Everything is so noisy

The gap between boredom and quietude

The too-much-ness of every point in 2024 is meme-worthy at this point: the holidays are too much, summer is too much, fall, I’d say, is where everything is maximally too much. Today is Julian’s 7th birthday and October is definitely too much in our house. Everyone’s birthday is either happening or imminent; it’s one long occasion that risks of depleting rather than energizing. As Jacob says: “we’re at risk of having too much cake.” 

At this point, all the anticipation I had of the routine that I thought would come with the start of school has burned away. At first there’s was no childcare after school, then an avalanche of reasons school is closed: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Indigenous People’s Day, some DOE day that leads to the fourth non-full week of the school year, Halloween, and so on. Activities kick into high gear, everyone’s back, everyone’s visiting. What is routine?

On any given day, you get reminders about how you don’t have school on a particular day next week. You get an email about how you can sign up for one of forty-six day-long (but actually only 6 hours long) “camps” in Brooklyn, for the low, low price of $150 per child, making that a $300 “day” for six hours minus the commute time. You get reminders to donate to Kamala, a newsletter about the devolving state of Bennifer, a text — 7 texts— about the sale (always a sale! Always about to end!) at Hanna Andersson, and you stop to think about how the kids might need or want halloween pajamas, but how by the time they arrive it’s already time for a holiday set.

There are reminders from the dentist, the car insurance (needs to be renewed), the teachers (please bring in supplies if your last name starts with A-K), about volunteering at the school’s fall festival, about the lice checks happening at school (oh lord), and all the newsletters you may or may not remember subscribing to at one point. There are headlines, videos, and posts about the war—the wars—the election, the hurricane, another hurricane. With this influx comes anticipatory dread, reactionary dread, helplessness dread, existential dread, survivor guilt, haplessness, hopelessness, maybe a tiny, tiny bit of hope, when certain things go less terribly than expected.  

You pause, and go to a meeting, which is both the reprieve and the actual work.

During a very long, bumper-to-bumper car ride on Saturday, while driving upstate, Julian spoke stream-of-consciousness about Minecraft for at least two continuous hours. “Let me tell you about the end. The nether. The sword of the cosmos is my favorite weapon. I know how to craft it now because I got the super weapons mod. Mama, what do you think my favorite ingot is? I want to play in a flat world. What do you think is my favorite material from a mod? What if I craft the sword of the cosmos but I’m not in a flat world? What do you think happens if put red stone on magma? Did you know that I can make my glass more prismatic? Did you know that C might not be my friend anymore because he doesn’t love the sword of the cosmos as much as I do?”

Ada is reading and Jacob and I are trying to drown out what is a constant din of Minecraft-themed white noise with music, but Julian is happy to have a fully one-sided conversation because nobody can even remotely answer his questions. He keeps going and going. We commend Ada for her incredible patience and she looks at us and nods, seeming much more than 2 years older in these moments.

Ada, upon arrival, wants my help sewing some buttons onto a piece of fabric. She is making a skirt to wear to her first, big concert tonight: Billie Eilish She wants help cleaning her earrings. She reminds me she wants me to take her to the dentist the next time she has to go, not her dad, to deal with all the cavities she has from sneaking candy into her bed that’s led to at least four catastrophically stressful appointments. She wants me to sit next to her while she does her homework, which is, bafflingly, learning cursive, but also not to help her, or offer feedback. Similarly, I’m also to sit within 5 feet of the keyboard while she practices a song called The French Doll. It’s quite beautiful, but also another source of constant sound, and then she switches to play it with pedals, then in orchestral mode, and after 15 minutes of hearing her play the same page of a song over and over I have to step away. After the piano Ada wants to listen to Chappell Roan and Julian wants to listen to sea shanties so they make a playlist that goes back and forth, which is a special kind of auditory whiplash.

For all the camp ads and promo emails and school events you ignore, there are the hundreds, or thousands, of needs and wants you can’t ignore, and have to mentally calibrate how to handle: finding new health insurance, figuring out who is picking up whom, and thinking to some degree—in advance—of how many meetings you need to move to make it all work. You find some capacity to talk about Minecraft or at least let Minecraft be talked about to you, and even to occasionally ask a question from a place of actual patience. You remember to check your voting address. Jacob makes the brownies for Julian’s birthday. You remember to bring in the school supplies. You remember to get more dishwasher detergent on the way home. 

Sometimes I think about the incessant conversation around childhood boredom — and how they need more of it — and think about how adult quietude is so hard to come by. They’re not exactly the same — boredom and quiet — but our inability to sit in quiet because of the constant hum of distraction—news cycles, jobs, text threads, work to be done, children — make me think that to be good at “being bored,” we need to create drastically more space for quiet. Maybe this is the only way to cultivate focus in a catastrophically distracting world, one that’s eaten up the space for pause, and left no space for awe and wonder, nor any space to sit with grief and empathy. One way to focus is to cut through the noise, but there’s increasingly more of it. Another is to leave more space, of every kind.

During the pandemic, I remember having what felt like a years-long state of chronic illness. When Jacob would ask me what it felt like, it felt like pure overstimulation— like every nerve in my body and brain were firing at once, in a fight against each other. Excessive sensation. My best antidote for escaping both my own mind and escaping the constant stream was to lose myself in activities that required physical exertion because it was the main way to escape my mind. I don’t just mean exercise but also anything with my hands, like baking, yard work, ceramics, hiking and running and this year, playing a lot of tennis. Mundane, repetitive, tactile catharsis. This is, of course, just my own methodology of quiet-making, in what often feels like a folly of an aspiration.

I envy my kids the most in this way — especially Julian. For all the endless noise and mess they create, and are sucked into, and for the incessant talking and their needs and needs and needs, he can escape into a world of deep, uninterruptible concentration—making things, reading, ignoring us and the world to an astounding degree, making something in completion from beginning to end in one sitting, whether studying a leaf, or finding ecstasy in a shell, a Lego build. The other day we were egging him to get outside even though he was calmly reading a book on the couch. Exasperated, he yelled: “Can’t I just….be HERE? I am peaceful!” It’s a gift of immersion and continuity you don’t know until it’s gone; to catch a glimpse is a reminder it is both fleeting and worth finding a way to preserve. 

---

Perhaps it goes without saying, but: check if you’re registered to vote, go vote, send a postcard to voters, check if you friends/family are registered to vote, make some calls, find an action near you.

---

Recommendations:

• To see / read: Maira Kalman has a beautiful new book out, Still Life with Remorse, a memoir of sorts, tracing family history through anecdotes and paintings. There’s an accompanying exhibit at Mary Ryan Gallery that opens tomorrow.

• To subscribe: Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s new Substack, Looking at Picture Books. This recent newsletter on Margaret Wise Brown’s writing, “Are Five Year Olds Better At Reading” is a true gem.

JON: Children’s stories are often shorter, or simpler on their surface, than stories for adults. But that’s not because kids are simpler creatures—their stories are allowed to be that way because kids are able to carry more than adults in their relationship with a book. As authors we can give them just a little bit, and we can trust them to inhabit it and run with it in all the directions we hope for, and many more besides. Adults need you to do so much more to feel engaged.

• To watch: “My Old Ass” with Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella. Extremely well done, very funny, great writing, terrible film name

• To watch: "The Wild Robot,” the film adaptation of the Peter Brown book. We saw this on a rainy day last weekend it was incredibly well done. It will also make you weep. My kids did, annoyingly, point out every minor difference between the book and movie, but I guess that’s why I made them read it first.

• To eat: The bread and straciatella at Rolo’s in Ridgewood (same folks behind Radio Bakery). Best bite of the year. The 2-sheet lasagna with crispy top also top notch.

• Speaking of food: Eater has a new app, and based on early poking around, it’s going to be extremely useful for finding food when you end up on some random cross-streets and want something decent.

• To read: Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often by Darby Saxbe for the NYT. Hard agree with all of it.

• To read: Priyanka Mattoo’s essay, Anchor Babies: How are we meant to experience joy right now?, about finding a glimmer of connectivity and reconciling horror with joy—for, and in the face of—our kids.

• !!!: That NY Liberty game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer by Sabrina Ionescu, and also from GQ: How the WNBA Became the Most Fun, Complicated, and Exciting League in Sports.

• To read: I finished Intermezzo (Sally Rooney) and … it’s fine? I would watch the TV version, which she already said she’s not making, but will admit I found the last 50 pages, and the urgent and repetitive exclusion of pronouns with very punctuated sentences moderately annoying to read. I would have liked to have loved *any* of the characters more. That said, I can appreciate that she has other intentions. This is a good conversation from The Paris Review with Merve Emre where she says:

Throughout my work, rather than writing about characters, I write about dynamics. I always find it funny when people say “That’s an interesting character,” or “That’s a good character,” because I don’t think a character has any intrinsic value. Every person is intrinsically interesting, but in a novel, what gives a character power is their relation to others, and how those relations change. - Sally Rooney

• Currently Reading: Continuing on my young, Irish writers bender with The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue, which is very fun so far.

• The kids are reading: The Amulet series, Sophie Escabasse’s new graphic novel, Taxi Ghost, Wonder by RJ Palacio, the Heartstopper series (again), etc etc etc

• To bake: These chocolate oat walnut cookies from Liz Prueitt of Tartine fame, which I admittedly haven’t baked yet but am definitely planning to.

• To bake: This sticky apple upside down cake from Alison Roman, which is great but dare I say could actually use slightly more sugar. I’d do 1/3 cup in the pan and a 1/2 - 2/3 cup in the batter. I also subbed in some almond flour.

Recommendations, please:

• What are some great essays / longform journalism you’ve read lately?

• What’s the best birthday cake recipe? (Leaning chocolate, but open-minded)