Be Honest Be Silly Be Kind

Hello lovelies,

I just had to look up how to spell that word, lovelies. Are you allowed to use a term of endearment if you don’t know how to spell it? Or does that make your endearment even more true?

This is reminding me that my son is pronouncing the Miss Nelson books “Miss Melson” right now and it’s making my week. Miss Melson Has a Field Day, etc. Give me all the Miss Melson I can handle. Speaking of handling things, the same kid got a splinter while we were out to eat last week, while running their hands along a rough-hewn banister. They spent the next thirty minutes intermittently peering at their palm, emitting dramatic sobs, sobering up, going about their business drinking lemonade, then glimpsing the splinter again and re-starting the cycle. After much discussion about how to get out a splinter at a restaurant that also happened to have a pair of tweezers on site (how clean were those tweezers and were they last used to place sprigs of arugula lovingly along a plate?) we put on a bandaid and called it a day. End of crying, end of (everyone’s collective, public) misery.

We then caught a music festival across the street, on a beautiful end-of-summer evening. Bandaids for the win!!

patriotic fire hydrant at the music festival

my phone took this picture while I was walking. I like it!

I read Samantha Irby’s book Quietly Hostile, which starts with an essay called “I Like It!” At first I wasn’t sure she could keep up yuks about the pandemic and the drudgery of writing across a whole book, but after a while I was in, in, in. Hats off to Irby for managing to write her life funny across four books, and squeezing in some tender essays at the end of this one, more on flavor with that of her first book Meaty, a book that mines a lot of family stuff. I felt a real affection for the person on the other end of that Word document by the end of Quietly Hostile, which is the whole reason people write, isn’t it? Love me!! lol jk. I actually don’t know why I write. I am both thinking a lot about that right now and also, not sure I care to understand the formula, pin it down like a dead bug on black velvet. Let’s just all enjoy being here together. That’s what I really want, you know? To be here and share this time with you.

scented brooms - get swept away

I watched Wild Wild Country, the documentary about a religious community that blossomed in Oregon in the eighties, and got kind of obsessed. I really enjoyed its storytelling, its tone, its lighting of interview subjects which is everything in a documentary, isn’t it? I also need to talk to someone at the Duplass Bros’ production company about their fonts. They used a different scrolling script for their film Blue Jay and it kept me from watching that film for years because I thought it was a period piece, which it is not. Has anyone seen Blue Jay? I kind of liked it. I thought the plot was a little far-fetched but I liked its emotionality.

Left: I'm showing you this clip for the #hairgoalz. I'm currently growing mine out but I love a good brunette hair helmet. Right font: I do not approve of you!

I think I’ve caught you up on all the major events over here. The kids started school and the parents are still crying because transitions are hard. I cleaned the kitchen sink last week and scrubbed off 211 layers of grime. I also started to un-ironically read Deepak Chopra but didn’t get very far. I love Deepak, sincerely, but I frequently need a story or I will fly away from your words. Give me a story that isn’t also a tale from your clinical experience (but no one asked for my opinion about publishing’s tenets of nonfiction especially around health! I DIGRESS).

Speaking of clinical experience, however, I’ve been musing about what to name my coaching business because Kara Norman Coaching doesn’t have a great ring to it. Turns out, it was sitting there on my old blog all along, in a photo I came across the other day:

Norms come on in

The business in that picture is having some apostrophe confusion, which honestly happens to the best of us. The other day my daughter pointed out a sign and laughed at its apostrophe gaffes and I thought oh no we are those people we have raised a lingustic snob.

lolol this is not me

my copy of The Librarianist came in from the library and I am pumped

If you are not blooming like these two end-of-summer decorative yard bushes, what are you even doing? Jk we are HOBBLING over here. Two of us have gotten through our first virus of the school year, the other two are coughing and deep-voicing their way through. (Tim is doing impersonations of Tom Brokaw right now, because his voice sounds so comically different/deep.) I have dragged all the furniture away from the walls of the basement and hooked up the humidifier because mildew threatens, and my heart is troubled by some transitional moments with art projects. Frankly, I’m somewhere between molting old identities and the nowheresville nakedness of not yet in my new skin.

But but but: we have a roof, we have each other, and also we have laundry machines that work? A coffee pot, games, vegetables to eat. Flowers growing just outside the windows, etc. Never forget what the ice cream cooler at a local lunch hall wants you to recall:

What do you find there, inside? What do you want to grow? And did you know that soil is made of ground-down rock? My son and I learned this last night while reading a Magic School Bus book. Holy schnikes! Insert your own metaphor here. I would like to say that in order for our plants to grow, you must first grind down the rocks there, which will give them soil. Too clunky? Too nakedly trying to wrap up this post? But it’s true. First, the rocks. Then, the soil. Without rocks there would be no soil. [Extend clunky metaphor.]

Sending you water and umbrellas for end-of-summer heat, maybe a healthy breakfast or two, and some of the delicious snacking carrots that grew like gangbusters in our little beloved raised beds this year. I will put my elbows out for you and guard against that gd cucumber vine trying to take over all your blooms. And I hope you find the most perfect garden gnome, or ceramic owl, or whatever makes your soul sing, to anchor your little patch of earth.

look who it was all along

Wishing you health and friendship today (and always). And if there are rocks in your path, I’m sending patience and deep breaths. Whether you decide to go around them or wait for them to nourish your soil, I will be here, beating a drum for you.

XOXO

Karamo Brown but also, I hope, the vibes this newsletter gives you