Welcome to At Capacity!

Didn't need another thing to do, did it anyway.

Today is the last day of the first quarter of 2023, and in the first quarter of 2023, one of my goals was to start a Substack newsletter. Which means, like many things in my life, that I have left it to the last minute to complete this goal, like the literal last day possible. Very on-brand for me, tbh! By this logic, today I also need to write 30,000 words of my novel, start a cookbook club, have a 1-1 date with one of my kids, make fish at home, and read an entire book. It is now 5:35pm and I am not going to do any of those things, but I figured I might be able to at least accomplish this one.

So welcome to my new newsletter! It’s called At Capacity because I am, quite frankly, at capacity. Perfect time to add a new commitment to my to-do list!

I was talking to a friend a few days ago about how relentlessly, incessantly busy life feels right now — between work and kids and the general humdrum drudgery of everything. You know the general humdrum drudgery of everything I’m talking about, right? It’s folding the laundry and walking the dog and figuring out what dinner’s going to be and doing the bare minimum to keep the house from taking a slow nosedive into a sanitation violation. It’s volunteering for field trips and renewing the Costco membership and supervising the writing of the thank you notes and sorting through the kids’ old clothes and buying the classmates’ birthday presents and scheduling the doctor’s appointments and scheduling the dentists’ appointments and returning the library books and returning all those emails and returning whatever thing I bought to try and fill whatever emptiness I was trying to fill one night at 10pm. It’s selling the Girl Scout cookies and buying the snacks for the baseball game and keeping up with my gig as my children’s personal Uber driver and uploading the yearbook photos and registering for camp and making the playdates and hosting the playdates and texting the guy about the caulk in the kitchen and going to the grocery store (again? again!)

I’m not complaining about any of this (maybe I’m complaining a tiny bit about some of this?), because I recognize a sort of quiet, suburban, middle-aged beauty in being slap-bang in the middle of the kind of life I always wanted—and the privilege inherent in that—but also wow, it is sometimes a lot.

My friend and I both agreed we felt much better after bitching a little to each other about how much it all feels, like, all the time. (And then, immediately after that, I felt slightly guilty about bitching about it to her because my friend is a doctor and I am a writer and if I screw up at my job, maybe someone writes a barbed tweet about how I put a comma in the wrong place but if she screws up at her job, someone literally dies. And she’s still holding it all together so magnificently!)

Anyway, I’m sure you’re holding it together magnificently too, and I’m really glad you’re here, reading….whatever this ends up being. What will it end up being? I honestly have no idea! I only know that I miss the sort of long-form writing I used to be able to do on a blog I kept from 2005 to 2013, and a Substack newsletter seems to be the current-day iteration of that (granted, I am also, like, three years late to this trend.) That blog was called Nothing But Bonfires, a name that came from a line at the end of “The Winter’s Tale,” when all these incredible things are happening all at once. As you can see from my astute literary criticism below, the line has appealed to me since I underlined it in my Norton Anthology of Shakespeare at university in 2001:

(Great line, great play. Maybe too many gentlemen entering, but otherwise, no notes.)

So thank you for reading and thank you, if you are so inclined, for subscribing to At Capacity, even if you yourself feel at capacity with the number of things you have signed up to have emailed to you. I hope this will be one of the fun ones!

Like everything I enjoy reading most, it’s not going to be about anything in particular as much as it’s going to be about, like, life, or whatever. Which I guess means it’s going to be about all these incredible things happening at once.