Let Me Tell You What I Really Think

But also give me one second to figure that out

I’m trying very hard to think much more. Or at least to be more conscious about what it is that I’m thinking. I’m sure I must think all the time. My mind is never blank, I don’t care to meditate. But if I had a bar chart categorizing all my thoughts I have no idea what the labels would be. Other than that one would probably read “boys” and one would read “ways to make canned tuna good.” 

For the sheer volume of my ideas I feel a lack of ownership. I’d like to train my mind to wander on a leash. To domesticate it into staying close so that I know where it’s been at the end of the day. I, like you and all of us, am consuming information constantly, but so rarely processing it. I know today’s headlines, that Jimmy Carter died and that Timothée Chalamet did something with someone called Nardwuar, but I haven’t stopped to investigate what that really means. Maybe nothing. Rest in peace Jimmy Carter though.

I’m unmoored in this system. My brain is a mangy, feral stray when it ought to be a freaking King Charles Cavalier. I feel my best when I’ve groomed my opinions, all their knots combed out and ready to show. This newsletter is one of the places that I do that. My lists is another. 

Me and my perfect brain. 101 Dalmations.

I love lists. Lists make me grounded and whole. In my dreams I have a large room covered wall to wall floor to ceiling in bulletin boards with all my lists. Top ten movies, happiest days, best meals I’ve eaten, songs that make me cry. Every item would be written in an august serif, like Garamond or Baskerville, printed and pinned up individually so I could amend each ranking for every new entry to the pantheon (most recently, Lady Bird, Thanksgiving Day 2023, Thanksgiving Dinner 2024 and “Work In Tall Buildings” by John Hartford, respectively.)

List of things I love, written last December.

I’ve always been obsessed with this kind of categorization. From the backseat of her Volvo, my legs not yet reaching the floor, I’d catch my mom’s gaze in the rearview mirror and say “If you could pick three movies to play on your eyelids whenever you wanted which would you pick?” “Who are your five best friends that aren’t Dad?” “What are your three favorite cereals that start with C?” 

“What is it with you and the superlatives?” she’d ask, exasperated and wishing I’d shut up so she could listen to Steve Inskeep in peace. The answer, then and now, is that I find them to be the most direct avenue to constructing a patchwork understanding of you and me both. That my mom’s C cereals would be Captain (sic) Crunch, Chex and Cracklin’ Oat Bran when mine are Cracklin’ Oat Bran, Cheerios, and Crispix enumerates in us one of countless key distinctions. I get to consider those tastes in conjunction with my own, to question what it is about us that would contribute to those disparate conclusions, and to find endless relief in the confirmation of our individuality. Other than going for a run or hosting four good friends for chicken dinner, these lists make me feel closest to knowing who I am. 

In this vein, late December is my olympics. We’re all settling into ourselves, or our ideas of ourselves or our hopes of what we might be, and lists are never more ubiquitous. Resolutions, “Wrapped,” Best-Ofs and Ins and Outs. Mini manifestos, time-capsules of our contemporary personalities. I’d never tell you my resolutions because that’ll jinx it but for your consideration I’ll say here In: brooches, falling in love and Out: gluten intolerance if you’re lying. A bunch of y’all have to be.

Beyond their potential for self-knowledge, though, these lists serve as coping mechanisms. Training wheels for a type of expression I’m desperate to wield, but so rarely do: certitude. Bullet-pointed and ordered, through my lists I pedal boldly away from the gray area. 

I despise ignorance, especially my own. I can’t remember what Jimmy Carter did. I live in constant fear of speaking out of turn. I hate to look stupid. I hate to start an argument without considering its rebuttal. I hate to offend anyone, I care desperately about what others might think of me, and I’m incessantly aware of my audience. Like right now, for example. In turns my writing is dedicated to a new friend or an old college professor or one of three boys reading this. They will never know which I mean. 

I worry sometimes that this will keep me from ever being a really good writer. That I’m too much of a people pleaser to bravely publish a debatable statement with fortitude or to write vulnerably about the things that have meaningfully changed me or broken my heart. My favorite writers do both with ease and grace and it’s my favorite kind of writing to read. 

Writing like Nora Ephron’s. Hers is the first face I’d carve into my Mount Rushmore of authors I’d like to be just like, not least because her feathered bob would look breathtaking in granite. A keen, sharp prophet of the modern experience, capable of giving name to such phenomena as the “white man’s overbite,” she writes with microscopic specificity and dogged, incontrovertible insistence that she knows best. On sweaters: “Don’t buy anything that is 100per-cent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store.” On what to serve at a dinner party: “Fish is no fun. People like to play with their food, and it’s virtually impossible to play with fish.” On interior design: “It is absolutely essential to have a round table.” It doesn’t matter that I don’t agree with her. Every line of her dogma leaves me wholly refreshed. I can’t help but be gleeful in the hands of someone with enough self-assurance to swear off fish. 

From I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron

I’d take up the chisel for Eve Babitz, too. I just read Slow Days, Fast Company on my friend

Erika Veurink

’s recommendation, and it had me smiling so big on the subway from page one. Eve Babitz writes like she’s writing just for you. Every sentence reads like a secret — lIke you’re sitting together in a red corner booth and she’s pressing her lips to your ear to whisper some other life-altering thing. She operates in universal truths. ”Women want to be loved like roses. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.” And she loves lists, too: “I am quick to categorize and find it saves me mountains of time.”

From Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz. Tattoo it on me.

I went to see Martha Stewart speak at Rizzoli Books last April. Though I don’t know that she’d identify as a writer, I’m claiming her to this end. From the second she opened her mouth I felt compelled to rigorously document everything she said, resulting in the single most valuable notes-app note I’ve ever composed. In the span of a one-hour conversation wherein the prescribed topic was someone else’s cookbook, Martha effortlessly professed her own stances on things like Palestine (pro), Tik Tok (anti), and nuts (“I hate nuts. I rarely eat nuts. I like macadamia nuts because they’re kind of fun.”) You hate nuts!!? Macadamia nuts are fun???! I love you. 

There was a Q&A portion at the end, and God smiled down on me as the Rizzoli Books employee yielded the microphone. I asked Martha, voice shaking, one of my favorite questions, the kind that makes my mom’s eyes roll all the way back into her head: “What would you cook to tell someone you love them?” Martha looked at me, unflinching and said in her gravelly baritone, “anything, when served with fervor.” 

That’s exactly what I crave. What I aspire to. A self-knowledge so well cultivated that I can stand steadfast in beliefs beyond just my favorite songs. A propensity for discernment, and a commitment to comprehension of the story behind the headlines. Taking my thoughts like carrot nubs and onion skins and chicken bones and boiling them down to something greater than the sum of its parts. A beautiful stock of ideas over which I've labored faithfully, and ready to serve still steaming, with fervor. I love you. This is good. I know it. 

Pony Recommends:

The best of everything since Christmas.

• With minimal guidance my brother Bairdie got me these L.L. Bean slippers and the I’ve developed an immediate and crippling dependency. I don’t remember what “home” meant to me before them.

• Julia has sworn by gertrude’s for months. I had their brunch forever ago and thought it was only okay and thus was wary of anything else they had to offer. But we went together last night and it was awesome. Get the chicken and the sweet potato knish and talk to the old married couple we talked to if they’re there when you go. They recommend the burger.

• A Complete Unknown banged. I don’t care what Richard Brody says. I thought its structure was wholly unique for a biopic, less focused on myth-making than on true character development to the extent that it doesn’t need to fall back on the legendary nature of its subject to be compelling. ALSO bonus: if you haven’t watched The Greatest Night In Pop yet you’re crazy! Incredible companion viewing and features a truly mind-blowing moment wherein Stevie Wonder has to do an impression of Bob Dylan singing “We Are The World” so that Bob Dylan himself can do just that. I love it I’ve watched it three times.

• I cooked Christmas dinner because I never won’t feel like I have something to prove. I wanted it to be this, but Bairdie insisted it be something with cheese in the headline. I opted for Baked Cheesy Pasta With Wild Mushrooms, accompanied by Roasted Chicken Thighs with Lemon, Thyme, and Rosemary and a salad with a dressing I made up. The pasta and the chicken are perfect together, united by rosemary and garlic through-lines and the same oven temperature. I made Sticky Toffee Pudding for dessert, which I will serve at my wedding and my funeral.

• The breakfast table of my youth elicits a Pavlovian yearning for Terry Gross' voice. So every time I go home I get back into Fresh Air. I listened to and loved the episodes with Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen, Billie Eillish & Finneas / Stephen Colbert & Evie McGee, and Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola. Still have not watched The Godfather.

Happy New Year’s Eve Eve! All our lives are going to change no matter what. I hope you liked reading this and even more I hope you’ll talk to be about it. XX for real, see you on the other side!