Loving People Who Annoy You
Our latest Death, Sex & Money episode + can you help me get a better night's sleep???
In our new episode on Death, Sex & Money, you get to hear my conversation with Carvell Wallace. Listen here.
For our conversation, Carvell and I talked at my dining room table in the East Bay, with my dogs underfoot and snacks on the table. And we get in there on some intimate stuff: romance, heartbreak, sex parties, and not always liking the people you love.
You may know Carvell as a writer or as an interviewer and podcast host. He’s a Slate colleague of mine, who has written for Slate’s parenting advice column Care and Feeding, and currently co-hosts the Slate podcast How To!
The occasion for our conversation was Carvell’s new memoir Another Word for Love, one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. His ideas about love are nuanced and challenging, as are his many stories of being let down by those closest to him. Reading it also made me appreciate what a gifted writer can do with words. There are underlined and dog-eared passages throughout my copy. When I think of how to describe his writing, the word sumptuous comes to mind — and that word doesn’t come to mind for me very often! Full and spacious and exacting all at once.
In the episode, I mention that while I’ve come to know Carvell personally through mutual friends in the East Bay, I was first an appreciator of Carvell’s work. Here are a few standout reads and listens if you want to dig in more.
“LOVE,” a podcast episode of The 11th from Pineapple Street Studios
“Trying to Parent My Black Teenagers Through Protest and Pandemic,” a 2020 piece in The New York Times Magazine
“A Genius of Empathy,” the first episode of a Peabody-winning podcast series about Mr. Rogers called Finding Fred that Carvell hosted
“How Did I Get Here?,” the first episode of the podcast series Closer Than They Appear, featuring a great interview with Mahershala Ali.
Riz Ahmed Acts His Way Out of Every Cultural Pigeonhole, a piece in The New York Times Magazine
A visualization that is helping me right now.
It’s midsummer, mid-election year, mid-debate about leadership and the underpinnings of our democracy. We are in it and we don’t know where we’re going to end up.
Being partway through things doesn’t always suit my producer sensibilities. I like to have a clear plan for where things are going and all the levers I have to control the outcome. But unfortunately, that’s not how life actually goes.
Maybe you heard my conversation with Jim Harris a few weeks back when we talked about flow and being in the rapids? (It was part of my extended conversation with him for Slate Plus listeners. If you missed it, join Slate Plus to hear it.) In moments of overwhelm this week, I’ve thought back on that conversation with Jim and this picture that my husband Arthur took last week.
We were on our inaugural family float down the river this summer. My kids were looking over the edge to closely examine everything we passed over. I was watching slightly ahead to warn them when a wave of whitewater was coming. I joined their giggles when they got nailed by a big splash and stood ready to grab their life jackets at a moment’s notice.
Arthur was steering from the back, the family member responsible for looking further downriver at any approaching obstacles. We’d checked the weather and available data about the river conditions, but we didn’t know if downed trees or other hazards could have been knocked loose from the burst of snowmelt that rushed through this riverbed over the last few weeks. He looked out ahead as far as he could see, and occasionally up and to the sides too, to make sure we didn’t miss sighting a beaver, an eagle, or a heron.
Together, we were a good team.
Let’s also take solace in the smiles on those dogs. They were just happy to be on the ride.
A Call For Help: Sleep Hygiene
I’m not sleeping great at the moment. Where I am in Cody, Wyoming, the days are long — bright outside by 6 am and not getting dark until after 9 pm. I love the extended summer daylight, but it’s not great for sleep — especially when one of those aforementioned dogs jumps up on my head at the first sign of light.
This might all be ok except I’m also having fits of sleeplessness in the middle of the night. And do you know what I do when I wake up and can’t sleep? Read the news, or listen to podcasts. This is not a great habit, I know! I ought to be charging my phone in another room, out of arm’s length. When I am my best self, I do this — but I am not always my best self.
I need a few extra tools to improve my sleeping routine. I haven’t committed to the world of sleep masks – should I? Is fitful sleep something that just comes with being a woman in her 40s, or is there some magic combo of tea + breathing + something else that’ll prove reliable?
I know there are plenty of tips out there for what we should all be doing for better sleep, but I’d like to know what you are actually doing. Please share some tips in the comments. What’s working for you and your sleeping bodies out there? I can’t be the only one here who needs more rest.
Until next week,
Anna
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Listen to our latest Death, Sex & Money episodes
7/9 Sex Parties and Shakespeare with Carvell Wallace
7/2 Baby Reindeer’s Intimacy Coordinator on Sex and Trauma on Screen
6/25 Kara Swisher and Orna Guralnik on How To Get People Talking
6/18 Mark Duplass on Making Money, Mental Health and Midlife
6/11 My Shy Bladder
6/4 I Was Afraid of Losing Myself to Motherhood. I Found Myself Instead.
5/28 Why You’re Not Having Sex
5/21 The Night Magic Mushrooms and Jam Bands Helped Me Walk Again
I've struggled mightily with sleep for many years. Perimenopause has made it worse (and Perimenopause begins earlier than many of us expect). I'd definitely recommend a sleep mask. I like Lunya. Middle of the night wakings are pretty routine for me, and I find the best hacks for falling back to sleep with ease are reading on a Kindle (with a backlight so you don't need to turn on a light) or listening to a long, soothing audiobook (set a sleep timer for longer than you need so you're not worried about having the audio stop before you fall asleep). If it persists, and it did for me, I'd recommend a book called The Women's Guide to Overcoming Insomnia by Shelby Harris as a do-it-yourself guide to CBT-I. Good luck!
This is not always the most practical thing to enact, but I have discovered that I sleep much better if I eat dinner really early--like finishing dinner a good four hours before I plan to be asleep. And when this fails and I find myself awake in the middle of the night, I listen to audio books of novels I know really well (a Dickens novel where I've seen the miniseries many times works well) at .75 speed.