2024.11.04
There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye.
One of the unexpected realizations to come out of my forties is that being human is often largely ridiculous. This, and that how we experience romance at age fifteen is more or less the same as romance at eighty-five. The assumption that we ever move on from giddy insecurity in the face of attraction to some more stoic and balanced response seems to me either an illusion created from a vacuum of storytelling, or the triumph of cynicism. Actual maturity, I've come to suspect, is largely just succeeding at not letting the injuries of your childhood debilitate you, which is the great challenge of life. As Larkin says, "An only life can take so long to climb / clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never." We're all mostly just sending the same messages back and forth to each other from puberty to death, the only difference as we go (hopefully) being that we do so with a better understanding of what we want, what we need, and the ability to ask for it directly and walk away from it more quickly when it doesn't serve us.
In Paris, cinq à sept, five to seven, is also slang for the after-work affair. It refers to the hours between leaving work and arriving home when one might theoretically take part in a sexual rendezvous.
I wake up hours later, sore from my night of dancing. From being twisted and contorted to accommodate another person's body. I feel used up in exactly the right way. Destroyed in the way Hemingway meant it, "the good destruction...the way we're made to be destroyed."Funny how Hemingway is showing up on my radar so much the past few days (the movie "Hemingway and Gillhorn", then a bit of a documentary talking about his gender play later in life)
Ellie has laid out a table of food. A planche of sliced, cured meat, three types of cheese, one of which is now oozing onto the board. A small jar of jam. And a focaccia she has just pulled out of the oven. We add the bottles of rosé we picked up at the Monoprix before we boarded the train and the baguette I bought from the *boulangerie*. *Une tradition*. They are made to be eaten, not stored. The image of the Parisian walking and biking through the city with their baguette in hand or bike basket is one of those instances when clichés exist for a reason. When I visited Paris in 2015, not long after the terrorist attacks, I had coffee with a Parisian who recounted how, during the two-day search for the terrorists, they had all been confined to their apartments except to go out and get their baguette.
"I like to always leave the house prepared for things to take a turn toward enjoyment."
For a long time Melissa and I used a shared Google Doc for a grocery list - it was great that it was real time and all, but kind of fiddly - hard to click the little checkboxes, and Google Docs is slow on a phone. So I made up a simple grocery list webapp.
* very easy to check off things on phone
* works on this ANCIENT iPad I now have set up as a permanent screen in the kitchen
* no chance someone is going to start trying to charge me a subscription
* items to get are sorted by the section of the store they're in
* you can add a comment to an item
* recently checked off items (in the last 60 minutes - arbitrary but effective) show up as crossed off items below
* older items are sorted alphabetically
In the interest of UI simplicity there are a few weirdnesses: no actual "checkboxes", you can only edit the section or note for an active item, and only delete an archived item, but honestly I think got the UI just right for our needs.
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