Greetings, friends.
Once again I come to you caveating that it’s a weird time to write what’s supposed to be a breezy li’l missive in which I share links to my writing alongside (ideally) humorous anecdotes about my life. As you’ve probably noticed, everything is, uhhh bad? And as you may remember from the last time I sent one of these things out, just under year ago, I’ve been dealing with a major downer in my personal life too.
I finally wrote about my friend who died, in a piece that I’m incredibly proud of, for The Stopgap. I hope you’ll read it.
But I can’t let this newsletter’s whole schtick become Meditations on Some Bummers, so I’m going to pivot away from that topic, as clumsy as it feels. By way of transition, I’ll share a link to something that my friend & I definitely both read back in the day, & that—in tone & vibe—reminds me of what we were like together in our best moments: an entry from Caity Weaver & Rich Juzwiak’s “The Best Restaurant in New York” series, which has been heroically rescued from dead-website obscurity by the good folks at the Gawker Archives. It’s impossible for me to pick a favorite—they’re all just as funny as they were when I first read them over a decade ago—but the one linked above is a late enough installment that it has a robust array of links in the “Previously” section at the bottom. Read ’em on your lunch break & pretend it’s 2015 again!
By contrast, the best I can say about 2026 thus far (which has been impossibly cold & snowy even by the standards of the notoriously cold & snowy biome where I reside) is that I’m finally catching up on inessential but useful tasks that have been lowkey plaguing me, & it’s been truly restorative. To pull myself out of an endless torpor of “what if I just did something fun & relaxing instead,” I rely a bit more on shame as a motivator than is probably healthy—but after years of microdosing it, I’ve built up a corresponding immunity to the scolding voice in my head when it’s reminding me about something that’s not a priority.
This system works okay, but even if I’m mostly tuning out the quiet buzz that indexes un-completed projects, it sure is nice to actually shut it off entirely. Take that, mental to-do list: I have mended the firefighter PJs my kindergartener wore to school on Halloween, & his light grey sweatpants, & the pair of uniform pants that have been out of commission for weeks due to an explicable hole. Like so many tasks in this category, the amount of time I spent periodically worrying over them far eclipsed the minimal time & effort it took to get them taken care of, but at least that means my sense of achievement is correspondingly outsized.
And while I’m championing small victories, I kicked off the New Year by finding two bras that I thought I’d lost: one, literally on January 1st (it was—wait for it—exactly where it was supposed to be in a drawer I open nearly daily, but somehow rendered invisible to me for weeks?), & the other, inexplicably shoved (by me) into the bag where we store our kid’s air mattress, clearly a casualty of my recurrent bad habit of seizing a momentarily convenient storage option with the false assumption I will remember having done so. I was certain I’d left it behind somewhere on a road trip last summer, but no! It was waiting for me to rediscover it all along.
Another victory is that I’m pushing past my discomfort with writing about “my bras” in a semi-public venue. My mom still teases me about how she had to start calling them “top underwear” after I got stricken by tween embarrassment on a shopping trip & banned her use of the more technical term (even though we were IN the underwear section at the time, & probably not in earshot of anyone else). I am well past 40 & have gestated an entire human being & I am standing here in my power to tell you that I currently own upwards of several bras, which I wear on the chest part of my human body. Sometimes, I even know the location of every single one—like right now!
I also discovered a plastic car my kid had been missing since last summer (at least!) while doing some post-Christmas toy reorganization, so with that trifecta complete there are no longer ANY missing items in my household. Not to say that I know where everything we own currently is, but there’s nothing I’m periodically hunting for & beating myself up over having lost—& that is a victory I’m happy to take.
If I were a character in a novel, you’d probably get points with your English teacher if you pointed out that I was focusing on small acts of domestic repair & cataloging as a way of grappling with a broader reality that feels both hostile & beyond my control. You’d also roll your eyes at the heavyhanded symbolism in the scene of me typing this—wind howling outside, kicking up clouds of snow—when I startled at a loud sound: a cache of gigantic icicles falling off my roof. (We get it, author, she’s SCARED ABOUT ICE. You didn’t have to make her house literally surrounded by it.)
Our Current MomentTM makes it challenging to offer upbeat advice that wends toward optimism, even though that’s what I feel obliged to do. But if there’s a theme here, it’s “do what you can, forgive what you can’t.” Tackle the long-simmering stuff when you have some downtime & need a productivity win, but don’t judge yourself too harshly when you simply need to collapse. You are, if you’re reading this, almost certainly overwhelmed in at least one or two areas of your life, likely more. Unless you need a targeted dose of shame to accomplish an essential, time-sensitive task, spare yourself the self-recrimination.
It’s gonna be a long winter, but I’ll see you again on the other side.
~court
PHOTO TIME
Just like last year, I snapped this on our family’s January road trip—between my miraculous bra-findings—in a hotel bathroom. I call it Accept That It’s Not Gonna Work Out.
