So I took a second (third?) sabbatical. My nicer computer broke earlier this year and I have been trying to get by with a mostly broken one, and by trying to get by I mean suffering with perceived (not real) dignity. It only works plugged in, the W and 2 keys are broken, and is running on a very old operating system that did not allow me to update Chrome, which was so slow on some websites that it would overheat and shut off if I try to use them. Like Goodreads .. funny because I also think Goodreads sucks and is stupid, but I like to keep track of what I am reading, just because I simply adore all forms of tracking. I did what any sane person could do in the face of a broken laptop and got addicted to Tiktok. I don’t have Instagram, and X the everything app is simply too strange and nazi-esque to spend a long time on. Not Tiktok though! I was learning so much about fake nutrition science (a passion of mine), yoga flows, weird workouts, and a TON of what I eat in a day (WIEAD). But for some reason, screentime on a computer makes me feel busy and successful, while screentime on phone makes me feel like a hunched over idiot purposely poisoning myself.

I have been thinking a lot about eggs, both the proverbial and literal. Putting all one’s eggs in a singular basket. Hard-boiled eggs. The price of eggs. The science of what they do in baking. The eggs below the dove nesting outside my kitchen window. Mostly the last one, mainly because I loved her dearly. I grew up with lovebirds as pets in the kitchen, and my mother and I would sing to them every night before we covered their cage with towels. It was “Good Night Ladies” from The Music Man, except we would sing “Good Night Jack and Sam” instead. I thoroughly enjoy The Music Man, not enough to watch it as an adult, but enough to think fondly of Marian the librarian, especially with things like:

• Now don’t dawdle, Amaryllis

• She made BRAZEN OVERTURES to a man who didn’t have a friend in this town ‘til she came here! Oh yes! That woman made BRAZEN OVERTURES with a gilt-edged guarantee… She had a golden glint in her eye and a silver voice with a counterfeit ring. Just melt her down and you’ll reveal a lump of lead as cold as steel - HERE - where a woman’s H E A R T should be!

The dove nesting right next to my stove became my little pet - I loved saying good morning and good night to her, and asking her how she was. But one day she and the eggs were just gone. It was strange, I was home and I didn’t hear a squabble, or the sound of a squirrel or a crow or anything, they were just there and then suddenly gone, so I don’t know what happened. But it has always been difficult for me not to take things like that as omens. Two years ago in June a stray cat died in the grass outside the kitchen windows of the apartment where I lived, and as it decomposed I found a new place to live.

So sometimes we can’t help that all our eggs are in one basket. Maybe we only have one basket at that point in time. Maybe there is only one egg. We don’t all have the luxury of many eggs, and many baskets. How is one meant to rebuild baskets?

Eggs ostensibly turn into live offspring. I have always thought of the idea of having children difficult to disentangle from my own idyllic childhood. I think of it in film photos, in little Hanna Andersson striped pajamas, as me becoming my mother, with a child that is just myself as a little girl. The idea of me, I am ~now~, becoming a potential mother, the place where I live forming someone’s earliest memories, is more challenging to wrap my head around. It seems like a lot of responsibility, a very very large egg in a tiny and fragile basket. In Notes to John, Didion’s private notes (to John) are regarding her meetings with a psychiatrist, which stemmed from a situational depression due to her daughter Quintana’s alcoholism and personality disorder. Didion strikes an impressive figure in that her private journals don’t betray a self that is different from the one she projected to the public in her novels and essays. She describes years of almost constant situations where her daughter is in crisis, and the impact this has on her. Knowing that it ends with her husband’s deadly heart attack, just months after the last journal entry, and then dissolves into her daughter’s long illness and death, makes it very poignant and depressing. I can’t, or maybe I all too easily can, imagine how complicated these parental relationships can get. That even after your child’s 38th birthday, you might be stuck in psychoanalysis for years to discuss what your Mother or Father did or didn’t do, and why those things may have led to seemingly insignificant choices that eventually led to your daughter’s long term mental illness. I do recommend the book if you are interested in Didion or psychoanalysis. I like that her psychiatrist says that she needs to act cheerful to be cheerful, and that working is the best way to banish her depression and anxiety.

Lately its been quick cry, pilates, another cry, coffee (matcha), GO. But seriously I can’t stop crying in public, and then I get angry because people look at me. I am reading Ulysses for the first time but want to read Agatha Christie instead (lazy), so have been doing one of my favorite things and reading the Wikipedia plot summaries for her mystery novels and trying to guess the murderer before its revealed. This works because by the time I am an old (or just older) woman, and less snobbish about what I read, I will likely have forgotten enough to enjoy the actual novels.

Here is a recipe for 6 egg sandwiches that can be stored in advance. They are good for meal prep. If you have time, double the recipe and freeze half for a rainy day. I also see people doing this kind of prep in their last month of pregnancy to fill the freezer for early newborn days.