Five Buckets of Nerdy Nostalgia (and Eighteen Rolls of Toilet Paper)

Children, books, gowns, catastrophes, and so on.

Last Friday was a tough one.

The boys were playing outside, and the unseasonable warmth of the first of November had softened to a more autumnal mellowness. My four-year-old was identifying chalked letters on our front sidewalk, and my seventeen-month-old¹ was tootling back and forth between attempting to sprint into the street and gleefully uprooting my potted kalanchoe plant. For one brief shining moment, I smiled serenely at my frolicking offspring and decided to seize the day and unload the remaining groceries from the back of my car. (17mo and I had gone grocery shopping that morning, but in the interest of time I had only unpacked the items that needed to be refrigerated.) As every parent of very small children knows, this kind of hedonistic optimism cannot go unpunished.

I was in the act of carrying a 24-pack of bottled water, an 8-pack of Gatorade, and an 18-pack of toilet paper across the front lawn when Emergency Struck. My pen shall draw a veil over the private details of the scene: let us just say that no one was hurt, but some in my household are still getting fully acquainted with The Potty, and occasionally there is a Catastrophe. I was compelled to leave my household goods strewn upon the browning grass, haul both children indoors, perform various cleansing rituals and other mortifying tasks in the bathroom, and prevent 17mo from sprinting back outside unchecked and unaccompanied.

Unfortunately, as aforementioned, all the stuff I had been trying to schlep from the car to the front door was still sitting not-so-pretty on the lawn. Considering that we are the only house on our street whose landscaping decor may prominently feature tricycles, whiffleballs, and uncoiled garden hose at any given moment (much to my husband’s chagrin) I did not care to leave a giant pack of toilet paper out for the ogling of the passersby. “Stay inside,” I told the baby, and hurried out to fetch it while the 4yo yelled at me from the bathtub.

Trying to wrestle all my things together in one armful, while hastening back indoors as quickly as possible to mitigate the amount of chaos 17mo might wreak in forty-five unsupervised seconds, I flew too close to the sun. The giant family pack of toilet paper burst from its bonds, bounced out of my arms, split open on the sidewalk, and strewed rolls of white Quilted Northern hither and yon. “OH NO,” I shouted, and it was lucky that that was the only thing I shouted, because 17mo was standing in the front doorway ready to parrot back. He shook his tousled red head solemnly. “No, no, no, Mama,” he said, wagging one fat finger at me remonstratively. “No. No. No.”

When I recounted this tale of woe to my mother on the phone that night, she laughed uproariously. “You have to write this stuff down,” she said. “Write about this kind of thing before you forget about it! Take a break from Jane Austen, maybe.”

Shockingly, my mother was not the first person in my life to mention that maybe the Austen content around here has been A Little Much lately, nor is she likely to be the last. I have been thinking about that quite a lot, actually. I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions about the future of this Substack. What am I doing here? Am I contributing anything of value to the writing world? Am I confusing people who signed up to read funny kid anecdotes by giving them 19th-century literature, and am I annoying the Austenites by telling them about my toddler’s scolding me when I made a mess? And is it strictly hygienic to gather up toilet paper from your front yard and keep using it?

Questions spring eternal.

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Last month, I had the good fortune and privilege to enjoy a Zoom session with author and writing coach Ruth Buchanan, someone I have admired on the Internet for quite some time. She jammed a tremendous quantity of inspiration and encouragement into our just-before-bedtime video call, and I came away feeling renewed and better focused.

Ruth is an editor and a storyteller and fellow Substack writer (if you don’t already subscribe to And Another Thing, you should!) and she usually coaches people who want to write books. I was honest with her, though, that a book seems very far off in the future for me and realistically I need to just stick with shortform writing in this season of my life. What I need is a clear vision for said shortform; I really despise the word “brand,” but “niche” will do for the time being.

It seemed like a ridiculously open-ended question, but somehow Ruth managed to both answer it and give me an action plan. She told me about Jenn dePaula’s concept of “five buckets,” or the basic interlinked categories into which a writer’s content can be sorted. I thought about it and ran through a quick list: parenting, classic literature in general, Jane Austen in particular, historical costuming, and the humor of the everyday mom/student/writer life. My biggest concern was that these five buckets are too varied. The sewing people don’t necessarily want to read the same things the writing people want, and vice versa.

But Ruth said she thought they were all interconnected. People, after all, are holistic beings with many interests, and many of those interests play off of each other. Looking at all of my offerings, she suggested they could all fit under a big canopy of “nerdy nostalgia.”

And I kind of love that.

The sort of person who looks back warmly on their childhood readings of the Little House on the Prairie books but is intrigued as an adult by the darker, truer history behind them; the sort of person who reads Austen and Dickens and Forster for fun but quotes The Office in everyday conversations; the sort of person who hoists a laundry basket on her hip and is instantly, imaginatively transported to another life of being a laundry maid in a 16th-century castle; the sort of person who composes arguments about the ending of Little Women in her head while wiping macaroni and cheese off baby cheeks; the sort of person who pored over the American Girl catalog and wrote “novels” on stacks of notebook paper and hit the library checkout limit a time or two; those are the people I am writing for.

I am all of them, and so perhaps are you.

So what can you expect ‘round here as Something Funny, Something True is now solidly working through its third year of existence? Well, five buckets of nerdy nostalgia, mostly. Books, generally. Austen, specifically. Childrearing (but I’ll make it funny, I promise). Sewing and haberdashery. The mundanity of ordinary life and the chores we do and the jobs we perform and the naps we try and fail to take while in the midst of it all our brains are ever-turning in an attempt to keep the creative juices flowing. Music-makers and dreamers of dreams, and washers of dishes and folders of laundry, and all that.

Nerdy nostalgia, then, but some future-minded thinking and fun, too. Do stick around. I promise it isn’t all Austen all the time. But I also promise we can talk about how the literature we read informs the people we are as well.

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If you think you already read this piece this year, or at least something very like it, perhaps you did. It’s the sort of insufferable navel-gazing one must expect from a person who writes personal essays and is majoring in English. Sorry. But I want you to know what you’ve signed up for, and if you haven’t signed up yet? You can do so.

I shall be back again soon to tell you about the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, which I attended in Cleveland in October (and yes, you can skip that post if you’re truly not interested! that applies to everything, really!). I shall write about my disaster of a ball gown, and the book Jane Austen held in her own hands that I got to see, and the wonderful people I got to meet and the notes I took and the stories I heard and the cauliflower soup I ate that I really want to replicate at home. In the meantime, let us return to my heap of toilet paper.

As I finished talking with my mom and thinking about how I really ought to write these things down (hey look! I just did!) the essay-writer in me was scrabbling around for a point. A thesis. Some sort of argument or takeaway or life lesson with which I could imbue the silly little story of my baby telling me NO NO NO when I made a giant mess. I came up empty, but I think that in and of itself is the point I want to make. Sometimes stuff just happens, and it’s funny, and it’s fun to write and read about. My boys won’t be little forever, but like Meg and Jo they—and I— will be interesting forever (I hope). I don’t ever want to stop being interested in the goofy little things that happen on an ordinary Friday afternoon, because I think if I stop being interested in those I shall stop being interested in life.

And life is too delicious for that. Dear old world, you are very lovely, and I am very glad to be alive in you.

I think I’ll remove the outer layer of paper from each of those rolls that took a tumble in the dirt, though. The world may be beautiful, but it is still full of germs.

1. Don’t come at me with “why don’t you just say he’s one.” He IS one, but there’s a world of difference between a one-year-old who just turned one and a one-year-old who’s halfway between one and two, and context is king in a world of misleading information and fake news.