Your Weekly Dose of EEE #28: What Can I Say? I'm Survivin'

Plus, No Hard Feelings: Surprisingly watchable

The city of Montreal, as seen from Mont Royal, which also means Montreal. Photo by author.

Hello!

A road trip (on purpose this time) over the long weekend left me a little discombobulated, and on-site work obligations last week meant I wasn’t able to sit down at my computer at all. So here’s a little makeup dose of EEE while I think through some things. (Don’t worry, you’ll get to hop on the thought train at the end. Buckle up.)

What’s Exciting Me?

I have a few book clubs coming up for When We Were Mothers and the opportunity to give a talk for a local organization. It’s also the beginning of a very busy period for my news organization, and while that’s feeling quite overwhelming at the moment, it’s also energizing and exciting.

If you’d like me to appear at your book club, either in person (if you’re local to the Boston area) or virtually, just reply to this email or email me! We always have a really great time.

What’s Entertaining Me?

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No Hard Feelings. I had very low expectations about this film about a woman (Maddie, played by Jennifer Lawrence) who is hired by the overprotective parents of a nineteen-year-old young man (Percy, played by Andrew Barth Feldman) to “make him a man.”

Maddie is about to lose the house her mother left her, and her car has been repossessed. (Incidentally, the tow truck driver is played by the same dude who plays Richie in The Bear.) This gig offers her a car so she can continue driving for Uber, earning money to pay the back taxes and keep her home. All she has to do is bring Percy out of his shell before he leaves for Princeton in the fall.

There were a couple of problems with the plot of this film—mainly that it was (1) super predictable and at the same time (2) not believable that someone as reserved as Percy would allow Maddie to influence him so easily.

But if you set those flaws aside, the film was very entertaining. The acting was good, and the characters were each quirky and funny in their own ways. Maddie’s personality is very similar to what I imagine Jennifer Lawrence’s to be IRL, and I kept thinking what it must have been like for Feldman to be working alongside her. I probably would have been paralyzed with starstruckness.

Call me old, but I was drawn more to the side theme of housing and the struggles many locals endure to stay in the homes their families have owned for decades or generations as they reckon with real estate developers, rising taxes, and the changing character of the place they’ve always called home. I think about the stories of the fire that wiped out the town of Lahaina on the Hawai’ian island of Maui and even issues my own community is facing as rising property values begin to equal taxes and home prices that are prohibitive to many current residents aging in their community.

In all, if you’re looking for an entertaining movie that won’t make you think too hard, No Hard Feelings might be a fun choice.

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I finished Rachel Barenbaum’s A Bend in the Stars, and I really enjoyed it! It was realistic and had a satisfying ending, and I miss the characters now that they’re gone. I can’t wait to read what Rachel creates next.

I started Tom Hanks’s book, Uncommon Type, on Audible, and at first, I was very confused. The first chapter, “Three Exhausting Weeks,” was about a friend that propositioned him (or so I thought), thus beginning a whirlwind, passionate but exhausting relationship. As Tom read, I thought he was describing how his relationship with his wife began, or maybe a relationship past. but then a new chapter began, and it was about a World War II veteran.

I’ll confess, I bought this book a couple of years ago and never got around to reading it. I heard an interview with Hanks somewhere—Conan O’Brien, maybe, or Stephen Colbert?—where he talked about the book and how he’s a typewriter enthusiast. I thought, “I’ll definitely read a memoir by Tom Hanks. I bet he has a lot of cool stories to share.”

And he does have a lot of cool stories. And they all include a typewriter in some way or another. They’re just not memoirs. The “chapters” are actually short stories. I feel silly that I didn’t know that before. I’m halfway through, and I’ve been enjoying the collection. I’m not usually a short story person (reading or writing), and if I’d known what kind of book this was I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. But I’m happy I did! I like the stories, and now that I realize it’s not a memoir I’m actually a lot happier with Hanks’s narration than I was at the start.

The story I just began has the same characters as one of the other stories, which I think is cool, as well. I’m interested to see where they go.

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Survivin’ by Bastille. I have always enjoyed Bastille’s distinctive sound, but I heard this song for the first time at the gym the other week and it really spoke to me. The chorus begins, “What can I say? I’m survivin’.” Life can often feel like that, and the last several months have been an extreme version of “…but after this week/month/season, things will slow down.” Things never slow down on their own, and I’m starting to think I’ll need to slow them down manually if I’m ever going to feel like I’m getting anywhere.

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I have been enjoying Sophia Le’s Write-Life Balance podcast and newsletter, and this week’s is extra cool because I’m in it! If you want to know how I went from writing imitation Christopher Pike stories at age 11 to publishing my own original novel at age 40, read and listen here!

How a 3-hour train ride turned into a debut novel

What’s Enlightening Me?

Alright. Well, this is not what I had in mind when I started this EEE.

I took a “break” after writing that last section, for a couple of reasons. First, because I had some meetings for my day job (educating) and my other day job (journalizing), and second, because I had to go to the gym. (I’ve been scheduling personal training into my week for almost a year now, because if I don’t prioritize it, it won’t get done and I’ll just keep sitting here at my desk gaining weight and being sore.)

While I was away from my computer, I listened back to that Write-Life Balance episode, and all the while my line from above, “I’ll need to slow them down manually if I’m ever going to feel like I’m getting anywhere,” reverberated in my mind. That plus the choice of Survivin’ for a song suggests the theme for this week’s EEE has chosen itself.

I talk a lot about balance, both in the podcast and in life. I also talk a lot about being a Gemini, never turning down an opportunity, and being so busy I can barely see straight. These ideas don’t agree with one another.

I was busy when I recorded that episode. Since then, I have been accepted into two programs that will provide funding and development opportunities for my news business and am waiting hear back from a third. I have six events coming up in the next month, all to serve my news work and my community. I’m planning a big community event in January, and without the grant I was hoping to get, I’ll probably need to do it on my own. Work on the novel has stalled altogether.

So—it seems like the news business has become my focus for the fall. It wasn’t my intention to divert my attention from my creative work, but the reality is that in order to reach sustainability with this business, which many members of my community have come to rely on, and which I enjoy immensely, I’m going to need to buckle in and focus on the development and financial health work that will get me there. After the fall, I will hopefully be able to offload some of this work and shift focus back to my creative work. But it makes no sense for me to subject myself to all these deadlines and deliverables when I am actually not feeling super satisfied about any of them. At the end of the day, I just feel guilty and like I’m not being productive enough.

Balance can’t mean taking on 1000 things and giving them each 1/1000 of my attention; it must mean dividing my time between a few important areas of focus, leaving the others until it makes more sense to pick them up again. Right now, it doesn’t make sense to try to do three jobs in 20 hours a week (minus appointments and distractions).

I’m not going to go away completely—I haven’t been without creative writing for more than half a decade, and I’m not about to leave it behind. I’ll still be in touch, just not with the frequency you’re used to.

Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you soon.