to be specific in our affections

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about specificity. There’s this clause that’s bound itself to my brain like a barnacle, and I notice it whenever I get into the elevator or turn on the shower:

to be specific in our affections

It’s been stuck there since this phone call I had in December. At some point, I said something nice. My friend paused and said, “You are very good at giving compliments.” 

You have two immediate options when you get a compliment: shiver it off or accept it. The latter is better. Then you can do what I do and spend your commute thinking about whether it’s really true, and why or why not, and what it really says about you. When people compliment you on giving compliments, it might be because you’ve noticed some small subtle something in them or in the way they move, and named it.

So maybe what I’ve been thinking about isn’t just specificity, but specificity in love. In friendships and in romance, I lean into love that feels specific. It’s easy to forget how actively we can design our affections for every recipient: I don’t want words that could be meant for anyone else; I don’t want to vaguepost. I want a love that’s conscious of my quirks. And when you have a love that exists specifically between two individuals, this creole of affection starts to emerge. The love gets wonderfully weird, and then it becomes durable. It develops resilience. How can two people constantly designing their love to welcome the weirdness and specificity of the other do anything but last?

There's this poem I think about a lot but can never find, which I think I encountered in an anthology when I was in high school. The poet writes about his wife's elbows, how they matter to him — it’s a comment on how we write about loving the neck and the lips and the eyes but what about the elbows? So much hinges on them, literally.

Don’t bother looking for it. None of the poetry that surfaces on search for love and elbows is worth reading. It's all too ambitious, too corny. I liked that one poem because I think the author understood that his job was simple, was to show you something small.

a night to myself, friends in town

Last night, I came home from work early. The milk at work may have gone bad, and I had two big milky coffees. Oops. I took a nap and woke up feeling like everything in my stomach was going to keep going in the right direction.

I thought about calling my friends, which is usually what I do at night, but I've been feeling so inward lately, and last night I really wanted to just watch YouTube videos and do my nails. I pulled up the imaginary calendar of my week and saw that on no other night would there be any guaranteed evening to spend on taking care of myself. I set up my station and chose nine different colors. The white is actually a cool grey chalky color, kind of like #FAFAFA, with a layer of milky jelly white on top of it, and there's no way to capture the translucence on camera, but it reminds me of really thin porcelain.

Anyway, I let myself take my time. I didn't do much but carefully, meticulously sculpt each nail, and for the first time in months, felt very satisfied with the process. I remembered my posture. I sculpted and filed and refined and resurfaced until each one was basically perfect. 

I watched this episode of Sad Boyz and let my brain go into art mode. I really like it when Jarvis gets into tech commentary. 

My friends are in town! I got into DC on Sunday afternoon and spent the day cleaning my place, then had Ethan and Elvira over for cookies and ice cream. She tried on a bunch of my clothes and took home the $400 Tory Burch turtleneck I picked up at a Virginia Goodwill for $6. Elvira pointed out that I'm always finding things. This is true. We also discussed the theory that everyone's allowed one crazy ex, and you're allowed two crazy exes under one of two conditions: (1) they're crazy for completely different reasons, or (2) they're crazy for the same reason, and you were able to discern the pattern.

I woke up at 6:20am this morning to meet Elvira for morning yoga, and we had breakfast and coffee nearby. In our sleepy state, we got speculative about the future, as usual. Tonight I'm taking her and Ethan on a tour of the National Mall. We will be bundled up, hot drinks in hand, then probably stop somewhere for for pizza.