write me well

Category: Weekly Blog

  • The Terrifying Thing About Content

    Content. Whoof. There’s a word to casually instill fear on an otherwise unassuming Monday morning. I have fought many mediocre battles in my life, but the battle to create content is my longest-standing, and right now it’s sitting right around Kathy: 0, Content: 1,000,000. 

    Any time you find something to measure your self-worth with, life gets terrifying real quick. For (my type of) creative, the definitive measure of self-worth is the ability to create things that interest some section of the general populous. The bar for this ability feels Everest-high, unachievable, the sort of thing you have to pay a Sherpa thousands of dollars to help you every step of the you’ll-probably-die-on-the-journey way. It takes one flip through a glossy magazine for me to feel equally inspired and idiotic. 

    But then, enter the internet. A quick scroll through any feed and the retina is greeted by articles, listicles, and content of a fairly non-threatening variety. It feels somewhat accessible and, dare I think it, achievable! Suddenly the bar is lowered, temptingly so, and you sit there and go, “Y’know, I can do that. If an article of reposted Tumblr memes can get clicks, then I, too, can get clicks!” 

    So you do the thing. You sit down at the coffee shop with your latte, artisanal sourdough toast, and whipped honey butter, and do your damnedest to write some bona fide interesting content.  

    And THAT’S when it happens. WHAM – you realize something so deafening, so critically offensive, that you don’t know how to handle it.  

    You don’t have anything all that interesting to say.  

    Worse, and perhaps just applicable to me, you realize something more terrifying: you do have something interesting to say, but interesting is a relative term, and your relative version of it is that everything you have to say somehow relates to the pop culture of years 1995-2008 – those in which your own culture was cold-pressed, fermented, grown, whatever – and if there is one thing that paying websites aren’t interested in, it’s really, really specific nattering about Meg Ryan films and how underrated the film Titan A.E. is.  

    What’s so terrifying about content is that like any slice of self-reflection put out for the masses, it gets held up to the lens of everyone else’s standards. What you thought was cool is not cool according to MaryUnicorn007 or Stan McClusky from Bend, Oregon. It’s definitely not cool or interesting to the Huffington Post, or Vogue, or Vice. So as you throw your 1,500 words out into the great void that is the internet, you hear them knock, hollow and unexpectedly, against a back wall you never saw, before clattering to the floor where your mother and sisters will be the only ones to ever read them.  

    Content. Maybe the content itself isn’t terrifying, but what everyone is about to think, or not think, about it, certainly is.   

    What turns that terror into beauty is that it so, deeply, profoundly, doesn’t fucking matter. Yeah, it does if you’re trying to pay the rent with it. But ask any freelancer, any writer that’s managed to go from hobby to hustle to full-time gig, and they’ll tell you that if great money is solely what you’re after, you’re in the wrong trade. Writers write to relate to others. To get their thoughts out there to help others. To form a club of cool losers who are on the same page about this one particular thing. To brighten a day or educate a stranger. And they’re right: if you want to get rich, you’re in the wrong trade. Which brings me to why I stopped stressing about content and made this very website happen. 

    If there is any one thing you can find that increases the likelihood of a smile, why on earth wouldn’t you want more of it in your life? It’s nobody’s business how interesting that smile-starter is to other humans. Put it out there if it makes you happy. Put it out there if it’s only going to get one unique view per day (from you, when you check the website to remind yourself that yes, it was the best idea to pick that font for the header, because look at how fucking amazing it looks). Create content for you, in every facet of your life, and you can’t come out the other end a loser. Or at least, if you do, I’ll think you’re a very cool loser.  

    There’s been a bit of an unaddressed hiatus here at Viv + Kit for the past few months, and to be honest, it’s because my life has been a bit of a shambles since July 27, 2019. I haven’t been able to get ahead of things or find balance or have great vision and control since my dad died and my work got unexpectedly unstable. It’s been a fear of being interesting, of creating content “worth” reading, that’s kept me off of here. I feel like a thorough fuck up right now – what on earth could I have to throw into the void that’s going to do anything for anyone?

    But sometimes the moments where you feel like all you’re doing is tripping from one fuck up to the next are the moments when you draw the best conclusions. Even if I don’t, the one thing I absolutely need more of in my life is what I love. What makes me smile. That has always been, and will always be, writing. So in a way, while it feels like the birth of this website two weeks before my life imploded was, shall we say, the most shit timing ever, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s exactly what I needed.  

    So stick around for the content, or don’t. I’ll still be here, creating it. Because that’s what makes me happy.  

  • I Promise I Don’t Hate Kids

    When tasked to come up with one thing that every human is universally good at, I’d love to pick something nice. Like being kind, thoughtful, or patient. (Or funny – we should all be so lucky. Imagine a world filled with John Mulaneys!) But in the glaring light of this blog post, not to mention the purposes of my own argument, I’m going to run with judging. Humans are universally good at judging. The more major the subject, task, or behavior, the more intense the judgement. Naturally it would only follow that for women, one of the most prevalent judgements we face is when we decide not to have children.

    It genuinely doesn’t seem to matter why we make that decision, or that of all decisions, this one in particular is the business of absolutely no one but the woman in question. But classic humanity: those very qualifiers obviously make it one of the most widely accepted topics to openly discuss. Prioritizing our careers. Deciding kids aren’t for us. Not being a fan of kids in general. Attempting to stave off overpopulation and reducing our carbon footprints. If there’s one thing you can rest assured when it comes to deciding not to have children, it’s that the majority of the populace will assure YOU that one day, many shriveled years (emphasis on shriveled) down the line, you will regret that decision.

    As a woman that’s fairly sure she won’t be reproducing at any point in her lifetime, I’ve read and enjoyed a large number of snappy comeback lists to just those assertions. Tumblr, Buzzfeed – the internet as a whole is full of them, and they’ve got some great rejoinders. (The internet is also apparently full of renaissance paintings infused with the face of Guy Fieri, something I discovered when trying to find a Mother/Daughter painting for the header of this post. Please go look at them.) Every list makes me laugh, but a friend linked one on Facebook a few weeks ago, and about six GIFs in, a nascent response from a fellow frustrated woman actually gave me pause. It mentioned that her least favorite presumption about us is that women that choose not to have children must, clearly, hate children.

    There aren’t a lot of decisions in the modern world that you can’t unmake. Your career, your education, your streaming subscription. Your marriage. Having pets. Buying a house. Short of those sins that come with a life sentence, pretty much anything can be reversed. But not having kids. That’s fairly obvious, right? Given that certainty, given the inescapable level of commitment that comes with having children, it’s kind of insane that choosing to have kids is a presumptive societal default. Really, it should be the reverse. Unless you’re absolutely over-the-moon certain that parenthood is for you, maybe we should encourage people to hold off.

    There’s no longer a question as to whether humans will survive (well, that’s not entirely true, but let’s just say running out of humans isn’t exactly our problem anymore). So why do we cling to the idea of everyone needing to have children? If anything, we should be grateful that some humans are willing to take one for the homo sapiens team and say “yeah nope” to progeny in general. But a practical argument is hardly guaranteed to stand up against these expectations, so it can be hard to be one of the women that “yeah nopes”. And like any circumstance when you’re judged unfairly, the most hurtful part of it is the conclusions people inevitably draw.

    I couldn’t give a shit that you think I’ll regret this in ten, twenty, thirty years. But I really wish people would stop thinking that just because I don’t want kids, I think they are the eleventh plague, that I’d rather die (or at least grimace) than hold a baby. Maybe, y’know, I’d just rather be Auntie Kathy than Mom. After all, being Mom is a helluva lot of responsibility. All of the things we lightly joke about on those rejoinder lists I’m actually quite serious about. Sure, I’ll never know the love of my own child, but it’s not going to kill me. The risk of what could happen if I did have kids and regretted THAT decision ten, twenty, thirty years down the line is potentially far more painful.

    So we’ve covered the fact that you can’t just assume I hate kids because I don’t want them. But something a lot less talked about, that is actually almost more of deterrent than the kids themselves, is how much I don’t like moms.

    There. I said it.

    It’s not quite that simple, because I don’t dislike all moms. Very far from it! Most moms are pretty great (shout out to mine, she’s one of them). But some moms…whoof. Some moms act like the primary requirement to joining their Motherhood Club is an enduring and unquestionable sense of self-righteousness. I just do not think I am ready to deal with that. I have no interest in being dragged into parenting strategy discussions. No interest in the judgement, almost more severe than what I would have faced had I not had children, that eventually follows when you meet a mom that doesn’t think you should be giving your kid potato chips. And I know. I KNOW: “You’ll never understand because you don’t have children.”

    Well, in the words of Chuck from Sons of Anarchy, I accept that.

    There are other ways to use the energy that mothers expend on loving their own children. I can’t argue that they’re equally fulfilling, but I would argue that they are equally admirable. Working with youth that don’t have supportive family systems. Fostering. Adopting. Volunteering. Or going to the other end of the spectrum – all of those people filled with decades upon decades of gut-wrenching and hilarious stories of their own, sitting in group homes with a weekly visit from family at most. Visiting them, talking with them, keeping them company. There are so many humans out there to love.

    Do I do all of those things? Absolutely not. (Is it physically possible to be that saintly?) But should I feel that I have an unused portion of my heart come my older years because I chose not to have my own kids, I am quite certain in my knowledge of my own spirit that engaging in any of the above would go far to make up the gap. Beyond that, I already have the luxury of (nearly!) two nieces to dote on ceaselessly. Somehow I doubt they’ll begrudge having an extra benefactor should it come down to it, and from what I’ve been given to understand, the Aunt Club is just a touch more chill than the Mom one.

    I am so excited to hear when my friends decide to have children and become mothers. I can’t say I’m passionate about changing diapers, but I’m happy to help and laugh when it’s an awful mess (Huggies are not my strong suit). I do think we should be more aware of how many more people this planet really needs, but I don’t believe restricting how many kids people have is the answer.

    I hope people are equally less judgmental of my decision to go childless, however much judging is their forte. I mean, maybe I will change my mind in ten minutes or three years. That’d be just fine too.

    Because when it comes down to it, there are no wrong answers to whether or not a woman wants to have children. But there is definitely a wrong way to respond.

  • Grief, Or Something Like It

    There are phone calls, and then there are phone calls.

    The second kind become great, memorable divides, minutes-long exchanges that separate Life Before and Life After. They’re the kind that tell you about something that’s already happened, while you’ve been blithely unaware, and suddenly the world shifts. You can’t unhave them and you can’t forget them. Saturday, July 27th, I got the second kind of phone call from my sister. Two transatlantic flights, one attempt to go back to work before I was ready, and some bone-deep jet lag later, I’m still coming to terms with the fact that my dad has died.

    When I went home to visit my family last February, I decided well in advance that I would try to specifically get my dad to engage. He was living with my mom and sister in Georgia and they were taking care of him, a task that became more mammoth as his Type II Diabetes (and stubborness) wore on. His behavior was the same unchanged pattern of the last seven trying years: solving puzzles online, reading articles online, and watching Netflix. Determined to squeeze something else out of him in the six days I visited, and with the resiliance of spirit of someone that didn’t have to deal with his increasingly difficult personality every day, I brought the game Catch Phrase.

    My family has always been terrible at enjoying each other’s complete company. Terrible is a strong word, but the truth of it is that there aren’t a lot of situations where all five of us in the same room ends up being much fun. But the surest fire way to achieve fun throughout childhood was a good card game. It was how my parents had passed their honeymoon and it was still a solid strategy three daughters later. Catch Phrase wasn’t a card game, but I thought it was a better bet, because it forced conversation. You can’t play Catch Phrase – basically $100,000 Pyramid in a pass-around electronic form – without talking to each other excessively. Ideally, also, it would involve a whole lot of laughing.

    Skeptical at first, my dad eventually acquiesced and the four of us sat in the living room, listening to John Anderson, playing Catch Phrase. And I will be forever grateful for that stupid little game, because in those few nights, I saw more of the old dad I remembered than I had seen in years. Sure, before and after he was unchanged, returning to his room and his puzzles once we’d finished. But the during – his thoughtful descriptions, his raised eyebrow at our own, less-than-thoughtful ones, the gleam of genuine amusement and following laughter when the buzzer went off the second he handed the game to my sister – the during I’ll remember forever.

    My dad was a wildly successful workaholic for the majority of my childhood. He’d been a regular full-time employee in the IBM-led tech world of the 1980’s before I was born, but for my entire memorable existence he’d been a charismatic contractor, selling his expertise to assorted companies across a variety of sectors. His contracts would take him all over the county, oftentimes all over the state, and they always paid him very well. My dad loved providing for his family and was fiercely passionate about it; he derived the majority of his joy in life from work, the sense of purpose and affluence it gave him, and most importantly, his ability to support his family. What he didn’t get from that (or our love, of course), he happily got from eating extraordinarily well. My dad was a big guy, and it took big food to keep him that way.

    There wasn’t much that stopped him, either, regardless of what he wanted. He had a steel will that was terrifying to behold, and not just as his child. I imagine dealing with my father in the workplace could be as horrifying as it was inspiring. He had a zero-tolerance policy for bull shit – a life motto of “No Surprises” and “You Can’t Fix Stupid” – that even extended to being too silly in the car. (During an ill-advised family road trip to Louisiana, one of only two such family vacations we went on in my entire childhood, we lost the privilege of going to a theme park on the way due to excessive silliness in the car.)

    In a family with a 4:1 female-to-male ratio, you’d think we would have ended up a pretty emotive, demonstrative bunch. But that was far from the truth. I never, ever doubted that my dad loved me. How he chose to show it, though, was in the way he provided for us, in the experiences he could give us, and from time to time, in a charming affability that made us realize that while poorly-timed silliness on our terms was something he had little patience for, silliness on his own terms was something he enjoyed sharing with us very much. The way my dad expressed love was usually never through words, and, not in the hollow way it sounds, almost always expressed through money. Taking us out to dinner. Paying for our favorite clothes and toys. Buying me an oboe after he’d just bought me a flute because I had the instrumental constancy of, well, an eleven year old. Dad loved us by spoiling us, and he loved it well.

    An imposing six-foot-three inches, confident, mustached, the definition of the sort of gentleman that can only buy his suits at the Big and Tall store: that was the guy I grew up with, and I was often in awe of him. We didn’t talk about a lot, but I loved listening to him, and most of my young memories of him are more of just going on rides with him than anything else. (He was a major fan of driving.) My sisters and I spent many an hour standing behind his office chair, peering at his computer monitor over his shoulder, impatient for him to finish explaining his newest Excel spreadsheet. And while we didn’t always have the same opinions, we could always be sure he would share his, and he always spoke with authority and inflection on most any subject at hand. He could sear you and your opinions with a look.

    I share all of this so you can understand just how hard it was to process the person he became after 2008, the person I visited last February.

    Between the sudden death of his best friend, who was almost ten years his junior, and the economic recession, which slowly saw the last of his contracts permanently dry up, my dad was a vastly different person from 2008 onwards. Never a man of many hobbies, with no work to keep him busy, he became a recluse, hyper conscious of the family budget and more inclined to spend time looking up minutia on the internet than to spend it speaking with any of us. Despite numerous efforts to network, he continually struggled to find any new jobs. Eventually he just stopped looking.

    It sounds so simple in hindsight, but it took us years to realize he was depressed, and years more to talk to him about it. But by the time we did, it was too late. Maybe because he thought it was weak, maybe because he genuinely did not think anything could be changed, maybe because he simply did not have the wherewithal to try – whatever his reasons, he never did anything to try and fix it. For seven years, it got progressively harder to keep the faith that he would ever manage to. From the moment I got that phone call from my sister, I realized a harsh truth: now, he never would.

    Losing your dad is never easy, but my dad’s health had been waning for years, and he had not been “himself” for a decade. I genuinely thought I had done most of my mourning for the person that raised me, because so much of him was already gone. Boy, was I wrong. I hadn’t realized that however much I had accepted where he currently was, that was NOT the same as him being gone. While he was still alive, there was still a chance – however impossible, however small – that he would rally. That the dad I had grown up with, dynamic and confident and charming and vital, would come back. I don’t think I will ever stop being sad that he just couldn’t. Because of his depression.

    Worse, it hurts that he never felt like he could talk to us about it. I would have given anything to lend just five minutes of my own drive and self confidence to my dad – from whom, through both nature and nuture, so much of those qualities were sourced – to get him to see he had the strength to get through it. To see that it wasn’t weakness to talk about it, that we absolutely knew he still loved and cared about us. To see that he didn’t need money to prove it and that all we wanted was for him to express it through words. All we wanted was a conversation about something other than the weather, a day spent on something other than puzzles and streaming more NCIS.

    My dad had advanced Type II Diabetes, Congestive Heart Failure, and was severely overweight. He passed peacefully in his sleep on a Saturday morning from a combination of his physical ailments. But I would argue that depression was his deepest illness, and that I couldn’t help him with it will always be one of my deepest regrets. I have my suspicions, but the truth is I’ll never know what it was that stopped my dad from being able to share what he was going through. All I know is he was painfully good at faking otherwise – he was always “doing good”. So in his memory, I want to take the time to say that if you are reading this, and you are “doing good”, you may not feel ready to talk about it yet. But I want you to know that when you are, I am someone that will always be here to listen.

    I didn’t know how to help my dad and so I settled for telling him that I loved him, showing him that I loved him. It wasn’t much towards the end – if I could change how often I called him over the last year, God you know I would – but I know as much as you can know anything in this life that he knew he was loved. Sometimes that is the best that you can do.

    It sounds stupid, so basic, but the strangest part of death is that no matter where you go, you will never find that person. No matter where you go. But there is a constant comfort in memories, perfect and imperfect, and while I will be sad for a long time, I will also be okay. I will move forward and eventually stop having those cutting, random thoughts – that my dad won’t ever know the person I marry, that he won’t get to see my neices grow up – and realize that for my dad, this was the best case scenario. More than anything, I will always be grateful for the time I did have, and everything wonderful he did give me. Because old those memories may be, but they will never fade, nor will their impact, nor my image – strong, dynamic, and loving – of my dad.

  • Bio Pages Are the Worst

    First off, cards on the table, I’m writing this about myself. All-powerful-Oz reveal. So, if I go and write an entire bio page about myself in the third person, it feels unutterably pretentious. Whether or not that’s true, or if the queasy pompous- feels it triggers are really an impostor syndrome flare up, is up to the internet jury.

    Instead of waiting for feedback I’m going to listen to Laura Branigan’s Gloria and write a weekly blog post that will for the foreseeable future function as my contributor’s bio page* for Viv + Kit. (I am already so into this idea that I think this will be the policy for all new contributors. The Laura Branigan part will be encouraged but optional.)

    *Editors note from 25/10/20 – this is now somewhat outdated, primarily due to the fact that my career went full dumpster fire at the end of 2019 and I pivoted accordingly

    Orange County born, Sacramento raised, and a jure sanguinis dual Italian American citizen, I’ve lived in all the best parts of California (I’m looking at YOU, San Diego) and now call London home. Day-to-day I’m head person in charge at Anthropologie’s flagship European store on Regent Street.

    Viv + Kit was borne of a desire to not only create and write on the regular, but to try and be a bright spot in any single person’s day, one post/list/essay at a time. You’re not going to find any Great Gatsby sort of authorship under my name, and I don’t know that I’m capable of changing anyone’s life or perspective in a major way. But if I can throw together a niche favorites list or snappy diatribe on how I think you should judge your success versus how society does that elicits just ONE laugh or smile, then I’m all about it.

    I used to really beat myself up because I felt like even post undergraduate education, I didn’t know “a lot” about anything. Like, most English Lit majors may not have a career waiting for them on the other side of that graduation ceremony stage, but at least they could walk you through Paradise Lost. No such luck here. When I was 22, the thing in life I knew the most about and was the best at was the “hip” import retailer Cost Plus World Market – real talk. I started working there as a cashier out of high school in 2007 and returned to the life when six months of dallying with the real world got me (and my degree) nowhere.

    Making a career out of retail has been a JOURNEY for me, mostly because I hate the idea of doing something other people don’t think is cool. (If you didn’t think I was basic before, there you have it. I’ve got the career aspiration equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte.) I derived the majority of my self worth for years out of what my job was, and for someone who viscerally remembers standing in the stock room of her old World Market, deciding to sign on for $30k in college debt because she REFUSED to be stuck in retail forever, having a career in retail was some Old Fashioned level bitter gall.

    But I’m exceptionally lucky in my skills and my interests (and my flawless aesthetic, I tell myself), because once I developed enough as a person to realize job status does not equal personal value / a job is a job no matter how you slice it, the two combined to land me in a career that’s ironically taken me everywhere I could’ve asked for.

    I was just biding my time while my dual Italian American citizenship stagnated when my District Manager approached me about becoming a supervisor with World Market. Two years later I was a Store Manager when a customer, who apparently worked at Anthropologie, recognized that my pants were from Anthro, and reached out to recruit me when I impressed her with my service. I worked for Anthro for two years and then it gave me the perfect in to move back to the UK, a goal I’d had since the second I left Norwich after university and had all but given up on by 2017.

    While customers, yes, can be challenging (when they’re not recruiting you), what nobody tells you about retail is that it’s like any other job – it’s defined by the people and what you put into it. I’ve worked with a handful of characters that I could happily do with never seeing again, but for the vast majority of my career I’ve had the pleasure of working with and learning from some most excellent specimens of human cool. In retail, there’s a 50/50 shot that every one of your coworkers has a side-hustle they wish was their main hustle – who, after all, would actively choose retail, is the running joke – and those side hustles are always fascinating.

    Over the years and with the help of some absolutely stellar professional mentors (Ed, if you’re reading this, you are still my hero), I’ve become a really great retail manager, and I genuinely enjoy it.

    Given all of the above, a lot of what I write comes from a place of self criticism, weighing my own values and journey against those of society, trying to take life a little less seriously, and reveling in and laughing at all of the conclusions I draw from my rose-colored view of my past and potential future. When you read something I’ve written, it’s likely to be laced with at least one of those concepts. I like to think of myself as an unlicensed authority on them.

    Other things I’ll chalk up as interesting qualifiers: experience living abroad and far from my family (not once, but twice!), unparalleled skill at quoting/making very specific pop culture references, and overusing a new word every 3-4 years. Ten years ago it was “epic”. Right now it’s “niche”. I enjoy making people laugh and I enjoy immersing myself in good music, fun pop culture lists, great fashion, highly-specific history subjects, and anything well-written. So it should surprise no one that I’m the founder of this website.

    My greatest fear is that when I write I’m like Midge Maisel telling her manager Susie that working every dinner party she can snag an invitation to is the same as successfully working an actual comedy club crowd. But let’s be honest. If that’s what’s happening here, there are worse people to be than Midge, center stage in someone else’s living room, making her friends and borderline strangers laugh. (Right…?)

  • Lot 432

    I don’t really believe all things happen for a reason (I do). But when seemingly unrelated events/moments/ideas coincide, I’ll pick up that old tried-and-vaguely-true mantra and preach to anyone within ten feet of me that fate is a thing that really pulls life together (and apart). Like, for instance, when the two ideas I’ve been toying with writing about pair up neatly and I get the opportunity to knock them both out in one go. Such is my luck today, sitting down in front of the enormous clock in Waterloo Station, realizing my unintentional theme is time.

    We use time to boundary everything. It’s usually the first reason we can or can’t do something, tied with or just ahead of money. At work, it is without a doubt my most familiar adversary, and if not having enough time was a Buy Five, Get the Sixth Free punch card situation, I wouldn’t get through a week without a freebie (or five). When someone or something gets a sense of entitlement about just how high they should rank on your priority list, there’s that embodiment-of-an-eye-roll argument that we simply MAKE time. Like we’re wizards that are one agenda notebook or scheduling app away from adding three more hours to the day.

    Worse – and maybe I’m alone here – time seems to have two distinct versions. There’s how it feels on a day off, and there’s how it feels on a day on. One second you’ve got a handle on how to manage your time, but then you turn around and your Saturday has gone by in an impossible flash, and NOTHING has gotten done. Unless watching a season of Sons of Anarchy for the billionth time qualifies.

    So how do you pick? How do you know what matters and what doesn’t? When you eventually find a way to magic in a few minutes here and there, how do you know what to do with it?

    There’s no single answer, but I’m going to try and help anyway.

    I Knew Him, Horatio!

    Two weeks ago I was in the office at my store, having the wily kind of Tuesday where in the middle of editing Excel spreadsheet formulas you decide that despite your borderline illiteracy in the subject of Shakespeare, it’s time to get a tattoo of that one line from Hamlet that you quote all the time.

    I have this thing about famed literature, where it doesn’t stick with me in a big way, but I retain bizarre but specific details that then carve out a spot in my heart for said literature regardless. These details and the resultent pseudo-obsession have no respect for the fact that this will almost definitely manifest in me embarassing myself when I try and talk about books I haven’t touched in ten years, a la Bridget Jones and Chechnya. A prime example of this – the obsessive specificity, if not the Bridget Jones part – is that I couldn’t write you three sentences on what happens in Catcher in the Rye, but until I die I will be able to recite the completely under-valued line “LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM MY VICELIKE GRIP”, spoken by Holden Caulfield when, with the senseless surety unique to late-teenaged boys, he executes the decision to put his friend in a headlock while he’s trying to get ready for a date. Give me a few years and I’m sure I’ll find a reason to get that tattooed too.

    Where Shakespeare is concerned, you’ve got the course I took during my English Lit degree, where I relied entirely on my friend (and Drama major) Suzy to get me through, and then you have my more prominent memories of the abridged collection of Shakespeare plays my aunt bought me in seventh grade. Hamlet was the first play I read, and I don’t know why, but the only thing that really stuck in my bones was that line: “Alas, poor Yorick!” (Well, that, and the image of Ophelia’s dad hiding behind some curtains, which my twelve-year-old-self thought showed some pretty weak hide-and-seek game). Real talk, though? I didn’t ever bother to look up what the hell Hamlet is even talking about when he says the line until that two-weeks-ago moment in the office.

    But then I did, and I decided that in fact, the skull of the court jester from Hamlet’s youth WAS something that should definitely live on my arm forever. Because when Hamlet says “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio”, he’s not just musing at a skull, as you do. It’s a bit of an “Oh shit, I knew the person behind this skull, he was pretty funny, and here he is, dead. Wow, life’s short,” moment. Life IS short, Hamlet. So thanks, Will Shakespeare, for your keen wordsmithing, and for giving me essentially a hip and highfalutin version of my own YOLO tattoo. It’s no punch card, and Yorick hardly actively gets involved in helping me prioritize my life and manage my time better. There’s a large case to be made, though, for having a bit of a black comedy reminder that even should you make the WORST decision when prioritising your time, we’re all Yorick in the end.

    #empressmatilda Gets Involved

    Two nights ago, Yorick fresh on my wrist, I was participating in the universal tradition of needlessly scrolling through my newsfeed one last time before going to bed. I was on an old post of mine (#narcissist) and accidentally tapped on one of the tags I’d used – unsurprisingly, given the post’s content, the Empress Matilda hashtag. And while generally speaking there’s not much happening in that tag, on this particular evening, there was a post from Dix Noonan Webb, an auction house in Mayfair, advertising several lots of coins going up for auction.

    Two lots included coins minted in the name of Matilda during the Anarchy. (Brief history for those new here: Matilda never officially reigned as England’s queen, but she got pretty damn close, and controlled most of the West Country during the nearly twenty-year period of time known as the Anarchy in the 12th century. More importantly, I’m highkey obsessed with her). The day and time of the auction? THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, A TEN MINUTE WALK FROM MY WORK.

    The first coin was valued between £700- £900, which was quite obviously outside of my price range. The second was a mere £200-£300, so still out of my league, but I went to the auction in hopes that nobody would bid for it (the history world isn’t quite as obsessed with Norman Feminist Icons as me….YET) and that they’d kick it down to £100 or so. With my hopes thus raised, I took the train in for the twelve o’clock start time, signed up for a bidding paddle, and made my way to the Wellington Room of Dix Noonan Webb, 16 Bolton Street, ready to get my auction on.

    Upon entering I helped lower the mean age of the room by about thirty years, and I immediately grabbed a seat in the back row, a few chairs over from the only other woman present. She was around my age, maybe a little older, but was seated with such chilled composure that I was absolutely certain this was not her first Late-Anglo-Saxon through Plantagenet Coin rodeo. She became one of my favorite humans when she leaned over and said, “All the women in the back then, eh?” I liked her even more when later in the afternoon I heard her chatting with another bidder and she genuinely uttered the sentence “Oh, I haven’t seen Dennis in yonks!”

    The auction started with Lot 299. I was interested in Lot 432. So I observed a fair amount of bidding while waiting out my Matilda coins, watching a few valued from £200- £300 go for closer to £1,000, while others – namely the most expensive coin of the day, one from 975 – went for a cool £8,000. (Who are these people and how do I become them). A handful of technical difficulties later, we made it through to the Norman coins, and finally, at 1:20pm, my time came. The Matilda coins went up, and I didn’t even get a chance to raise my paddle, because those motherfuckers went FOR £1,200 AND £4,300. I watched it happen, grinning like an idiot from my seat in the back row, because even though I clearly wasn’t going home with those coins, Matilda’s popularity, long-overdue, was clearly on the rise.

    Yorick was very fresh when I attended this auction, still encased in Dermalize and looking rather worse for the wear as the ink and plasma gooped a bit beneath the bandage (you’re welcome for that visual). He sat with me, not judging the fact that I didn’t have that kind of money to drop on medieval coinage, but more importantly, justifying my decision to sit in the Wellington Room in the first place. Because as much as I’ve just spent a lot of your time trying to convince you that we all die in the end, so do what you want with your time, sitting in that auction room gave me an amazing flip side. That this collection of coins – gathered by countless people with page-long provenances, if anyone had kept a record of their entire existence – showed that even if after we’re all dead and buried, humans are such that even a smashed up penny from the pocket of a noble in 1139 has value, almost a thousand years after its owner was dead an buried. After the monarch printed on it, who actually never even reigned but fought like hell for the right to, was forgotten by most of the world.

    & Waterloo Station

    When I saw down to write today, I picked a new writing spot. I was sneaking in a writing session before a closing shift, something I don’t do often because my writing sessions are almost exclusively the territory of days off. The past 48 hours had me filled with words, though, so I plonked down at a coffee shop at Waterloo Station, surrounded by hundreds of summery Londoners, and stared at the giant clock suspended from the ceiling.

    It doesn’t matter what you do with your time, but in the best possible way. All of that pressure that you feel is absolutely temporary. You can look at it from the perspective of YOLO Yorick, or of some nine-hundred year old coins. Yorick, the jester, being dead, when once he was funny and jovial and very much alive. Those coins, with Matilda’s seal stamped into them, surviving hundreds of years, into a world Matilda herself could not have imagined, being in a small auction room in Mayfair, where some mysterious bidder dropped over four grand on them.

    Time is ceaseless. It’s there whether you do the thing or you don’t. Whether your priorities are always the same or change every day. Whether it’s 2019 or 1139. Whether you’re cracking jokes or impossibly sad. It just keeps going on. It’s a little terrifying, but at the same time, strangely comforting. There’s not a lot in life you can bet on never changing, but the passage of time is one of them. And like Achilles says in the 2005 cinematic masterpiece, Troy, “Take it, IT’S YOURS!”

    Sure, he’s actually talking about immortality, but his aggressive demand is one I’d encourage everyone to echo. Your time IS yours, and you should spend it how you want.

    And if you’re waiting for the right moment for some change, think of Yorick. This might just be it.