january '26 postcard
baby's first delusion of grandeurs, meditation, baby porcupines, and more!
It hasn’t snowed in Utah all winter and I am starting to worry that it is my fault. I spent the entire summer moaning about how I wasn’t ready for it to snow, about how I hated driving in the icy slush, about having to shovel the driveway in the morning before the sun was up so I could make it to work. Now, I worry that my passive manifestation has made me solely responsible for the anomalous weather. Step aside, global climate crisis and water-guzzling AI data centers, the blame for this one is on me. We will have a summer of brittle, sun-burnt grass come June, but at least the walking paths are all open and dry.
This month, I told my boyfriend that I loved him for the first time. He somehow beguiled me into saying it first, which was not in my plan. (The plan was to wait the bastard out until he said it first). Now, I can’t stop saying it. Do you know I love you so much? I ask him at least once a day.
Being with him, among many other things, has helped to heal my inner child. I am a kid when I am with him. He listens as I talk and talk, never judgmental or condescending. Yes, babe, he assures me, I promise I’m not bored (and that feels like a stronger declaration of love than lousy “I love you”). I laugh unguardedly at the jokes he tells. We play-fight and wrestle like rowdy little puppies, still covered in downy fluff. I name the stuffed animals he gives me and sometimes will send him updates on how they’re doing (Good Meep, a plush strawberry, has lore that grows deeper every day). This is all so extremely childish and it’s everything I have needed. To pander to the Substack algorithm, I would go as far as to say it’s whimsical.
Earlier that day, before any heartfelt confessions, we drove out to a nature reserve to go looking for porcupines (from the safety of my car, of course. I made the mistake of not telling this fact to my grandma and for a moment she thought that I was absolutely senseless to go stalking through the woods looking for porcupines). The number of porcupines we ended up seeing was extremely disappointing. He says we didn’t see any, but I saw a mysterious blob high up in a tree that I could have sworn was a porcupette1 and I am choosing to believe that is what is was. We climbed a lookout tower and pressed our faces to the cold telescope mounted on the railing. We stood beneath every tree, necks bent at 90° angles, perusing each branch for any sign of life. When we discovered that the mass we thought could have been a creature was actually a bird’s nest or a tangle of old fabric, I pouted dramatically, huffing and puffing and exaggeratedly throwing my arms out. He laughed and shook his head.
We also saw a flock of bluebirds with wings so bright they were almost fluorescent. We pulled over to the side of the path and hung our heads out the window to get as close as we could. They looked like Christmas tree lights flying through the sky. Truly one of the most brilliant things I have ever seen.
Later, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, cuddled under a tiny throw blanket on his bed, he asks me what I think happens after death. I am so overwhelmed with love and adoration for him in that moment that I can’t do anything but kiss him. And then, in a rant that goes off in 6 tangents before it even gets close to answering the original question, I tell him what I think happens after death.
I find Kurt Vonnegut to be a very intriguing figure, as he seems to have predicted the future in a way I didn’t think possible. I thought oracles only spoke in vague riddles and allegories. But then there is Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, which speaks of AI without speaking of AI and in a way that I don’t think is uncharacteristic for science fiction, but that is closer to reality than anything I have read before. Maybe he got to try out a proto-ChatGPT on Tralfamador before it reached us Earth-dwelling plebeians. Whatever the case may be, oracle or timetraveler or just good guesser, Kurt Vonnegut and his Mandarax consumed my mind this month. Among the 5 books I read in January, Galapagos was the most impactful. It’s one of those books that I couldn’t read in a “normal” amount of time. I had to sit with it, let the story swirl around in my mind. I would read a chapter and have to put the story down to let my brain dissect what I had just read. The most notable read of January, maybe even of the last 6 months.
Cheers, Kurt Vonnegut, ChatGPT’s first hater!
“Mandarax,” she said, “turns out to be a very good teacher of the art of flower arranging.” That was what she had been so proud of being, of course. But her self-respect had been severely crippled by the discovery that a little black box could not only teach what she taught, but could do so in a thousand different tongues.
“It has taken me an unforgivably long time to realize how much malice there is, how much contempt for others there is, in what you do. You, *Doctor Hiroguchu” she went on", “think that everybody but yourself is just taking up space on this planet and we make too much noise and waste valuable natural resources and have too many children and leave garbage around. So, it would be a much nicer place if the few stupid services we are able to perform for the likes of you were taken over by machinery. That wonderful Mandarax you’re scratching your eat with now: what is that but an excuse for a mean-spirited egomaniac never to pay or even thank any human being with knowledge of languages or mathematics or history or medicine or literature or ikebana or anything”?
All month I have been meditating daily to mixed success. One of my only New Year’s resolutions was to meditate every day for a year. So far, I haven’t missed a single day!
I find yoga nidra to be the most effective technique to get me in the trancelike meditation state that I so crave, but I like to keep my options open. Though meditation has been nice, I feel slightly like I have been cheating myself by leaving my meditation until right before bed, when I’m too tired to meditate for longer stretches of time. Right as I am about to reach that meditative state—the one where you feel like you’re floating in the ether as the world fades away—my guided meditation ends, or I can feel myself succumbing to the pull of sleep. My best meditation days are usually Sundays when I have the whole day to myself and can carve out 45 minutes in the afternoon for a lavish meditation session complete with lavender oil, bolsters and props, and, if I’m feeling indulgent, a heating pad draped over my stomach.
I have yet to experience many lightbulb moments during meditation where I suddenly see the world differently and feel enlightened, but I can feel that some progress is being made. I am heading in the right direction. My thinking is getting clearer, slowly but surely, and I have found that general awareness of the world around me is becoming stronger. Right now, I think I am in the training part of the process, the habit-building. I anticipate that February will be for refining the practice. My ultimate goal by the end of February will be an hour of uninterrupted meditation.
The final semester of my undergraduate career has started and it is bringing up a lot of emotions. Who will I be if not an English major? If not a student? I know that this is not the end but instead a happy new beginning! I am not done with school forever! After a gap year, I will be off to graduate school! I will be a student again soon! Still, the thought of not building my life around assignment due dates and class schedules scares me. I don’t want to say goodbye to something that I love so much. I have devoted the last five years of my life to studying English and I don’t know who I will be when that is not what consumes my life2. My prediction is that I will go through an intense personal curriculum phase to quell my craving for structure, burn out on that, and then wander aimlessly through life for a few weeks/months until I find an organic self-study routine.
Or maybe I will be suffocated without the structure of a class schedule and I will impulsively start a second bachelor’s degree in anthropology or wildlife ecology. Only time will tell.
Writing is… going. In fear of jinxing it, I refuse to give out any information. All I will say is that the wheels in my head are starting to turn. Here are three possibly unrelated pictures that are totally not related to my current writing at all.
January was wonderful and I am so content! Everything seems to be “in progress”. I have few “AHA!” moments to report but every day I feel closer to my goals and the life I have dreamed of than I felt the day before. So much forward momentum! I’m sailing through life!
Thank you for reading and happy February! May your month be filled with love and eros and hopefully a bouquet of roses and a heart-shaped box of chocolate.
xoxo,
ab
I learned that this was the word for a baby porcupine while writing this essay and it is possibly the cutest thing that I have ever heard. If you are a porcupette fan like me, please watch this cute video of a little fluffball named Spike. The video is titled Angry baby porcupine throws tantrum, falls off deck and is accompanied by the description, “This is the end of the tantrum. It went for longer.”
I don’t believe there will ever be a time when English doesn’t consume my life. Even without a set curriculum or a degree to chase, I think I will always be deeply enamoured with literature and language. I was in love before my degree and I am sure that I will stay in love after. Reading and writing stories have always been a keystone to who I am as a person.