Christmas gifts
I love the holidays! Any holiday, really.
Christmas is second only to Halloween in my book. It’s so sparkly! The best part, though, is the gift giving, which has become infinitely more fun since I became an aunt.
Right now my niece and nephews are in the sweet spot, that cusp of kid-ness, where they’re young enough to want things that are completely ridiculous but adorable and not self-serving or angsty.
Ie., I shelled out big time this year to buy my third-grader nephew a fluffy blue dragon toy he keeps talking about that animatronically blows fake fire to toast a fake plastic marshmallow on a fake plastic stick. Heavy duty batteries not included.
How many more years will he want something so innocent, so sweet, so dumb? How many more years will I be able to afford pricey Christmas gifts for the growing number of babies on my Christmas list?
Not long. So I have no shame. I love their little faces when they see they got what they wanted. The world will kick ‘em around a bit and forever soon enough.
My niece is into glitter and guts, which I adore. She wanted a doll that is a scientist, so of course I obliged. My sister teamed up with Santa to get the doll accompanying accoutrements for when Dr. Doll decides she wants to have it all.
Ie., baby stroller and party outfits.
To go with her science doll (which also came with a robot so it was hard to top), I got her this book by illustrator Rachel Ingotofsky.
It’s a charming, colorful and robust ode to the ladies who have made big impacts in science and engineering, like Jocelyn here.
I heard about the book watching this Broad and High episode that featured Rachel. Makes me want to get myself InDesign and Illustrator for Christmas… Hmm…
Joan Didion on self-respect and a notebook
This presidential election’s results were pretty brutal, and I tend to close myself off when I’m angry, thus, I’ve been in a state of introspection the past few weeks. Finding a way to lose with power led me to this essay by Joan Didion.
I’ve always been a fan of her writing, and this essay is one just one example of her capability to transform a new idea fresh, waving us over to look at it from her new-found vantage point. She wrote “On Self-Respect” for Vogue in 1961. Another Vogue writer who was supposed to cover the same topic flaked last minute so Joan wrote this to an exact character count.
I’m so glad she took the opportunity to save the space from being converted from editorial to ad. Decades later we’re still reading it. Here are some gems:
People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in a access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.
To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” is another one of my favorites. Rediscovering her work has led me to dust off the old habit of recording things I see every day in a notebook. I can do whatever I want with it, since notebooks are not a precious thing, like diaries or journals. Throw it out or laugh at it or use it in later days as a resource for story ideas, plot twists or character traits.
You can read it and get inspired to start your own here.
Words on the street
As seen on my walk home. A greeting from the door of Four Sided in Chicago.
At Mariano’s. “Clash of the Pot Pie-tins.” The scenes this phrase led my imagination toward made grocery shopping much less terrible.
I’ve seen more and more branding in bathrooms this past year or so. This little reminder at the Cards Against Humanity office in Chicago proves words are never a waste of space.
