Everything Happened | vol. 220

Lovespell

The first Valentine’s Day I ever spent with Nick, he’d worked graveyard shift the night before and then stayed up through the morning to make me cupcakes. When it was time for our date that evening, he was falling asleep into his plate at the Dube (RIP.) I trundled him back to his apartment and met up with my friend Erin at Larry’s (RIP) for birthday drinks. Erin loved having a Valentine’s Day birthday because she could always count on being able to corral a few lonelyhearts (or people with zombie boyfriends) desperate for something else to celebrate. I wasn’t mad that he fell asleep. It felt like an indie movie. I tucked him in and slipped back into the night, scheming my jukebox picks.

I got Nick a Super 8 camera as a Valentine’s gift that year but didn’t think to get him film for it. Everything that we did felt cinematic to me. I probably wanted us to try to make movies of our time together. Everyone who is in love thinks they are inventing something. His friend was the projectionist at the art theater in Bexley, the old-money first-ring suburb east of Columbus. It was the first city to ever be named an arboretum—the entire town under an old-growth canopy. His friend had to test each film for quality and sometimes invited us for a sneak peek. The whole theater to ourselves. After the movie, we rode our bikes through the manicured streets and let the hidden in-ground sprinkler systems soak us.

Once he bought a stack of plates from the thrift store and pitched them to me so I could shatter them with a baseball bat. We found a spot behind an abandoned gas station overlooking one of the many ravines that vein the north part of the city. Some of the plates shattered beautifully, but a few were Corelle and so I had to club them to death. A sort of al fresco “rage room.” Years later, he would return to that spot to see if he could find any shards in the dirt. He inset a foraged plate fragment into a wooden ring box he carved himself and put an engagement ring in it. He didn’t have to tell me what it was when I saw it. What else could it be?

It shouldn’t have worked out and at the beginning, it felt fated not to. At times, it has felt like an anthology series, with the romantic leads recast every few years. The other night we were driving sleeping kids back from DC and had the opportunity to relitigate it all in the dark. I said that grad school had taken my carefree boyfriend and made him mentally ill. This felt like a scary, possibly mean thing to say out loud, even for me, someone who monologues constantly and struggles to hold back. Nick chuckled at this.

We’re both mentally ill! We both probably always have been. I love who they cast this season. This show is hitting its stride.

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A bunch of things I want to link to:

-KJM’s Brooding newsletter for The Cut is always good and these have been recent favorites:

Clean house hegemony: “I admire order, but I don’t associate it with joy and I never really learned how to create it, so I live in a state of mild self-disgust most of the time. I’m forever thinking about ways that my versions of clean are other people’s versions of dirty.” SAME

On being an adult orphan: “But then again, I feel like a piece of space trash since my mother died, errant and signalless. I’m an only child — in an adult’s body — and having no living parents causes severe vertigo sometimes. There is no one to dutifully call when I have gotten home safe from a trip.”

Both of those links give you a field to subscribe to Brooding at the bottom, which you should do!

-Emily Gould has good taste. It’s mainstream for a grimy, offbeat feminist voice in fiction/screen/etc to be elevated now and I firmly believe her now-shuttered press Emily Books (co-run with Ruth Curry) is responsible. She has a new newsletter called Making It (also for The Cut) (The Cut should give more of my friends newsletters, how about Katie Leitch) where she interviews people about how their art gets into the world. When I first read the tagline “conversations about cash, craft and compromise.” I clapped my hands at my desk like a girl being served her birthday dessert.

They’re all good but the most recent newsletter about Ifé Toussaint, a tattoo artist specializing in stick-and-poke is truly wonderful.

Emily is a generous person and when she elevates your work, you feel truly special. (I know from experience.) Because it isn’t charity—she believes it to be worthy of the attention.

-Some you know that I dabbled in the sleep coaching world. It started with hiring a sleep consultant to help with Desi when he was three. It was so life-changing that I wrote about it for Vox, and then trained as a sleep consultant myself. For a year and a half, I was taking clients on the side in addition to my full-time job. I was still working full-time, doing occasional freelance writing, caring for two kids, experiencing a tiring third pregnancy, and doing frequent solo stretches while Nick drove 500 miles to Ohio every few weeks to do elder care.

Something had to go. I found the sleep consultant community overall to be scammy, rigid, and conservative. I had expected myself to be the archetypical sleep pro—I’m a double Taurus who loves sleep, decadence, and relaxation! But what’s out there is a lot of neurotic, insecure moms who benefitted from sleep rules for their children and then got pulled into an MLM-style training and referral model to sell those rules to other people.

I really just wish sometimes that I could put my head down and commit to the grift. I would probably have a new sunroom by now instead of a rotting screen porch. You know who commits to the grift though? Harvey Karp. I reviewed his Snoo bassinet a year ago. (tl;dr I think it’s a useful tool but you should buy it secondhand.) I always suspected there was more to the story with this Karp guy though.

Bad founder stories are catnip for me, so a bad founder story that focuses on the sleep world is a true gift from the gods. (Grift from the gods?) A deep dive into the world of Happiest Baby, Harvey and wife’s sleep-industrial-complex nightmare. Incredible piece from Insider.

It’s not that I think sleep coaching is a grift. It can be heaven, an opportunity to hand people their life back. I just don’t have the constitution to self-promote nor the savvy to do it well. It’s why I’ve been writing this newsletter for ten years (!!!!!) and you don’t see any book deal or paid option. Ha. Should I do a paid option? Been thinking about it.

-One last thing: I had an extremely fun time writing about Julia Fox’s apartment tour for Romper.

Love you all 4evs

yr mate,
Evie
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