Emchap's Shit from the Internet 03/10/21 š
In a cheerful coincidence, newsletter night this week falls on my 30th birthday, which I have so far spent walking around with a friend and eating, which are my two favorite activities. I have been given both just a bajesus-ton of scotch and neon green crocs to use as outside slippers, which really feels like a full circle version of what adulthood is, which is nice. Iāve received very kind words from a variety of people and I feel very loved.
I have wanted to be 30 since I was 10, so to have it here feels slightly surreal, particularly given that under other circumstances I would be having a very different birthday than the one I had. (Yāall I would have breathed so many peopleās air and eaten so much dim sum.) But it rained and there was a rainbow, which in southern California seems like a good omen, and I saw a bunny in the garden I was at with my friend, and so many people have been so kind to me.
I took the week off work and have been spending it doing various relaxing things, and one of those was reading Gaudy Night, a detective mystery written more than 80 years ago. Though nominally a novel about Peter Wimsey (itās his series), the bookās narrator is actually his love interest, who he helped save from a wrongful execution when her ex-boyfriend was murdered, subsequently proposed to, and then got mega-shot-down by because she thinks gratitude is a bad foundation for a marriage and thinks he just wants her because sheās grateful.
Theyāve remained friends for five years and sort of been dating in the way that everyone is sort of dating in a historical context in which the options are āundifferentiated friendsā and āengaged,ā and are very attracted to each other in a way thatās obvious to all the other characters. He proposes every so often and she says no.
It is an unexpectedly horny book for something so oldāIām used to my beloved Jeeves and Wooster books and as far as I can tell no Wodehouse character has ever had sex in their lives. Versus this scene, where the protagonist realizes that in fact she has made the terrible choice of falling in love with this dude:
Accepting rebuke, he relapsed into silence, while she studied his half-averted face. Considered generally, as a faƧade, it was by this time tolerably familiar to her, but now she saw details, magnified as it were by some glass in her own mind. The flat setting and fine scroll-work of the ear, and the height of the skull above it. The glitter of close-cropped hair where the neck-muscles lifted to meet the head. A minute sickle-shaped scar on the left temple. The faint laughter-lines at the corner of the eye and the droop of the lid at its outer end. The gleam of golden down on the cheek-bone. The wide spring of the nostril. An almost imperceptible beading of sweat on the upper lip and a tiny muscle that twitched the sensitive corner of the mouth. The slight sun-reddening of the fair skin and its sudden whiteness below the base of the throat. The little hollow above the points of the collar-bone.
He looked up; and she was instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water. Through the confusion of her darkened eyes and drumming ears some enormous bulk seemed to stoop over her. Then the mist cleared. His eyes were riveted upon the manuscript again, but he breathed as though he had been running.
It is, as the teens say, erotique. (It reads like really intense early-2000s X Files fanfiction. Itās great.)
The book has a whole murder plotline which is beside the point (I love detective books and donāt care about the mysteries at all), but when itās not focused on that and is instead Peter and Harriet Hang Out In a Boat or Buy a Chess Set or Discuss Their Complicated Relationships With Their Family, it becomes a legitimately fascinating book about what someone whoās well into adulthood (sheās in her 30s, heās 45; sheās a successful author and heāsā¦ rich in a hereditary fashion but also solves crimes?) gives up by potentially getting married.
The tension in the book isnāt between whether sheāll pick him or another man, but between whether sheāll pick marriage (to him, specifically) and the vulnerability it entails or whether sheāll stay independent and become an academic at her old college. The author makes this a very real-seeming dilemma by having Harriet spend a lot of time with women whoāve made the second choice who seem happy with it, and who she admires.
But itās his series, and heās a very compelling romantic lead, and so she goes with him; thereās a very cute proposal scene that I had to translate because itās in Latin and I didnāt go to Oxford.
Though of course the tension at the middle of it doesnāt apply to me (you cannot force me to go to grad school I swear to god and so far no handsome gentleman detective has offered to marry me), the entire idea of what one gives up by making a particular choice reminded me so tremendously of this old Dear Sugar column about ghost shipsāthe idea that so often in life there isnāt a correct choice, just the one you made and that life that it gives you, versus the million other possible lives you could have lead, passing in the night. The problem remains resonant because itās a problem of being a human with a finite number of hours, but I was surprised by how much it struck me when reading. It remains a modern-feeling book because the problem at its core is a human one.
Not related to any of the above but Iām performing at a Zoom comedy show this Saturday, and all interested are welcome.
Shit to read
The pandemic is rotting our brains.
Inject it into my veins.
Shit to eat
Have someone deliver an unexpected cookie cake to you.
Eat the cake.
Thatās it, thatās the entire recipe.
Shit to listen to
This sort of chiptune-y song named after the dessert Iāve eatenā¦ so much of this week.
Shit to buy
Crocs, apparently.