Thankful For Distractions
An unexpected game of catch, plus dogs and Lamb Chop, books and autofiction, Apple Notes, the Appalachian Trail, World of Warcraft, and more.
This email is days “late,” and I wish I had a better excuse, but it was purely because I got distracted. The chaos of daily life gave way to preparation for the Thanksgiving holiday, which gave way to the travel and holiday itself, which gave way to more travel and my own personal holiday—a birthday—yesterday.
But distractions can be a good thing, something for which we can be thankful. Spending time with my family, both for the holiday whose very purpose is to give thanks and an early birthday celebration for me, reminded me of how much I’m truly thankful for. Not big, showy things or gifts, but small, everyday treats that remind us what it is to be human.
Take, for instance, this recent example. A few weeks ago, Courtney and I bought a junior-sized football so she could further pursue the joy of tossing around the ol’ pigskin, which she’d recently discovered at a tailgate before a Mizzou football game.
We take the ball along with us on our walks, and about two miles from the house is a small park, where we’ve taken to playing catch.
Only a few throws into our game, two young boys, one aged 8 and the other only slightly older, came up to ask if they could play.
I said yes without really thinking.
Courtney, citing her inexperience, chose to sit the game out, and I assumed the role of permanent quarterback as the boys ran routes and played defense in alternating turns.
The kids, MJ and Antoine, had limitless energy. Antoine was the smaller of the boys, but he was clearly the more naturally gifted athlete. He’d catch a pass for a touchdown, spin the ball like a top with a flourish (mimicking his favorites, no doubt), then rip off a backflip out of nowhere, and finally heave the ball with his whole tiny body the length of the field in a perfect spiral that both Courtney and I were envious of. His smile was suddenly the biggest thing on him.
MJ was a bit taller and seemed older, like a big brother type though something told me the boys were just friends (or perhaps more distant relatives). He knew more terminology, would tell me routes with names recognizable in organized football huddles (whereas Antoine would tell me the routes that he wanted to run by failing to whisper, using his hand to signal this way or that, and saying dead giveaways like “left” or “right” much too loudly).
They chided each other fondly, a soft kind of trash-talking of young athletes, but they were clearly so thrilled just to be playing. They were in the park by themselves, no parents around, and I’m not sure what they had been doing before they spotted us to ask if they could play. Probably just exploring and trusting something fun would turn up.
It was 30 or 45 minutes, and then it was done. Daylight was fading, and Courtney and I still intended to walk another mile before turning around and heading home. We gave the boys fist bumps and told them that if they ever see us down there again, to say hello or play along with us again.
None of this is actually remarkable, and I don’t mention any of it to pat ourselves on the back. What stood out to me (and I think to Courtney, as well) was how the whole thing made us feel after the fact. Throughout the remainder of the walk, if conversation lagged, we’d inevitably come back to how we felt playing with the boys. We talked about how easy it would have been to miss out on this incredible feeling—not of self-satisfaction or anything focused inward because of what we’d done, but just a reminder of goodness in the world. A reminder of the purity of kids, who didn’t concern themselves with so much of what divides adults today, be it race, religion, politics, you name it.
They were innocent, uncorrupted, good. Like so many, sports is a near-universal language; for adults, it’s a shortcut to conversation, something more interesting than the weather that conveys a familiarity that strangers haven’t yet earned. It’s a buffer from other thornier conversation topics. It’s shared culture.
For boys with energy to burn, it transcended talking; it was the most natural thing in the world to see two people throwing a ball and to say, “Hey, can we get in on that?” Never mind they were strangers, a different race, wayyyyy older. None of that mattered. And it was a wonderful afternoon distraction.
The difference between the kids and me is they’ve likely already forgotten about it. It’s just another day, just another game of playtime, and it makes sense to them because that’s what the world should look like. Hopefully they’ve played a thousand games since then. But for me, I can’t stop thinking about it because it is, in fact, rare.
I don’t walk up to strangers that way and ask to join in their fun; I’m way too self-conscious for that. I don’t play games nearly enough. I don’t find joy in distractions but rather, too often, annoyance. Without ever trying or intending to, I am, in my day to day, too closed off to the world around me, often preferring a bubble of solitude while out in the world. But those boys did me a solid: They reminded me of what we lose as we age. And my heart was so full as a result of it. For that, I’m thankful for MJ and Antoine, strangers and new experiences, and the simple joy of tossing a football.
Ten Worth Your Time
- Some stories just resonate because you can see your situation in them, and, like me, I’m sure many felt this one ring true. It’s about our dogs’ obsession with the little plush-toy dictator known as Lamb Chop. My mom dutifully restuffs and repairs Millie’s Lamb Chop, which is essentially faceless now. My friends Mary and Brandon back in Wyoming keep a stockpile of Lamb Chops for their numerous dogs. There’s something about the thing that dogs respond to, and this article from The Atlantic tries to figure out what that might be.
- I’ve got a lot of book-related content in here this week because, sometime in the aftermath of the election, I just dropped off with my book reading. Courtney ran off and left me, as she finished our most-recent book club selection, and all I could do was apologize and say “Don’t let me hold you up.” I just haven’t had the attention span to sit down and commit to my book, even though it’s indisputably a masterpiece. I enjoyed this New Yorker book review about a work that endeavors to determine if there is such a thing as a genre of 20th century fiction. Not genres employed during the 20th century, but whether there is such a thing as a 20th century novel. It’s an interesting bit of research, and it sounds like an interesting read.
- I found this article from Spike to be an interesting meditation on how the internet is shaping not just our consumption of novels but the writing of them as well. It’s a dense article at times, but I enjoy how it grapples with that which we consider in so many other walks of life: how the internet is changing us, our habits, our interpretation of the world. It quotes a David Foster Wallace piece trying to unpack the same basic question but for TV and how it shaped fiction and our capacity to enjoy it, and I think the effect of the internet could be even more disruptive because its enjoyment so closely resembles reading, though it isn’t, not really. I especially liked this quote:
Many editors of legacy publications, including Will Blythe of Esquire and Adrienne LaFrance of The Atlantic, have taken the position that the internet is in direct opposition to the novel. Their argument goes that the internet, at its core, offers distraction as an entertainment unto itself: to softly scroll and survey, but not to see; to scan, but not to read.
- The Spike article above is, in reality, a commentary on not just the internet-ization of the novel but a somewhat dense (borderline academic in areas) look at autofiction, which, as a concept, intrigues me because I’m never certain what constitutes the genre. I can easily follow it when it’s something like the protagonist of the book shares the same name and biographical details as the author. But I struggle to discern the genre’s boundaries when this article cites Ben Lerner as one of the foremost practitioners, for I’d just finished a week or so before The Topeka School, Lerner’s third book, and found none of those glaringly apparent references to self. (By that, none of the characters is named Ben Lerner.) The response would likely be “But look at all of the other markers that are so clearly inspired by Lerner himself, namely how the protagonist is this high school debate wunderkind. After reading more about Lerner, I can readily concede the truth of that, but what makes it autofiction still eludes me. What makes it different from Ernest Hemingway’s roman a clef The Sun Also Rises, the real-life inspirations for which are beautifully recounted in Leslie Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly? Extending the questioning further: What does the category of roman a clef, the formal definition of which is “a novel in which real people or events appear with invented names,” really add to understanding fiction? Does it matter where an author finds inspiration? Is it more or less satisfying (or legitimate) if one can figure out the source? I don’t know the answers, but I do like pondering the questions.
- I’m pretty sure I’ve written about my (unhealthy) obsession with productivity content—all the tools, tips, strategies, and more that help you supposedly get more organized and productive. It’s this insanely well-populated subculture of Youtube (and other social platforms), but, for me, serve as largely a distraction from actually productive endeavors. One of the areas of productivity is note-taking—content creators will often debate the virtues of analog versus digital notes and how they take one (or both). Within the digital note-takers subgroup, there’s even MORE content to be created around WHICH TOOL to use for your notes—Evernote? Roam? Obsidian? Bear? To any of you who don’t know what any of these are, you represent a growing set of digital note-takers who insist that the best note-taking application is the simplest and most accessible, which for many, is Apple Notes. This somewhat collage-like piece in Dirt is just a collection of different people’s Apple Notes, and it’s oddly satisfying to read through what people have jotted down—the useful, the not useful, the funny, the serious, the sad, and everything in between.
- I love to hike. Little has felt better or more restorative than trekking through the Rockies a couple of months ago (save for the very real adjustment to the altitude). My dad loved to hike, too. One of the purer obsessions he got into in his later years was watching YouTube videos of Appalachian Trail thru-hikers. I never actually pitched the idea to him, but one of my great regrets was that he, my brother, and I never went to hike at least some of the AT together. Never mind a thru-hike, which is the focus of this Guardian story, but to call it a “hike” doesn’t even seem fair. Tara Dower set a new record for the fastest completion of the AT in just under 41 days, breaking the previous record by 13 hours. That’s 2,100-some-odd miles in just over a month; she had to run the equivalent of two marathons a day.
- This quick story from The Washington Post is jam-packed with fun facts about Utqiagvik, Alaska, the northernmost American city, which is enduring 64 days straight without sunlight.
- I’m a complete World of Warcraft illiterate, but I loved this anniversary piece rundown of the game’s cultural footprint. I am totally fascinated by the references to how the game was used in academia, from studying war to epidemics. But what I can speak to are some of the many pop culture recommendations that are WOW-adjacent. The South Park episode is hilarious and absolutely deserved its Emmy. The documentary Feels Good Man was a True/False Film Fest favorite of mine from a few years ago, and it’s on a WOW-inspired meme that led to the downstream effect of Pepe the Frog’s adoption by the alt-right and the artist’s attempt to reclaim his work from hateful forces. Finally, one of the most affecting documentaries from this year’s True/False was The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. It’s a truly stunning piece of filmmaking, not just because the story is incredible but because the director really does something original with the way the film was created. Would definitely watch a documentary about the making of this documentary.
- Speaking of documentaries, Bright Wall/Dark Room had an essay about one of the best ever, The Thin Blue Line. I still remember being introduced to this one in a film class in college, and I was blown away. I don’t know that, up until that point, I had any conception of just what a documentary film could do, with my of documentaries rooted somewhere in the PBS-style shows and movies I’d grown up watching. This was something else entirely, and if I had to guess, it probably marks the moment documentaries became one of my favorite art forms.
- Anora is one of the best films of the year, and Dana Stevens’ review in Slate absolutely nails it. So many have made comparisons to Safdie Brothers’ films, but I never got that level of anxiety from this film. The bulk of the film is one of those fun all-in-one-day adventures with an unlikely crew of people thrust together to “solve a problem,” as it were. It’s just the right mix of funny and dramatic.
Culture Diary
Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past couple of weeks.
The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.