I’m so sorry this is your first newsletter this week! I have had some extra Slate work to do, including my very fun “live” Zoom session yesterday, which you can find here (please share widely, we need the ad revenue and also I want it to do well so they ask me to do more videos). I dressed up and put on makeup! Now with extra haunted jewelry!
I have also been logging some barn time, vetting this handsome fella here (he’s extremely heavily sedated and getting leg x-rays, I’m hoping to give him a good forever home but you always want a vet to check out even a rescue horse so you don’t have Fun Surprises down the road.)
My friend’s mare Volera’s foal was due on the 14th, so we’re on high alert. Her tail is all wrapped and ready, and she is super into her luxe foaling pen. She’s lying down now at night, so we’re really really close. Any morning now we’re going to wake up to a damp long-legged goofy-ass foal, and I am finding the prospect of new (equine) life to be very invigorating and grounding.
This phenomenal piece by Ed Park about what may be the very first Korean-American novel delighted and fascinated me and now I have acquired said novel and cannot wait to read it:
What if the finest, funniest, craziest, sanest, most cheerfully depressing Korean-American novel was also one of the first? To a modern reader, the most dated thing about Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, published by Scribner’s in 1937, is its tired title. (Either that or its subtitle, “The Making of an Oriental Yankee.”) Practically everything else about this brash modernist comic novel still feels electric.
East Goes West has a ghostly history: at times vaguely canonical, yet without discernible influence, it has been out of print for decades at a stretch, and surfaces every quarter-century or so as a sort of literary Brigadoon. (Last year’s Penguin Classics edition is its third major republication.) Kang’s debut, The Grass Roof (1931), captures the twilight of the Korean kingdom in the first two decades of the twentieth century, as Japan colonizes the peninsula. Its narrator, Chungpa Han, is a precocious child whose thirst for education takes him from his secluded home village to Seoul, three hundred miles away; into the heart of Japan; and finally to America, where East Goes West picks up on the pilgrim’s progress.
Though both novels were first published to great acclaim by Maxwell Perkins—the legendary editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe—they stand as the alpha and omega of Kang’s fiction career: an explosion of talent, followed by thirty-five years of silence. His sensual, impudent voice and bold escape from his homeland (“I had seen the disintegration of one of the first nations of Earth”) provoked Rebecca West to exclaim, in a review of The Grass Roof, “What a man! What a writer!” Yet by the time of his death in 1972, Kang had faded from public recognition.
A truly excellent Absolute Unit:
After a video team meeting today, I hung up the call and proceeded to get undressed for a shower. After a few seconds, when I was significantly but not completely undressed, I noticed that the app had frozen and was still open. The rest of my team had been staying on for a different meeting, so I prayed it had disconnected on their end and closed it.
At a meeting with our team lead later in the afternoon, she (gently) let me know that it had not disconnected and told me it wasn’t a big deal. Obviously I am DEEPLY mortified and basically want to die right now.
Should I reach out to the other team members and offer an explanation/apology? Also, can you tell me that someday everyone will forget this happened and I’ll stop reliving it in my head while wanting to barf, even if it’s not true? Everyone on my team is great and I’m sure will act like it never happened, but I’ll always know what they’ve seen.
Do I have to quit now? Just kidding. I think. Ugggghhhh.
I have watched this video about dogs and one cat a thousand times since I first saw it yesterday. Also, this corgi.
Edith’s snail story is so delightful.
I really liked my column on Monday, I hope you do as well. It gave me the opportunity to answer a hard question:
Dear Care and Feeding,
We are at an impasse with my in-laws that I do not know how to reconcile. My mother-in-law who lives 25 minutes away (my parents are two hours away) watches our 5-month-old son while my husband and I both work full time, and has done so since our parental leave ended when he was 3 months old. We could afford day care, but this is everyone’s preference.
For backstory, I had a traumatic postpartum experience that included three weeks of mental health hospitalization (panic and psychosis). While I was in treatment, my husband moved in with his parents, and they took on a lot of baby care day and night. We continued to live with them for another two months while I readjusted to parenting and got back on my feet. I found out from my husband later that when I was in the hospital, his family went to the courthouse to look into taking away custody because they thought that I was a danger to my son—they didn’t want me discharged—and that my husband wasn’t thinking clearly for “siding” with me. His mother claimed that she was using her “mother lion instincts” and that her only concern was his well-being.
We also have parenting differences: She insists on holding my child on her lap with a pillow on the couch in front of the TV for most of his naps. I put up with this because he would still nap in the crib for us on the weekend and I doubted she would listen if we took a stand. Plus, my husband doesn’t care if she parents to her beliefs, and I am too confrontation-averse to try to put my foot down.
Now we have hit the impasse during the coronavirus. We are both teleworking and watching our son, and though it is stressful, he is doing well and we can manage. She is still willing to watch him still, since we are social distancing from everyone but them, so the risk is minimal. However, she refuses to watch him at our house, even just a couple days a week, which is our preference during this. We want to spend the opportunity of this crisis to be around our son more and parent him ourselves as much as we can. Teleworking from their house isn’t an option because I need my desktop computer and internet.
There was a tearful conversation where she asked why we were “doing this to her” and claimed that “the major primary caregiver in his life is gone.” When we asserted that it was better for him to see more of his parents, she asserted that “structure” and their routine is more important. This all together makes me extremely uncomfortable, like she thinks she is more of his mom or a better mom than I am, and exacerbated the jealousy/possessiveness that I think a lot of working moms feel toward caregivers. I’m not sure how to face having to go back to work and leave him with her again all day. I guess how to do this is my question?
—Insecure Daughter-in-Law
My friend and I are still talking about Tony Stark:
Great work here by Captain Awkward, as always:
Dear Captain,
I’ve looked in the archives for something like this, but I couldn’t find anything. What do you do when you apologize and it seems to upset someone even more?
I (she/her) have an ex (he/him), and we have recently reconnected after a breakup and period of no contact and are trying to be friends. He was the one who ended the relationship, if that helps, and I was the person who asked for space, and recently reached out. We broke up mostly because he wasn’t the best communicator, and when I brought it up he said it was easier to break up. (He is a Geek Social Fallacies carrier)
I live in an area under shelter-in-place, and after that started he started texting and messaging more frequently, and then occasional phone calls. I wasn’t sure I wanted this much contact, but was feeling a little lonely with the SIP, and figured he was as well, we could support each other a bit. I have a wide ranging circle of friends that I have been virtually in contact with, I wasn’t focusing on him.
Anyway, we were talking about what we’d been doing since the SIP began, and I mentioned I’d been working on my writing, and he expressed interest in it, and I asked if he’d be willing to give me some feedback. This wasn’t unusual, it had been something he’d done for me when we’d been together. So I emailed it to him, he emailed some feedback (which was good feedback!), and I got caught up thinking about it and how the writing worked with his feedback, and I guess I hadn’t responded or said thank you, quickly enough? Because a few hours after receiving it he texted to ask if I’d gotten it. And I realized I hadn’t acknowledged it, apologized and thanked him.
And then a few days later I asked if he would read over an article I’m working on, and he said yes. He read it and sent me feedback a day or so later, but I was caught up in work when the email arrived (SIP and working virtually means I get SO MUCH MORE EMAIL than usual, and I got a lot before!), and I just didn’t get a chance to respond. Partially because I felt that he deserved more than a, “thanks, got it” email.
But the next morning beforeI got a chance to do this I got a text saying it was “weird,” I hadn’t acknowledged his messages. I emailed back, apologized, and thanked him. He then asked if we could have a phone conversation, which we did that evening.
Prior to our phone conversation, I realized he was probably feeling unappreciated, and made a point of acknowledging that when we talked, and said that he was also probably trying to show that he cared for me by doing me a favor, and that was really nice, and when I didn’t respond quickly enough he felt ignored or rejected or vulnerable.
And by saying that, he seemed to get really annoyed. Claimed I must be feeling resentment for our breakup, and that it wasn’t any “psychobabble” about feeling vulnerable or rejected, he’s obligated to help out any friend that asks for help. And ranted in this general vein at me for a bit. While also saying, as he ranted, that we didn’t have to have this “whole talk” about this, but he…kept talking? And talking, and talking. I tried to acknowledge his feelings, but I also didn’t want to keep discussing it, and basically listened until he wore down.
We ended it with him feeling better, I guess? But I felt worse. More so because I felt like I was trying to give a sincere apology and recognize his feelings and then we could move on, but it turned into him becoming more annoyed, and that line about being “obligated” really hurt, I thought he was just being friendly, but it now that gesture feels tainted somehow.
Captain, I don’t think it would be helpful to talk to him about this, I think I have to accept that this is just my friendship with him. But I’m confused, why did he get so annoyed? Is there a way I could have apologized better?
Confused Navigator
My friend Nichole speaks for me:
I love you so much. I’ve really missed you this week! It was nice to have a little Easter break, but better to be back, messing around with you. Tell me about your fav outfit. Tell me about your comfiest outfit. Tell me how you’re doing. You’re being so tough, even if you cry every day. You amaze me and inspire me. You truly helped me mourn John Prine, which was very challenging and you nailed it. Thank you.
xoxoxoxoxox
nicky
Here is the DIRECT LINK, please do share and also say nice things in the FB comments bc everyone on FB is a monster person who will hate me: https://www.facebook.com/21516776437/videos/810756199408856/
I just dropped my spouse off yesterday morning for a 20-to-30-day stay at an eating disorder center. I was totally freaked out by the idea of a residence during COVID but the people who run it seem on top of their shit so I'm less concerned now about that. My spouse needs it, so I'm over it. I'm kind of freaked about the long-term work that this is going to be; we'd already been in couples counseling for some other things. Not that I can't handle putting the work in, but it just feels like so much and life has already been bonkers.
The house feels so weird to be alone with the dog in. I think the dog misses my spouse quite badly but maybe I'm projecting? Probably both.