I am writing 100 How-To essays. It is a big project. Here is why I am doing it. This is essay 40 of 100.
I’d been trying to post a how-to essay every Friday in 2020. A compliment I’ve received on this project from multiple people is, “I love how you’ve been working on this for three years but you’re only 20 essays in. It shows us how people can work slowly on something.” But I didn’t mean to work slowly on this. I meant to finish it quickly. In one universe, I was writing one of these per day.
But then I sit down and realize that in fact, I have no idea. The things I know about I am afraid I don’t know about. I mean that it turns out that even in my thirties, as it was in my twenties and my teens and when I was seven, any time I think I have anything figure out, the universe finds some kind of hilarious way to turn it upside down. Like a sparkly cloud is saying “HAHAHAHA YOU WERE WRONG AGAIN HA. HA. HA.”
Food is a good example.
First I’m three and I think, “Wow, chicken nuggets. What a food.”
Then I’m four and I ask where chicken comes from and I decide to never eat chicken again.
Then I’m 15 and I have had pizza every Friday for the past decade (which is a long time when you are 15), and I look through one brutal PETA pamphlet and I think, “OK, veganism is the only way forward.” Then I lose, like 80 pounds in six months and I’m more sure than ever.
Then I’m 19, and I discover vegan junk food, and I gain the weight back, and I can’t understand how or why this is happening.
I’m 23, I move in with a crowd of health conscious activists, and they only ever eat salad, and I lose all that weight AGAIN. So I think, “I should just only eat salad and no other foods for the rest of my life.” And then for years I flit around, cutting out gluten, or sugar, or processed foods, or grains, or some combination of these things, and the weight comes and goes, and I am always sure that I have food figured out for periods that last between one and six weeks.
And then I come to Chicago, I thicken, I eat a lot of bread. I stop eating bread. I eat more bread. Bread is out. Bread is in. Bread bread bread bread bread; bread is everything; the whole of the cosmos is bread or lack of bread and bread turns up in all my dreams.
Suddenly I’m 30 and it’s all about calorie density, and I can tell you how many calories are in 95 percent of the foods that you can name. I learn about intuitive eating. I try that. I gain weight. I go to the gym. I secretly track calories. I weigh in! I throw out my scale! I buy a new scale! I make meal plans and I toss them out the window. I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO EAT, AND WHATEVER I AM DOING AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT IS ALMOST DEFINITELY WRONG.
Food is actually simple, because the rest of life is broader and the consequences are longer term. And so it’s Friday morning again and I sit here staring at a blank screen with the words “How To” lingering seductively in the TITLE box and I have no idea how to do anything.
Luke keeps saying, “It’s winter.” As in, “You’re depressed because it is winter, and no one can blame anyone for their depression in winter.” This is a thing that I say a lot to other people, so I recognize the cadence. And I now understand that no matter how logical a statement like that might be, one’s own sadness always feels so unique and important and unlike everyone else’s, so it comes out sounding like, “Oh, you just have a cold,” when you secretly know that the thing YOU have is so much worse than a cold, but no one will understand, so you might as well be quiet about it.
This week I did the following things:
I went to the dentist on Monday morning, and all he did was clean my teeth. Then after that he took an x-ray of the bones around my teeth, and then he said, “You have no new problems, so I’ll see you again in six months.” This is a huge accomplishment, because just two years ago a woman told me that I would need years of work on my teeth, and it would cost at least $12,000. Now that era was over. I wanted to tell all my friends that they should go get their teeth cleaned every six months, because it’s absolutely worth it to not be blind-sided by a $12,000 mouth prognosis. But then I thought, “That’s just the dental industrial complex telling me to say that,” and I thought about how all my friends would laugh and tell me that their teeth were fine, and their teeth WOULD be fine, because my teeth are alien teeth made of porcelain or something even more prone to tiny holes, and this idea of telling people to do something about their teeth was likely one of my worst. So I got in my icy car and rubbed my hands together and drove to the gym.
I went to the gym three to four times this week so far. At the gym, I ran on the treadmill while reading The New Yorker. This is my current favorite way to run. I like to read one column of text while walking, and one column of text while running. I hate running without walking. I also am doing some embarrassingly light weight training, and everything is sore. Whenever the little paper postcards in my New Yorker fall to the ground at the gym, I cringe at myself, this horrible hipster person with her horrible New Yorkers with her horrible mismatching gym gear, dropping things everywhere like a snobby slob.
I taught a humor workshop in Winnetka. I taught three other classes, too, in other places. Teaching was good. Teaching only works if you are a total grown up, which means that you can tell the children that you are sad if you really want to, but you can’t behave as though you are sad. Being able to not behave as though you are sad when you are sad is the best way to differentiate between high-functioning and non-functioning depression. I am high-functioning. About this I am proud.
I played Mario Kart, I made peanut fried rice, I talked with Bethany about school, I watched gentle television with Luke, I took showers and tried to think about how to be a better cartoonist until the water got cold (sorry), I wrote in my page-a-day diary.
In this diary, I am trying to remember images and not feelings from my days. The feelings are unreliable indicators of memory. So many of my diaries are full of this cobwebby melancholia that comes out in spurts of self loathing and vacillations of anger, fear, and the unknown. When I read them back I can’t remember those times, really. All the feelings sort of melt together and it seems like I could have written that 2001 diary entry YESTERDAY. I’m still wondering about food and boys and the weather and what I’m supposed to do with my life.
Therefore, I’m trying to record some concrete details so I can go, “Oh yes, that was the day we watched the hawk get the rat in the back yard, and the chickens did that manic symphony.” Or, “Ah, Luke made a lot of salty mushroom dishes that January.” Or, “I guess on this day I ate rye bread and washed a single window in the bathroom. I don’t remember that, but it’s down here, so I’ll pretend that I do.”
The point is, it’s Friday, and here is my how to essay. I don’t know how to do anything. That’s fine; I’m fine. It’s winter.