You Don't Need to Feel Perfect

Scenes from my Frog & Toad fall

Nov 01, 2023

“Just then there was a strong wind. It blew the list out of Toad’s hand. The list blew high up into the air. ‘Help!’ cried Toad. ‘My list is blowing away! What will I do without my list?’

“‘Hurry!’ said Frog. ‘We will run and catch it.’

“‘No!’ shouted Toad. ‘I cannot do that.’

“‘Why not?’ asked Frog.

“‘Because,’ wailed Toad, ‘running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!’” [Frog and Toad Together, Arnold Lobel]

When I was a kid I used to make fun of my mom for making so many to-do lists. She’d leave them on counters and tables around the house. My favourites were the ones she’d scratch on a square of toilet paper with a ballpoint pen in the bathroom, writing down some task for the next day that she’d remembered while brushing her teeth.

Now that I’m an adult I catch myself at the same thing, though my phone usually becomes the dumping ground for these various notes:

Wear your retainer / Dad bday gift / Secret Sex [after a confused moment, I remembered it’s a book title] / Olive oil grape cake / Buy dog food!!! / Man on bus says he worked at balloon store for five years, but caught COVID in May and developed a latex allergy. Now he wants to go to culinary school.

(Some are more practical than others.)

Every Sunday night I also write down everything I have to do for the week into a daily planner. I’ve also started writing down my two writing projects—which I call novel and book, for some reason—and drawing four little checkboxes next to them. Next to novel each checkbox represents 250 words to write that day; next to book each represents 15 minutes of research, writing, editing, etc.

Most often I need lists to externalize and organize my life, though they can also feel constraining. In early October, I found a different list I had made a few months earlier, called Things (Fun!) To Do This Summer. I’d clearly made the list and then forgotten to ever consult it again. There were a few things I’d actually done, a few high hopes that were never going to happen (see you next summer, table-tiling project). And there was: Bike to Tommy Thomson park.

Why don’t I just do that now? I thought. If there’s something relieving about putting your life down onto the page in list form, it’s nothing compared to the serotonin bump of deciding to deviate from said list entirely.

I downloaded the city bike app and reacquainted myself with pedaling. I haven’t owned a bike in years. I forgot how good it feels to move that way. The sun was bright, with just enough chill in the air. I biked along the lake and then down Leslie, into the park. A harried woman corralled twenty kindergarteners toward a picnic table. Bikers in spandex nodded curtly at me as they flew by in the other direction. I stopped to walk across the floating bridge and take a picture of the city skyline. A flap of geese flew over my head, two of them honking as their wings knocked together.

🌳

“I stopped believing that ‘theory’ had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?” [The Possessed, Elif Batuman]

The scribbled list I keep in the back of my day timer reports that I’ve read 12 books this month. Since there are only four weeks in a month, this seems quite high. I look at the list of titles and wonder how time works, wonder what I’ve retained. Between reading for school, research, and reading to avoid schoolwork and research, I’ve put a lot into my brain in October.

Despite this, I feel oddly disconnected from work, writing, thinking. A friend sends me a photo of an email Louise Glück wrote about writer’s block. The periods of blankness [and] silence are desolating but tell yourself the well is filling up. I start biking during the day to parks I haven’t been to yet. My tires squelch over gingko berries, the vomit-y scent chasing me. I stop on bridges to overlook a valley painted red with turning maples. I get a coffee at Evergreen Brickworks and read Naomi Klein. She believed strongly in the promise of the liberal meritocracy: giving people the tools to rise as individuals, not creating universal programs to guarantee a better life for all. Every time I look at the news, every time I open social media, I see a death toll ticking up and up. It is nearing 6,000 that day, an unimaginable number. Netanyahu appeared to tell soldiers a ground defensive is coming … Israeli Defense Minister warns war is still in early stages … Next to me, three teenage boys, there on a class trip, quiz each other on different types of housing. High-density, low density. Middle income. They read off paper worksheets. One of them says, I know how you can tell the really rich neighbourhoods. You look at the cars. Sometimes there’s a neighbourhood with really fancy houses but all the cars are crap. Another says, A mortgage isn’t like debt, because it’s an investment. So it’s better. They debate how often interest rates are reassessed. I wonder if they really believe they will be able to own homes here one day. I wonder if I am a cynical person.

I read Jenny Erpenbeck, following the path she traces through a series of books that she has read. I think about reading as looking for something. But what am I looking for? I read my childhood journal. I read a book about the Korean War. I read a book from my adolescence about Christian martyrs. I read a novel about a documentarian driving across the country, who wants to help children who’ve been separated at the border. I read a news story about parents in Palestine writing their child’s name on their arm so they can be identified if the worst happens.

There is a protest. We march in the street and my insides swing from hope to futility and back again. The way voices crack when they are hoarse from yelling makes me want to cry. I wonder what to do other than to be a body in a place and a person who cares.

🍃

“I think a good place to start is just to do more check-ins with yourself, which takes a couple seconds […] just, throughout the day, be like, ‘Am I comfortable right now? What's one thing that I could do to make myself a little bit more comfortable right now?’” [McKayla Coyle, Material Girls podcast]

“I’ll write you a prescription for the 30 mg version of the pill,” says my doctor. “And then you can take two until you feel ready to start taking one. Or you can take two every second day, and one every other day. And then eventually one every two days. But if there’s a day you suspect you might need it, if you know you’re going to be stressed, or drinking, or eating spicy food, just take two that day …”

My doctor always has a great manicure, and it never matches her work clothes. Today her nails are lime green and filed into sleek tapered points. I don’t compliment them because I’m always complimenting her nails and now I’m self-conscious because it’s the only thing that changes about her. Otherwise she’s eternal in a white coat and pale blue scrubs.

“How do I know when to taper?” I ask. “Like now, I feel good, but every week or so there’s a day where I feel it—not bad pain, not like before, but a burning in my chest or maybe just kind of uncomfortable for a few hours—”

She starts to answer, but it becomes clear that what she’s really saying is, I don’t know how to tell you that you’re just going to have to feel it out.

“You’re not going to feel perfect,” she says, as if this is obvious. And it’s so shocking to me that I laugh.

“Oh,” I say. “Right.”

What a strange trick of the brain, to live in a body that has never felt perfect and yet always be expecting that, once I fix my current discomfort, it will.

🍂

“Blushing is the colour of virtue.” [LED sign outside of St. John’s Bakery]

My friend’s apartment has high ceilings and beautiful molding and is decorated with her characteristic perfect minimalism. She lives in a small city in the Netherlands where the park behind her house is full of happily munching cows. Even though we’ve known each other for more than a decade I’ve never been to her house. We’ve nearly always lived on different continents. She makes me a pumpkin spice latte and lets me interview her for my book.

The next day my parents, my partner, and I take a canal sightseeing tour in Ghent. The Flemish tour guide tells us about the “manneken pis” statues everywhere of children peeing, and how they were a symbol of the tanners’ guild, because tanners used the ammonia in children’s urine in the leather-making process.

“This was a good way for poor children to make money, by selling their urine. Though some of them realized they could water it down with water from the river. Which lead to the new profession of urine taste-tester,” he says, pausing dramatically for sounds of disgust from his passengers.

“Then some of those taste-testers moved to the Netherlands and founded Heineken,” he adds. “Ha-ha-ha!”

Towering, ornate buildings, seemingly from every century side-by-side, loom over the edges of the canal. In a tree on the side I spot a hand-lettered sign wedged in the branches, facing the water: BOAT TOURS ARE NOISE POLLUTION.

On the approach on the flight home, I can see snaking patches of trees that look like rivers from this high up, breaking through the Ontarian urban sprawl. Autumn has arrived while we were gone. We’re landing into washes of fire red and mustard and umber.

We have friends over to watch Over the Garden Wall in the cozy light of the million wicker lamps Jon keeps buying from Ikea. Our two-person household slowly eats half a large pumpkin pie that Jon got free from work. I go to a friend’s house to help process the black walnuts that thump into their backyard in the fall; three of us spend an hour crushing the fleshy hull of the walnut beneath our boot heels, then peeling it open to reveal the hard, gnarled shell inside. I take home a ziploc bag full of them and scrub the shells clean under running water, dry them and put them in my oven (the only “cool, dry place” in my apartment) to cure. We pick open a broken one, tweezing bits of the nut inside free with our fingernails. It tastes floral and vegetal, not bitter but not quite sweet. Who ever first thought to eat a walnut?

One day I forget where I left my To-Do list and I wander around listlessly (literally) the whole day. In the evening, I find it, and write down everything I did that day, just so I can cross it off.

🍁

Writing News

Despite feeling writer’s block settle on me along with the gloomy weather at the end of the month (wait … is my writer’s block just Seasonal Affective Disorder??), I do have a few pieces of writing-related news to share:

First up, I reviewed a wonderfully weird and poetic little novel, Jawbone by Meaghan Greeley, for CAROUSEL Magazine this month. And, ta-da! The review is out today! You can read it here and pick up the book (which I heartily recommend doing) here!

Also, I am going to be reading at Speakeasy Reading Series (the reading series put on by my MFA program) in November. If you are in Toronto, you can attend in person at Glad Day books, 7:30 pm on November 22! The event will also be broadcast on Zoom, so you can join virtually as well. More details to come on the Speakeasy Instagram—it’s always a very lovely time.

Book Corner

As mentioned, I read a lot this month. Here are some highlights:

Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger is one of the best books I’ve read this year. How do you take a twitter joke and turn it into a probing, thoughtful analysis of our entire political climate? She’s just the best.
I was also blown away by Alicia Elliot’s new novel, And Then She Fell. The twists! The harrowing, embodied language! And yet it’s so funny.
Nothing Special has been on my list to read for a while because I love coming-of-age stories and anything even tangentially related to Andy Warhol and The Factory. This was that, with an emotionally precise rendering of a fraught young female friendship thrown in, which, come on.
And finally: I’m currently trying to write a presentation for school on Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz. It’s spectacular, but having to talk about it in front of a bunch of my very smart peers has caused me to reread it more than once—something I always want to do but rarely do with poetry—and there’s more richness there every time I return to it.

Künstlerromance

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