Foreclosures & Preclusions*

Greetings, friends! 

You may have noticed that this missive is coming from a different newsletter-output system than its predecessors, and that is because (as you may be but probably aren’t already aware) TinyLetter officially shuttered at the end of February. This is a personal tragedy for a few reasons:

1) Dealing with it has required me to do a bunch of fiddly backend computer stuff that is too annoying to even bother discussing (much**), but I wish to note, and mildly whine about, how it’s taken up a lot of time.

2) I’ve subsequently realized that—although this particular genre of writing is technically just a “newsletter”—somehow “TinyLetter” became an eponym for me, such that now I feel weird about it becoming terminologically obsolete. It’s like if Kleenex stopped making facial tissues. And, even beyond that, I’ve grown fond of the straightforward simplicity of the interface, with its cute li’l heart icon. I’ll miss it, even if it feels foolish to have an attachment to a glorified webpage.

3) My generation and cultural background mean that my mind was infected by the Austin Powers franchise at a formative age, so I can’t help but read the name of this communiqué’s new home, “Beehiiv,” to the cadence of “oh, be-have.” I am not happy about this or defending it in any way. But it also kind of reflects my resignation about this whole state of affairs. Sigh, oh Beehiiv.

Anyway. Sorry about all that. You know what’s not irritatingly boring? The fact that I continue to serve as Dear Businesslady for The Stopgap and its readerly community! In my latest column, I found myself recommending that the letter-writer pursue a career in, of all things, academic administration—which is, as some readers know, the industry where I’ve spent the vast majority of my working life, pseudonym notwithstanding. It’s a very specific type of workplace, but also one I’ve been loath to leave for an ever-increasing number of years, and kind of magnificent in the breadth of jobs that one can hold within the confines of a single institution.

It’s funny to have gotten to the point where I’m discussing my own career so straightforwardly. When I started out writing as Dear Businesslady (nearly a full decade ago!) I was anonymous, and never really intended to link my alter ego with my actual self. It wasn’t until the book that I had to reveal my secret identity, and figure out how to harmonize my online advice-giving persona with the human typing up her words. But now—especially in this iteration, which I am very straightforwardly doing purely for the love of it—the column feels like the expression of a philosophy that began when I was a teen, teetering on the precipice of adult independence.

Like many people of my demographic I spent my freshman year of college listening to a lot of Ani DiFranco, by which I mean, accumulating a library of illegally downloaded Ani DiFranco songs via AudioGalaxy and Kazaa. (Napster, of course, was dead by the time I matriculated.) One of these, “Joyful Girl”—specifically the version featuring the Buffalo Philharmonic—has become an aspirational touchstone for me, so much so that a quote from the chorus was in the signature of my personal email until, as far as I can tell, the year twenty sixteen. In case you’re unfamiliar: “I do it for the joy it brings / because I am a joyful girl / because the world owes me nothing / & we owe each other the world,” punctuated thusly. (I’m pretty sure I quoted from it in an AIM away message at some point back in the day too—most likely the “bathroom mirror has not budged” line, if you’re familiar. Wow, how many antique internet entities can I mention in one newsletter? Winamp! Xanga!!)

There’s a different verse from that same song that’s been on my mind lately and—in an instance of beautiful serendipity—when I clicked around the above YouTube link to make sure it was correct, I happened to jump right to it: “I wonder if everything I do / I do instead / Of something I want to do more? / The question fills my head.” While that line has rattled around my subconscious for approximately half my lifetime, it’s resurfaced more frequently since becoming a parent—first in a kind of grimly ironic way during the overclocked newborn years (most often while taking a hard-fought shower), and lately as I bemusedly regard my kid’s struggles to comprehend the mechanics of decision-making. He doesn’t quite understand yet that choosing one thing often forecloses other options, and that sometimes you preclude other possibilities even though you’re not aware that you’re making a choice at all.

I’m given to understand that this is not uncommon in his age group (nearly four, and sidebar, nearly F O U R earth years old??!). And as with many things in parenting—a role where I’m so often tasked with describing basic features of existence that I would take for granted otherwise—I hear myself explaining a concept with a greater level of self-awareness than I necessarily practice in my own life. I think about how helpful it would be to me, sometimes, if a friendly giant could squat down to my eye level and tell me earnestly, “Now Courtney, I see that you want to stay at your computer until you finish this project, but if you don’t stop now it means you won’t have time to do yoga before you have to take a shower. Are you okay with that?” If present household conditions are any indication, I would nod emphatically in response and then absolutely lose my shit about how much I wanted to do yoga upon being told it was shower time—and while technically I was talking about my toddler when I wrote that, it’s not entirely untrue of myself either.

Instead of a benevolent guardian nudging me toward good choices, I have a little gremlin who’s optimistic about my time management to the point of cruelty. Everything will take the exact minimum amount of time it’s ever taken, it assures me, And nothing new will come up at work, and you definitely won’t spend ten minutes looking for a specific pair of yoga pants, at least five of which are motivated by sheer stubbornness because you’re so annoyed by your inability to find them. So by all means, it hisses, keep typing, even though you’re not on a deadline—your imminent leisure time is all but guaranteed.

Of course, this happens in the inverse too, and arguably that’s even worse. Instead of acknowledging that I’m having an off day brainwise, or that I’m so burnt-out that even doing laundry feels like too heavy a burden, and giving myself permission to relax, I’ll let myself flit fruitlessly from one task to another, constantly moaning my lack of productivity while not actually getting anything done.

It’s one thing to deliberately choose one activity over another—whether or not you ultimately regret it—and quite another to shut down options for yourself without even realizing it. And when your day is guided by de facto choices that you don’t even recognize as decisions, your life feels unmoored. At the same time, it takes effort to think about what “something [you] want to do more” even is, and then work backward from there to arrange your routine around actually doing it. It’s much easier in the moment to just let time trickle by, even if the consequence is feeling dismayed at 5pm.

It's easy to let whole weeks, months, years slide by too, until you realize you’re living your entire life in that panicked “where did the time go” state. And obviously I don’t want that for myself—I don’t want it for anybody, which I think is what motivated me to get into the advice game in the first place. On the one hand, for almost everyone on earth, a job is definitely something you do instead of (and to facilitate) the things you’d rather be doing. But on the other, there are more and less appealing versions of gainful employment. And it can be easier to understand the options available to you—the choices you’re already making or could be making instead—if you offer up your situation to be analyzed by someone who’s inclined to consider every relevant twig on a given decision tree.

Are you in such a deliberative state right now? If so, please write to me! (The address, as ever, is [email protected].)

I could say so much more about decision-making (which is, after all, foundational to nearly every aspect of living; we’re deciding things so constantly that the full scope is exhausting to contemplate). But since we’ve already engaged with media fixations from my highschool and college years, let’s go back even futher. I just went down a rabbit-hole of researching Brechtian Epic Theater and its focus on the “Not/But” element as half-remembered by me in a children’s book I once owned, because I recalled that it encourages actors to narrate the choices their characters aren’t making. Which means in practice, saying things out loud like, “She sat down in the chair. She didn’t walk out of the room.” As a young tween who didn’t understand that it’s more of a rehearsal exercise than “how some people think theater should be,” I found this confounding, which I think is why the memory had such staying power. But aside from being proud that I managed to figure out the source text and the theater style it was referencing, I felt like this deep dive couldn’t possibly be relevant. So it was wild to encounter—while most of the foregoing was already written—this line on Wikipedia: “Rather than portraying a thought or action as ‘naturally’ arising from the given circumstances of the scene or ‘inevitably’ following from them, this technique underlines the aspect of decision in the thought or action.”

Somewhere between the overwhelming overkill of infusing a “not/but” ideology into every choice and the passive rudderlessness of a life defined by others’ whims is a middle ground, where you work to make space for the things you care about but cede control over things that don’t really matter (whether objectively, or to you). And I guess, in both ways, that’s what this move to Beehiiv has been for me: a desire to maintain this space, a ceding of control to another digital overlord, and a head that, for some reason, cannot let go of… something something Austin Powers? <She made the choice to reference Austin Powers again. She did not find a way to incorporate a comparatively less embarrassing quote from Ani DiFranco.>

I get a lot out of these opportunities to think aloud on the page (as it were) and I’m grateful to have an audience that justifies the exercise. Thanks for joining me on the journey.

~court

*I considered calling this installment “Preclusions, Perceptions, Mirages” as a nod to this iconic line delivery from The Last Unicorn until I decided that might be too niche. But clearly I still wanted to share the reference with those who might appreciate it.

**For anyone curious about how the newsletter sausage gets made, here’s a quick rundown. The old TinyLetter archives were supposed to be taken down after February 29th—that link still works as of this writing, but presumably isn’t long for this world. I have transferred those posts to Beehiiv (like so), after temporarily parking them on Substack, which I used as an intermediary to make the import easier. (Shoutout to my spouse for coming up with this workaround after I complained to him about the lack of a graceful TinyLetter-to-Beehiiv solution.) Although some of my best friends favorite newsletter-writers are on Substack, it doesn’t place any limitations on what folks can write, which means it helps publicize some really horrendous views. That has made me less than thrilled about beginning to publish with them. I do, however, want to keep sending this thing to you lovely people—many of whom have been kind enough to stick with me as subscribers for years, bless you—and for the archives to persist in some kind of publicly perusable format. Which I’ve now achieved. We did it, Joe, dot gif. Except the import worked imperfectly: while things look okay on Substack, the Beehiiv versions have neither paragraph breaks nor images, and of course all the links to other TinyLetters will soon be dead. I could manually update all the posts to fix this—and perhaps will do so someday—but this migration has already taken a huge chomp out of my precious discretionary time. As has narrating this saga. And so I will leave well enough alone for now.

PHOTO TIME

Hiding amid the panoply of pics featuring my child that define my phone’s camera roll, I found this late-January still life of the clutter on our kitchen island that I’d totally forgotten about. It feels like a nice accompaniment to this latest set of musings: an entirely unintentional assemblage of objects, none of which (aside from the fruit platter and faucet) have persisted—and yet also a scene where I saw some beauty worth preserving.