Delights

Finding joy in the depths of winter.

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It’s the last day of February, and the sun is starting to shine on us longer here, but still not quite long enough (and sometimes annoyingly straight into my eyeballs as I try to drive my kids to various activities in the evenings.) It’s also a the day that evens out all those quarter days that the Earth’s orbit around the sun creates. The internet tells me that we call this leap day because it makes the days “leap” over the day they would have fallen on in a non-leap year. Humans are weird.

I am about half way through Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, and delighting in so much of it - including  his annoyance monster “who, for the record, never smiles and always wears a crooked bow tie” (mine too, especially when the sun shines directly into my eyeballs), and most particularly, his thoughts on Toto in Chapter 52 – the band, not the dog. I supposed Toto is the delight of that day’s essay, though it’s not clear. To me the delight is the essay itself because it’s relatable and illuminating and hilarious – an observation about some “very average looking gentlemen” turns into apocalypse. We are the world indeed. The internet does not provide and I’m actually kind of delighted that instead of pointing you to a link, I’m going to have to send you out into the real world to find this gift of an essay IRL.

In the meantime, his book has inspired me to follow his lead and share some recent delights of my own:

• Celebrating my birthday for two weekends in a row.
• Reading My Favorite Thing is Monsters. (I keep wondering how it’s been out since 2017 and I had no idea i existed… the rocks I don’t know I live under.)
• Learning that My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two comes out in May. (hmmm, maybe I found out about it at exactly the right time?)
• Jon Stewart being back at The Daily Show on Mondays.
• Jon Stewart’s bittersweet moment of zen (I’m not crying… no, wait, I am totally crying.) (Yes, still a delight - that kind of love, always a delight.)
• The existence of tap dancing.
• The existence of sloths.
• The existence of Ryan Gosling's music project Dead Man’s Bones and the album they made (thank you to Andrea Sparacio for the tip on this awesomeness.)
• The random playlist that Spotify creates after listening to the above album
• “Well, everywhere I went led me to a place I didn’t want to be. So I was stuck.” (Paul Simon’s answer to the question “What makes you stuck?” when posed by Dick Cavett in this interview from 1970,)
• Paul Simon’s hair in above interview, which leads me to believe that some of us, no matter how valiantly we try, will never win the battle with bangs.

• This article about Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” which also mentions “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Take Five,” and “Never Tear Is Apart," but I'm burying the lead here because it opens with this: " "I've always said that 'The Killing Moon' is the greatest song ever written," is Echo and the Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch's humble estimation of the lead single from the band's 1984 magnum opus, Ocean Rain."
• The internet rabbit holes I went down to get to that article. (Though I will still delight in not being able to find The Book of Delights Chapter 52 in any internet rabbit holes.)

I hope these little joys bring you a little joy. And I'd love to hear about any other delights of your own - we need them so much right now.

Til next time -