Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of July 28, 2024
• It’s amazing how much room a four-foot six-year-old takes up in a king bed.
• I need to be more like my two year old. Falls sleep with a book. Wakes up, gets a new book and flips through that. Meanwhile, I’m not reading any of the great books I have stacked on my nightstand because I might miss a hot take about Star Wars or Marvel on YouTube. If the future is doomed, it’s our fault, not the kids’.
• On my run this morning, Chicagoans were in a special kind of mood. Usually, we all work together to share sidewalks and bike/running paths. Not the case today. Obliviously (read as selfishly) blocking the sidewalks and paths, ignoring polite “On your left” calls as I passed, cutting in front of me with their dogs, not slowing down at driveways heading onto the roads. Just stellar asshole behavior. Toward the end of my run, as I was reaching the limit of my patience where my polite, “On your lefts” were about to become, “MOVE!,” I ran past a young couple pushing their child in a stroller. The kid was about a year and a half old and he waved at me with a big smile. And everything inside of me calmed down. I smiled, waved back, and said, “Hi! Good morning!” The parents smiled and waved. It was a nice way to end what was—assholes aside—a solid workout. And then I remembered that kids grow up to become adults and that most adults are assholes on purpose.
• The one thing I’m looking forward to as this Presidential Election barrels forward is that we might just see how identity politics is not only not the answer to America’s problems, but instead is a big part of its problems.
• What makes it so hard to believe our kids are as old as they are is not because we don’t understand how calendars work. It’s because we get reminders from Time Hop and Facebook Memories, so it literally is just yesterday we saw them as infants. Social media fucks us in every hole in every way.
• I, apparently, have a thing for older women who whisper cuss words as if they’re too old and polite to speak such trash.
