I’ve been writing a lot of emails to myself lately. Mostly, I’m sending articles, essays, and short stories, but I’m also sending notes, quotes, and music. I get a strange kick out of emailing myself, because while on the one hand it seems like a completely logical method of reminding oneself to do something, on the other hand, it feels and is completely ridiculous. “Dear Me, read this later.”
These things that I've been emailing Me are not at all related to one another, really—mostly they're just different things that interest me and that have threatened to destroy my productivity at work on that given day. So instead of letting the Internet win, I have created a chain of emails to myself, all under the subject line "to be sorted later," not that I know what it is exactly I plan on sorting later.
Currently, I am planning to sort the following things out later: a recent
short story in the
New Yorker, submission guidelines for a website that I'd like to write for, two
writers' tumblrs,
an interview with one of those writers, and something about Lars Von Trier, and something about walking. Specifically, something. One email says only, "LARS VON TRIER - ?" and “on walking…”
Yes, I am aware I sent these notes to myself, so I probably should know what these things mean. But I don't. Well, I sort of do. Two Sundays ago I watched "Nymphomaniac," Volumes 1 and 2, and it left me feeling odd and unsure of my feelings and vaguely disturbed, but not as disturbed as I thought maybe I was supposed to feel. I think I wanted
some critic to tell me if Von Trier was a
misogynist or
pro-woman. Then I thought that maybe I should be an adult, and come to my own conclusions. Then I got annoyed by the whole thing and put the question of Lars Von Trier out of my mind entirely.
As for the "on walking..." note, your guess is as good as mine. I like to walk?
Moving on: I still have more to sort. Come to think of it, I haven’t actually sorted any of these things yet. I haven’t read
that short story yet. I haven’t yet read Roxane Gay’s
piece in The Guardian about Ferguson. I still haven’t read
the poem “The Lost Art of Letter Writing,” for fucks sakes!
One of my problems is that I want to read everything at once. Sometimes this gets more out of hand than others. I still haven’t finished my summer Shakespeare project. My brother and I are in our third year of doing this. We pick a different Shakespeare play each summer to read, and then we might talk about it a lot, or a little, or not at all. The point is the reading of it, mainly. Jay texted me three weeks ago, saying, “Finished Lear” and still, I’m not done. The underachieving younger sister strikes again! Ha, ha.
It’s no wonder I haven’t finished
King Lear yet. I’m also currently reading:
The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles, Living History (because I felt it was required reading before reading Hillary Clinton’s latest book), and
Bad Feminist. Oh, and
A Wrinkle in Time, because I learned it was
going to be made into a movie, so of course I needed to read it again. (My most recent reading of it was in 2010. I am insane.) I’m supposed to be halfway through another book,
Cutting for Stone, as part of a book club my friend Natalie invited me to join. I haven’t opened the book. It is 658 pages long.
I’d say I’m not always like this, but I’m always like this. I have a permanent stack of books. The other night I grabbed
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention off the shelf, and then
The Dream Songs, and then I realized I had two other books, and my journal, in my hand. And then you add the Internets, including
access to the New Yorker archive (!) to this equation, and that’s it. I’m dead.
Sometimes I feel like I’ll never get around to sorting it all out later. Constantly, I’m reminded of my mother, sitting in her green chair, which is now my green chair, with a stack of books on the floor next to her. She had bookmarks in all of them, including
Les Miserables, which I stole from the pile after my mother died. I’ve added it to my own stack of books from time to time over the last 12 years, but it never makes the cut. It always ends back on the bookshelf, to be sorted later.
