sunshine and thunderstorms

Care and Feeding, Slate, 23 January 23:

Dear Care and Feeding: I live in the very lonely overlap of a Venn diagram, and I need help figuring out how to fix it. To keep it short, I’m a mom who was on the fence about having kids, so I’m not a very ‘mom-y’ mom. My kid isn’t my life or my identity, and while I think I’m a caring and attentive parent, I’m not the primary parent, and I like it that way. I lost most of my non-parent friends when I had my kid. However, my appearance and interests still very much scream “non-parent.” My kid is off-putting to the people most like me (many are overtly judgmental), but my looks and lifestyle are off-putting to other moms (for example, I prioritize my appearance, have a lot of tattoos, and value my work). This has left me very lonely and isolated. Finding friends as an adult is so hard, so please don’t suggest “finding my people” as I’m very extroverted and have been trying to make new friends for years. It’s not working. If I’m honest, I think my childless friends think I’m stupid for having a kid, while my mom acquaintances are jealous of my appearance and judge my choices. It really sucks. —The Worst Venn Diagram

Dear The Worst Venn Diagram,

Holy shit, a mom ... but with tattoos? Is that even possible? You think you've heard everything at a gig like this, but then someone as incredible as you comes along with such an unusual life story! What a remarkable woman you are.

I can see why it would be difficult for someone as hot and interesting as you to make meaningful connections when you yourself are so special and have a lot of tattoos, and moms are always so ugly and boring and worthless and don't have any tattoos, let alone a lot of them. It might help take the sting off to reframe it this way: it's actually a much bigger bummer that all those sad, frumpy mommy-bots are missing out on an amazing opportunity to befriend a mom with tattoos. Can you imagine how enriched their lives would be if they could get over themselves for just one minute and try to understand you as a person, rather than making a bunch of generalizations and assumptions based on surface-level observations? But here they are, writing you off as soon as they see how beautiful and covered in tattoos you are when you walk around with your important briefcase from work. It's really their loss.

You're practically a unicorn! I mean, okay — unicorn is hyperbole. But you get what I'm saying! You're probably one of a handful of women anywhere who has a kid and also cares about the way she looks, and when you add in the fact that you work and have just so, so many tattoos? I don't know, unicorn might not be far off.

In light of that, you've set for yourself a really hard task here. It's not going to be made easier by the fact that the dull and homely stay-at-home moms who stupidly chose to contribute nothing worthwhile to society are being so judgmental about the way you live your life as a gorgeous, professional cool girl who just happens to have a kid. You have such a neat and fun lifestyle and other women don't! Why should you be punished for being a valuable person who, more importantly, values herself, unlike the other moms, who look like absolute shit and never have anything interesting to say and don't have tattoos and are so mean and critical of your choices and the way you look?

Never forget this: you are exceptional. It's not such a mystery that you've been trying so unsuccessfully to make friends for so long. Of course you can't "find your people." There are none. You're a sexy mom with tattoos and a job, and that's always going to be hard for the two kinds of women on earth to understand, whether they're the kind of woman who is a judgy, child-free asshole or the other kind of woman: a jealous, kid-obsessed mommy zombie.

Lionel has a beard.

Masks just do not fit correctly with facial hair, especially as much facial hair as he has. This was hugely publicized in spring 2020 (remember when there were stories of people with beards for religious reasons shaving them to mask properly? Big deal). Not to mention, anyone who knows enough virus safety to use a KF94 eighteen months before huge disease control bodies officially stop recommending cloth/surgical masks, 1000000% knows this.

If I were before your face I would like to shake hands with you, for I feel that I would like you. I would like to call you Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk. I think that at first a man would be ashamed, for a man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become a second nature to him; but I know I would not long be ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, and so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age no man becomes worthy of the name without an effort. You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still—but I have no wings.

[…]

If you care to know who it is that writes this, my name is Abraham Stoker (Junior). My friends call me Bram. I live at 43 Harcourt St., Dublin. I am a clerk in the service of the Crown on a small salary. I am twenty-four years old. Have been champion at our athletic sports (Trinity College, Dublin) and have won about a dozen cups. I have also been President of the College Philosophical Society and an art and theatrical critic of a daily paper. I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips—sensitive nostrils—a snubnose and straight hair. I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self control and am naturally secretive to the world. I take a delight in letting people I don’t like—people of mean or cruel or sneaking or cowardly disposition—see the worst side of me. I have a large number of acquaintances and some five or six friends—all of which latter body care much for me.

[…]

It is vain for me to try to quote any instances of what thoughts of yours I like best—for I like them all and you must feel that you are reading the true words of one who feels with you. You see, I have called you by your name. I have been more candid with you—have said more about myself to you than I have ever said to any one before. You will not be angry with me if you have read so far. You will not laugh at me for writing this to you. It was with no small effort that I began to write and I feel reluctant to stop, but I must not tire you any more. If you ever would care to have more you can imagine, for you have a great heart, how much pleasure it would be to me to write more to you. How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul. I don’t think you will laugh, Walt Whitman, nor despise me, but at all events I thank you for all the love and sympathy you have given me in common with my kind.

Three weeks later–which, considering the speed of transatlantic mail at the time, pretty much means immediately–Walt Whitman wrote back. He had, at the time, been recovering from a paralytic stroke three years earlier that had left him, in his own words, “entirely shattered—doubtless permanently, from paralysis and other ailments,” but he still found the time to respond with a much briefer but still very affectionate letter, the opening paragraph of which read as follows:

My dear young man, Your letters have been most welcome to me—welcome to me as Person and as Author—I don’t know which most—You did well to write me so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, and so affectionately, too. I too hope (though it is not probable) that we shall one day meet each other. Meantime I send you my friendship and thanks.

[letter source]

Despite Whitman’s parenthetical remark about the improbability of meeting, Stoker did eventually manage to call on Whitman a couple of times some years later, and expressed that 

I found him all that I had ever dreamed of, or wished for in him: large-minded, broad-viewed, tolerant to the last degree; incarnate sympathy; understanding with an insight that seemed more than human.

Wut

It's so specific!!

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

but maybe being from hawaii just made me think of the ocean of a safe cradley sort of place i know its scary i know it’ll kick your ass but sometimes its ten types of turquoise and and sometimes sea foam sticks to your eyelashes sometimes the sun hits your face even when you’re twenty feet under and i have a hard time forgetting its first and foremost a womb 

little mermaid children racing eachother below the waves, trying to keepup with the surfer above them, laughing and rolling in the water, just shimmers in the corner of the humans eyes.