Offering yourself a "yes"

trying redirection this week

There is this meme I think about often, about how a cat is just some guy who lives in your house and doesn’t speak your language and you’re in love. 

This is certainly true for us. Kitty is, at her core, just some guy who lives in our house. Recently we have unlocked the secret to having her sit on your lap, which is to place Tim’s green and white blanket over yourself and speak sweetly to her. If you build it, she will come. 

She is so delightful in these moments that it lessens the acrid frustration of all the times when she is annoying as hell. 

It’s easy to get frustrated, but this unconditional attention and devotion is what I’ve promised her. She didn’t sign up for anything, she was just an orange fluff behind a supermarket in a town in North Carolina when she got scooped up. She is, as we often say, just a little kitty. She knows not what she does or why she does it (because she’s hungry or tired, usually, because she is a little baby).

How much of love is connected to the tiny acts of care, to paying attention when you’d rather not, doing the thing even when you don’t want to? 

Kitty is just a silly little guy!

I’m thinking about this in relation to the other thing we remind each other – cats respond better to a “yes” than a “no.” When she scratches the couch, or tries to swat a crystal off the high shelf next to the couch, she is looking for a reasonable alternative. She is looking for a yes.

I wonder about offering reasonable alternatives to myself. It’s the same when I’m doing something I shouldn’t, like staring at my phone too late, or not going for the walk that I should take, or spiraling about all the ways my body is not cooperating, or reading helplessly about concerted efforts to deny the existence of Long Covid during #LongCovidAwarenessMonth.¹ Doing the things that make me feel like I’m spinning my wheels, getting all revved up and out of my body without actually taking any meaningful action or reaching a satisfying resolution. 

Can I offer myself a reasonable alternative in those moments? A yes to redirect that energy and attention? 

Some ideas:

• Going for the walk 

• Picking up my English paper piecing (hexies <3) 

• Stretching or doing my PT exercises 

• Calling my reps for the zillionth time about a ceasefire, or about keeping masks in healthcare, or about funding for Long Covid 

• Participating in one of the many LC letter-writing campaigns detailed in the recent edition of

  Teams Human

• Drinking some water 

Instead of the emotional equivalent of pressing on the bruise, can I give myself space to choose another option? What’s more, can I do it with that same quality of love and devotion that I use with Kitty, instead of with castigation and disappointment and a sense of failed discipline? I would like to try that, this week.

The Sew Zone

After much back and forth, my machine is still at the shop. But! The problem has been identified and I think I will get it back soon.

In the meantime I’ve picked up the hexies I dove into in the fall. How nice! Here they are. These are 1 inch hexies, lovingly glue-basted and sewn by hand. I have a shoebox full of the fabric and paper pieces that will make up this quilt.

hexiesssss

I have been joking that this will end up being my life’s work because it really does take a long time to sew these. Also, my god, 1 inch is so small! But it’s a good change of pace.

Consuming

Watching

• Girls 5eva – wow, ok! I am singing the title track over and over again. 

• Beanpole. I didn’t watch this when it came out in 2019 and I feel conflicted about watching a Russian movie given the ongoing war, but I did pick this recently. There are so many details that are very specific to post-WWII Russia that I wonder how non-Russian audiences understood the movie. There is a Very Bad Thing that happens early on in the movie that is very upsetting. But I can’t stop thinking about this one. 

• It’s American woodcock season in the Northeast and so we tried to spot one at a conservation area nearby on Saturday at dusk. I think we heard it peenting twice! There’s still more time to try to see them. 

Reading 

• I finished up The Book of Love and I really loved it! Kelly Link #1 fan 

• The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen – I am really enjoying this exploration of what life can look like with a platonic partnership at the center. It is aspirational, for sure!

Listening

• New! Kacey! Musgraves! Also Golden Hour — I had never listened to that album before last September and this morning I listened to it again and just felt so overcome and weepy.

• Canto Ostinato. This is apparently a composition by Simeon ten Holt, but I am very very into the Erik Hall recording from the last few years, on piano and electric piano and organ. John Cage-y. The artwork for this album also makes me happy, I look at it and think, quilt.

Eating 

• Been very into protein salads lately. Your egg salads, your tuna salads, your smoked trout salads. If you have a good one, please send it my way?

• I also made a big dumb pot roast yesterday – Mississippi roast – and it was very salty and very tasty.

xoxo
mvp

1. For an in-depth look at this, I recommend this recent edition of

The Gauntlet

, if you can stomach it.