2025-10-19 Journal Entry

Blah, a bunch of words. One of the things that feels like it’s been hampering my writing is that I’m not reading as much, so I’m hear to remedy that today by burning through a big chunk of Cloud Atlas, I hope. I’ve already gotten about 50 pages under my belt, and I hope to knock out about a hundred more or so today.

My anxiety for today is that Mel and them have their small group at the house tonight, and I’m being a bit of a crapehanger about the whole thing, if I’m honest with myself. It is, alas, the exact sort of thing I don’t like. A religious small group of thirty-somethings – and, so I’ve learned recently, at least one guy who is recently divorced and used to do a bunch of cocaine, though that’s perhaps the person I would like to speak to the most – and all of their kids running rampant around their house. I love their family dearly, but it’s kinda the thing where like your kids (or this case, my nieces and nephews) are cool, but I don’t really give a shit about other people’s kids. I recognize intellectually that kids are great, but I do feel like “childlike wonder” is almost a meme. My hot take: there’s something nice about growing up, too. Children have wonder because they also have no responsibility, and adults lose that because they become overwhelmed by responsibility. But if you can effectively manage responsibility, you can also retain that wonder too. The world is big and wide and beautiful, and it doesn’t take being naive or whatever to see that. I think people idealize children almost out of nostalgia, and there’s very few adults who truly, actually embody that sort of childlike wonder. (And the unfortunate reality is that many of them end up killing themselves, like Robin Williams, because again, it seems like the return to childhood is some kind of strange regression while attempting to flee the difficulties of adult life.)

Perhaps that’s something to muse on: must we actually regress to infancy to have wonder? I think not. Perhaps the more accurate thing is what Picasso said about children being artists, which does not itself imply anything about responsibility or agency or having the resources at hand to do interesting things.

I’ll also recognize that this is almost certainly me putting attitudes into the minds of others that almost certainly aren’t there. But it does seem like the people who espouse that attitude aren’t very happy and have trouble embodying it themselves.

Well, I honestly don’t have much to say about that. What I was saying was about why I don’t really want to go to small group, one reason of which is other people’s kids, the second of which is dropping into a demographic group which I don’t really care all that much about hearing from or learning about, and the final is that they will I believe take over the entire house and prevent me from having any kind of private space. Normally in a case like that I’d just camp out in my own room, though I think the kids will be taking over the basement. I may be able to just hide out in my room and we can mark that as off-limits, though back to the other people’s kids thing, I’m unsure that everyone will listen to that, and I hate few things more than random kids barging into my room while I’m trying to read. I can always put headphones on, but as soon as I tell kids that the room is off limits and they see me in there, they will immediately think it’s funny to open the door and will make some kind of game of it. I love them all to death, but sometimes the difference between things being really off-limits and playfully off-limits is tough for them to figure out. (See T3’s tendency to punch basically anyone over 20 years old, which he mistakes as okay because his dad lets him do it to him – a reasonable limitation, but something difficult for a five-year-old to really understand.)

I hate that this particular day’s entry has been obnoxiously negative, but it’s the first thing that’s coming to mind today. I’m bitching and moaning about stuff, and it’s honestly one of the reasons I most would like to have an apartment in Birmingham and that I wouldn’t have to stay in the house with any of the kids, sweet as they are. Anyways, so it goes.