Well, it’s December. Which, to me, is Holiday Hoo-Be-Whatty time. And that means, a Holiday Hoo-Be-Whatty special! Between now and 12/31, paid subscriptions are 40% for the next 12 months. Oh, it’s the most wonderful time of year!
This began as a kind-of stream of consciousness exercise to find my way to the newsletter this week. Instead, a lightly edited version of that exercise is what found its way into the newsletter this week.
P.S. My second train home ended up being mostly express so I even made pretty good time.
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I'm sitting on a Q train, on my way to a cookie party deep(ish) in Brooklyn and I'm wondering what I should write the newsletter about today. This kind of exercise doesn't always work for me—this just start writing and see what happens exercise—but I have an hour on this train so let's see if anything comes of it. I have a feeling my typing is going to be atrocious because Google will try to make word decisions for me and they will be the wrong decisions.
Whenever I am on a train going somewhere I know at least one other friend is going to, I always wonder if I will run into them on the train. The serendipity has to be just right. You would have to get in the same car on the same train on the same route at the same time. It's not impossible. I've run into people before. But it's rare. Then, there is the question of whether you'd want to run into them or not. I once sat next to someone I knew for multiple stops and he didn't notice I was there and I didn't say anything. It wasn't that I didn't want to see him per se, it was mostly because my social battery was low and I didn't have the energy for a train catch-up. That was a chance meeting that that other person never knew we had.
I've also run into people who have really had to work to catch my attention. If I'm reading on the subway, I can pretty easily block out everything else. It's usually not until someone invades my personal space that I notice exactly who they are. That is a more pleasant invasion usually. More unpleasant invasions I will resist naming.
Is it really the subway that this whole newsletter will be about? No, that seems silly. And not very interesting.
I need to remind myself that the newsletter need not be some kind of opus, some long manifesto every week. It's hard to do that because, while my readership is not large, I am worried about losing readers and never finding new ones. I start to wonder if I am annoying everyone. But then again, how many people truly open the newsletter? I don't really check because…and maybe it’s just me annoying me.
I don't know that worrying about what to write about does much for me. Everything is universal and nothing is universal and so it doesn't matter. Some people will connect with it. Some people won't. That's the way with all things in life.
Still, all these musings until this point in this document seem really dull.
I know how to dress for 54° weather but not 54° weather in December. It's so warm for this time of year that I feel like I should put on shorts. That's incorrect. I've got on ripped up jeans instead. And a long sleeved shirt. I fear I will be too hot still. I did forgo an outfit that had a layer UNDER a sweatshirt so that's using the ol' noggin.
This mostly stream of consciousness writing hasn’t necessarily worked. At least not in terms of developing new ideas that feel right for a full newsletter. Still, I sit on the train. And I am tired so typing away staring at a screen turns up the dial on the tiredness. I don't want to fall asleep and miss my stop. No sireeeeee bob.
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Good news. I made it to my destination without falling asleep. My trains back to Queens are messed up so, after leaving my travel buddies to their respective trains, here I sit in a random station in Brooklyn waiting. I thought about it during the cookie party and I realized it was likely I was going to use whatever I wrote here. It seems predestined now.
It's a random Sunday in December 2024 and this is what it looked like for me.
There were cookies. And friends. And cookies I got to take home. Can't complain too much.
It would be really helpful.
THANK YOU for reading. Very seriously, thank you. If you’d like to learn more about the newsletter, here’s my About page. It’s about…me…and this…newsletter.
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