient staffing and executive leadership whose expectations were out to lunch. Nick and I were also completely boned financially. We both make a decent income for the cost of living here but our debts mean we get autodebited to a pulp every month, living in constant fear of car trouble and medical bills. My daughter was in her bucket car seat way too long because there was no day that presented itself as an obvious day to be out $200 for a new convertible car seat.
  
  Now, we would later come to be those jackasses for whom the pandemic was a boon financially — we didn’t lose our jobs, we skipped three months of Jane’s daycare tuition when her school was shuttered, had our federal student loans paused, and got that first and last stimulus check. But way back in innocent January, I was so stressed out about this work project with my name all over it that I couldn’t sleep and idly dreamed about getting hospitalized for something non-serious but that required me to abdicate my job responsibilities and go on short-term disability. I told Nick I wanted to quit, and while he is normally the type of guy to be like, yeah girl fuck ‘em!!!! He was instead like……Yeah, sorry you can’t.
  
  I really couldn’t!
  
  I didn’t quit. I applied far and wide for jobs that would save me from the nightmare project and pay me more, enough that we could finish any of the half-completed house projects that taunted us. Not one call back, not one interview. I got a few freelance pitches accepted and we bought a dishwasher. Just in time to start generating dishes times four people times three meals times snacks. Very lucky.
  
  My team and I finished the stupid project, dragged it over the finish line in the middle of a pandemic with no childcare and only a few weeks past our initial deadline. And now my job is basically fine and it is because I have that job that I was able to take EFMLA this fall to facilitate my son’s virtual schooling and flex the shit out of my hours to make our life work during All This.

  The point of this is not to suck up to Jobs as a concept. Don’t be sick. It’s that things can change without you having to do anything, and I never believe this even though it’s always been true. I tell myself this over and over, and I always forget, so here I am writing it down to tell you but also to myself.
  
  But by all means, quit a job you hate if you can afford it! Yuck! Also, this is less relevant in ~these times, but it is not illegal to get up and walk out of your office with no plans to return for the day. You’re an adult.

• My friend Erin had a baby! Erin is one of my oldest and best friends and it’s fun being able to relate to her on the mom plane now, too. Sure, I haven’t actually MET her baby and who knows when I will be able to! But, like, on 4/20 Erin sent me a picture of her weeks-old baby propped up against a stuffed llama with the caption “alpaca bowl for us!” and I lost my shit during a video call for work and had to turn my video off and fake a childcare emergency in the chat. I had that surge of well-being like when you see your friend walk into a stressful party where you feel out of place. Tina Fey wrote about this feeling in her book. Shortly after Amy Poehler joined the writing staff at SNL, she handed Jimmy Fallon his ass over some childish comment he made. Tina Fey described it as, “My friend is here!!!” My friend is here!! It’s Erin!!
  

• In September, Katie and I rented adjacent glamping situations near Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia and spent two nights, Katie’s brilliant idea. I wonder how many more times in this I will mention Katie. Katie Katie Katie. KL+EE 5eva. Anyway, we enjoyed communing with nature and not having to go get anyone a cup of milk every ten minutes and I’m glad we did that because now it is going to be cold forever and as healthy, EXTREMELY YOUNG laptop workers we are basically dead last in line for the vaccine!!
  
  But anyway, Katie (I think…I hope) seems to enjoy executing the details and vision of a trip, even a low-key outdoorish sleeping situation. This is lucky for me, someone who usually can only contribute what we call “vibes” in the biz. The friend biz.
  
  One of the mornings, Katie produced a spread of bagels with cream cheese, veg, and crucially, Maldon salt for sprinkling. (Probably if Katie had chosen a different companion, she would have packed lox, which is what you actually want on a bagel. But unfortunately, she would be breaking the fast with someone who converted to vegetarianism spontaneously in 1999 to impress the camp counselor they had a crush on at Lutheran sleepaway camp, and never turned back.)
  
  You might be familiar with Maldon, little crunchy luxe pyramids of salt made for decadent sprinkling. I had forgotten, and on the way back home from West Virginia, I bought a box and have been elevating my egg toast, my peanut butter waffles, and my chocolate ice cream sundaes ever since.
  

• My sister is on the mend after being only the ninth person ever to contract a disease in the way that she contracted it. I remember back in March when she was in ICU and I was researching her diagnosis and I would get to the part in every case study where suddenly the author is casually describing autopsy findings. Mostly these people were not surviving!! I stopped researching, it was too scary. What she went through and is going through is horrible but I feel so lucky that she made it.
  

• I bought these sandals by Chacos in a color called “limelight” for myself for my birthday and they felt like what I imagine Super Mario World clouds feel like and I still wear them out of the house WITH SOCKS if it’s not wet out even though it’s December because that is the kind of eccentric recluse vibe I offer now.

  

• For like seven years, we lived in a neighborhood of Columbus called Victorian Village beside Neil Avenue. My breath still catches thinking about riding my bike home from work down Neil Ave through the cathedral of towering sycamores and admiring the gigantic gingerbready as fuck Victorians. Once, these Victorians were left to crumble, but in the ‘90s rich gentrifiers started buying them up and now they are fancy, stately and expensive.
  
  Our rental shared an alley with one of these Victorians and it was owned by a Croatian couple. The man had a long, gray ponytail and was tan year-round, the wife had close-cropped white hair and an Eileen Fisher energy. Every year they had a plant sale and yard sale and they opened up their backyard to the neighborhood. It was the best day of the year. I would admire the extravagant garden setup spitting distance from the moldy Victorian I called home.
  
  The jewel of the backyard was a kidney-shaped pool shiny with hand-painted Moroccan tiles.
  
  It was very important for me to swim in this pool. Once, I bought a gauzy white peasant top from her yard sale and would wear it to take out the trash in our shared alley, hoping to bump into her. In my version of things, I would mop my sweat with the sleeve of the shirt she once owned (easy point of connection!) and work into the conversation that we didn’t have air conditioning. (We didn’t!)
  
  I never swam in the pool. Not even the summer that I was hugely pregnant and expecting an August baby, when anyone who encountered me could clock that I was in urgent need of a dip. Our moldy section of a Victorian became unlivable once our baby hit toddlerhood; we moved five miles north, and eventually out of Ohio entirely.
  
  My kids’ babysitter this summer was living for a time at her friend’s house (the parents of her friend) and they have a beautiful pool. A few days out of the week, my kids would spend the entire day at the pool and our babysitter would send us pics and I would sit in the same room where I’ve been most hours of the day since March 13. And I would seethe with jealousy over the lives of MY OWN CHILDREN.
  
  I kept hoping I would be invited to swim, it seemed like a very obvious thing to do to invite me over to swim. But you know what? Other people are not in charge of knowing what is obvious to you. So I invited myself and it was great. And the next week, our sitter decided she needed to move back to her own parents’ house so pool time was over for the summer. If I had waited to be asked, I would have missed my chance.

  

• Drew Barrymore had her ex-husband Tom Green on her talk show and everyone said this encounter was very moving?? and that is not the word I would pick!! But they said to each other “I CELEBRATE YOU” and now my household has received the gift of that phrase, which should always be used with a frisson of fear, because it is meant to cut the tension, and sometimes when things are tense, levity does NOT WORK. But Nick is a mentsch and I celebrate him.
  
  Really though, highly competent women are always saying that their mediocre ass husbands “put up with a lot” from them and I’m always like……hm but are u sure. But this is not what’s going on here. First of all, who are you calling highly competent?
  
  I basically think I’m great, but I also know that I’m exhausting. Are you exhausted getting to the end of however many thousand words this newsletter is? Because that’s what it feels like in my brain all the time. I just never stop being myself and it’s a lot. I’m tired.
  
  Last week, we got word that my kid’s school was closing, our part-time babysitter quit, and I was getting my first batch of clients for my brand new part-time gig as a sleep consultant (email me if you want to know more about how I can help your child sleep, this aside is called Sales, FYI), and then accidentally started a home refinance while Nick was working.
  
  Like, we had talked about maybe doing a refinance but then I just went and did it because that’s what I’m like. I was texting him from bed what documents to upload to a portal and he was like “huh?”
  
  It would have been normal and appropriate for him to take issue with this but instead he was like, oh good, this will give me the push to repaint our peeling garage door before the appraiser comes!! Because that’s what Nick is like. AND I CELEBRATE HIM.
  

• And guess what else? I CELEBRATE YOU, dear reader. I used to feel embarrassed about how long I’ve been doing this newsletter, because shouldn’t I have more to show for it? At my government job, they used to give us a certificate every year in the all-staff meeting during the month of our work anniversary. And once anyone got past five years, they became visibly hostile to this tradition. “Please don’t draw attention to me still just being here.”
  
  I remember when Meaghan O’Connell got her book deal (hi Meaghan!!) after her TinyLetter birth story (buy her book tho) I had this feeling of embarrassment like……oh is that what we’re supposed to be doing with newsletters?
  
  Anytime someone would kindly say “Can’t wait to see what you do next!” or similar, I would be seized with dread because I had no sharply focused ideas about ‘next.’
  
  Listen, I am probably working on an essay collection and a misguided attempt at fiction. But I am only doing it for funsies and because I told my therapist I would. Maybe they will live forever in my Google Docs and that is okay. It’s comfortable in there with all my cover letter drafts and bodies of NYT articles I’ve dirtbaggishly thieved from behind the paywall because my browser doesn’t believe my NYT login.
  
  But I’ll probably always be addicted to writing these newsletters for free because it’s really fun for me and no one writes back anything shitty, which is amazing. Only extremely great vibes here at Everything Happened Inc.

  I
  
  CELEBRATE
  
  YOU
  
  yr mate,
  Evie
  

  Rich Juzwiak @RichJuz

  Week 7!

  

  
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