Is this thing on?

Are we still doing this?

It’s been a minute! And what can I say? Here are all the excuses for my absence I thought about giving you today:

• I am married to school, and our relationship is extremely time-consuming

• I’ve been super busy watching Beat Bobby Flay reruns

• I got lost in a corn maze

• I picked up my cat one too many times and to get me back, he grew large enough to pick me up and wouldn’t put me down for a few months

• I’ve been writing these religious, actually, I guess you just haven’t been getting them? Yes, you — you, and only you

• WRITERS’ BLOCK

• I only work on typewriters now

Or none of these! Truth be told, 42 new Substacks launch every ten minutes and I couldn’t think of a single thing I could say that would be worth you opening yet another one. A lot of people are doing wicked-smart things! They have real thoughts! They’re sharing feelings! And what am I doing? What am I adding that’s so special? And then I figured it out:

Nothing. Nothing! I am but one person on the internet and have never been a niche writer and/or someone who was doing something super unique. I’ve always been some broad on the internet shouting into our one, true void. You don’t like it? Unsubscribe! Please! This is free, and bless you for reading this far! But I have missed it.

Between us I, like everybody else who decided to be a writer, am not sure about my relationship to writing anymore. It’s not that I don’t like writing (I am writing this on the first day of reading week when I have zero real responsibilities and could be power-walking around the mall like the senior citizen I am — I clearly like it enough), it’s just that writing and I grew apart a little bit. We stopped hanging out as much. We were inseparable besties for a very long time, and then we got busy and then days became weeks, became months, and suddenly I had no idea what they were doing for work anymore. And I didn’t know if I really even missed it, maybe we weren’t even as close as I thought we were.

Writing about yourself is weird. To start, who cares? (Pick up my book and answer that question yourself! #LOL #plug) To second, it’s tiring. What I thought were Big Huge Things in my twenties and early thirties absolutely were within context, but we know the older any of us get, the more cold, hard reality we begin to get fluent in. And to be honest, where I used to turn to writing to figure out my shit, I started to turn into . . . not writing. I started processing. Doing stuff. Talking about it when I needed to. Not talking about it when I didn’t need to. Thinking! Sending voice notes to pals. Going to school. Writing papers and enjoying not having to thread my own experiences through them. Writing papers and wishing I could thread my own experiences through them a little more. Basically, I’ve been divorcing myself from Queen Ephron’s belief that everything is copy because it really isn’t. Some things can be written about later and other things don’t need to be written about at all. My book moms (see: my ECW editors who have the patiences of saints) told me that a long time ago, but like anybody’s child, I had to figure it out on my own. So here we are!

So this is where I would like to tell you exactly what to expect from this newsletter going forward. This is where I would, after telling you a little bit about the last half-or-more-year, say “As of today, here’s how we’re going to proceed!” like I have a plan or have ever had one. But does anybody even want that anymore? Is anybody sitting at their computer every day, waiting for newsletters, and saying “GOOD. This is exactly what I EXPECTED. And it DELIVERED.” I hope not. So instead, I will offer this: I am still here! I like being here! I missed being here? Maybe sometimes I’ll throw an essay your way or maybe I’ll send you a list of things that have been making me happy/angry/hungry/whatever! No part of my life has followed a map, so why should this? It’s a newsletter, for heaven’s sake.

In the meantime, I do have a few updates:

• I fucking love school, I LOVE IT. I know it’s only part-time and I’m officially student-poor again, but it turns out that going to school when you want to be at school will make your semesters sail by. You may even hate adding footnotes less.

• I Amy March’d (read: burned to the ground) 85% of my first Small Tornadoes draft, and am currently very slowly rebuilding. Very. Slowly. If the book was a house, it has a foundation and a workable blueprint. I have ordered the drywall and lumber. At some point it will get a roof. And frames.

• I’ve started watching TV and movies again? And participating in pop culture? And enjoying it? I spent a long time equating the process of enjoying or consuming anybody else’s work with it needing to somehow relate to my own, and I do not recommend kiboshing that ideology ASAP if you’re doing the same. I have started writing and talking about pop culture more, though, and it’s great! Balance. Who knew it was necessary to not wanting to collapse in on yourself like a dying star?

• I started watching Tournament of Champions and it is my Super Bowl. Everybody on the Food Network is my best, close, personal greatest friend.

• Barry, Fran, and my Mom are all doing amazing, thank you for asking.

• Here is a photo of me lurking on TikTok, an app I use only to consume videos and never, ever to make them myself. I am 38 years old, and I remember MySpace. It is not for me to create videos about my day, it is for me to watch everybody go through their own days.

Anyway, it’s 2024 and here we all are. Talk soon, but I cannot keep a schedule unless my GPA or paycheque depends on it.

- A.

PS. I will never make this newsletter look good or professional because I don’t know how and I do not care to learn.