What is your kiwi?

Credit.

A few years ago I had lunch with a former intern who was in town and wanted to catch up. He told me a story of a man who had never eaten a kiwi.

"It's not a very interesting story," he said. "His parents didn't like kiwis so he never had them as a child. Only when he was older, and people started saying, 'you've never had a kiwi?', did he realise it was a weird thing. But he decided to make it a choice. He still hasn't eaten a kiwi."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because he thought, one day when life gets too dull or repetitive, or he feels depressed, he will know there is still something new to look forward to. All he has to do is go downstairs to the nearest shop and buy a kiwi." He paused heavily on that ending and leaned over our empty plates. "Angela. Do you have a kiwi?"

I can't remember how I answered. I like the idea of having some small, easily-accessible thing that remains to be experienced, a hedge against the everyday travails that can make life feel Sisyphean. In moments I've considered the question since, I mostly think about big kiwis: Moving to Paris. Half-moving to Italy. Learning to forge and tend fires. Learning to cook. That one time when, lonely in my new Paris life, so long ago, I took a four-hour improv class.

But the point of the story is that a kiwi isn't a big thing. It's a tiny thing that reinfuses a tiny dose of magic into life, enough to keep going, to hope again. I went to the Italian bookshop in Paris and practiced Italian with the shopkeeper, which made me nervous. I let Demo talk me into buying butter cookie-scented candles. I ate dark chocolate with octopus on top. I conducted that Covid experiment where I stayed up as late as I wanted, and slept when I wanted, and ended up living on a reverse schedule to everyone else: Breakfast became dinner, sunrise my sunsets.

The general vibe on the social networks right now is that people are tired of hoping for a "better" 2023 than the 2022 we got. I think of something a client said, months ago: Nobody believes anymore that life will be better tomorrow than it is today. Nobody thinks anymore that their children will do better than they did. 

Hope is being crushed, at a growing pace, under the burden of capital.

What a mindset to find oneself in, though. Where does one go from there? I've already done the rage against the machine, shuttled through the abject desolation that follows. There's no solace there. There is no there there. As King Solomon once said: "Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!"

It occurred to me, the other day, what my kiwi actually is. I've been fooling around with it for the last few years, and it has never stopped restoring my sense of wonder. 

My kiwi is making weird choices. Big, small. Doesn't matter.

When you're finally ready to cede to chaos, it merits remembering that chaos yields new cosmos. This is the lesson of trickster gods, and, oddly enough, kiwis: The fruit is thus named because it resembles the furry egg of the kiwi bird. It is a something that looks like something else—deceptive, but not shatteringly so. (Unless you're a kiwi bird, I suppose.)

Social conventions are collapsing. All the things we didn't dare do, for fear of punishment or opprobrium? Fuck it. Make the weird choice you didn't think was allowed. Go on vacation alone. Do the wacky masters degree. Run away from all the war news and take a salsa class. Quit your job and live on unemployment awhile. Take up a weird hobby that has zero viable hope for becoming a "career." Fuck careers. Learn High Valerian—or better yet, a real language like Tagalog—and speak it to strangers.

Call reality's bluff. Test the elasticity of your possible, your normal.

We spend so much time chasing rewards and avoiding punishment. Half of the rewards and punishments don't come to fruition. I suspect the worst thing we can do in this time is dig our heels into the old, dying promises and threats our system has made to sustain itself, and find ourselves alone holding an empty bag in the end.

Norbert Wiener once observed that the more one learns about the universe, the more one realises that life was an improbable gift, utterly squandered when you measure it by the arbitrary benchmarks of civilisation. The sum of this gift cannot simply be spent desperately pursuing capital or some golden standard of success. We need more.

Make weird choices. My weird choices have done more for me, and borne more beautiful fruit, than my careful plans. Sometimes the outcomes have sucked, but that was less than 5% of the time, and 0% were devastating. It has all been a good exercise in staying open, curious and childlike; and learning the many nuanced lessons that love still has to teach me.

To return to the topic of kiwis, though, here's a weird choice I made about them specifically once, when I felt too lazy to peel one. I bit straight into the skin. It wasn't fibrous or unpleasant; improbably, the skin is totally edible. Practically melts in your mouth. Because of this weird and vaguely antisocial choice, I will now spend the rest of my life knowing that peeling a kiwi is a luxury I can indulge in or not. 

It doesn't take a massive weird choice to make your life richer.

Chaos makes new cosmos. If you don't happen to like the one you find yourself in, another awaits around the corner of your next decision.

Entropy

These days I spend a lot of time napping, biking and walking, and wondering who I'm disappointing out there in this wide world. Probably no one. And if someone? I'm not sure it matters.

When I first arrived in France, it felt good that people were beginning to need things from me and expect me places. It felt like proof of integration. I was laying roots, planting them firm into the good earth.

Some years ago, when I was still at Hurrah, another founder—who knew I was on my way out—told me he loves running a company, and doesn't see how he can ever have a boss again. How, he asked, can I content myself with returning to that?

I've never been a good employee.

Freelance is its own kind of business. But it's mostly a solo business, and it suits me. I evolve alongside my clients and partners. We grow together for awhile, then part. I am sufficiently lucky, at this stage in my career, to be able to choose who I work with, and say no to projects that are more about money than about predilection. I can also command rates that don't make me constantly wonder if I'm being fucked (though one always does, in the end, find ways to wonder if one's being fucked).

I'm happy with my wide horizons of discretionary time. I'm happy with the fact that I don't worry so much about money anymore, in part because I have found a way to feel bountiful within my means. This isn't really about being on top or on the bottom.

These seem like important things to convey because I recently had a shaky moment, where I looked around at all my friends and peers, and admired everything they were doing. She works for the UN! She wrote a bunch of books! He is a minister with the Elysée! He gets sent to different countries to learn the language and culture, just because his expertise is so important to different facets of his company! She has her own TV show!

Then this worm crawled into my brain. Am I where I should be? People are flipping houses, making babies, plunging their roots so deep into the soil that they're touching crust. 

These days, I'm generally contented even when I'm not paid for something that ends up rippling outward. Then I got to wondering if I content myself with "so little" because The Patriarchy has trained women to not expect pay for so much of the value they bring to communities.

There's this book by Luigi Pirandello. It's called One, No One, and a Hundred Thousand. It's basically about a guy who spins out and dismantles his entire sense of identity from the inside, then begins conducting experiments with people he knows to try to understand "who" they think they know. His conclusion struck me: Some people's ideas about who you are can become so powerful that they supersede your inner truth about who you are in the larger world; ultimately, who you think you are doesn't matter, because this other you that someone else designed is perfectly real to them, and that reality has effects that impact you, too.

This is my worst fear.

When I was in high school, my closest friends decided to turn against me. It was a deep, insidious and incredibly wide-reaching collaboration. It made me a pariah at school. Little by little, it spread into the church I attended in another city, and as a result, bled into my relationship with my parents, and also into my relationship with my boyfriend.

It is hard to convey how traumatic that was. At school I became untouchable. I was never able to attend church again, and as a result, lost my closest friend there—a relationship that only healed just a handful of years ago. 

My parents beat me half to death, made me quit my job, and contemplated not sending me to college—my last exit door. My boyfriend turned his back. The one friend I had who was connected to none of this later admitted that she actually helped start the whole thing.

There was nothing I could say and nothing I could do. I had no one. I thought I would die of it, and it wouldn't matter to anyone.

Lately I think about this a lot.

The thing that most bothered me was that this group of people used lies to undo my life, well seasoned with small elements of truth. In essence, they took stories that belonged to me, wilfully changed them to cause harm, and created a larger narrative that became greater in the world than any personal truth. Nobody was interested in my side of the story. Nothing I could say could combat the narrative that had utterly transformed my reality.

Part of me invests a lot of time in trying to inoculate myself from that ever happening again. Indeed, it did almost happen recently ... but I found, to my relief, that the people the perpetrator put her story to stood their ground, and I wasn't even in the room when it happened. In that moment, something about me that was truer to other people than a story that person was telling ended up protecting me. Maybe I was also aided by what they already knew about her, and her nature—things I did not know at the time, or at the very least, thought I was safe from.

The life I have now, the life I'm designing, is the one I want. But I also wonder, on days like this, whether there aren't a few people out there who feel disappointed in me—who are expecting something from me, waiting for me to show up and perform what they consider my role to be. I wonder if, on some level, I'm disappointing myself (why aren't I writing a novel?). I wonder if I am afraid.

I strongly suspect, however, that none of this matters. It doesn't matter that I continue to smoke, because clearly my guilt is insufficient to stop me. It doesn't matter that I've ignored my personal writing projects, because clearly what I want to be doing is resting. And why would I want to be a minister at the Elysée, or work with the UN?

I'm not even really sure whose metrics these are, or to what degree they are even mine. It doesn't seem useful, here, to sit and list all the cool stuff I'm doing and cultivating. It's not even really about that.

Job roles and titles aside, here is what I know I do: I open the box. 

Like Pandora?

Yeah, like Pandora. I am always opening the box—for myself, for others. It doesn't matter what's inside. Sometimes I do it for money, when I ask strange questions and those questions become an article or a job or a minor strategy shift. Sometimes I do it for free, when people call or message me at weird hours of the day to hash out some puzzle.

I don't need to know why this is, what purpose it serves, or whether it's good or bad, which seems like the least useful question of all. I know it's my nature, and everything living is just looking for the most harmonious way to express its nature.

Generally speaking, that's enough. Being able to harmoniously express my nature is the success metric, insofar as that I need one, and life doesn't really need that. People need that. Life is mostly concerned with diverse possibilities for diverse outcomes, because that yields more and interesting new life. Sometimes harmony does that, but often conflict does. Conflict yields chaos and the birth of new cosmos. That's the function of the trickster in storytelling.

(I'm being repetitive in these posts, I know. But it's what I'm working through, so it's just going to be repetitive until I've sorted it.)

I'm arriving at a place where I can just trust that. I can also tell this is working, that this is right for me, because I don't feel any compulsions to be casually cruel or to hurt anyone. I want to love more, expansively, and better.

But we are never monoliths; we are porous, connected to communities and systems. Many things with diverse agendas are working on us, with us, and against us, all the time. Sometimes shit wiggles in. That's fine, it's interesting. It's an opportunity to ask these questions again, in different ways, to see if the answer still comes out as it has up to now. Or maybe the questions themselves change.

I'm entering a new myth cycle—more Cupid and Psyche, less Persephone. I'm going to split my life between France and Italy. I've fallen in love, in a stupid falling-down way, with a person who sees my bugs as features—who's happy to take the full weight of me, and whose full weight I am also delighted to take. We talk to each other like teenagers, but shamelessly. We plan our futures, shared and apart, without fear. We don't worry we will be misunderstood ... which is quite remarkable, given that we're both having to learn new languages to speak at all.

We are also nerdy in a way that tickles me. Today we spoke; he observed, rightfully, I think, that when we fight, it will be like two nuclear warheads suddenly facing each other.

"But I want you to know," he added earnestly, "that I will never detonate."

"You'll keep your plutonium in a solid state for me?" I teased.

"I don't operate by fission," he replied. "I operate by fusion."

I swooned.

Grad school starts again in November. It recently also occurred to me that I've fallen in love with myth the way a med student might suddenly fall in love with something rare and particular—cystic fibrosis is everything, I want to devote my life to it! That's how I feel about myth. It's everything, it's everywhere, I can see how it ripples through us and through time, how we change it and it changes us, how the stories we tell are the most important stories in the world because they inform our every interaction and sense of self. We use these archetypes or not, but we always live them, sometimes to our peril.

I don't know what to do with this. For now, it simply is, like the fact that I am always opening the box.

I have also begun knitting a blanket. I knit it in the wee hours of the night, through four, five, six in the morning, while listening to Neil Gaiman read me The Sandman. I fuss over the outcome of each square as I produce it—will there be enough yarn to complete it? Should I add some kind of pattern? What if I change up the knit style? This thing is going to be chaos. But I'm kind of into that—this part of me that's constantly courting entropy. I can't seem to help it. I love it.

You learn that in physics: The universe is always moving toward entropy. It seems like a thing to embrace. The advantage is, if you don't like the new cosmos you've made, another awaits beyond your next decision. 

It's something Pirandello's protagonist evokes—every moment, he is made, destroyed, and made again.

Songline

Something in me is changing, which should come as no surprise. We all changed in pandemic times. But it increasingly occurs to me that the only thing that really matters, whether or not it is paid for, is the nature of my interactions, not only with people but with all things. No one being or object is especially sacred in and of itself, but interaction makes us so. Interaction lights a spark, creates a cosmos—possibility.

I'm not sure how true this is, but it's true enough for now.

There is also a part of me that thinks I've arrived at a place in my life where I'd like to say more here, in this strange quiet corner of public space. I have no idea who is reading this, or whether I mostly talk to myself. But I have often been tempted to say more out loud, and not indulged it. Or else I have done it in an irregular way, like a tap that chronically drips.

It doesn't seem worthwhile or skilful to convey anything true about oneself to more than one person at a time. But maybe that's also what makes it a good exercise. When I begin, it is hard for me to curate. There is only the constellation, every star its place. In the best moments, I feel like I am walking a songline, every meander a part of the myth logic, the scale of a serpent, dragon, god. 

It's strange, the size of the investment we made in linearity. But the lucky thing is, we can withdraw it when we like. One of the first things they teach you in accounting is that sunk cost fallacy is aptly named.

Rules for the Immediate Term

• Be indulgent with friends, who are fighting demons of existential neuroses, even if they're fronting like it's all good. That's a coping strategy, like manic baking and oversleeping. (I know, because it's mine.) Some people have never been alone with themselves this long.
• Be patient with colleagues and clients; it's hard to take the concept of "bottom lines" seriously right now, even if it defines survival for most of us. No one knows what'll matter when this ends, or how the levers of civilisation will alter. "Base reality" is literally under construction. We won't get another grace period like this in our lives.
• Forgive yourself. If it's all taking a toll, make your standard no higher than One Big Thing to do each day. Everything else can be cream on top. You'll advance, slow but sure. It'll keep the creeping strangeness at bay.
• Be real with people. Don't lead them on, or ghost them if you've made a commitment: Don't create more chaos. If you did, give them peace.

Cooperation is our superpower. If the best you can do right now is mind yourself and your mental health, help others by not adding to their neurotic demon echo chamber.

I hug you all, but only figuratively.

A meditation on seeds

It's apt that my last post featured Madeline Miller's Circe because I happen to be re-reading it as part of a social campaign, the #CirceReadalong by Little, Brown & Co. for the book's paperback release.

This week I've read chapters 1-5, and it feels good to be back in this world. My eyes slide down the story like water over stone, and small synchronicities are leaping out, things I didn't see before, because I've changed and the world's changed, too.

This marks France's sixth week in enforced confinement. Between my last post and now, I left Facebook (then returned), then all the social networks (just for a break, then returned). I left operations at Hurrah, days before confinement dropped. I quit smoking. I learned to cook. (It's fun! Who knew?)

And spring began.

I'm digging the introspection available in this strange snow globe, the opportunity it's provided to burrow and tease out the particulars of what I want to become at this point in my life. I've got all the time in the world, it seems, holed up in my office with its soft yellow light, a frankincense diffusion going and tea brewing and my fingers kissing the keyboard until the black outside goes deep electric blue, a world briefly submerged, it seems, by water—my favourite part.

Here are two quotes from those early chapters of Circe that've leapt out, for me, in relation to the confinement I'm living.

That's my life right now. As we all know, I'm also mortal. So part of me feels a little dangerous, like getting really spendy on the Croisette when you know it's all on credit. 

It's such a gorgeous way to encapsulate the immortal conception of time. I thought about how, in the narrative, many generations pass between Circe meeting Prometheus and meeting Glaucus. She doesn't feel that time pass, and we don't either. Most of it passes in idleness, boredom, small pleasures in the home she's always known: A childhood.

Six weeks have gone by. The world outside my window is a timelapse of the springtime sun rising and setting, and the moon traversing her phases in between. I feel the ways I've gotten strange, rewilded. I am already so far from the person I've been for the last five years that thinking about it gives me vertigo. It's frightening.

This feels like the compelling, unavoidable conflict happening in all our conversations right now. Per a YouGov poll in the U.K., just 9% of polled Brits want their lives to return to how they were. A Sociétés poll in France found similar results for one French person in two: When all this "ends"—and I'm sceptical we see an end the way we assume things end, neatly and on time, a train ride from one place to the next—people want to seriously revisit the rhythms of their lives and how they consume.

It takes, what, 60-odd days to change a habit? We'll all have been in some context of confinement that length and longer still. We are changing whether we want to or not. 

Yet when you look at how certain governments are trying to strong-arm a return to economic "normalcy" into the too-near future, there's palpable concern that all of this will have been for naught. Can they enforce a return to mindless consumption, a new iPhone every year, double the plane-trips to compensate for all the networking events and conferences missed... maybe just with masks and elbow-bumps?

Idiocy.

I think they'll try, but the reality we knew is gone, whether we like it or not. "Normalcy" packed her gone-for-good suitcase and didn't look back. 

Pandemics have a way of ending a chapter that everyone mistook for reality itself. The Bubonic Plague ended feudalism—reality as most Westerners knew it for an unbelievably long time. The Plague of Athens corroded Athenian democracy. The Spanish Flu struck the match that would become the fire that would sever the formal colonial bond between Great Britain and India. (Among other things.)

"But," some guy somewhere on Twitter whines, "you're talking about times when we had less scientific know-how and technology."

Shut up. It is blind confidence in the dogma of our current reality that makes it so hard to learn, not only from our own history, but from what these new rhythms we've taken on are already telling us. I'm not saying I don't believe in science or tech; of course I do. I'm saying our models are currently unsustainable, which is something we all hopefully know by now. I'm saying we get this free crash-course in how much our kids actually eat in a day, what consumables matter most, which food is actually local to our areas, who our neighbours are, what we care about, and for whom we matter.

Our systems are more fragile than we believe. Nothing is a monolith. And if we are so married to something that's gone, we will be poorly equipped for the progress we can make in the brave new world flowering before us. Mourn if you like; that's healthy. But don't drag the corpse around and force people to interact with it.

Personally, I look forward to the day this changed world, and this changed me, meet. I haven't any idea what we'll create between us, but the timing is right. Nothing I've already been seems to fit anymore. 

Revolutions

I started this blog in 2005 with a secret plan, the kind you hatch in college when everything is possible and all the world is new: I'd curate some cool advertising and marketing-related stuff happening on big sites already doing that, then punt myself to editors and ask them to hire me.

Ad blogs were plentiful, growing fat at that stage where they're rapidly commodifying and there are plenty of big players, but shakeout and consolidation hasn't happened yet. I still had a personal Xanga, back when private blogs for just a few people were still something that existed.

My plan worked: I became a writer, then, in due course, an editor, and I dedicated my pen to the places that paid me, leaving Live and Uncensored to languish. With time this site evolved again—mostly into a place where I curated cool ad stuff and talked about my movements.

Then the sector changed, as sectors do. The aforementioned shakeout happened and I was laid off, right as I'd arrived in Paris, convinced I was stable enough to unhook from my built-in ecosystem and try making a whole new life from scratch. Ha! the universe said. I see you testing the ocean, you silly small-town fish. Meet the fucking sharks.

"You're still young; you can always move back in with your parents," an editor told me as he dropped the axe and I watched the sun set through the window of my 500 square-foot Paris apartment. I hadn't even emptied the boxes yet.

When Adrants and MarketingVOX cut me loose, I didn't know it then but the timing was right. On the MarketingVOX side I'd been asked to get rid of all my journalists and found myself alone, writing up to 16 articles a day, with few vacations and little downtime. Every time I asked, I got the same answer: "Lots of writers want your job." They weren't wrong, but I was also too young to understand the extent of what was being asked of me. I was too young not to fear my obsolescence.

So when the blog universe collapsed in the wake of the subprime crisis, I was so tired that I didn't ever want to write again, and I got lucky: In France, Adrants and MarketingVOX had pretty good brand equity. Contagious, and all the cooler publications that would follow, were still young and new. So French publications, ad agencies and startups reached out and said, "Hey, we feel like we know you; let us help."

Our sector, which is historically fickle, saved me and I will never forget it.

I went into strategy and still wrote, but less—maybe a handful of articles a week, for a smattering of advertising and tech publications for French brands putting feelers out to the English-speaking market.

Live and Uncensored slid into stasis.

At the same time all this was happening, personal blogging also underwent an evolution. Xanga fell apart, and even Blogger—where this blog still lives—lost equity to sites like Posterous and Tumblr. Medium rose up with its cool-hunter cachet, and suddenly there didn't seem to be a point in blogging about one's life unless it was in the interest of advancing the narrow themes of your Personal Brand.

I wrote less and less and less here, finding occasional solace in a minor concept called Inklust, which I made just because I wanted to be able to share quotes from books I was reading.

As websites slid out of style, aggregator sites where you could store all your social and work links in a sassy format—like flavors.me and the about.me—rose to glory, and I redirected angelanatividad.com from here to a flavors.me page. There it remained for at least a handful of years, driving people to a short bio where they could quickly jump to my Facebook, my LinkedIn, my articles, whatever they wanted.

In the meantime, Live and Uncensored got its own URL, where it remained in the quiet, gathering random hits from hopeful porn-seekers. I'd come back a few times a year, when I had a quote to share or something new to say (usually related to some world tragedy currently in progress).

Much has happened since. I started writing for Adweek and launched my own agency, Hurrah. I wrote a book, Generation Creation, with two of my best friends in the world. I began applying for naturalisation in France. I learned how to make pancakes. I quit smoking for a week.

Last week I went away on a writers retreat and the world changed again: Flavors.me is shuttering, and About.me probably isn't far behind. It turns out we are as interested in aggregator sites as we are in websites.

So I've redirected angelanatividad.com back here, where it belongs and where perhaps it should have been pointing all along. More than a decade of my life passed and this little corner of the internet has been the only place I could return to. It bore witness as we reinvented ourselves with each new morning in the arms race of social relevance. And while I went off and tried setting roots elsewhere, at places that became other things, Live and Uncensored remains—the site of my crash-landings and rebirths.

I'd like to promise to write more consistently here, as I've done many times in 12 or so years, but experience says that isn't likely. What I do know is that I'll keep coming back.

In the face of relentless change, that's something, isn't it?

A Potentially Incomplete List of Things I Keep Lists Of

1. Tasks, organised by type (freelance, personal life, money owed, money loaned, etc. Long-term projects get their own special separate lists)
2. Shopping list
3. Things to pack for a given trip
4. Talking points for given events... or just to have a handle on what I want to say if I have my hand raised
5. Things I'd like to watch, and who referred them
6. Things I might read, and who referred them
7. Books I've read—the longest list running in terms of seniority. I think it's about six years old?
8. Shows I'm currently watching and have completed, plus notes on who referred them and how I generally feel about them
9. Articles or stories I'd like to write
10. Articles or stories written on a given day, and the word count (20.000 words at MIP alone!)
11. People I hang out with (full name, current job title, date, location, what we discussed, photo)
12. Things I may like to buy—a list I often forget about, but that's by design. When I open the list again, sometimes years later, I buy the thing if I still want it and the timing is right. Or I delete it, because it's otherwise taking up room on the list
13. Potentially cool book ideas
14. Potentially cool business ideas
15. Patterns I'd like to knit—possibly my youngest list
16. Things to be grateful for—not often updated, but generally updated in times of duress. It's a good exercise
17. People to buy presents for, and/or presents to buy people, and why 

I think that's everything, but I can't really be sure. Written out like this, it seems a bit manic. But the funny thing about lists is that they become religions, planets around which I orbit, gravitational anchors to keep from spinning into chaos.

It's possible that I do this because, like marketing people frenetically counting Likes, it's an easy way to mark progress. And maybe at some point, these small demarcations of a life will yield a deeper thing I'm trying to keep track of but can't quite put a finger on. 

That's about all I have to say about lists.