Anxiety is a feature, not a bug

And other fun life tips

Hey howdy there, friends old and new! I just watched a shitty Western from the 1930s, so now I’m feelin FOLKSY.

I know a bunch of you came via my Slate essay about being a crossing guard, thanks for visiting my tiny corner of the internet! You’ll find we keep it short and sweet here, popping in just once a month or so to tell you about…

Five things I’ve recently liked that you might also like:

1. I can finally announce this, and in fact, I did announce it already, over yonder on Instagram and whatever Twitter substitute du jour is wheezing along… but I have a new novel coming out! It looks like this:

   

   Can you be “agog” in this, our 21st century? If so, consider me AGOG at this gorgeous cover by Erin Fitzsimmons.

   This book is told exclusively through linked obituaries and spans 300+ years. It’s about death and art and AI and humanity and love and betrayal - and it’s a pretty cool story, which is hard for me to admit to, as a lifelong impostor. I hope you’ll check it out, add it on Goodreads, preorder, request it from your libraries, etc and so on. It comes out October 22, so you have plenty of time to get sick of me bringing it up.

2. As a crossing guard, I have gotten really really good at dressing for the weather. And in Chicago we have a lot of weather. I also have chronically cold toes, not a great combination. If you too live in a place that has inhumanly cold winters and have feet like ice cubes, might I recommend these socks? I’m not getting any money from them, just a fan of not losing my toes to gangrene, cowpoke. I can also say that Hot Hands have been a GAME CHANGER. I shove em in coat pockets or between layers of gloves (yes sometimes I wear LAYERS of gloves, such as when it’s minus-20 degrees Fahrenheit outside, a real temperature that will freeze your damn eyeballs if you keep ‘em open too long.)

Just tryin’ to keep them eyeballs wet

3. My reading drought continues, with two notable exceptions. First: A book with a cringey self-helpy title that is, you just have to trust me, like having a wonderful Jungian psychologist in your pocket. It’s called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. I heard about it from Austin Kleon’s newsletter, which is where I get many of my book recommendations. I was drawn in by author James Hollis’s suggestion that when facing a big life decision, don’t ask “Will this make me happy?” (Humans are notoriously bad at knowing what makes us happy) but rather “Will this choice enlarge or diminish me?” I think about this all the time and can confirm it gives a very different spin to decision-making. And then he knocked me out with this quote:

   “Clearly, psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity in us for the toleration of anxiety and ambiguity. The capacity to accept this troubled state, abide it, and commit to life, is the moral measure of our maturity.”

   This has gotten too long already, but my takeaway here is that anxiety is a feature, not a bug, of growth and life. The question then becomes NOT how to get rid of anxiety, which is impossible anyway, but how to build a tolerance to it.

4. I also love love loved Anna North’s Outlawed. Excuse me, a post-apocalyptic 1894? A gender-bending Hole in the Wall gang? I do declare, fetch me my smelling salts.

5. Wow, this newsletter got a bit book-heavy. Let’s finish it off with fashion! When I was a tween, my mom realized I didn’t want her to buy me clothes anymore, so she gave me a small monthly allowance to buy them for myself. I was extremely lucky both for this generosity and also for the chance to find my personal style at a very young age - stomping around the sales racks at Contempo Casuals in Woodfield Mall wearing Chuck Taylors I had spray-painted silver. These days? I hate shopping, I hate fast fashion, and I get overwhelmed by thrift stores. But I started following a few secondhand fashion people on Instagram and got INSPIRED. So my big “resolution” for 2024 is to give myself a small monthly clothing allowance, and keep it chill — just pop into a thrift store every month and pick out a thing or two that catches my eye. Figure out what I love again and try to feel good in my skin.

Bonus Lewd Animal Fact!

Okay this isn’t LEWD, but it is genital-specific, and most people don’t know it, so here we go. The true size and shape of the human clitoris wasn’t imaged and confirmed until 2005:

In 2005 Australian urologist Helen O’Connell … used microdissection of cadavers and magnetic resonance imaging of living women to reveal what only a few brave anatomists had ever dared to point out.

O’Connell compared the clitoris to an iceberg: beneath the surface, it was 10 times the size most people thought it was and boasted two to three times as many nerve endings as the penis.

All I can say is… a very happy 19th birthday to the clitoris’s coming out party!