Every day I scramble an egg and watch television.
It’s not a real egg, it’s a plant-based one. It kind of looks like the bottle of honey mustard you don’t stock in your fridge, but once every six months, you wish you did. We can label me a tentative lacto-vegetarian. Not lacto-ovo because I never liked real eggs, and because in baked goods they don’t count, because I can’t see or taste them. But for the sake of what I have to say later, or maybe for imagery’s sake alone, I recommend you picture a real egg.
Every day I scramble an egg and watch television, and I like it.
When I like something, I make it everyone’s problem. For a long time I thought it was because I like very few things. Then my roommate/best friend Izzy taught me a new word. Anhedonia1. It’s a word I can blame. An inability to derive pleasure. I like a lot of things, but clinical depression and hellish circumstance won’t give me the slightest clue what those things are.
Except now I’ve unlocked two: egg and television.
I have this half-baked theory, which I adopted in part from a half-baked theory presented in the pilot of the upstanding and wrongfully sacrificed Hulu original High Fidelity. Rob (Zoë Kravitz’s character) and Simon (white guy without a Wikipedia page) are sitting in a bar (which is illegal so tell your friends) and arguing that the things you like (art, literature, films, food) are more instructive than what you are like.
So this is how I see it:
I don’t really feel like a person because I don’t know what I like. Besides egg and television. But I’m hoping that the repeated act of sharing what I like will attract more things I like. Sharing as self-exploration/definition and survival! Or something.
Enter this newsletter.
There has been nothing to say for months. I couldn’t write up until now, and I barely talk to anyone. My friend Jo is the glowing exception. We volley thoughts (which would probably morph into tweets if not for our concerted detox) back and forth at a velocity that invites early onset arthritis. I’ve been straddling contrived community and effortless isolation (Pandemic Season 1), before and now (Pandemic Season 7 Stages of Grief), the digital and material worlds (the networks can’t get enough of this one). I talk to Jo about it all. She encourages me to write something down and send it to people, which requires me to let go of how it’s perceived. Waiting until I have all the words would be worse than using the wrong ones.
When I learn a new word, that also becomes everyone’s problem.
love this and you
love this and you <3