Dear Darling Ones,
Today has been an annoying shit show. It’s one of those days where I have zero emotional capacity to deal with any minor inconvenience and there have been 828 minor inconveniences. I will not bore you with the details. They are so inconsequential that when I talked to my friend EM on the phone she laughed at my pettiness.
This morning I had a call with one of my long-time, sporadic clients. She’s a hoot, runs an excellent nonprofit, and is so comfortable in our working relationship she drops the word fuck in our conversations on the reg. My clients who are not afraid to say the f-word are my favorite. Also, 99% of my clients will say the f-word because I only work with the totally rad.
Today between talking about actual work and other stuff she said, “You’re an interesting person.”
I was taken aback. Me? Interesting? I’m not, as they say on the TikTok for reasons I haven’t quite discerned, a main character. As I often joke with Sister #2, I’m the Mary to her Laura, the Jackie to her Roseanne, and the Beezus to her Ramona. At best I’m a guest star on a very special episode where everyone learns not to bully the fat girl.
So yeah, totally taken aback. So aback that I was quiet for so long she thought maybe the call got dropped.
What I thought in response: Not really, I’m just so starved for human attention* that I’m literally dying and will be as witty as possible in an effort to extend this conversation 30 seconds. Not really, but I have turned my trauma and sadness into humorous anecdotes to distract people & myself from that actual trauma and sadness.
What I said in response: “Thank you.”
For the record, I find myself endlessly fascinating and super amusing. I crack myself up on an hourly basis and sometimes even compliment myself on my wit. However, most of this doesn’t translate to other humans.
What was so nice about this little exchange is that I felt seen. So seen in ways I haven’t felt in a long time because I have no interacted with people who aren’t related to me in forty-four fortnights.**
In other news, today I got a signed 45 of Amanda Shires & Jason Isbell’s duet “The Problem” and it makes me smile every time I think about it and I cannot wait to frame it and put it on the wall of my dining room which is gonna resemble a super nerdy hardrock cafe after Christmas. I can’t wait to show you.
Jodi
*I feel like this is a little bit of a misnomer, because I talk on the phone with friends every weekend. But still. . . Sunday to Thursday is a long damn time. I frequently don’t interact with anyone on those days and feel untethered to this earth. It’s hard.
**a slight exaggeration. I really love fortnight as a measurement of time and I’m gonna bring it back in 2021.