Things I Have Loved (in spite of all this despair)

A belated hello! One year after making this newsletter, I never wrote again. Common theme in my life… how many journal entries have I started with “long time, no write”? It’s a curse! But whatever. I’m just a human.

This last week I’ve kind of felt in Hell. Nico and I spent the weekend in amazing Kendall County, Texas, celebrating my friend Kendall’s 28th birthday (the author of Kendall County, a Substack worth reading). It made me think that more people should host crazy, incredible birthday parties when they turn pretty uneventful ages. Why wait until 30 or 50 when you could invite 15 of your friends down to the Texas Hill County to have a pickleball tournament, shoot skeet, drink lots of Lone Star beer, and dance underneath the flashing lights of a party box to celebrate turning 28 or 33 or 46? That’s something I love about my friends. They teach me to live my life like it is my fucking life. This is inspiration I need as we enter into Trump’s presidency, and all day long I think about school districts sending instructions to teachers about what to do if ICE shows up to their classroom doors or public health agencies being told to stop all communication. When I look up, I see my friends teaching me to live my life like it is my life, and this life must include radical, transgressive bravery and loving my friends and allowing them to love me.

Other than that, I don’t have much else to say, but here are some photos that have been helping me look up:

These huge ass dinosaurs in the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Wow! I am so small!

My new bedroom setup. Our friend Reed built this bed frame for us using only hand tools! And it is topped with a beautiful quilt stitched together by our friend Liesl. How?! What?! We are showered with love.

After Nico’s godson was baptized, we were expecting cookies in the fellowship hall. Absolutely not! We were treated to a Filipino feast, including this whole hog.

Nico’s parents’ amazing, colorful, bold living room. I can’t stop thinking about how I want a bright blue living room now.

Finally, this scene from out of a movie. Cally, Jace, and I were walking the mile back to the ranch when we turned back and were met with a gaggle of friends. In this photo, there are folks living in NYC, Austin, Nashville, Memphis, and Detroit. All for a 28th birthday!

I think that’s all. I’m living in a web of love and distress and kindness and lying in bed and standing underneath the sun and despair and hope. I hope I can remember to keep looking up.